As other documents in this collection on Moroccan nationalists in 1947 and 1950 have exemplified, the United Nations was an important arena in decolonization struggles for Arabs, as it was for Asians and Africans as e.g. Alanna O’Malley’s The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo crisis, 1960-1964 (2018) has shown. In this regard, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 and taken over by the Fatah movement in 1969, was no exception.

To be sure, Palestinian organizations including Fatah and the PLO decried key UN actions. One was the UN Palestine partition plan of 1947; another was UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. Calling upon Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied” during the Six-Day War in June and calling for the “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace,” it did not mention Palestine or the Palestinians. Even so, the PLO sought to get access to the UN and UN recognition. A crucial landmark on this road was the address to the UN in New York in November 1974 by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004), a Fatah co-founder in 1959 and from 1969 PLO chairman.

Arafat did not speak at the Security Council, which was and is dominated by its five veto-carrying permanent members Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR/Russia. Rather, he addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where from the 1960s Third World states were in the majority; his speech was the first time that the UNGA allowed a non-state representative to attend its plenary session. The UNGA invited the PLO after having decided, in September, to begin separate hearings on Palestine (rather than making Palestine part of general Middle Eastern hearings), and after the PLO was internationally recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, a landmark accomplishment for the organization. The UNGA president who introduced Arafat, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1937-2021), was the Foreign Minister of Algeria, which since its independence in 1962 had supported the Palestinian cause organizationally, militarily, and politically. Arafat spoke in Arabic; the below text is the official UN English translation. Arafat did not write the text all by himself; several PLO officials and Palestinians close to the PLO, including Edward Said, assisted, as Timothy Brennan has noted in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021). Later in November 1974, the UNGA inter alia decided to give the PLO observer status and affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Zhou discusses China's relationships across the Middle East, including PRC policy toward Israel. He also reviews the proposed nuclear-weapons-free-zones in Africa and Latin America, as well as developments concerning the Non-Aligned Movement and the Second Asian-African Conference.

Zhou and Nasser discuss developments in Algeria, the Second Asian-African Conference, oil in the Middle East, US foreign policy, and the economic situation in Egypt.

Zhou and Nasser discuss developments in and relations with Libya, Tunisia, Israel, Palestine, Morocco, Yemen, and Mauritania, as well as the Non-Aligned Movement and the proposed second Asian-African Conference.

Zhou Enlai and Ho Chi Minh discuss preparations for the second Asian-African Conference and the potential participation of countries such as the Soviet Union, Malaysia, and India.

The Chinese Ambassador to Syria and the Syrian Foreign Minister discuss the timing of the Second Asian-African Conference and the Arab-Israeli conflict

A list of problems between China and other Asian-African countries

Description of the reaction to the Asian-African Conference in both participating countries and capitalist ruled countries.

The agenda of the Bogor Conference was to determine the purposes, timing, and participants of the Asian-African Conference. The five Southeast Asian countries agreed that China and Japan should participate in the Asian-African Conference, but some countries also insisted on the participation of US allies such as Thailand and the Philippines.