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Why was there no push for a Palestinian state from 1948 to 1967?

Short answer: because for those 19 years the West Bank and Gaza were in Arab hands — Jordan and Egypt — and neither the Arab states nor the Palestinian leadership of the day sought a separate Palestinian state in them. The dominant frame was pan-Arabism (Palestine as an all-Arab cause to be solved by eliminating Israel, not by a separate Palestinian nation-state); Jordan annexed the West Bank and actively suppressed a distinct Palestinian statehood; and the PLO's own 1964 founding charter explicitly disclaimed any claim to the West Bank and Gaza. The specific demand for a state in the West Bank and Gaza is overwhelmingly a post-1967 development. That does not make Palestinian identity "invented" — but it does mean the history is often misremembered, and both the fact and its limits deserve to be stated plainly.

The setup: 19 years under Arab rule (1948–1967)

After the 1948 war, the territories now central to the conflict were held not by Palestinians but by Arab states:

  • The West Bank was captured by Jordan, which annexed it in 1950 (recognized by essentially only Britain and Pakistan) and made its Palestinian residents Jordanian citizens [VERIFIED].
  • Gaza was placed under Egyptian military administration — Egypt did not annex it and did not grant citizenship, leaving Gazans stateless [VERIFIED].
  • A nominal "All-Palestine Government" was proclaimed in Gaza in September 1948, but it was a paper entity under Egyptian control, quickly sidelined, and never a functioning state [DOCUMENTED].

In all 19 years, no sovereign Palestinian state was created in either territory — by anyone.

Why there was no state, and little demand for one

  1. Pan-Arabism, not Palestinian statehood, was the frame. The dominant ideology (Nasser's Arab nationalism, Ba'athism) held that there was one Arab nation and that "Palestine" was an all-Arab cause — to be solved by the Arab states collectively, by undoing 1948 and eliminating Israel — not by carving out a separate Palestinian nation-state. This is visible in the PLO's own founding: its 1964 charter was titled al-Mithaq al-Qawmi — qawmi meaning pan-Arab national — written by Ahmad Shukeiri to reflect Nasser's pan-Arabism (the word only changed to watani, Palestinian-national, in 1968) [DOCUMENTED].
  2. Jordan actively suppressed it. The largest bloc of Palestinian territory sat under a regime that had annexed it and absorbed its people as Jordanians — and that discouraged a distinct Palestinian national identity and statehood, which would have threatened Jordanian control [DOCUMENTED].
  3. The early demand was about return, not a state in what remained. The immediate post-1948 Palestinian political goal was framed around the right of return and reversing 1948 — not around accepting the post-1948 lines and building a state in the West Bank and Gaza.
  4. The clincher — the PLO's own 1964 charter. Article 24 of the 1964 National Covenant explicitly disclaimed any claim to the very territories now at the heart of the two-state demand: it declared that the Organization did not exercise territorial sovereignty over the West Bank (then Jordanian), the Gaza Strip (then Egyptian), or the Himmah area. Its goal — "the liberation of Palestine" — meant the land Israel held. In 1964 the PLO expressly sought no state in the West Bank and Gaza. (When the charter was rewritten in 1968, this Clause 24 was removed — see below.) [DOCUMENTED — the 1964 Covenant text; corroborated by the 1968 revision's removal of the clause]

What changed after 1967

The Six-Day War transformed everything:

  1. 1967 created the object of the demand. Once Israel took the West Bank and Gaza, "who rules them" flipped from an intra-Arab matter (Jordan/Egypt) into an Israel-vs-Palestinian one, giving Palestinian nationalism a single, concrete territorial focus it had lacked.
  2. The crushing 1967 defeat discredited pan-Arabism. The promise that the Arab states would "liberate Palestine" collapsed. Palestinians concluded they had to carry their own cause — and a distinctly Palestinian nationalism surged.
  3. The PLO was transformed (1968–69). The fedayeen factions (Fatah, Arafat) took it over, turning it from an Arab-League instrument into an independent national movement. The 1968 revised charter removed the 1964 Article 24 disclaimer and renamed the document from qawmi (pan-Arab) to watani (Palestinian-national) [DOCUMENTED].
  4. The demand then evolved — slowly — from "all of Palestine" to a West-Bank/Gaza state. Through the 1974 Arab League Rabat summit (recognizing the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people") and the PLO's 1974 "phased" political program (12th PNC, Cairo, June 1974), to the 1988 Algiers Declaration of Independence (accepting a state in the West Bank and Gaza and, implicitly, Israel's existence), to Oslo (1993). The two-state demand as we know it crystallized 1974 → 1988 → 1993 — all after 1967 [DOCUMENTED].

The one standard on this

This is a factually grounded point, and it is used — fairly — to argue that the early conflict was about undoing 1948 and Israel's existence, not about a West-Bank/Gaza state. The 1964 charter, the pan-Arab frame, and Jordan's suppression genuinely support that observation, and this page states it plainly.

But one standard flags where the argument gets over-extended — into "therefore the Palestinian people is invented." Two facts keep it honest:

  • "No state demand 1948–67" is not "no Palestinian identity." Palestinian national feeling has roots in the late-Ottoman and Mandate periods — the Arabic newspaper Filastin was founded in Jaffa in 1911, and the 1936–39 Arab revolt was a major crystallizing moment. The identity is older than the specific two-state demand, which is post-1967.
  • A demand crystallizing with circumstances is normal, not disqualifying. National movements routinely take their specific territorial shape in response to events — Zionism did too, coalescing as a modern political movement in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Historical contingency is not the same as illegitimacy.

So: state the sequence — no Palestinian state was sought under Arab rule; the PLO's own 1964 charter disclaimed the West Bank and Gaza; the two-state demand is post-1967 — and let the reader weigh what it means. The sequence is a fact; the inference that it delegitimizes Palestinian statehood is a contested reading, and this site does not smuggle it in as one.

Go deeper: Was Palestine ever a country? · Where do "Palestine" and "Palestinian" come from? · PLO & Hamas — Doctrine & Rejections · Palestinian Identity · Is it the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, or occupied territory?