Ask where the Palestinian claim to land comes from, and one answer returns more often than any other: the people were there first. It is the answer a viewer carries out of a documentary, the one a student writes on a placard, and it feels like the sturdiest ground available, because prior presence sounds like something a map or a census could settle. So does the record match the intuition? The instruments that actually carry the operative right name something else. The General Assembly’s resolution under the title “The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” reaffirmed, on 18 December 2002 and again on 17 December 2024, “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine,” and neither text uses the word “indigenous.” The scholarly argument that indigeneity grounds the claim is real, published and named, and it runs alongside the official record rather than through it.
Key Findings
- General Assembly resolutions 57/198, adopted 18 December 2002, and 79/163, adopted 17 December 2024, both reaffirm “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine,” and neither uses the word “indigenous.”
- The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) grants self-determination at Article 3 but specifies its mode at Article 4 as “autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs,” and Article 46(1) bars any reading that would “dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.”
- The PLO Negotiations Affairs Department’s standing position on borders, last revised in 2019, defines the claim by a dated line: “A State of Palestine based on pre June 4 th 1967 border with East Jerusalem as its Capital.”
- The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimated 15.49 million Palestinians worldwide at the end of 2025, 5.56 million in the State of Palestine, 1.86 million in the 1948 territories and 8.82 million in the diaspora, an estimate no single register enumerates.
- The Montevideo Convention of 26 December 1933, Article 1, sets four qualifications for statehood, “a permanent population,” “a defined territory,” “government,” and “capacity to enter into relations with the other states,” and prior presence is not among them.
Which right do the UN resolutions attach to the Palestinian people?
The General Assembly attaches self-determination and statehood in the same clause, and has kept that clause unchanged across 22 years. Resolution 57/198, adopted on 18 December 2002 under the title “The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination,” reaffirms “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine.” Resolution 79/163, adopted on 17 December 2024 under the same title, repeats the clause word for word.
One wording, two dates 22 years apart, and the wording does not change across the interval. What the wording never contains is the category the intuition reaches for. Neither resolution uses the word “indigenous,” and neither invokes the framework that international law reserves for indigenous peoples. The right they carry is the right of a people: peoplehood, self-determination, and a state.
That is a distinction between two legal vocabularies, not a ranking of them, and it matters because the two deliver different things. Self-determination in the decolonisation sense terminates in external statehood, which is exactly what the resolutions’ own clause names. The indigenous-rights framework, examined below, defines its own mode of self-determination differently.
These resolutions are instruments of a political organ rather than adjudications, and they bind no one by their own force. They are citable for what they say, and what they say is the plainest statement the official record holds on the question: when the international body that has returned to this subject for five decades writes down which right the Palestinian people hold, it writes self-determination and an independent State of Palestine, and it wrote the same phrase in 2002 and in 2024 without adding indigeneity to it.
The same pairing appears in the Human Rights Council’s output, examined further below, where self-determination is linked to permanent sovereignty over natural resources. That doctrine also belongs to decolonisation rather than to indigenous rights. Across the two organs, over more than twenty years, the operative category is consistent, and it is the category of peoplehood.
Is it often said indigeneity grounds the liberation claim?
Yes, and the argument is made in peer-reviewed venues by named authors. Ukashi, writing in Peace and Conflict Studies in 2018, argues for reconsidering Zionism as an Indigenous emancipation movement against imperial and settler-colonial characterisations, an ideologically committed intervention the author announces as such in his own introduction, which places indigeneity at the centre of the dispute from the opposite direction.
The frame’s own scholarly pole is equally named and equally dated. Dana (2024), in Middle East Critique, argues across eight pages that Israeli settler colonialism should be classed as exceptional within settler-colonial studies, reasoning from Zionist ideological roots and the absence of a conventional metropole. Locker-Biletzki, in Review of Radical Political Economics in 2025, a refereed conference paper in a themed symposium published for the Union for Radical Political Economics, argues the settler-colonial case across Palestine and Israel from 1920 to 1956. Sunnemark (2025), in Critical Sociology, frames the Palestine solidarity movement as an organic, locally situated grassroots “solidarity ecology” guided by Palestinian civil-society calls.
So the premise is granted in its checkable form. The frame exists, it is published, named scholars make it in named journals across at least seven years, and it holds that liberation means decolonisation rather than accommodation within existing arrangements.
What none of these works does is measure anything. Dana’s article contains no figures at all, so no number can be attributed to it. Locker-Biletzki measured nothing, and the figures inside it are quoted from other authors. Sunnemark reports no external-funding mechanism, and that absence is not a measured null. Ukashi’s demographic numbers are block quotations from another author and are themselves contested in the historiography.
These are arguments about how to characterise a history, offered on one side of a live dispute. They are the frame’s strongest statement, and they are interpretive scholarship rather than a finding.
Does the indigenous rights declaration promise statehood?
The instrument that defines the category specifies self-government, not independence. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted in 2007, grants self-determination at Article 3, and then names its mode at Article 4: the “right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs.” That is the one article in the Declaration that says what kind of self-determination it confers, and it terminates inside an existing state.
Article 46(1) makes the boundary explicit from the other side, barring any reading of the Declaration that would authorise or encourage action that would “dismember or impair, totally or in part, the territorial integrity or political unity of sovereign and independent States.” The two articles fit together: the Declaration confers a robust internal self-determination and expressly withholds the external form.
This is what makes the relationship between the two vocabularies more than a labelling question. A claim routed through the indigenous-rights framework reaches autonomy and self-government within a state’s territorial integrity. A claim routed through decolonisation-era self-determination reaches independent statehood, which is the formulation the General Assembly resolutions above actually use. The frame examined in the previous section argues that indigeneity strengthens the sovereignty claim; the instrument the category belongs to bounds the sovereignty it grants, and bounds it short of the statehood the resolutions name.
The question of which populations in the territory satisfy the indigeneity criteria is a separate question with its own answer, and is treated elsewhere. What this section establishes is narrower and prior to it: even a population whose indigenous status were settled beyond dispute would find, in the governing instrument, a self-determination defined as autonomy over internal and local affairs, with the territorial integrity of existing states preserved at Article 46(1).
The Declaration, like the resolutions, is non-binding. It is the category’s own text, and it is citable for what it states.
What did the World Court say about Palestinian self-determination?
The Court indicated, by eleven votes to four, that Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is unlawful, and reasoned from self-determination. Its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, requested by General Assembly resolution A/RES/77/247 of 30 December 2022, records at paragraph 274 that “the obligations violated by Israel include certain obligations erga omnes,” and that among them is “the obligation to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
The recorded votes at paragraph 285 differ subparagraph by subparagraph, and the differences matter. Jurisdiction was unanimous. The findings that the continued presence is unlawful, and that Israel must bring it to an end “as rapidly as possible,” each carried by eleven votes to four, the narrowest margins in the opinion. The obligation to cease new settlement activity and evacuate settlers carried fourteen to one, as did the obligation to make reparation. The third-state duties of non-recognition and non-assistance carried twelve to three.
The opinion is advisory. It arose on a General Assembly request under Article 65 of the Statute rather than in a contentious case, and it binds no one. The Court ordered nothing, and Vice-President Sebutinde dissented from subparagraphs 2 through 9, with Judges Tomka, Abraham and Aurescu dissenting from the two unlawful-presence subparagraphs.
The relevant feature for this question is the category the Court reached for. Its erga omnes reasoning names self-determination, the prohibition on the use of force to acquire territory, and obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law. It does not reach for indigenous status, and it does not need to: the right it identifies as violated is the one the General Assembly resolutions have reaffirmed since 2003, held by a people, terminating in a state.
Paragraph 278 spells out one practical consequence, requiring that states distinguish in their dealings with Israel “between the territory of the State of Israel and the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967.” That is a territorial distinction drawn by a date and a line, which is the same shape the parties’ own positions take.
Which sovereignty do the natural-resources resolutions name?
Human Rights Council resolution 31/33, adopted on 24 March 2016, names permanent sovereignty over natural resources, a decolonisation doctrine, as an integral component of Palestinian self-determination.
The resolution reaffirms “the inalienable, permanent and unqualified right of the Palestinian people to self-determination,” including “the right to their independent State of Palestine,” and affirms in its preamble “the applicability of the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources to the Palestinian situation as an integral component of the right to self-determination.” The General Assembly runs a parallel series on the permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people over their natural resources.
That link is the closest the official record comes to a land-based sovereignty distinct from state-building, and it is worth being exact about where it comes from. Permanent sovereignty over natural resources is a doctrine of the decolonisation era, developed for peoples emerging from colonial administration and asserting control over the wealth of their territories. It attaches to a people and a territory. It is not the land relationship the indigenous-rights literature describes, which rests on continuity of connection and traditional knowledge rather than on national development.
The Council’s own formulation makes the dependency plain. Permanent sovereignty over resources is treated as a component of the right to self-determination rather than as a freestanding claim, so the resource sovereignty travels with the peoplehood right rather than beside it. Its operative paragraph 4 confirms that this sovereignty “must be used in the interest of their national development,” which is development-state language.
These are resolutions of political organs, not adjudications, and they are labelled as such. Their value here is that they close off the most natural place an indigeneity claim might have entered the official record. If the international instruments were going to reach past statehood toward a land-and-resources sovereignty grounded in prior presence, this is the series where it would appear, and what appears instead is the decolonisation doctrine, attached to the same right the 2002 and 2024 General Assembly resolutions reaffirm.
Across both organs, then, the answer is consistent in its category. The right is a people’s right; the resource sovereignty is its component; the terminus is a state.
Which language do Palestinian representatives use themselves?
The representative bodies define the claim by a dated line and a state. The PLO Negotiations Affairs Department’s standing position on borders, last revised in 2019, states: “A State of Palestine based on pre June 4 th 1967 border with East Jerusalem as its Capital.”
It defines the line itself in the same document: “The 1967 border, which is defined as the 1949 Armistice Line along with all legal modification thereto up to June 4th 1967, is the internationally-recognized border between Israel and the occupied State of Palestine.”
That is a border claim, resting on an armistice line and its modifications through a named date, not on ancestral presence. The same page records the historical compromise in territorial terms: “Since 1988, however, in the interest of achieving peace and ending the conflict, the Palestinian leadership limited the national aspirations to statehood to 22 percent of mandate Palestine, seeking a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
The dated statements follow the same register. The PLO Executive Committee, meeting on 1 August 2026, affirmed, as reported by WAFA, the Palestinian news agency, that any agreement should lead to “an end to the Israeli occupation and guaranteeing the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination through the establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the June 4, 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, based on the two-state solution and relevant international resolutions.” The Palestinian Presidency, on 8 September 2026, likewise reaffirmed “an independent, sovereign, and viable State of Palestine along the June 4, 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living in security and peace alongside the State of Israel.”
Each of these is a party’s own published position and is evidence of the position and nothing more. Two features recur across all three. The operative right is self-determination. The territorial claim is fixed by 4 June 1967 rather than by duration of presence.
The NAD page carries figures on settlers and land shares that are unsourced assertions in a negotiating document, and none is cited here. What is citable is the shape of the claim, and the shape is statehood and a border.
How many people would a unifying indigeneity claim have to cover?
About 15.49 million people, on the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ own worldwide estimate for the end of 2025, and no single register enumerates them. That is the population a unifying political identity would have to span, and the Bureau’s own breakdown shows how scattered it is.
The Bureau puts 5.56 million in the State of Palestine, 1.86 million in what it calls the 1948 territories, meaning Israel, and 8.82 million in the diaspora, 6.82 million of them in Arab countries. Those are estimates across jurisdictions the Bureau does not administer, not a count.
The registers count by residence and status, not by descent. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics’ 2017 census, the last measured base for the territory, counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip on a reference date of 1 December 2017, comprising 2,881,687 in the West Bank and 1,899,291 in Gaza, and it could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem, where administrative estimates were used. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, reporting the population on the eve of Rosh Hashana 5786 in September 2025, counted about 2.130 million Arabs among Israel’s residents, a category the Bureau defines as Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze.
Those two bureaus are counting different populations on different definitions over territory whose boundaries they draw differently, and neither counts the diaspora at all. The worldwide figure is consequently an estimate assembled across systems rather than a count, and the Bureau reports it as such. The 2017 census covers residents of the West Bank and Gaza only, not the global Palestinian population including the refugee diaspora.
So the claim that indigeneity offers a political identity capable of linking Palestinians across geographies and legal statuses is a claim about a population that the administrative record keeps in separate ledgers, by design. Residence, citizenship and refugee registration are the categories the registers keep; ancestral origin is not one of them, in either bureau’s tables. A frame that unified across those ledgers would be doing something no statistical system in the territory currently does.
The statuses themselves, and how the official records keep them apart, are treated separately. What this section establishes is the scale and the fragmentation: one estimate of 15.49 million, one census of 4,780,978 residents from 2017, one Israeli count of about 2.130 million Arab residents in 2025, and no shared register behind any of them.
Where do scholars say indigeneity is not the movement’s language?
Sabina Ali, writing for Contending Modernities at the University of Notre Dame on 29 January 2026, argues that defenders of Zionism have appropriated the language of indigeneity to claim it for Jews. Her critique documents the category being claimed from both sides of the dispute.
That makes indigeneity contested ground in this argument rather than one side’s settled premise. Dowty (2022), in a signed faculty essay for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington titled “Is Israel a settler colonial state?”, argues against the settler-colonial characterisation the indigeneity claim sits inside. That essay is faculty commentary rather than research: no referees, no DOI, no reference list, and it supports only that a named scholar argues that position.
What none of these disputes is Palestinian presence in the land. The disagreement is over whether indigeneity is the frame that carries the political claim, and whether it is the only one available. The published record shows several registers in simultaneous use: self-determination in the resolutions, occupation law in the 2024 advisory opinion, permanent sovereignty over resources in the Human Rights Council series, borders and statehood in the PLO’s own position, and settler colonialism with indigeneity in the Dana, Locker-Biletzki and Sunnemark literature.
Ali’s 2026 analysis and the Dowty essay are named positions on different sides of the same question, published four years apart, and neither measured anything. So the split is between characterisations, argued by named authors in named venues, and the record holds both.
A report that presented indigeneity as the movement’s language would be selecting one register from five in active use, and a report that presented it as absent would be omitting a peer-reviewed literature spanning at least 2018 to 2025.
What does sovereignty require beyond a claim of prior presence?
Four qualifications, and prior presence is not among them. The Convention on Rights and Duties of States, signed at Montevideo on 26 December 1933, states at Article 1 that “the state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government; and d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.”
The English text says “should possess,” not must; the word “effective” appears nowhere in Article 1; and the Convention is regional, signed by nineteen American republics, binding each party only from its own ratification under Article 14. It also names no organ to decide whether any entity satisfies the four qualifications, and Article 3 points the other way, providing that “the political existence of the state is independent of recognition by the other states.”
Those four qualifications are about present capacity, not about historical connection. A population, a territory, a government, and the capacity for foreign relations are things a state either has or does not have on a given date, which is why a claim of prior presence, however well established, does not answer them.
The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995 shows what that gap looks like operationally. Article XVII(1) carves out of the Palestinian Council’s jurisdiction “Jerusalem, settlements, specified military locations, Palestinian refugees, borders, foreign relations and Israelis,” and Article XVII(2) confines the Council’s territorial jurisdiction to West Bank territory “except for Area C,” while its personal jurisdiction applies “to all persons, except for Israelis.” Article XVII(4)(a) records that “Israel, through its military government, has the authority over areas that are not under the territorial jurisdiction of the Council.”
Foreign relations and borders, two of the four Montevideo qualifications and their preconditions, are reserved by that text. The agreement provided for three further redeployments completing within eighteen months of the Council’s inauguration, and for permanent status negotiations to commence no later than 4 May 1996.
Methodology and limitations
This report draws on four source types, each labelled where it appears.
Primary and official records: General Assembly resolutions 57/198 (18 December 2002) and 79/163 (17 December 2024) on the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination; the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), Articles 3, 4 and 46(1); Human Rights Council resolution 31/33 of 24 March 2016; the Convention on Rights and Duties of States (Montevideo, 26 December 1933), Article 1; the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement of 28 September 1995, Article XVII; the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics 2017 census and its end-2025 status brief; and the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics population release of September 2025. The General Assembly and Human Rights Council resolutions are instruments of political organs and bind no one by their own force; UNDRIP is a declaration, not a treaty; the Montevideo Convention is a regional treaty among nineteen American republics and is not a universal instrument.
Court records: the International Court of Justice advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, cited for the text of its operative paragraph 285 and the recorded votes on each subparagraph. The opinion is advisory rather than binding, arose on a General Assembly request under Article 65 of the Statute, and is named here for its dated reasoning and its tallied votes.
Parties’ own positions: the PLO Negotiations Affairs Department’s standing borders page, last revised in 2019, and the PLO Executive Committee and Palestinian Presidency statements of 1 August 2026 and 8 September 2026 as reported by WAFA, the Palestinian news agency. These are one party’s published positions, reported in the third person by a news agency rather than as issued texts, and they are evidence of the positions and nothing else. The NAD page carries unsourced figures on settlers and land shares; none is cited.
Peer-reviewed and scholarly argument: Ukashi (2018), Dana (2024), Locker-Biletzki (2025), Sunnemark (2025), Ali (2026) and Dowty (2022). Every one of these is interpretive, and none carries a measured quantity; the Dowty piece is unrefereed faculty commentary and Locker-Biletzki is typed by its publisher as a conference paper.
Two limits bear on the population figures. The 15.49 million worldwide estimate is not an enumeration and no single register produces it; the 2017 census is the last measured base for the West Bank and Gaza, could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem, and every later total for the territory is a projection off it. The two statistical bureaus count different populations by residence and citizenship, so their figures are never summed.
Conclusion
So does the record match the intuition that prior presence is what grounds the claim? Across the instruments, it does not carry it. The operative right the official record attaches to the Palestinian people is self-determination terminating in statehood, written into the General Assembly’s clause in 2002 and repeated unchanged in 2024, reasoned from by the International Court of Justice at paragraph 274 of its 19 July 2024 opinion, and linked to permanent sovereignty over natural resources by the Human Rights Council in 2016.
The indigeneity frame is nonetheless real and published, argued in peer-reviewed venues by Ukashi in 2018, Dana in 2024, Locker-Biletzki and Sunnemark in 2025, and it sits inside a live scholarly split with Dowty and others on the other side. What it does not do is deliver more sovereignty than the peoplehood claim already carries. UNDRIP Article 4 defines its self-determination as “autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs,” and Article 46(1) preserves the territorial integrity of existing states, so the instrument that owns the category stops short of the independent statehood the resolutions name outright. The Palestinian representative bodies themselves define the claim by a date and a line, the 4 June 1967 border with East Jerusalem as capital, in a position last revised in 2019 and restated in August and September 2026. And a unifying identity would have to span about 15.49 million people whom no single register counts, across bureaus that record residence and citizenship and never descent.
What sits at the end of this is a question about which language a claim travels in, and it is not a technical one. The frame that feels strongest in public argument, the one that says we were here first, routes a claim through an instrument that grants self-government inside somebody else’s state; the frame that reads as bureaucratic, a people’s right to a state on a dated line, is the one every official record actually carries. If the vocabulary that moves a public and the vocabulary that moves an instrument point to different destinations, which one is a movement supposed to speak?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do UN resolutions say “people” rather than “indigenous people”?
The resolutions reaffirm “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including the right to their independent State of Palestine,” a formulation the General Assembly adopted on 18 December 2002 and repeated on 17 December 2024. Peoplehood in the decolonisation sense carries a right that terminates in external statehood, which is what the clause names. No reason for the choice of category appears in the resolutions themselves.
Does UNDRIP apply to any population in Israel or Palestine?
UNDRIP’s own text does not identify which populations satisfy its criteria, and the Declaration names no body to decide. The question of who qualifies in this territory is separate and is treated in the Institute’s report on indigeneity claims and the treaty criteria. What the Declaration does settle is the content of the right it grants: autonomy and self-government at Article 4, with territorial integrity preserved at Article 46(1).
How does permanent sovereignty over natural resources differ from an indigenous land claim?
Permanent sovereignty over natural resources is a decolonisation-era doctrine attaching to a people and a territory, and Human Rights Council resolution 31/33 of 24 March 2016 treats it as “an integral component” of the right to self-determination rather than a freestanding claim. Its operative paragraph 4 states that this sovereignty “must be used in the interest of their national development.” That is state-development language rather than the continuity-of-connection language of indigenous-rights instruments.
Which body has ruled on Palestinian self-determination, and was the ruling binding?
The International Court of Justice addressed it in an advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, requested by General Assembly resolution A/RES/77/247. It is advisory, not a judgment, arose under Article 65 of the Court’s Statute, and binds no one. Its narrowest operative findings, that the continued presence is unlawful and must be brought to an end, carried by eleven votes to four.
Why is 4 June 1967 the date in the Palestinian border claim?
The PLO Negotiations Affairs Department defines the line in its own terms: “the 1949 Armistice Line along with all legal modification thereto up to June 4th 1967.” The same page states that since 1988 the leadership has limited its statehood aspirations to 22 percent of mandate Palestine. Those are the party’s own published positions, cited as such.
How many Palestinians are there, and who counts them?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimated 15.49 million worldwide at the end of 2025, an estimate rather than an enumeration. Its 2017 census counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza on a reference date of 1 December 2017 and could not directly enumerate East Jerusalem. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics separately counted about 2.130 million Arab residents of Israel in September 2025, on its own definitions.
Which criteria does international law set for statehood?
The Montevideo Convention of 26 December 1933 lists four at Article 1: a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and capacity to enter into relations with the other states. The English text says a state “should possess” them, and the Convention names no organ to decide whether any entity does. It is a regional treaty signed by nineteen American republics.
Do scholars agree that settler colonialism is the right framework here?
No. Dana (2024) in Middle East Critique and Locker-Biletzki (2025) in Review of Radical Political Economics argue within the framework; Dowty (2022), in a signed essay for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, argues against it. Ukashi (2018) argues in Peace and Conflict Studies for reading Zionism itself as an Indigenous emancipation movement. None of the four measured anything.
Sources
- Convention on Rights and Duties of States (the Montevideo Convention), 1933. Signed at Montevideo, 26 December 1933, Seventh International Conference of American States; treaty A-40, Organization of American States as depositary. Official record (treaty text).
- Dana, T., 2024. Notes on the ‘Exceptionalism’ of the Israeli Settler-Colonial Project. Middle East Critique. DOI 10.1080/19436149.2024.2342733. Peer-reviewed.
- Dowty, A., 2022. Is Israel a settler colonial state? Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington. jewishstudies.washington.edu. Academic centre essay, not peer-reviewed.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. Media release, September 2025. cbs.gov.il. Official record.
- Israel and the PLO, 1995. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Signed Washington DC, 28 September 1995. Official record (treaty text).
- Locker-Biletzki, A., 2025. Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956. Review of Radical Political Economics. DOI 10.1177/04866134251322919. Peer-reviewed (meeting report).
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017 (final results). Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record (national census).
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. A Brief on the Status of the Palestinian People at the End of 2025. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record.
- PLO Negotiations Affairs Department, no date (last revised 2019). Our Position: Borders. nad.ps. Party’s own published position.
- Sunnemark, V., 2025. The Palestine solidarity movement as solidarity ecology. Critical Sociology. DOI 10.1177/08969205251371599. Peer-reviewed.
- Ukashi, R., 2018. Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis. Peace and Conflict Studies, 25(1), article 7. nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol25/iss1/7. Peer-reviewed.
- United Nations General Assembly, 2002. Resolution 57/198, The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. A/RES/57/198, adopted 18 December 2002. Primary record, adopted resolution.
- United Nations General Assembly, 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, annexed to resolution 61/295. Primary record, adopted declaration.
- United Nations General Assembly, 2024. Resolution 79/163, The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. A/RES/79/163, adopted 17 December 2024. Primary record, adopted resolution.
- United Nations Human Rights Council, 2016. Resolution 31/33, Right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. A/HRC/RES/31/33, adopted 24 March 2016. Primary record, adopted resolution.
- WAFA (Palestinian news agency), 2026. PLO Executive Committee discusses situation in occupied Palestinian Territory, 1 August 2026; and Presidency welcomes joint statement by 12 countries, 8 September 2026. english.wafa.ps. Party’s own published position, as reported.
- Ali, S., 2026. Weaponizing Indigeneity: Zionist Media Discourse on Possessing Palestine. Contending Modernities, University of Notre Dame, 29 January 2026. contendingmodernities.nd.edu. Academic project publication, not peer-reviewed.