The Arab League was formed in Cairo on 22 March 1945 with six members: Egypt, Iraq, Transjordan (renamed Jordan after independence in 1946), Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Yemen joined on 5 May 1945. Since its formation the Arab League has promoted the Palestinian Arab cause in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including by imposing the Arab League boycott of Israel. The Arab League opposed the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine in 1947. On 15 May 1948, the then seven Arab League members coordinated an invasion of what was by then the former British Mandate, marking the start of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
In 1964, the Arab League created the Palestine Liberation Organization to operate within the territory of Israel. During the Six-Day War, the Arab League was instrumental in the oil embargo, which lasted until the Khartoum Resolution in September 1967. The League members also agreed to continue the state of belligerency with Israel and not to negotiate a settlement to the conflict. The signing of the Egypt–Israel peace treaty was condemned, and Egypt was suspended from the Arab League in 1979, which lasted until 1989. The Arab League on 15 November 1988 recognized the proclamation of the State of Palestine. The Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel signed the Oslo Accords in 1993 which led to the setting up of the Palestinian National Authority. The Arab League has not made any official statements either supporting the establishment of the Palestinian Authority or condemning it. In October 1994, Jordan signed the Israel–Jordan peace treaty with Israel, and it was not ostracized by the Arab League, as Egypt had been in 1979. In 2002, the Arab League endorsed a Saudi Arabian Arab Peace Initiative which called for full withdrawal by Israel "to the 1967 borders" in return for fully normalized relations.
28-30 July 2025, the twenty-two nations of the Arab League, the European Union’s twenty-seven, and seventeen more, including Great Britain, “Indonesia for Asia”, “Senegal for Africa”, and “Brazil, Canada and Mexico for the Americas”, signed onto a document called the “New York Declaration,” on implementation of the two-state solution, at an international conference hosted by France and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, authorized by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly adopted in December 2024 with a vote of 157 to 7. The conference aimed to develop a widely supported international framework addressing the disarmament of Hamas, the release of hostages in Gaza, the reform of the Palestinian Authority, and post-conflict planning, including consideration of a two-state solution in the form of a declaration envisioning a 15-month plan to establish a sovereign Palestine. Key provisions: Israel to ceasefire and withdraw from Gaza and from depredations in the West Bank; Hamas to disarm, return all remaining hostages, and relinquish rule over Gaza. The Palestinian Authority/PLO was represented. Neither the US nor Israel were present, nor any representative of Hamas.
1945–48 At the end of World War II in 1945, the Palestinian Arabs were leaderless. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had been in exile since 1937, and spent the war years in occupied Europe, actively collaborating with Nazi leadership. His relative Jamal al-Husayni was interned in Southern Rhodesia during the war. As the war ended, Amin al-Husayni escaped to Egypt, and moved to Lebanon in 1959; he died in Beirut on 4 July 1974.
In November 1945 the Arab League re-established the Arab Higher Committee as the supreme executive body of Palestinian Arabs in the territory of the British Mandate of Palestine. The committee was immediately recognised by the then six Arab League countries; the Mandate government recognised the new Committee two months later. However, the Committee fell apart due to infighting, and in June 1946 the Arab League imposed upon the Palestinians the Arab Higher Executive, renamed as "Arab Higher Committee" in 1947, with Amin al-Husayni (then living in Egypt) as its chairman and Jamal al-Husayni as vice-chairman.
On 2 December 1945 the Arab League Council formally declared a boycott of any Jewish-owned business operating in Mandatory Palestine: "Jewish products and manufactured [goods] in Palestine shall be [considered] undesirable in the Arab countries; to permit them to enter the Arab countries would lead to the realization of the Zionist political objectives.
1948–49 According to an interview in an 11 October 1947 article of Akhbar al-Yom, the Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha reportedly said: "I personally wish that the Jews do not drive us to this war, as this will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades".Sachar, 1979, p. 333. The second part of this sentence, without the caveat that he hoped to avoid war and incorrectly dated to 15 May 1948 (the day after the Israeli Declaration of Independence), became known as the Azzam Pasha quotation, after it was widely disseminated in English as anti-Arab propaganda.
The Arab League bitterly opposed any attempts to establish a Jewish state and worked strenuously to defeat any partition of Palestine. When the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was adopted in resolution 181(II) by the General Assembly on 29 November 1947, it was unanimously rejected by the Arab League and by all its members and by leaders of the Arab community, including the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee.
On Friday, 14 May 1948, a day before the British Mandate over Palestine expired (the next day being Shabbat), the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, and approved a proclamation declaring the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel. The next day the seven Arab League members, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, coordinated a march with their forces into what the previous day had been the area of the British Mandate, marking the start of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. In the introduction to the cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States to the UN Secretary-General on 15 May 1948, the Arab League gave reasons for the intervention of the Arab States:
On the occasion of the intervention of Arab States in Palestine to restore law and order and to prevent disturbances prevailing in Palestine from spreading into their territories and to check further bloodshed.
Clause 10 of the Cablegram said:- 10. Now that the Mandate over Palestine has come to an end, leaving no legally constituted authority behind in order to administer law and order in the country and afford the necessary and adequate protection to life and property, the Arab States declare as follows: (a) The right to set up a Government in Palestine pertains to its inhabitants under the principles of self-determination recognized by the Covenant of the League of Nations as well as the United Nations Charter. (b) Peace and order have been completely upset in Palestine, and, in consequence of Jewish aggression, approximately over a quarter of a million of the Arab population have been compelled to leave their homes and emigrate to neighbouring Arab countries. (c) The Mandatory has already announced that on the termination of the Mandate it will no longer be responsible for the maintenance of law and order in Palestine except in the camps and areas actually occupied by its forces, and only to the extent necessary for the security of those forces and their withdrawal.
The Cablegram also declared - The Arab States recognize that the independence and sovereignty of Palestine which was so far subject to the British Mandate has now, with the termination of the Mandate, become established in fact, and maintain that the lawful inhabitants of Palestine are alone competent and entitled to set up an administration in Palestine for the discharge of all governmental functions without any external interference. As soon as that stage is reached the intervention of the Arab States, which is confined to the restoration of peace and establishment of law and order, shall be put an end to, and the sovereign State of Palestine will be competent in co-operation with the other States members of the Arab League, to take every step for the promotion of the welfare and security of its peoples and territory.
Six days after the invasion, Azzam told reporters: "We are fighting for an Arab Palestine. Whatever the outcome the Arabs will stick to their offer of equal citizenship for Jews in Arab Palestine and let them be as Jewish as they like. In areas where they predominate they will have complete autonomy."Palestine Post, 21 May 1948, p. 3.
However, despite the rhetoric Arab leaders were disunited. The Egyptians knew of Abdullah's agreement with Meir and were determined to thwart Transjordan's territorial ambitions, "thus the Arab war plan changed in conception and essence from a united effort to conquer parts of the nascent Jewish state and perhaps destroy it, into a multilateral land grab focusing on the Arab areas of the country."Morris, 1999. p.221
An Egyptian Ministerial order dated 1 June 1948 declared that all laws in force during the Mandate would continue to be in force in the Gaza Strip. On 8 July 1948, the Arab League decided to set up a temporary civil administration in Palestine, to be directly responsible to the Arab League. This plan was strongly opposed by King Abdullah I of Transjordan, and received only half-hearted support from the Arab Higher Committee. The new administration was never properly established. Another order issued on 8 August 1948 vested an Egyptian Administrator-General with the powers of the High Commissioner.Palestine Yearbook of International Law 1987–1988, Vol 4, by Anis F. Kassim, Kluwer Law International (1 June 1988), , p 294
The Egyptian government, suspicious of King Abdullah's intentions and growing power in Palestine, put a proposal to the Arab League meeting that opened in Alexandria on 6 September 1948. The plan would turn the temporary civil administration, which had been agreed to in July, into an Arab government with a seat in Gaza for the whole of Palestine. The formal announcement of the Arab League's decision to form the All-Palestine Government was issued on 20 September. The All-Palestine Government was established in Gaza on 22 September 1948 and was recognised by all Arab League countries except Jordan; and on 30 September a rival First Palestinian Congress was convened in Amman and promptly denounced the Gaza "government".
"A key feature of the Arabs' plans was the complete marginalization of the Palestinians... This aptly reflected the political reality: The military defeats of April–May had rendered them insignificant. The Arab League through the first half of 1948 had consistently rejected Husseini's appeals to establish a government-in-exile... Under strong pressure from Egypt, which feared complete Hashemite control over the Palestinians, the League Political Committee in mid-September authorized the establishment of a Palestinian 'government.'"Morris, 1999. p.222
1949–1967