This photograph shows Yasser Arafat, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Nayef Hawatmeh and George Habash in Tripoli, 1977 when the Steadfastness and Confrontation Front was formed.
The front was formed in 1977 by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the governments of Libya, Algeria, Syria and South Yemen. It was intended as a protest and a show of position after President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had travelled to Tel Aviv to meet Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and begin the peace negotiations that would eventually lead to the Camp David Accords. This Egyptian initiative was widely seen in the Arab world as an abandonment of the previously-agreed principle of withholding recognition of Israel and as breaking the Arab alliance against Israel.
The Front affirmed its rejection of United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 and reiterated the unwillingness to recognize Israel or negotiate with it as regards a Palestinian state. It also condemned every Arab government who did not join the Front, called for a boycott of Egypt, and emphasized the ties between Syria and the Palestinians.
The Front did not explicitly call for Israel’s destruction, but repeated the PLO’s Ten Point Program calling for a Palestinian state on “any part of Palestinian land…as an interim aim of the Palestinian Revolution.” This had been interpreted, at least inside the PLO, as a step towards a two-state solution and was highly controversial among Palestinians.
