Khaled al-Hassan

Khaled al-Hassan ( also known as Abu Said ) (13 February 1928 – 8 October 1994) was an early adviser of Yasser Arafat, PLO leader and a founder of the Palestinian political and militant organization Fatah. Khaled was the older brother of Hani al-Hassan. He and his family lived there until Israel's capture of the city in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, in which he participated as part of the Palestinian Arab forces. His family settled in Sidon, Lebanon, but he left for Egypt where he says he was briefly detained "just for being Palestinian." Upon his release, he reunited with his family in Lebanon and lived there for a while.

In 1949 he formed the short-lived commando group Tahrir Filastin. A year later he moved to Syria. During this time, al-Hassan worked as a teacher in Damascus and helped found the Islamic Liberation Party in 1952. Syrian authorities threatened to arrest him that year for attempting to set up another Palestinian commando group, but he fled to Kuwait. There, he worked as a civil servant, typist, and later as the country's Secretary-General of the Municipal Council Board until 1967. He was awarded Kuwaiti citizenship in the mid-1950s.

Fatah and PLO activism Al-Hassan was one of the original founders of Fatah, establishing a network of activists in Kuwait. In 1962, al-Hassan, Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir and Salah Khalaf founded a magazine called Filastuna, Nida' al-Hayat ("Palestine, Our Call to Life"). According to al-Hassan, the Kuwaiti group became known before those in Europe, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Gaza and Iraq because of the magazine, which was based in Tripoli, Lebanon. Al-Hassan was one of ten members of Fatah's Central Committee, which became the main body of the movement.

In 1968, al-Hassan was elected to the Palestine Liberation Organization Executive Committee (PLO-EC) after Fatah took control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1968. Early that year, al-Hassan persuaded Saudi King Faisal to enforce the "liberation tax" which required Palestinians in Saudi Arabia to pay a percentage of their income to the PLO. This, in turn, supplied the PLO with 60 million riyal yearly. Also, in that year, he spoke to the Egyptian Foreign Minister Mahmoud Riyad and Mohammad Hassanein Heykal on behalf of Gamal Abdel Nasser in order to familiarize him with Fatah and its armed branch al-Assifa.

From 1973 until his death, al-Hassan was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Palestinian National Council and was thus considered the first "foreign minister of the PLO". After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, he argued that the "Palestinian struggle" could continue with a state in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel and he wrote up an unofficial five-point proposal in April–May 1980, advocating for Israel’s withdrawal from the territories, the deployment of United Nations forces, and work on arrangements for the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories.