As other documents in this collection on Moroccan nationalists in 1947 and 1950 have exemplified, the United Nations was an important arena in decolonization struggles for Arabs, as it was for Asians and Africans as e.g. Alanna O’Malley’s The Diplomacy of Decolonisation: America, Britain, and the United Nations during the Congo crisis, 1960-1964 (2018) has shown. In this regard, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which was founded in 1964 and taken over by the Fatah movement in 1969, was no exception.

To be sure, Palestinian organizations including Fatah and the PLO decried key UN actions. One was the UN Palestine partition plan of 1947; another was UN Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. Calling upon Israel to withdraw “from territories occupied” during the Six-Day War in June and calling for the “acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace,” it did not mention Palestine or the Palestinians. Even so, the PLO sought to get access to the UN and UN recognition. A crucial landmark on this road was the address to the UN in New York in November 1974 by Yassir Arafat (1929-2004), a Fatah co-founder in 1959 and from 1969 PLO chairman.

Arafat did not speak at the Security Council, which was and is dominated by its five veto-carrying permanent members Britain, China, France, the United States, and the USSR/Russia. Rather, he addressed the UN General Assembly (UNGA), where from the 1960s Third World states were in the majority; his speech was the first time that the UNGA allowed a non-state representative to attend its plenary session. The UNGA invited the PLO after having decided, in September, to begin separate hearings on Palestine (rather than making Palestine part of general Middle Eastern hearings), and after the PLO was internationally recognized as the sole representative of the Palestinian people, a landmark accomplishment for the organization. The UNGA president who introduced Arafat, Abdelaziz Bouteflika (1937-2021), was the Foreign Minister of Algeria, which since its independence in 1962 had supported the Palestinian cause organizationally, militarily, and politically. Arafat spoke in Arabic; the below text is the official UN English translation. Arafat did not write the text all by himself; several PLO officials and Palestinians close to the PLO, including Edward Said, assisted, as Timothy Brennan has noted in Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said (2021). Later in November 1974, the UNGA inter alia decided to give the PLO observer status and affirmed Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

Etienne Manac’h, reporting on a thaw in relations between China and Hungary, suggests that the PRC seeks "a greater zone of autonomy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe."

The Secretary of the Polish Embassy in Paris offers his views on Sino-Soviet relations in the context of developments in the Vietnam War.

French diplomat in Beijing Etienne Manac’h writes that "China is very concerned by the trend towards détente emerging in East-West relations."

Luo Guibo is curious about developments in West German-Soviet relations and the Conference on European Security, while Etienne Manac’h inquires about China's appointment of ambassadors to Europe.

Etienne Manac’h reports that although China may soon re-appoint ambassadors to Eastern Europe, officials from Poland and Czechoslovakia are skeptical of China's policies toward their countries.

Pierre Cerles provides an assessment of Chinese foreign policy toward Eastern Europe during the 1960s within the context of the Sino-Soviet split, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Cultural Revolution, and China's own internal leadership divisions.

The Department of Asia-Oceania analyzes shifts in Chinese foreign policy toward Eastern Europe following the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and connects the apparent changes in Beijing's diplomacy to the Sino-Soviet split and the Vietnam War.

Describing problems amongst communist countries, the Polish Ambassador to Japan reports that "Mao Zedong considered himself as the heir of the Chinese Emperors and treated the Ambassadors as such." The Ambassador also describes kidnappings carried out by the North Korean government.