The founding of the PLO is obviously a major event in the history of Palestine/Israel, but I'm finding very little online about it. All I can tell is that it was founded by the Arab League in 1964 for the "liberation of Palestine". Israel had taken a ton of land from the Arab league after 1948, and would take even more after the six-day war in 1967. What is the evidence that the PLO was meant as an organization to fight for an independent Palestine, rather than being a tool of the Arab League to retake land? After all, "liberation" from Israel does not necessarily mean liberation from Arab League control. Otherwise, why did the Arab League create the PLO in the first place?
Thank you very much!
Firstly, you have a misconception. Israel did not take land from the Arab League in the 1948 war. The 1948 war between Israel and the Arab states over what was formerly the British Mandate did not involve land that belonged to any member of the Arab League. It had been owned prior by the British, and prior to that by the Ottomans, whose empire dissolved following WWI. Israel was founded in an area that did not have any Arab sovereignty or control. Thus this was not about "retaking land" that the Arab League lost, but rather taking land that the Arab League considered to have been taken from Palestinian Arabs, who they regarded as its rightful owners (though Jews did not, of course, agree with this characterization).
The second point here is what the goal of the PLO was. The PLO was founded with a Charter in 1964 that differs from the 1968 Charter issued as Fatah (Yasser Arafat's group) was taking over it. The 1964 Charter did not call specifically for a Palestinian state. It was only obliquely referenced. This is because the PLO, originally founded, was more of an Egyptian proxy than independent group, though it was officially founded in the Arab League. The Egyptian leader of the time sought to create, with help from the Iraqis and Syrians, a group that they could use to focus and control Palestinian attacks and insurgencies against Israel, while maintaining plausible deniability for its actions (i.e. not directly ordering the attacks with their own military). Other groups, like Fatah, sought to steal the mantle from the PLO, but ended up controlling it. At any rate, the PLO was not founded with the explicit goal of creating a Palestinian state because the Arab world did not necessarily care to create one. The goal was to destroy Israel, and Egypt and Jordan in particular (as well as Syria) had long harbored desires for chunks of what composed Israel from 1949-1967. The PLO's reason for existence was as a tool, one that eventually (following the defeat many regarded as humiliating in 1967 to Israel) became more and more independent of the Arab world, though still relying on them as supporters and sponsors.