[1] The Alliance was created in Damascus in December 1993 by ten Palestinian factions opposed to the negotiations that led up to the Oslo Accords.

[5][6] The idea of a new rejectionist Palestinian coalition emerged with the Madrid Israeli-Palestinian talks in 1991.

In the view of the secular factions, Hamas tried to replicate the experience of the Fatah dominance in PLO.

[2][3][8] The ten founding members of APF were: The two main secular factions, the PFLP and the DFLP, left the Alliance in 1998 as a result of their willingness to engage in dialogue with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

[7] The APF contained nationalist, leftist and Islamist currents, with widely different ideological objectives.