UN-Truth

For many of the people attending the Fatah Sixth General Conference that opened today in Bethlehem, Fatah was the hope of their lives.

Fatah was the nationality that most of these Palestinians still do not have.

The membership, mostly men, believed with all their hearts and souls that Fatah would save them, that Fatah was a winning force that would lead them to a solution for their dispossesion, that would restore their dignity and honor.

And now, only about 2,000 of them — who were authorized to receive invitations though what appear to be secret and arbitrary decision-making, and who are now present in the Conference in Bethlehem — will be deciding the future, if not the fate, of their movement.

By Thursday, a new leadership will or will not be elected. Lobbying is now non-stop at many locations around Bethlehem, mostly in hotels where delegates are staying, and at the Terra Sancta Conference Hall.

Up for grabs are 21 seats on the Fatah Central Council (there are over 120 nominees), and 120 seats in the Fatah Revolutionary Council (there are over 600 competing candidates).

Until a few days ago, it was not even clear that this Conference in Bethlehem would even take place.

But, over the past week, it became quite clear that the current leadership, (starting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is also head of the overarching Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and who is at the same time apparently leading Fatah) was absolutely determined to go ahead with this meeting, whatever the cost.

The last Fatah General Conference was held in 1989, not too long after Yasser Arafat had proclaimed a Palestinian State within the borders that existed on the eve of the June 1967 war (thus legally renouncing claims on any other territory controlled by Israel). Almost in the same breath had sufficiently denounced and renounced terrorism with all the required wording to the satisfaction of the United States so that careful official contacts were authorized. But the Palestinian leadership always insisted that their right to resist Israeli military occupation was not terrorism.

The Israelis, however, were not won over until 1993, when they agreed to exchange mutual recognition with the PLO after a year of previously-secret negotiations facilitated by and often conducted in Norway. It was Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and Ahmad Qureia (Abu Alaa) the other main figure seated beside Abbas on the podium today as the Fatah Conference opened in Bethlehem, who participated in the Oslo track on behalf of the Palestinians (but it was the late-and-lamented Yasser Arafat who signed the first Oslo agreement, the Declaration of Principles, alongside the late-and-lamented Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in a ceremony organized by the U.S- then-President Bill Clinton on 13 September 2003.

The Olso Accords authorized the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was supposed to administer the occupied Palestinian territory (the West Bank and Gaza, which the Oslo documents say would be treated as a single territorial unit). It is to be noted that Israel approval was required every step of the way, for every single detail, including for the name of every single Palestinian employed in every PA Ministry, and for every Palestinian passport or residency document that the PA would supposedly issue.

Even so, to quiet Israeli accusations and anxieties, the Palestinians were asked to denounce terrorism yet again, and President Clinton and his wife, Hilary Rodham Clinton, travelled to Gaza in 1998 to attend a special session of the PLO’s Palestine National Council that was convened specially for them. where the required words were spoken yet again. And again, resistance was not relinquished.

But today, as the Fatah General Conference convened in Bethlehem, Israeli Ministers and media expressed shock and anger as the emerging Fatah platform would make it clear that Palestinian “resistance” to the continuing Israeli occupation is a right under international law that will be retained even as the preferred option is for a peaceful solution reached through negotiations.

However, there are no negotiations at the moment.

During Israel’s military in Gaza, the IDF’s Operation Cast Lead that started on 27 December and lasted until 18 January, the Palestinian leadership broke off the faltering negotiations that failed, under the American-sponsored Annapolis process, to reach any conclusions, including the goal stated by former U.S. President George W. Bush — to have a Palestinian State by the end of 2008 (or, by the very last day of the Bush administration, before the inauguration of a new President in January 2009).

Now, the Palestinian leadership is saying that it will not resume negotiations unless there are assurances of Israeli commitment to a two-state solution and an end to Israel settlement-building.

In one of the statements made in the Fatah Conference today, Israeli-Arab (Palestinian) Knessent member Ahmad Tibi, said that the Palestinian territory should be “cleaned” of Israeli settlers. In fact, he said it twice, repeating the phrase in a manner reminiscent of the oratory style of the late Yasser Arafat. (This rousing oratory style, exhibited by only a couple of other speakers during the long opening session today, won the most enthusiastic audience response.)

Earlier this year, Ahmad Qureia had said that he thought it would be ok if Jewish settlers wanted to stay in a future Palestinian state, as long as they abide by all Palestinian laws (and do not require special privileges, like the colonial-era Capitulations that European powers forced, to favor their own nationals, on the dying Ottoman empire).

In his long (three hours, almost Fidel-Castro length) statement today, Mahmoud Abbas seemed to endorse the same idea.

But Ahmad Tibi disagreed. Tibi and fellow Israeli-Arab Knesset Member Mohammed Barakeh were stopped by the Israeli Border Police who operate the main Bethlehem checkpoint and were denied entry from Israel on Monday evening. But, they managed to make it to the opening session on Tuesday (today).

The Jewish Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) published a report asking: “In this regard, the crucial question is: Is Fatah going to waive its historical principle of “armed struggle” and devote itself to peace negotiations based on compromise?” Looking at the draft Fatah Conference documents with a magnifying glass, the JCPA makes the following almost-Talmudic analysis: “The two relevant documents to be discussed and approved by the Fatah Congress are the Political Program and Fatah’s ‘Internal Order’. The Political Program might be seen as reflecting progress in terms of accepting a political solution and rejecting violence – but it falls short of waiving the principle of armed struggle. The real problem lies in the Internal Order document, which restores all of the phrases that were omitted in the Political Program. While the Political Program sought to subordinate the struggle to the need for ‘international legitimacy’, the Internal Order is very clear in rejecting all international peace initiatives. In the Internal Order document, Fatah retains the armed struggle as a strategy in order to liberate the whole of Palestinian and eliminate Israel. Article 12 calls for ‘the liberation of Palestine completely and the elimination of the state of the Zionist occupation economically, politically, militarily, and culturally’. Article 13 calls for ‘establishing a sovereign democratic Palestinian state on the entire Palestinian territory’. While the Political Program lists the ‘one-state solution’ as an option in case the ‘two-state solution’ fails, the Internal Order document mentions the ‘one-state solution’ as the only solution. Should there be any question regarding Fatah’s objectives, Article 17 states: ‘The armed popular revolution is the only inevitable way to the liberation of Palestine’, while Article 19 notes: ‘The struggle will not end until the elimination of the Zionist entity and the liberation of Palestine’ .” The JCPA study can be read in full strong>here.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell if this is what these two documents say, because I haven’t seen them.

According to the JCPA study, “The political program uses the term ‘the struggle’ (not quite describing it as the ‘armed struggle”’ and even the ‘peaceful struggle’. However, there is more than one reference to the term ‘the struggle of all options’.” The JCPA analysis reports that The model seen to fit our times is the anti-wall campaigns in Nil’in and Bil’in, but ‘10,000 times as fierce’.”

In his long speech today, which was for the most part a selective and rather manipulative history of the Fatah movement, Mahmoud Abbas did make a surprising and very approving endorsement of the regular demonstrations against The Wall in the West Bank villages of Nil’il and Maasara (he did not mention Bil’in, and he has not been at the demonstrations in any of those places).

Abbas recounted that at one point in the 70s or 80s, in some military confrontation with Israel, he and others felt there was no option other than to surrender. But, Abbas said, Yasser Arafat had put on his military uniform and said “It is not us who will surrender, it is the Israelis”.

Abbas also stressed that the denoument of the 1982 Israeli seige of Beirut was actually the first hudna between Israel and the Palestinians. [In this first hudna, if that's what it was, Yasser Arafat was obliged to evacuate his stronghold in Beirut, along with all of his fighters, and go into exile that ended only in 1994-5, when he and the fighters were allowed to return to the occupied Palestinian territory under the terms of the Oslo Accords.]

Today, Mahmoud Abbas stressed that this was a return — the Fatah and PLO platforms have always called for the right of return of Palestinian refugees. Something like 150,000 Palestinian officials and fighters and their families were allowed to come to the occupied Palestinian territory, while there are something like 5 million Palestinian refugees still living in exile, in their diaspora.

And, Abbas said today at the Fatah Conference in Bethlehem, “here we are on our land, and here we will stay”.

Mohammed Dahlan — who is said by some Fatah activists to be closely aligned with the current Fatah current leadership, despite appearances that he has been sidelined — is said to be in a good position to win a seat on a new Fatah Central Council.

There was a rumor reported to me by a Fatah source on Monday night that Dahlan had suddenly left to go to Jordan. But he was sitting right there in the front row, in the seats demarcated for extra-special VIPs, at the opening session on Tuesday morning.

Dahlan apparently is counted as one of the Gaza Fatah members attending, though he has not been in Gaza since the Hamas rout of his Fatah-led Preventive Security Forces in mid-June 2007. He is perhaps the most despised man in Gaza because of the role he played as head of the Palestinian Preventive Security Forces there, which was confirmed by reporting in an article published in the April 2008 issue of Vanity Fair.

Accusations that Dahlan and Abbas were present during American and Israeli conversations about killing Yasser Arafat before his mysterious final illness and death in 2004 were made , sensationally and rather bizarrely, in a press conference in Jordan about two weeks ago by senior PLO and Fatah leader Farouk Qaddoumi, in a manner that lead a number of Fatah members to question his mental state, Qaddoumi’s accusations, which he said were contained in transcripts that he waved in his hands, were apparently a last-ditch attempt to forestall the Fatah Conference that convened today — but the manoeuver backfired. Qaddoumi was not present in Bethlehem, and Fatah loyalists said he was “not welcome”. He will apparently be eliminated from all his leadership positions.

Time magazine is reporting, in a “curtain-raiser” article on the Fatah Conference, that “there is a move afoot at the conference to take down Abbas’s national security adviser, the Bush Administration-favorite strongman Mohammed Dahlan. The conference will hear proposals for an investigation into the events that saw Hamas eject Fatah forces and take control of Gaza by force in 2007 — with many blaming Dahlan for having at least partly provoked the takeover”.

[Angry Arab - As'ad AbuKhalil -- writes in his blog here today that "it just won't happen" ...]

According to the Time article, the idea is to tie Abu Mazen’s hands, not to unseat him, at least not yet. The Time article adds that “A second target will be Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a political independent appointed by Abbas at Washington’s behest, although over strong opposition from both Hamas and Fatah”.

Fayyad — though he is not a Fatah member –was seated front and center, in the very middle of the VIP section at the Fatah Conference’s opening session today.

The explanation that the article in Time magazine gives for these possible moves in the Fatah Conference is this: “The conference marks the first opportunity Fatah’s own membership will have to comment on the moderate negotiating strategy adopted by President Abbas, and the result is likely to weaken his mandate to pursue the sort of talks the Obama Administration is envisaging in the near future. For many the priority is to rebuild Fatah, which requires that the movement return to the sort of politics that can challenge Hamas for the mantle of “resistance” … Much of the Fatah rank-and-file, and even many in the leadership, believe that the only way the movement can be saved is to break with American tutelage, and seek to reclaim the mantle of ‘resistance’ from Hamas. The result is that the political statement adopted by the conference is unlikely to please the U.S. and Israel. Indications from within Fatah suggest that the conference political document will reaffirm the Palestinians right to ‘resistance’, specifying non-violent challenges to the occupation, but remaining silent on the question of armed resistance and the future of the Fatah-affiliated militants of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade. It will flatly reject Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a ‘Jewish state’, on the grounds that this undermines the rights of Palestinian refugees and of those with Israeli citizenship. It will also insist on a complete freeze on Jewish settlements in occupied territory as a precondition for any talks with Israel, which it will stress must be based on U.N. resolutions — which will include recognition of the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees expelled from Israel in 1948, a demand that Israel deems a deal-breaker. Then again, making a deal on the terms currently on offer is clearly not the priority for much of Fatah, which believes that such an agreement would kill their organization. Instead, the conference will seek to rebrand Fatah with a more radical stance, in order to more effectively compete with Hamas … The debate at the conference will certainly be intense, and its outcome will either radicalize the movement’s profile, or else exacerbate the divisions within Fatah in a manner that hastens its collapse”.

The Time magazine article can be read in full here .

Filed under: Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine & Palestinians