Voting started in Bethlehem for delegates to the Sixth Fatah General Conference — the first such meeting in 20 years, which will result in a change of leadership in the largest and most powerful Palestinian political party.
Mahmoud Abbas has surprisingly managed to dominate the Fatah conference, but Fatah activists say a new leadership will now limit Abbas’ power.
Photo from the Ma’an News agency website – Mahmoud Abbas puts the ballot it took him 20 minutes to complete (because of the long list of names of candidates) into a Fatah ballot box in Bethlehem on Sunday. His son, Yasser Abbas, stands behind and to the left in the photo.
Pre-conference fears of dissidence and clashes were not realized. The actual problems were minimal, the protesters were fundamentally polite, and Abbas modified his tone somewhat in the session in which his nomination to lead the party was passed by acclamation (“Sit down, habibi[my dear, in English] and be patient” he cajoled, unlike his order to Central Committee candidate Husam Khader a few days earlier: “Sit down or get out!” Khader, who was protesting the lack of a report from the outgoing Central Committee about what had happened over the last 20 years since the last Fatah General Conference, said in a later interview that he responded to Abbas by saying he might be the President outside, but he is just another Fatah member inside. However, since the nomination-by-acclamation process, Abbas is now officially the President inside the party conference as well.)
The most trenchant criticism was, like Husam Khader’s, targetted at the failure — in fact, it was an outright refusal — of the outgoing Central Committee to present a report accounting for mistakes made, lessons learned, and funds received and spent. In remarks to journalists in Bethlehem’s central Manger Square after an Abbas spokesman gave a press briefing implying that the Conference delegates were satisfied with reports from the Conference’s 18 committees
as a substitute for a summary report, Qaddura Fares said that if they tried to get away with that “they would get a sifir [zero, in English], just like students who show up at exams but fail to turn in a paper”.
What public jostling there was, often though not always was split along the “generational” lines generally used to describe factions in Fatah. The “older generation” includes the remaining survivors of what Fatah calls its “historical leadership”. A “younger generation” is now over 40 years old, and could better be described as “transitional”, and a slightly younger generation is less powerful but still hardly what has been called “politically toothless”. Zakaria Zubeidi, for example, the now-amnestied former most-wanted-outlaw of a Jenin military militia aligned with Fatah was admitted to the opening session, then excluded after criticism he made was reported in an interview published by Ma’an News Agency, then readmitted and allowed to make his own statement to the conference.
Abbas’ appointment as Fatah party leader was greeted with Palestinian-style celebration (including a older woman in a traditional embroidered dress calling out shrill fellahi [peasant] poetic praise). Campaigning and electioneering is over. And many delegates were relaxing in a pleasant evening around Bethlehem’s Manger Square, facing the Church of the Nativity where Christ is believed to have been born.
The voting is expected to last until after midnight. It is taking place in the same Terra Sancta school in Bethlehem, just off Manger Square, where delegates have been meeting and confronting their differences — some of them very strong — since last Tuesday.
The disputes. and a certain amount of disorganization, have delayed proceedings considerably. The Fatah Sixth General Conference was originally scheduled to end on Thursday, but is now expected to continue until the coming Tuesday, at the earliest.
The results of the voting may be known sometime late on Monday.
Delegates have divided into sections and told to go to various rooms in the school to fill in their ballots, which are on paper. Though it had originally been thought the voting would end soon after midnight, some delegates are having to wait for their assigned turns to vote until 03h00 or 03h30 this morning.
Gaza delegates were supposed to vote via their mobile telephones — although that might compromise the secrecy of their ballot — but a member of the Conference secretariat said Sunday morning that the rival Hamas party, now the de facto governing party in Gaza, confiscated overnight all the mobile phones of those Fatah members in Gaza who were selected to be delegates to the Conference, and are thus eligible to vote. This report was not confirmed by other sources.
An alternative solution was being examined before the voting started. “The important thing is to start, and to include the Gazan delegates”, said the source in the Conference secretariat. “It may be impossible for them to continue, in which case they might declare a strike, but at least the point would have been made that they should participate simultaneously.
The Conference secretariat staff who are involved in the voting process shut off their mobile phones as the voting process began, and they agreed to be shut in the Terra Sancta school until the end of the vote counting. That is expected to be Tuesday morning. If there is a need for a re-count, they are prepared to stay inside for another three days.
The importance of being a member of the Fateh Central Committee is made clear by the effort and attention that delegates to this General Conference in Bethlehem have given to this project.
A Fatah activist who was not included among the 2,230 delegates to the conference, but who is an effective operative and analyst, said that the Central Committee is “the highest address in Fatah, and they can decide everything — they can pressure the President, and decide who the Ministers will be. If I am in this Central Committee and I want my brother to be minister, I can make it happen”, he said with some ironical disapproval.
But, the Conference decided that Central Committee members could not hold another job, and must commit to devoting themselves full-time to their position, if elected.
For the last two years in particular, since the Hamas rout of Fatah Preventive Security forces in Gaza (led by Central Committee candidate Mohammed Dahlan, who was away at the time) in mid-June 2007, the Central committee has not been effective at all, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (who is also head of the overarching Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO, and who is now clearly leader of Fatah as well, after his election by acclamation on Saturday), did whatever he wanted without any effective opposition. Members of the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC), which has been unable to meet for several years, since such a significant proportion of its membership is imprisoned in Israeli jails, have protested what they call Abbas’ undemocratic use of his presidential emergency powers to issue a large number of laws by presidential decree.
“The Central Committee has done nothing in the last two years. They were weak”, said the Fatah activist who is not a delegate at the Conference in Bethlehem. “Now, this is the first time in 20 years that the leadership will change, and Abu Mazen will not feel that he has power as he had until two days ago”.
A Fatah analyst who was stricken at the last minute from the list of those invited to attend as delegates — in order to accomodate others who were upset and grievously offended at not having been included originally — and who is instead working in the conference “administration”, said that Abbas, in a speech he made upon his election by acclamation on Saturday, “recognized that not everybody who was attending the Conference merited being there as a delegate, and that some who were kept out of the room had had greater right to be inside”.
Fatah had been weakened by internal rivalry over the past 20 years, he said, and the organization showed an absence of vitality, due to deaths, assassinations, The Wall, the situation in Gaza, the lack of communications. What this conference has done, he said, is allow an evaluation of the state of the organization, and this has shown what needed to be repaired. “The real congress will be the Seventh, now scheduled to be held in five years” — and, he added, there will be only 800 – 1,000 delegates attending, as opposed to the 2,300 or so in Bethlehem this week.
The Revolutionary Council will decide many things that have until now been in the hands of the President only, and it will now meet every three months.
Anyone elected to serve on the Central Committee, he said, would have to resign from any other other Ministerial posts, or jobs, and would have to devote him- or her- self to the Central Committee on a full-time basis. The positions will be salaried, and the work will be full-time. “The idea is to separate Fatah and the Palestinian Authority”, he said. “Before, almost all Central Committee members were also ministers or Ambassadors, and the organization lost out”.
And, he said, starting with the Political committee programs that was adopted on Saturday night to guide Fatah for the next five years, “there is for the first time a vision for Palestinian society — in all fields”.
Before, he said, Fatah had only a military, political, and information departments.
The remainder of the committee reports — economic, social, educational, etc. — will be adopted by the conference plenary in the coming day or two. This vision, he indicated, had been developed over the last three years by officials — experts, such as university professors in economics — working in small teams in workshops in Palestine. A separate preparatory committee, with a team of hundreds of people, was been working on organizing the conference for the last year or so, he indicated.
This will be a program to prepare for the independent state of Palestine.
The Conference stated that Fatah is a national liberation movement whose aim is to liberate Palestine, to put and end to Israeli occupation, and to build an independent state in the territory occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem — as well as to assure the refugees’ right of return in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 194.
Until this goal is reached, the conference decided, the Palestinian people have the right to use all forms of struggle, including armed struggle. This, the conference delegates agreed, is guaranteed by the UN Charter and international law, although the forms of struggle used will depend both on the circumstances and on the interests of the Palestinian people.
Other forms that were mentioned in the program adopted by the Conference included non-violent civil disobedience, or demonstrations such as those held every Friday at Bil’in, west of Ramallah, where villagers protest that the route of The Wall cutting them off from their lands has not been changed — despite a court order to do so. However, those demonstrations, and similar ones at nearby Ni’lin and at Maasara near Bethlehem [the two places which were specifically mentioned by Abbas in his opening speech, though he must have forgotten to mention Bil’in], have been repressed by steadily increasing brutality by the Israeli Border Police and security forces — six people were taken from their beds in the middle of the night in Bil’in last week on the eve of the opening of the Fatah conference, for example. However, the Palestinian leadership, and the Fatah leadership, has only been seen near those demonstrations once (when the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the Israeli military to change the route of The Wall in that area), though the demonstrations have been on-going for years.
Another form of struggle that was explicitly mentioned was a boycott of those Israeli products which are replacable by products made in or imported into the West Bank.
The Fatah Conference program specifically mentioned the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem only, not all of Jerusalem as was reported by a reporter for Israel’s Kol Israel (Voice of Israel) official broadcaster. His report was picked up and published in a number of other Israeli media outlets. And the Fatah Conference program did not specify that the West Bank must be “cleansed” of Israeli settlers — it was Israeli-Arab-Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, who made that statement in his speech that was the final statement in the opening session of the Fatah Conference last Tuesday (Tibi had been prevented from entering Bethlehem the night before by Israeli Border Police who control the main Israeli checkpoint from Jerusalem into Bethlehem.)
Nevertheless, when the Israeli government held its regular weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak complained that “the rhetoric coming from Fatah and the positions being expressed are grave and unacceptable to us.”
UPDATE: The Jerusalem Post was more discursive though along the same lines in an editorial it published on its website on Monday: “The atmosphere for the conference was auspicious … Under these circumstances one might have expected Abbas to finally begin the process of socializing Palestinians to the idea of coexistence with Israel and the need to compromise on borders and refugees. Instead, Fatah remained steadfastly uncompromising … That Abbas was re-elected “general commander” running unopposed did not help Fatah’s credibility. For Israelis, what matters is that rather than demonstrating leadership, Abbas and Fatah made demagogic appeals to a Palestinian street that sees moderation as weakness. This self-defeating intransigence is a deep-seated facet of Palestinian political culture. Abbas had a bully pulpit to coax the population in a more moderate direction, yet he and other Fatah leaders took the easy road – scapegoating Israel. Still, the assembly generated enough prevarication and dissimulation to perpetuate the pose that Fatah is a genuinely ‘moderate’ alternative to Hamas”. The editorial did note, however, that “the Islamists have been losing their appeal among Fatah’s disenchanted bourgeois base“… This JPOST editorial can be read in full here.
UPDATE: Yariv Oppenheimer, General Director of Peace Now, wrote an opinion piece published today in Israel’s largest-selling newspaper, Yediot Ahronot, [and it was also circulated by email] in which he scoffed at those pushing the panic button: “The Palestinians remain unchanged; an oppressed and harried people desiring independence alongside Israel without having to recognize or uphold Zionist ideals or the principles of the Jewish state. Those hoping the Palestinians were on the verge of joining the World Zionist Organization and pledging allegiance to the State of Israel may be disappointed, but realists willing to take an honest look at the Bethlehem convention will have seen positive and unprecedented indications of new Palestinian willingness to make peace with Israel and drop the demand for the right of return. It isn’t easy being a member of Fatah in Palestinian society; after years of occupation, increasing settler numbers and the building of the separation wall deep inside Palestinian territory, and in the face of rising violent religious extremism from Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran, Fatah continues to advocate non-violent resistance. Belonging to Fatah is sometimes worse, in the eyes of Palestinians, than being left-wing is to some Israelis. Fatah, which is perceived as a secular, rational organization, for some reason still believes that negotiations and peace talks can lead to real results. Israel, on the other hand, has shown no great willingness to cooperate with the Palestinians on such issues as settlements, the route of the separation wall, or the release of Palestinian prisoners … The Fatah convention in Bethlehem is not a gathering of collaborators or Israel lovers, but rather of the leaders of the Palestinian national struggle who believe that peace with Israel is possible and necessary, and that the secular, moderate Palestinian liberation movement is the one that will lead the Palestinian people to independence“.