Fatah

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Note: This article title may be easily confused with Fatah Revolutionary Council

Fatah




Leader	Mahmoud Abbas

Founded	1958 or 1959
Headquarters	Gaza city

Political ideology	Secular, Nationalism
International affiliation	Socialist International

Website

Fatah (Arabic: فتح‎); a reverse acronym from the Arabic name Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini (literally: "Palestinian National Liberation Movement") is a major secular Palestinian political party and the largest organization in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a generally secular multi-party confederation. In Palestinian politics it is on the center-left of the spectrum. It is mainly secular and nationalist although not predominantly socialist.

In the January 25, 2006 parliamentary election, the party lost its majority in the Palestinian parliament to Hamas, and resigned all cabinet positions, instead assuming the role as the main opposition party.

1 Meaning of name
2 History
3 Participation in the peace process and controversies
4 Fatah armed factions
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Meaning of name

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The Fatah official emblem shows two fists holding rifles and a hand grenade superimposed on a map of historic Palestine (i.e. the post-1922 British Mandate borders, including present-day Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip)

Fatah martyr poster in Bethlehem

"Fatah" means "conquest" or literally "opening", in the Arabic language. The acronym "FATAH" is created from the complete Arabic name: HArakat al-TAhrir al-Watani al-Filastini, becoming "HATAF", which, since it means "sudden death" in Arabic, was reversed to become "FATAH".^[1] This word (Fatah) is prominently used for the Islamic expansion in the 700s, and so has strongly positive connotations for Muslims.

[edit] History

The movement, which espoused a Palestinian nationalist ideology in which Palestine would be liberated by the actions of Palestinians, was founded in 1958 or 1959 by members of the Palestinian diaspora - principally professionals working in the Gulf States who had been refugees in Gaza and had gone on to study in Cairo. The most notable of these was Yasser Arafat, who was head of the Palestinian student movement in Cairo from 1952 to 1956. Fatah became the dominant force in Palestinian politics after the 1967 Six-Day War dealt the coup de grâce to the Arab nationalism that had inspired George Habash's Arab Nationalist Movement. The November 1959 edition of Fatah's underground journal, Filastinuna, indicated that the movement was motivated by the status of the Palestinian refugees in the Arab world:

The youth of the catastrophe (shibab al-nakba) are dispersed... Life in the tent has become as miserable as death... [T]o die for our beloved Fatherland is better and more honorable than life, which forces us to eat our daily bread under humiliations or to receive it as charity at the cost of our honour... We, the sons of the catastrophe, are no longer willing to live this dirty, despicable life, this life which has destroyed our cultural, moral and political existence and destroyed our human dignity. (quoted in Baumgarten, 2005, p. 32).

From the beginning the armed struggle, as manifested in the Great Uprising of 1936-1939 and the military role of Palestinian fighters under the leadership of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, was central to Fatah's ideology. Fatah joined the PLO and won the leadership role in 1969, after which the other constituent members the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine were marginalized. According to the BBC, "Mr Arafat took over as chairman of the executive committee of the PLO in 1969, a year that Fatah is recorded to have carried out 2,432 guerrilla attacks on Israel." ([1]).

Fatah's first ever guerrilla attack came on January 3, 1965, when they attempted to sabotage the Israeli National Water Carrier, which had recently started operation. The attack was thwarted by the Israeli Security Forces.

Fatah's commanders were expelled to Lebanon from Jordan following violent confrontations with Jordanian forces during the period 1970–1971, beginning with Black September in 1970.

In the 1960s and the 1970s, Fatah provided training to a wide range of European, Middle Eastern, Asian, and African militant and insurgent groups, and carried out numerous attacks against Israeli targets in Western Europe and the Middle East during the 1970s. Some militant groups that affiliated themselves to Fatah, and some of the fedayeen within Fatah itself, carried out civilian plane hijackings and terrorist attacks, attributing them to Black September, Abu Nidal's Fatah-Revolutionary Council, Abu Musa's group, the PFLP, and the PFLP-GC.

Fatah received weapons, explosives and training from the former USSR and the former Communist regimes of East European states. China has also provided some weapons.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the faction was dispersed to several Middle Eastern countries with the help of US and other Western governments: Tunisia, Yemen, Algeria, Iraq and others. In the period 1982-1993, Fatah's leadership resided in Tunisia.

Until his death, Arafat was the head of the Palestinian Authority. Farouk Kaddoumi is the current Fatah chairman, elected to the post soon after Arafat's death in 2004.

Fatah has "Observer Party" status at the Socialist International.

Since 2000, the group is a member of the Palestinian National and Islamic Forces^[2], which includes both PLO and non-PLO factions, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, listed as terrorist organizations in the West. ^[3]

Fatah endorsed Mahmoud Abbas in the Palestinian presidential election of 2005.

In 2005, Hamas won landslide victories in nearly all the municipalities it contested. Fatah is "widely seen as being in desperate need of reform", as "the PA's performance has been a story of corruption and incompetence - and Fatah has been tainted." Political analyst Sallah Abdelshafi told BBC about the difficulties of Fatah leadership: "I think it's very, very serious - it's becoming obvious that they can't agree on anything." [2]

On December 14, 2005, jailed intifada leader Marwan Barghouti announced that he had formed a new political party, al-Mustaqbal ("The Future"), mainly composed of members of Fatah's "Young Guard." These younger leaders have repeatedly expressed frustration with the entrenched corruption in the party, which has been run by the "Old Guard" who returned from exile in Tunisia following the Oslo Accords. al-Mustaqbal was to compete against Fatah in the January 2006 Palestinian legislative election, presenting a list including Mohammed Dahlan, Kadoura Fares, Samir Mashharawi and Jibril Rajoub on December 14 [3] [4]. However, on December 28, 2005, the leadership of the two factions agreed to submit a single list to voters, headed by Barghouti, who began actively campaigning for Fatah from his jail cell.

Reactions to the news have been split. Some have suggested that the move could be a positive step towards peace, as Barghouti's new party could help reform major problems in Palestinian government. Others have raised concern that it could wind up splitting the Fatah vote, inadvertently helping Hamas. Barghouti's supporters argue that al-Mustaqbal will split the votes of both parties, both from disenchanted Fatah members as well as moderate Hamas voters who do not agree with Hamas' political goals, but rather its social work and hard position on corruption. Some observers have also hypothesized that the formation of Mustaqbal is mostly a negotiating tactic to get members of the young guard into higher positions of power within Fatah and its electoral list. A variant theory, highly plausible, is that after the elections, Mustaqbal will either be partially re-incorporated into Fatah, or will function as part of a Parliamentary coalition with it in opposition to Hamas and other political rivals. [5]

Some editorialists have drawn a parallel between Barghouti's split from Fatah and the upheaval in Israeli party politics resulting from Ariel Sharon's leaving the Likud to form Kadima.[6][7]

[edit] Participation in the peace process and controversies

Yasser Arafat signed the Declaration of Principles with Israel in 1993 and exchanged mutual renunciations of terrorism with Israel and a mutual recognition between the PLO and Israel, and was allowed to return to the Palestinian territories from exile in Tunisia. The PNC met in a special session on 26 April 1996 to consider the issue of amending the Charter and assigned its legal committee the task of redrafting the Palestinian National Charter consistent with the Arafat letters in order to present it for approval. [8] A redrafted charter that does not call for the destruction of Israel has yet to be presented or approved and the official PNA website displays the original, unamended text of the PNC Charter. According to the US Department of State, "The Palestinian National Charter... [was] amended by canceling the articles that are contrary to the letters exchanged between the P.L.O. and the Government of Israel 9-10 September 1993." [9]

The group has been accused of continuing attacks against Israeli civilians, and of supporting guerrilla warfare against Israeli soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and against the security forces inside Israel as a part of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, started in 2000 after the failure of the Camp David 2000 Summit.

Those who hold that some forces within the leadership of Fatah still have a goal to destroy Israel, find the evidence in quotations such as those of Farouk Kaddoumi in his November, 2004 interview with Iran's Al-Aram TV station ([10], [11]):

Kaddoumi: [There are] 300 Million Arabs, while Israel has only the sea behind it.
Interviewer: Minister, how do you see the future of Palestine?
Kaddoumi: At this stage there will be two states. Many years from now there will be only one.

In August 2006 it was implicated in the abduction of freelance Fox cameraman Olaf Wiig from New Zealand, partner of BBC journalist Anita McNaught and Fox presenter Steve Centanni from USA.

[edit] Fatah armed factions

Quwwat Al-Sa'eqa
Black September (operated mainly in the 1970s)
Hawari Special Operations Group
Tanzim
Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades
Abu Reish Brigades
Fatah Hawks
Force 17

While Quwwat Al-Sa'eqa are the official armed body of Fatah movement, many of the other factions have never been officially recognized by Fatah's major leading bodies: The Revolutionary Council and The Central Committee. At many instances, some of those factions were considered rebellious and outlawed by the Fatah official bodies, especially the Black September group.

[edit] See also

Christian Fatah martyr poster in Bethlehem

[edit] References

^ Encyclopedia Brittanica. Fatah. Retrieved July 30, 2006. "Fatah [...] inverted acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini [...]"
^ Statement issued by the National and Islamic Forces February 10, 2001
^ "Country reports on terrorism", U.S. State Dept., April 27, 2005