Word: arafats
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Each side, predictably, is blaming the other for the impasse. Netanyahu last week warned that Abbas will have to "decide if he is Arafat or Sadat." Sadat is hailed in Israel and the U.S. as a peacemaker, while Arafat has been portrayed as an obstacle to peace. But things look very different to the Palestinians: Abbas has a portrait of Arafat hanging in his office, and seeks to draw authority by claiming to represent his legacy; it's highly unlikely that any Palestinian politician would claim Sadat as an object of emulation...
...odyssey across the ummah - the global community of Muslims. The scope of the images - from the ultra-contemporary fashion shoots of Turkey to the primal Ashura rituals in Iraq, the artificial ski slopes of Dubai to the sea of pilgrims keeping vigil on Saudi Arabia's plain of Arafat - reveals the ummah not as a monolithic body of believers, but a complex collection of individuals each subscribing to Islam in different ways, their breadth and diversity impossible to capture in a single frame...
...occurred. The 2,000 delegates to the movement's first conference in two decades re-elected Abbas as their leader - no surprise there, since he ran unopposed - but it unceremoniously dumped from the ruling Central Committee many of the shuffle-footed old guard associated with the late Yasser Arafat. (See pictures of the 2006 Palestinian election won by Hamas...
Having successfully dodged demands by party delegates to account for the millions in missing aid money and donations that have flowed through Fatah's Central Committee over the past 20 years, many of Arafat's defeated cronies clambered into their limousines and sped across the Jordan Valley to their plush villas in Amman. Many of Fatah's leadership live in exile and cling to the demand that all Palestinians turned into refugees by the creation of Israel in 1948 be allowed to return to their confiscated land and homes. Successive Israeli governments have refused to recognize a right of return...
...deal on the terms currently on offer is clearly not the priority for much of Fatah, which believes that such an agreement would kill its organization. Instead, the conference will seek to rebrand Fatah with a more radical stance in order to more effectively compete with Hamas. Unlike Arafat, who framed his negotiation strategy with Israel in revolutionary language (which, of course, heightened Israeli suspicions over his bona fides as a peacemaker), Abbas is unable to couch his positions in the language of struggle, and without Arafat's charisma, he is seen as lacking a clear political vision to offer...