Word: fatah
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Israeli authorities presumably believed they had caught a big fish: George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmed Jabril of the P.F.L.P. general command, or perhaps even Sabry Khalil Bana, better known as Abu Nidal, chief of the self-styled Fatah Revolutionary Council and the suspected mastermind behind countless terrorist attacks. But when the Israelis ordered passengers and crew to disembark from the commandeered craft, they discovered only a group of Syrian and Lebanese officials aboard. In what appeared to be a notable failure of Israel's highly vaunted intelligence services, the big fish had managed...
They said Abu Nidal did not attend the meeting but sent several representatives of his organization, which he calls the Fatah Revolutionary Council...
Getting rid of him, however, may not be so easy. Though his alliance with Arafat has never been more than a marriage of convenience on both sides, Arafat needs to demonstrate a hold on P.L.O. factions outside Arafat's own group, Fatah; Abbas is very nearly the only splinter leader available for that purpose. He is also a symbol of a particular type of Palestinian: the generation that grew up in refugee camps, became guerrillas in early manhood, and never accepted any goal but the establishment of a full-fledged Palestinian state, or any method of achieving it except armed...
Within the P.L.O., Abbas has always been a hard-liner well to the left of that body's mainstream. From its formation in 1964, the P.L.O. has been an umbrella organization for a bewildering variety of groups (Arafat's Fatah is by far the largest) that have little in common but the dream of a Palestinian state. Divided by strategy (whether to rely on diplomacy, guerrilla war or some uneasy amalgam of both) and the rivalries of their leaders, the groups have split and recombined endlessly. In 1974 Arab states proclaimed the P.L.O. "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian...
...That month, Arafat finally managed to convene a meeting of the Palestine National Council, a parliament-in-exile for the theoretical Palestinian state, in the Jordanian capital, Amman, and have himself re-elected chairman. Abbas showed up to give Arafat needed support from someone outside Fatah, and Arafat named Abbas to the P.L.O. executive committee...