Word: fatah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Leadership elections inside Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, are a lot like comets: they only come around every 20 years or so, and are marked by a brief but spectacular display of pyrotechnics that don't alter reality on the ground. For ordinary Palestinians, life after the Fatah conference will go on much the same - they will still face the daily travails of Israeli military checkpoints around their towns, and dealing with a Palestinian government rotten with corruption and cronyism. (Read "Fatah Conference Aims to Boost Its Radical Credentials...
...within the leadership circles of Fatah, a major shift has 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...
...shadow of Hamas looms large over the conference, and not only because the movement is blocking Fatah delegates in Gaza from traveling to Bethlehem until Abbas agrees to release some 1,000 Hamas prisoners being held in the West Bank. Hamas, quite simply, has eclipsed Fatah in leading the Palestinian fight against Israel. It directly controls Gaza, and only the ongoing suppression of free political activity in the West Bank prevents the Islamists from making a far stronger challenge to Abbas on his own turf. The steady stream of Western officials and journalists traveling to Damascus to meet with Hamas...
...conference marks the first opportunity Fatah's membership will have to comment on the moderate negotiating strategy adopted by Abbas, and the result is likely to weaken his mandate to pursue the sort of talks the Obama Administration is hoping to see in the near future. For many, the priority is to rebuild Fatah, which requires that the movement return to the kind of politics that can challenge Hamas for the mantle of resistance. Since the failure of the Camp David talks in 2000, successive Israeli elections have shown the voters moving steadily away from support for the peace process...