Word: fatah
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Israel, it seems, was convinced that the hydrofoils, each with a capacity of 150 passengers, had been sent to Messina to be fitted with guns and armor plating so they could be used to ferry Fatah guerrillas into the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, from which they were driven by Israeli troops in 1982. The plan, say the Israelis, was for Fatah fighters to make a dash for the Lebanese coast from Cyprus on the high-speed hydrofoils under cover of night. And how did the Israeli spooks who foiled the plan smuggle bombs into Italy? "You just come...
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...
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...