Word: fatah
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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...
Still, the leadership election gave President Abbas a much-needed political booster shot. The conference has allowed him to regain control over Fatah and oust a few rebellious party rivals who were a liability and an embarrassment. But it is doubtful, say party delegates, that the new members of the influential Central Committee will assist Abbas in patching up with Hamas, the Islamist rival movement that beat Fatah in the elections of January 2006 and forcibly ejected Fatah militias from Gaza the following year. Arab and Western leaders have emphasized reconciliation between the rival Palestinian power centers...
...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...