Word: palestinian
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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...
...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...
...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 for the refugees, claiming that the return of millions of Palestinians would soon outnumber Israel's Jewish majority...
...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 as a key condition for moving forward with the peace process. (See pictures of Israel's assault on Gaza...
...flexing its own muscles while Fatah held the spotlight, Hamas has renewed talks through the Egyptians over the release of captive Israeli soldier Corporal Gilad Shalit in exchange for several hundred Palestinian prisoners. If Hamas pulls off the deal, it would undermine Abbas' own credibility, since his years of negotiating with the Israelis in U.S.-sponsored peace talks yielded few positive results hailed by ordinary Palestinians. Over 11,000 Palestinians remain in Israel captivity, and Abbas has long demanded that Israel free many of them, but to no avail...