Fatah fails to look at dire problems
This posting has these items:
1) Al Jazeera: Fatah: From liberation movement to West Bank government, Mouin Rabbani traces Fatah’s move from being an inclusive liberation movement to an aimless satrap of Israel;
2) Al Monitor: Hamas delegates find welcome at Fatah conference, but not trust, Ahmad Melhem explores the significance of Hamas being invited, and attending;
3) NY Times: Mahmoud Abbas, Re-elected as Fatah Leader, Moves to Solidify Power, all about Abbas and possible challengers (only Dahlan);
4) Times of Israel: Opening night of much-hyped Seventh Fatah Congress a perplexing snooze, why I left in a sulk on the first day;
Fatah leaders at the Seventh Congress. The Central Committee is now more uniform than it has ever been – all Muslim, almost all men, most old, all but one living in the West Bank or abroad (or in prison). Photo from Presidential Office, via Reuters
Fatah: From liberation movement to West Bank government
The recently concluded Fatah congress only intensified the aimless drift that characterises Palestinian condition today.
By Mouin Rabbani, Al Jazeera
December 06, 2016
Amman – To Mahmoud Abbas’s credit, he has shown more interest in convening the general conference, the supreme body of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, Fatah, than did his predecessor Yasser Arafat.
In 2009, albeit almost five years after taking charge of the movement, Abbas together with his closest associate, Muhammad Dahlan, convened the General Conference for the first time since 1989. Together, they remade Fatah in their image. During this past week, after an interval of seven years, Abbas convened its seventh General Conference. This time Dahlan was absent, which was very much the point of the exercise.
In years past, Fatah’s general conference served to negotiate consensus between the movement’s various factions and power centres on issues such as its strategic orientation, political programme and representation on its decision-making bodies.
While Arafat – as a rule – emerged triumphant from such gatherings, he also ensured that the movement’s myriad constituencies were adequately represented, and thus co-opted, in key institutions such as its Central Committee and larger Revolutionary Council, and that the political programme incorporated their divergent core principles.
As a mainstream national liberation movement open to every Palestinian, irrespective of ideological persuasion, social background or geographical location, Fatah counted among its ranks marxists and millionaires, rebel fighters and bureaucrats, rural refugees and urban notables, and Muslims, Christians and Jews drawn from virtually every Palestinian community on the planet.
The 1982 expulsion of the PLO from Beirut, and more particularly the renunciation of conflict with Israel and establishment of the Palestinian Authority pursuant to the 1993 Oslo Accords, began the transformation of Fatah into a party of government that is primarily concentrated in the occupied territories.
This reality notwithstanding, the 2000-2004 al-Aqsa Intifada demonstrated that both the movement’s cadres and elements of the leadership retained a capacity to mobilise Fatah for its inaugural purpose.
With the ascension of Abbas, resistance came to a definitive end. By the time the sixth General Conference convened in 2009, Fatah had been neutered as a national liberation movement, its militants and power centres neutralised, exile constituencies cast aside, and its ambitions limited to administration in the occupied territories and international diplomacy.
To be fair, It did have some fight left in it, but this was directed at the rival Hamas movement, which had seized power in the Gaza Strip, as well as other Palestinian detractors.
What’s ahead for the Palestinian Fatah?
To speak of the Palestinian schism these days is no longer to reference the split between Fatah and Hamas that neither group seeks to resolve because both are sustained by it. Rather it refers to the conflict that erupted within Fatah between erstwhile partners Abbas and Dahlan. As the latter became too ambitious and brash for the former’s paranoid taste, Abbas engineered Dahlan’s downfall and expulsion from both the movement and the West Bank.
Unlike with Hamas, political and policy differences between Abbas and Dahlan are to this day non-existent.
While many Dahlan loyalists were removed from their positions in the PA and PLO, purging them from Fatah proved a more difficult task. A complicating factor is that Dahlan’s main base of support is in the Gaza Strip, while Abbas’s authority – and for that matter field of vision – is confined to the West Bank.
Not only has Dahlan managed to retain the allegiance of many associates despite the price this entails, he has also cultivated powerful Arab friends. More recently, Dahlan has built a robust relationship with Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Indeed, Abbas’s initial enthusiasm for the Egyptian coup of 2013 that removed Hamas’s Arab champion Mohamed Morsi from power in Cairo has since waned considerably.
An Arab Quartet consisting of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirtaes, motivated in part by growing concerns about the increasingly erratic nature of Abbas’s leadership and the absence of succession planning by the 81-year-old PA president, have sought to persuade Abbas to become reconciled with Dahlan.
It is against this background that Fatah’s general conference was convened from November 29 – December 4, 2016. The multiple existential crises confronting the Palestinian people and their national movement by contrast had nothing to do with either the motivation or timing of this event.
Rather than risk Dahlan loyalists’ participation, Abbas simply excluded them from the list of delegates permitted to join the proceedings in Ramallah’s presidential compound.
During the six days of the conference, and contrary to expectations, Dahlan’s name was never mentioned and his issue ignored. And to counter the pressures of the Arab Quartet, pointed references were made to the “independence of Palestinian decision-making” and 28 foreign delegations – including representatives of the United Nations and European Union’s parliament – invited to address the conference.
The approach and display of superior legitimacy and mandate seems to have paid off, and complicated further Arab pressure on Abbas, to the point where observers suggest a rival Fatah conference Dahlan had scheduled for Cairo may be indefinitely postponed.
The general conference further bolstered Abbas by unanimously re-electing him to lead Fatah at the very outset of the conference – before he even delivered the report on his and the movement’s performance since 2009, which was in any case not discussed and debated.
Jibril Rajoub was second in the poll (after Marwan Bargouthi), his popularity boosted by his promotion of Palestinian football. Photo from foto-net.
The other big winner was Jibril Rajoub, Dahlan’s West Bank counterpart and fierce rival during the 1990s, and more recently head of the Palestinian Football Association, who garnered the second-highest (and some suggest the highest) number of votes to the Fatah Central Committee. This said, a deputy has yet to be appointed, with no succession mechanism in place.
If the convention served Abbas well, the same cannot be said of Fatah. Of the 18 members elected to its new Central Committee, only four hail from the Gaza Strip (of whom three live in the West Bank), just one is based in exile, 17 are men and a same proportion over the age of 50, and for the first time it is exclusively Muslim.
The 80-member Revolutionary Council is dominated by West Bankers to an even greater extent. While Abbas can ameliorate these imbalances somewhat with his quota of discretionary appointments, one activist concludes: “The damage is done. Today the former national liberation movement Fatah became the party of West Bank government. It might as well have displayed a sign reading ‘Gazans and Others Not Welcome’.”
Viewed politically rather than geographically, Fatah is today more monolithic than at any time in its history. This cannot augur well for what has been the spinal cord of the national movement for many decades.
Nor has the Palestinian struggle for self-determination emerged strengthened from this conference. One is tempted to state that its final communique consisted of slogans rather than a programme fleshed out with mechanism to implement decisions but – among any number of lapses – this document neglected to explicitly mention of the refugees’ right of return.
Rather than contribute to the revival of Fatah and the Palestinian national movement, the recently concluded general conference has only intensified the aimless drift that characterises the Palestinian condition today.
Congress delegates. In a move said to exclude all supporters of Dahlan (who was also ejected from the party) the number of Fatah members allowed to attend was reduced from the 2,500 at the 2009 congress to 1,400 members this year. Photo by Mohamad Torokman/ Reuters
Hamas delegates find welcome at Fatah conference, but not trust
Despite the recent civility between Fatah and Hamas, it will take more than a Hamas delegation at Fatah’s general conference to repair their nine years of division, as mutual distrust remains strong.
By Ahmad Melhem, trans. Cynthia Milan, Al Monitor
December 07, 2016
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Recent developments have some observers asking if PLO parties Hamas and Fatah are possibly nearing reconciliation, but others point to the numerous failed attempts at rapprochement since the groups split violently in 2007.
A Hamas delegation participated in the opening of Fatah’s seventh general congress Nov. 29 in Ramallah, possibly marking a turning point in the groups’ relations.
Ahmed Haj Ali, Hamas’ representative to the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), expressed the importance of his group’s participation in the event. Speaking on behalf of Khaled Meshaal, the head of Hamas’ political bureau, Haj Ali said, “We are partners in our homeland and the decision-making process. We are ready [to assume] all the requirements of our partnership with Fatah and all other factions.”
On Nov. 30, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads Fatah, thanked Meshaal for “his kind and promising words.”
Abbas said, “Our national unity is the backbone of our cause. We call on Hamas to end the division through democracy, by holding the Palestinian National Council elections as well as presidential and legislative elections.”
Speaking about the implications of Hamas’ attendance at the congress, Haj Ali told Al-Monitor, “Hamas’ participation was not part of protocol. It was rather to express its position over reconciliation and its willingness to be partners with Fatah and all other factions when it comes to decision-making and fighting for the Palestinian cause.”
He added, “Hamas’ participation stems from its belief that no party can exclusively make Palestinian decisions, because unity is a must.”
Abbas and Meshaal had met Oct. 27 in Qatar, which is sponsoring reconciliation talks between the two movements.
Sultan Abu al-Einein, a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, told Al-Monitor, “We hope that Hamas’ words will be interpreted into actions, and we hope the national interest will win over partisan interest.” He added, “President Abbas sent a positive message to Hamas at the conference when he stressed the need for unity by forming a government of national unity or conducting presidential and legislative elections.”
He noted, “We are worried about Hamas, because we have heard the words [of its leaders before] and we want to see action. Hamas must bear the historical responsibility of ending the division.”
Yahya Moussa, Hamas’ PLC representative, spoke with Al-Monitor about Meshaal’s statement.
“Hamas stressed the importance that all factions participate in the decision-making process, in addition to the need for Fatah to unify its ranks and return to its initial program, which is the armed resistance and the development of the Palestine Liberation Organization.”
Despite all the well-wishing, however, it didn’t take long for the war of words to heat up once again.
Moussa said, “Abbas’ message is worthless. It is a play on words.” He added, “President Abbas has to make a real move toward Hamas and make concessions as the latter has done in order to end the division.”
Author and political analyst Ibrahim Abrash told Al-Monitor that Hamas and Fatah always present a positive front before meetings, but things go downhill from there. He allowed, however, that this time might be different.
“Meshaal’s words and Abbas’ positive response and the way he praised Qatar’s and Turkey’s roles in achieving reconciliation could indicate that the president wants to try to work out reconciliation from a new perspective,” Abrash said.
Hamas’ participation at Fatah’s seventh congress stirred up some positivity. However, during Fatah’s sixth congress, held Aug. 4, 2009, when now-dismissed Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan participated, Hamas was attacked and accused of attempting to stage a coup. Dahlan, an Abbas rival, did not participate in this year’s conference. Some believe Hamas’ participation resulted from its agreement with Fatah to keep Dahlan away.
Sufian Abu Zaida, a close Dahlan associate, wrote in his Dec. 1 article “Love Letters Between Hamas and President Abbas” that “Hamas has made up its mind and picked a side” in Fatah’s internal conflict. He was referring to Hamas choosing Abbas over Dahlan.
He added, “Hamas seems to be convinced that President Abbas needed to get rid of his nemesis Dahlan, or at least weaken him. Seeing as how [Dahlan’s] main center of power is Gaza, Abbas is ready to make concessions and to take all the steps he was reluctant to take during the past 10 years.”
Some Dahlan supporters wanted to hold a separate conference, as Dahlan was excluded from the seventh congress. Naima Sheikh, a dismissed Fatah leader close to Dahlan, told Al-Monitor, “Hamas did not allow us to organize any event in Gaza to express our rejection of Fatah’s congress, and this may have been the result of an understanding between Abbas and Hamas. … We submitted several requests to Hamas in Gaza, but they were all denied.”
Is Hamas seeking to exploit the disagreements within Fatah? Sheikh said, “It is only normal for Hamas to take advantage of the Fatah disputes. Any political faction as major as Hamas would want to take advantage of any conflict within its political rival … to overcome its own crises.”
Though Hamas apparently chose Abbas over Dahlan during the conference, Abrash said Hamas has sent positive messages to both Abbas and Dahlan, who has close ties with Egypt. Abrash believes Hamas will choose the side that offers the most to it and Gaza.
He explained that Hamas was searching for common ground with Abbas, which may help resolve some outstanding issues, but one cannot yet be optimistic about ending the division or reaching reconciliation.
Mahmoud Abbas, Re-elected as Fatah Leader, Moves to Solidify Power
By Peter Baker and Rami Nazzalnov, NY Times
November 29, 2016
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Under fire at home and abroad, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority moved on Tuesday to solidify his decade-long hold on power with a party conference that had already been purged of most of his opponents.
The carefully selected delegates wasted little time in formally re-electing Mr. Abbas as the leader of Fatah, the party that controls the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. “Everybody voted yes,” a spokesman for Fatah, Mahmoud Abu al-Hija, told reporters who had not been allowed into the conference hall for the decision.
The conference, Fatah’s first in seven years, comes as the Palestinians face economic troubles, violent clashes among competing clans and the continuing Israeli occupation of the West Bank. Critics complain that Mr. Abbas’s leadership has grown insular and out of touch. He convened the conference to demonstrate his continued grip on the Palestinian Authority and to restock the Fatah party leadership with allies.
“It represents a renewal of legitimacy; there is no doubt about that,” Nasser al-Kidwa, a former Palestinian foreign minister, said in an interview. Mr. Kidwa is a nephew of Mr. Abbas’s predecessor, Yasir Arafat, who is still revered by many Palestinians. The vote at the conference, Mr. Kidwa said, “turns the page on some of our internal problems that have existed in recent times.”
Omar Shalabi, a party member attending the conference, said that Fatah activists wanted to bolster Mr. Abbas in the face of the challenges before him. “We assured the president that we are with him,” Mr. Shalabi said.
Even Mr. Abbas’s supporters, though, said change was necessary, and they expressed hope that he would bring in fresh blood. “We need a new strategy because we are facing a very hard situation,” said Hatem Abdul Qader, a former Palestinian government minister. “We need to think out of the box. We need new hope.”
Mr. Abbas, 81, who was treated recently for heart problems, has been a central figure in Fatah for decades. He was a lieutenant to Mr. Arafat and a member of the team that negotiated the Oslo accords with Israel in the 1990s; he ascended to the Palestinian leadership after Mr. Arafat’s death in 2004. In the 12th year of what was initially supposed to be a four-year term, Mr. Abbas has lashed out at opponents, and they have been ousted from party positions and at times arrested.
Mr. Abbas was once a favourite of Americans and Arab allies, but they have grown increasingly disillusioned with him. Now he is caught between Palestinians who consider him too close to the Israelis, and Israelis who say he is no partner for peace. His own would-be state is split between the West Bank, where he governs amid the Israeli occupation, and Gaza, which was seized nearly a decade ago by the more militant Hamas faction.
Some Palestinian activists had wondered whether Mr. Abbas would use the conference to give up at least one of the three titles he holds — leader of Fatah, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and president of the Palestinian Authority. But he made clear on Tuesday that he would not.
What remained unclear was whether Mr. Abbas would lay out a succession plan during the gathering, which was scheduled to last at least five days. He has rebuffed calls from Arab nations and Palestinian activists for him to groom a successor. Because of the split with Hamas, it is not certain who would be next in line to lead the Palestinian Authority if Mr. Abbas were incapacitated.
Mr. Abbas planned to address the conference on Tuesday evening, and he sat onstage and appeared in good spirits. At the last minute, though, he postponed his speech until Wednesday. Some veteran observers doubted that he would use the occasion to identify a possible heir, if only because doing so might set up another power center in the West Bank that would inevitably undercut his authority.
Missing from the conference were Palestinian leaders and activists who had fallen out with Mr. Abbas, including those affiliated with Muhammad Dahlan, a former security chief who has lived in exile since 2011.
Allies of Mr. Dahlan, and even some Palestinians who were only thought to be his allies, have been purged from Fatah or arrested, and competing factions have engaged in violent clashes. Diana Buttu, a former Palestinian official who is now a critic of Mr. Abbas, named 10 party figures who had been ousted recently.
“To me, the story is who is not at the conference,” said Grant Rumley, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington and a co-author of a forthcoming biography of Mr. Abbas. “This conference will formalize the split within his own party.”
Marwan Barghouti came top of the poll for Central Committee members. Here, appearing in court on April 3rd 2003. Photo by Baubau/SIPA
Some supporters of Mr. Abbas played down the divisions. “This is Israel’s strategy, for us to butt heads with each other,” said Jamal Muheisen, a member of the Fatah central committee. “Even though we have difficulties with other parties, everybody recognizes Mahmoud Abbas as the president of the Palestinian people.”
Several potential successors or their representatives attended the conference, including Mr. Kidwa and the wife and son of Marwan Barghouti, a popular figure who is serving multiple life terms in an Israeli prison for murder.
The son, Qassam Barghouti, 30, said that Palestinians were “very committed” to his father, but that the goal for now was bringing the party together. “After the divisions we’ve been seeing in the last two to three years, what we saw shows that Fatah is united,” he said during a break in the conference.
Mr. Abbas hoped that the event would be a step toward reconciliation with Hamas. Ahmed Haj Ali, a senior Hamas legislator, was invited to address the conference.
“We are partners in this homeland, our cause, struggle and resolutions,” he told the delegates, “and we in Hamas are ready to fulfill all requirements of this partnership with you and all factions.”
Only Mahmoud Abbas is identified by Times of Israel in this photo of the opening ceremony in Ramallah. November 29, 2016. Photo by Flash90.
Opening night of much-hyped Seventh Fatah Congress a perplexing snooze
Ramallah event quickly lost momentum with drawn-out addresses by non-Palestinian politicians, and hit a wall when Abbas decided not to speak
By Dov Lieber, Times of Israel
November 30, 2016
RAMALLAH–The opening night of the Seventh Fatah Congress — which was hyped as the event that would usher in a new age for the Palestinian party currently ruling the West Bank, and perhaps see a possible successor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas crowned — was both mystifying and dull, revealing, perhaps, that it was put together to delegitimize certain Fatah members rather than as the democratic measure the UN praised it for being.
The highlight of Tuesday’s opening night was supposed to be Abbas’s speech, which would set a new direction for Fatah and chart a new course for the entire Palestinian national movement for years to come.
But after two relentless hours of speeches by a variety of minor non-Palestinian politicians, through which the crowd began to slowly stream out of the auditorium or doze off, the 81-year-old Abbas decided on a whim he would deliver his speech another night.
In attendance were 1,322 Fatah delegates, scores of imams, members of the anti-Israel ultra-Orthodox group Neturei Karta, priests both Christian and Samaritan, and at least five Arab Israeli MKs including Joint (Arab) List leader Ayman Odeh and MK Ahmad Tibi. Only 11 percent of the delegates invited were female, a division reflected in the mostly-male audience.
During the conference there were laughs, such as when one of the snoozing delegates in the front row appeared on the large screen during the speech of Irish EU parliament member Martina Anderson, who is the head of the Palestine Committee in the EU.
When a member of the Chinese Communist Party began to speak in fluent formal Arabic, laughter quickly turned into great applause. He declared his “party was working to strengthen relations with Fatah.”
In a slew of lengthy speeches by other Arab politicians, including a former Egyptian foreign minister, a Tunisian politician and a representative for the Jordanian prime minister, all stressed how dear the Palestinian issue was to the Arab nations.
The crowd’s collective ears perked up when it was announced Hamas political chief Khaled Mashaal would talk. The shock, though, quickly cooled off after it became clear Mashaal, who lives in Doha, would not be giving the speech, neither in person nor even by satellite. Instead, a surrogate, a firebrand imam, read his speech to the audience. The speech contained nothing new, but “Mashaal” repeated a recent talking point that his Islamist movement “will do whatever needs to be done” in order to bring about reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.
The most high-level invitee to talk during the opening night was Nickolay Mladenov, the United Nations special coordinator for the Middle East Process. He opened by calling Fatah “the soul of the Palestinian people, just as the Palestinian people are the soul of the Arab nation.” This won him applause. A bit of balanced diplomatic-speak, “Never give up until the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. A state that lives in peace, in security and mutual recognition with Israel,” was met with silence.
Mladenov’s speech revolved around the importance of democracy, lauding the congress itself as a democratic measure vital to the success of the Palestinian cause.
But the real story of the congress, according to Grant Rumley, research fellow at the Defense of Democracies, was those who weren’t invited.
“The biggest impact of the conference happened before the conference even started,” said Rumley.
While the congress is three years overdue according to party regulations, many speculate Abbas’s abrupt call to convene it was a move to bolster his position and fend off his political rival, former Gaza strongman Mohammad Dahlan, currently in exile in the United Arab Emirates.
During the five-day confab, the party in control of the PA will elect its 23-member central committee — in which Abbas serves as president — and its 132-member revolutionary council, considered Fatah’s parliament.
Fatah members associated with Dahlan were not invited to the congress, essentially eliminating their legitimacy and voice within Fatah.
Rumley, who attend the congress, said Abbas is seizing the chance to close ranks while “his rivals are at their weakest and he feels little external pressure from the White House to reform internally.”
Like the excluded Dahlan supporters, the press also felt wronged by the congress.
The scores of journalists — Israeli, Palestinian and some from major Arab news stations — had their cellphones confiscated by security before entering the event, causing a sense of panic among some of the reporters and rendering others useless.
The sudden and unanimous reelection of Abbas as the head of Fatah, Tuesday night’s most important event, took place as the media was locked away in a “press club” they were shuffled into as soon as they entered the headquarters compound.
After a short press conference, in which a Fatah spokesperson promised Abbas’s speech that night would be the “most important” of the five-day congress and would introduce Fatah’s plan to bring the Palestinian national movement to the “next stage,” the media was kept in the press club for a total of three hours, with no access to the Fatah delegates.
From the press club, the media was then led directly into the main auditorium — in a capricious manner; some were allowed to take their bags with their laptops and some were not. The press was then forced to spend the next few hours standing or sitting on the floor in the back, again kept away from the Fatah delegates.
After Abbas suddenly announced he’d rather not talk that night, the scores of already irked journalists, who had endured five hours of waiting, quickly packed up and left.