The largest and most influential Palestinian political party, Fatah, electing new leadership
Marian Houk
August 10, 2009
Voting has closed in Bethlehem by delegates to the long-awaited Sixth General Conference of Fatah, the largest and most powerful Palestinian political party.
The voting was by both those delegates present, and by some electronic means for those blocked in Gaza and unable to travel to the West Bank.
The results of the voting will result in a change of Fatah, and Palestinian, leadership.
For many of the people attending the Fatah Sixth General Conference that opened today in Bethlehem, the Fatah movement was the hope of their lives. But, after most of a lifetime spent in struggle, there still is not a Palestinian state.
Fatah was the nationality that most of these Palestinians still do not have.
The membership (mostly all men) believed with all their hearts and souls that Fatah would save them, that Fatah was a winning force that would lead them to a solution for their dispossesion, that would restore their dignity and honor.
And now, only about 2,000 of them -- who were authorized to receive invitations though what appear to be secret and arbitrary decision-making, and who are now present in the Conference in Bethlehem -- will be deciding the future, if not the fate, of their movement.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has long been criticized for his lack of charisma and his ineffective style, but he has surprisingly managed to dominate this Fatah conference. Fatah activists say, however, that a new leadership will now be able to limit Abbas' power.
Fears of dissidence and clashes were not realized. The actual problems were minimal, the protesters were fundamentally polite, and Abbas modified his tone somewhat in the session in which his nomination to lead the party was passed by acclamation
"Sit down, habibi[my dear, in English], be patient", Abbas cajoled after his nomination as party leader, in a very different style from earlier in the meeting, when he ordered Central Committee candidate Husam Khader a few days earlier: "Sit down or get out!" Khader, who was protesting the lack of a report from the outgoing Central Committee about what had happened over the last 20 years since the last Fatah General Conference, said in a later interview that he responded to Abbas by saying he might be the President outside, but he is just another Fatah member inside. However, since the nomination-by-acclamation process, Abbas is now officially the President inside the party conference as well.
And after his election by acclamation as Fatah party chairman on Saturday, a newly-charismatic Mahmoud Abbas was uncharacteristically conciliatory. He called on "Our brother, Abu Lutuf, Farouk Kaddoumi", to withdraw his statements, and to come back to Fatah. "We are all human, we all make mistakes, and we all forgive", Abbas said. "Those who own their mistakes are the best among us".
With that performance, said another Central Council candidate, "Abbas became a leader".
The most trenchant criticism was, like Husam Khader's, targetted at the failure -- in fact, it was an outright refusal -- of the outgoing Central Committee to present a report accounting for mistakes made, lessons learned, and funds received and spent. In remarks to journalists in Bethlehem's central Manger Square after an Abbas spokesman gave a press briefing implying that the Conference delegates were satisfied with reports from the Conference's 18 committees as a substitute for a summary report, Qaddura Fares said that if they tried to get away with that "they would get a sifir [zero, in English], just like students who show up at an exam without their paper".
The public sparring and jostling was often, though not always, split along the "generational" lines generally used to describe factions in Fatah but which many party members say are misleading. The "older generation" includes the remaining survivors of what Fatah calls its "historical leadership". A "younger generation" is now over 40 years old, and could better be described as "transitional", and a slightly younger generation is less powerful but still hardly what has been called "politically toothless". Zakaria Zubeidi, for example, the now-amnestied former most-wanted-outlaw of a Jenin military militia aligned with Fatah was admitted to the opening session, then excluded after criticism he made was reported in an interview published by Ma'an News Agency, then readmitted and allowed to make his own statement to the conference.
Abbas' appointment as Fatah party leader was greeted with Palestinian-style celebration (including a older woman in a traditional embroidered dress calling out shrill fellahi [peasant] poetic praise). Campaigning and electioneering is over. And many delegates were relaxing in a pleasant evening around Bethlehem's Manger Square, facing the Church of the Nativity where Christ is believed to have been born.
The disputes. and a certain amount of disorganization, have delayed proceedings considerably. The Fatah Sixth General Conference was originally scheduled to end on Thursday, but is now expected to continue until Tuesday, at the earliest.
The last Fatah General Conference was held in 1989, not too long after Yasser Arafat had proclaimed a Palestinian State within the borders that existed on the eve of the June 1967 war (thus legally renouncing claims on any other territory controlled by Israel). Almost in the same breath had sufficiently denounced and renounced terrorism with all the required wording to the satisfaction of the United States so that careful official contacts were authorized. But the Palestinian leadership always insisted that their right to resist Israeli military occupation was not terrorism.
The Israelis, however, were not won over until 1993, when they agreed to exchange mutual recognition with the PLO after a year of previously-secret negotiations facilitated by and often conducted in Norway. It was Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and Ahmad Qureia (Abu Alaa) the other main figure seated beside Abbas on the podium today as the Fatah Conference opened in Bethlehem, who participated in the Oslo track on behalf of the Palestinians (but it was the late-and-lamented Yasser Arafat who signed the first Oslo agreement, the Declaration of Principles, alongside the late-and-lamented Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in a ceremony organized by the U.S- then-President Bill Clinton on 13 September 2003.
The Olso Accords authorized the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was supposed to administer the occupied Palestinian territory (the West Bank and Gaza, which the Oslo documents say would be treated as a single territorial unit). It is to be noted that Israel approval was required every step of the way, for every single detail, including for the name of every single Palestinian employed in every PA Ministry, and for every Palestinian passport or residency document that the PA would supposedly issue.
Even so, to quiet Israeli accusations and anxieties, the Palestinians were asked to denounce terrorism yet again, and President Clinton and his wife, Hilary Rodham Clinton, travelled to Gaza in 1998 to attend a special session of the PLO's Palestine National Council that was convened specially for them. where the required words were spoken yet again. And again, resistance was not relinquished.
But today, as the Fatah General Conference convened in Bethlehem, Israeli Ministers and media expressed shock and anger as the emerging Fatah platform would make it clear that Palestinian "resistance" to the continuing Israeli occupation is a right under international law that will be retained even as the preferred option is for a peaceful solution reached through negotiations.
However, there are no negotiations at the moment.
During Israel's military in Gaza, the IDF's Operation Cast Lead that started on 27 December and lasted until 18 January, the Palestinian leadership broke off the faltering negotiations that failed, under the American-sponsored Annapolis process, to reach any conclusions, including the goal stated by former U.S. President George W. Bush -- to have a Palestinian State by the end of 2008 (or, by the very last day of the Bush administration, before the inauguration of a new President in January 2009).
Now, the Palestinian leadership is saying that it will not resume negotiations unless there are assurances of Israeli commitment to a two-state solution and an end to Israel settlement-building.
Meanwhile, at the Fatah conference in Bethlehem, the movement's Gaza delegates were supposed to vote via their mobile telephones -- although that could compromise the secrecy of their ballot -- but a member of the Conference secretariat said Sunday morning that the rival Hamas party, now the de facto governing party in Gaza, confiscated overnight all the mobile phones of those Fatah members in Gaza who were selected to be delegates to the Conference, and are thus eligible to vote. This report was not confirmed by other sources. Fatah and Hamas are engaged in a bitter political rivalry that spiked when Hamas contested elections for the first time in January 2006 -- and won. Then, saying they feared a planned coup, Hamas fighters moved against Fatah-led Palestinian Preventive Security Forces and won, this time militarily, in mid-June 2007. The antagonism has been intense ever since.
An alternative solution to accomodate the Fatah delegates blocked in Gaza was being examined before and during the voting process. "The important thing is to start, and to include the Gazan delegates", said the source in the Conference secretariat. "It may be impossible for them to continue, in which case they might declare a strike, but at least the point would have been made that they should participate simultaneously".
The importance of being a member of the Fateh Central Committee is made clear by the effort and attention that delegates to this General Conference in Bethlehem have given to this project.
A Fatah activist who was not included among the 2,230 delegates to the conference, but who is an effective operative and analyst, said that the Central Committee is "the highest address in Fatah, and they can decide everything -- they can pressure the President, and decide who the Ministers will be. If I am in this Central Committee and I want my brother to be minister, I can make it happen", he said with some ironical disapproval.
But, the Conference decided that Central Committee members could not hold another job, and must commit to devoting themselves full-time to their position, if elected.
For the last two years in particular, since the Hamas rout of Fatah Preventive Security forces in Gaza (led by Central Committee candidate Mohammed Dahlan, who was away at the time) in mid-June 2007, the Central committee has not been effective at all, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (who is also head of the overarching Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO, and who is now clearly leader of Fatah as well, after his election by acclamation on Saturday), did whatever he wanted without any effective opposition. Members of the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC), which has been unable to meet for several years, since such a significant proportion of its membership is imprisoned in Israeli jails, have protested what they call Abbas' undemocratic use of his presidential emergency powers to issue a large number of laws by presidential decree.
"The Central Committee has done nothing in the last two years. They were weak", said the Fatah activist who is not a delegate at the Conference in Bethlehem. "Now, this is the first time in 20 years that the leadership will change, and Abu Mazen will not feel that he has power as he had until two days ago".
A Fatah analyst who was stricken at the last minute from the list of those invited to attend as delegates -- in order to accomodate others who were upset and grievously offended at not having been included originally -- and who is instead working in the conference "administration", said that Abbas, in a speech he made upon his election by acclamation on Saturday, "recognized that not everybody who was attending the Conference merited being there as a delegate, and that some who were kept out of the room had had greater right to be inside".
Fatah had been weakened by internal rivalry over the past 20 years, he said, and the organization showed an absence of vitality, due to deaths, assassinations, The Wall, the situation in Gaza, the lack of communications. What this conference has done, he said, is allow an evaluation of the state of the organization, and this has shown what needed to be repaired. "The real congress will be the Seventh, now scheduled to be held in five years" -- and, he added, there will be only 800 - 1,000 delegates attending, as opposed to the 2,300 or so in Bethlehem this week.
The Revolutionary Council will decide many things that have until now been in the hands of the President only, and it will now meet every three months.
Anyone elected to serve on the Central Committee, he said, would have to resign from any other other Ministerial posts, or jobs, and would have to devote him- or her- self to the Central Committee on a full-time basis. The positions will be salaried, and the work will be full-time. "The idea is to separate Fatah and the Palestinian Authority", he said. "Before, almost all Central Committee members were also ministers or Ambassadors, and the organization lost out".
And, he said, starting with the Political committee programs that was adopted on Saturday night to guide Fatah for the next five years, "there is for the first time a vision for Palestinian society -- in all fields".
Before, he said, Fatah had only a military, political, and information departments.
The remainder of the committee reports -- economic, social, educational, etc. -- will be adopted by the conference plenary in the coming day or two. This vision, he indicated, had been developed over the last three years by officials -- experts, such as university professors in economics -- working in small teams in workshops in Palestine. A separate preparatory committee, with a team of hundreds of people, was been working on organizing the conference for the last year or so, he indicated.
This will be a program to prepare for the independent state of Palestine.
The Conference stated that Fatah is a national liberation movement whose aim is to liberate Palestine, to put and end to Israeli occupation, and to build an independent state in the territory occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem -- as well as to assure the refugees' right of return in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 194.
Until this goal is reached, the conference decided, the Palestinian people have the right to use all forms of struggle, including armed struggle. This, the conference delegates agreed, is guaranteed by the UN Charter and international law, although the forms of struggle used will depend both on the circumstances and on the interests of the Palestinian people.
Other forms that were mentioned in the program adopted by the Conference included non-violent civil disobedience, or demonstrations such as those held every Friday at Bil'in, west of Ramallah, where villagers protest that the route of The Wall cutting them off from their lands has not been changed -- despite a court order to do so. However, those demonstrations, and similar ones at nearby Ni'lin and at Maasara near Bethlehem [the two places which were specifically mentioned by Abbas in his opening speech, though he must have forgotten to mention Bil'in], have been repressed by steadily increasing brutality by the Israeli Border Police and security forces -- six people were taken from their beds in the middle of the night in Bil'in last week on the eve of the opening of the Fatah conference, for example. However, the Palestinian leadership, and the Fatah leadership, has only been seen near those demonstrations once (when the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the Israeli military to change the route of The Wall in that area), though the demonstrations have been on-going for years.
Another form of struggle that was explicitly mentioned was a boycott of those Israeli products which are replacable by products made in or imported into the West Bank.
The Fatah Conference program specifically mentioned the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem only, not all of Jerusalem as was reported by a reporter for Israel's Kol Israel (Voice of Israel) official broadcaster. His report was picked up and published in a number of other Israeli media outlets. And the Fatah Conference program did not specify that the West Bank must be "cleansed" of Israeli settlers -- it was Israeli-Arab-Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, who made that statement in his speech that was the final statement in the opening session of the Fatah Conference last Tuesday (Tibi had been prevented from entering Bethlehem the night before by Israeli Border Police who control the main Israeli checkpoint from Jerusalem into Bethlehem.)
Nevertheless, when the Israeli government held its regular weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak complained that "the rhetoric coming from Fatah and the positions being expressed are grave and unacceptable to us."
But, there was negative Israeli reaction to a decision taken inside the Conference on Thursday, when, according to Haaretz, "Top Fatah officials on Thursday ruled that Israel was to blame for the death of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Officials on the third day of the Fatah convention in Bethlehem accepted the proposal, put forth by the chairman of the Arafat Institute, stating that Israel had been behind the 'assassination' of the late Palestinian Authority Chairman. The second clause of the proposal, following the blame on Israel, called for leaving the investigation into Arafat's death open. The third clause affirmed Fatah's request for international aid to probe the issue". This report can be read in full
here.
To show its displeasure even before this development, two Israeli F-16s made six flyovers of Bethlehem on Wednesday— twice flying low and slow — almost directly over Nativity Square and the almost-adjacent Terra Sancta conference center. Almost all the delegates were inside the session hall, and unaware of this rather direct and heavy-handed message from the Israeli political and military establishment, showing its disapproval of Fatah draft documents saying that while the group has chosen the path of peace, it would not renounce its right (under international law) to resist the on-going Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory. On Thursday, there were again five separate fly-overs by Israeli F-16s, in the morning, midday, and again at the end of the day.
Earlier, one source of anxiety has been soothed, when the Israeli Supreme Court declined to arrest five Fatah members who are attending the conference in Bethlehem. The Supreme Court judges said that this was a decision for the government, not the court".
The voting was by both those delegates present, and by some electronic means for those blocked in Gaza and unable to travel to the West Bank.
The results of the voting will result in a change of Fatah, and Palestinian, leadership.
For many of the people attending the Fatah Sixth General Conference that opened today in Bethlehem, the Fatah movement was the hope of their lives. But, after most of a lifetime spent in struggle, there still is not a Palestinian state.
Fatah was the nationality that most of these Palestinians still do not have.
The membership (mostly all men) believed with all their hearts and souls that Fatah would save them, that Fatah was a winning force that would lead them to a solution for their dispossesion, that would restore their dignity and honor.
And now, only about 2,000 of them -- who were authorized to receive invitations though what appear to be secret and arbitrary decision-making, and who are now present in the Conference in Bethlehem -- will be deciding the future, if not the fate, of their movement.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has long been criticized for his lack of charisma and his ineffective style, but he has surprisingly managed to dominate this Fatah conference. Fatah activists say, however, that a new leadership will now be able to limit Abbas' power.
Photo from the Ma'an News agency website - Mahmoud Abbas puts the ballot it took him 20 minutes to complete (because of the long list of names of candidates) into a Fatah ballot box in Bethlehem on Sunday. His son, Yasser Abbas, stands behind and to the left in the photo.
Fears of dissidence and clashes were not realized. The actual problems were minimal, the protesters were fundamentally polite, and Abbas modified his tone somewhat in the session in which his nomination to lead the party was passed by acclamation
"Sit down, habibi[my dear, in English], be patient", Abbas cajoled after his nomination as party leader, in a very different style from earlier in the meeting, when he ordered Central Committee candidate Husam Khader a few days earlier: "Sit down or get out!" Khader, who was protesting the lack of a report from the outgoing Central Committee about what had happened over the last 20 years since the last Fatah General Conference, said in a later interview that he responded to Abbas by saying he might be the President outside, but he is just another Fatah member inside. However, since the nomination-by-acclamation process, Abbas is now officially the President inside the party conference as well.
And after his election by acclamation as Fatah party chairman on Saturday, a newly-charismatic Mahmoud Abbas was uncharacteristically conciliatory. He called on "Our brother, Abu Lutuf, Farouk Kaddoumi", to withdraw his statements, and to come back to Fatah. "We are all human, we all make mistakes, and we all forgive", Abbas said. "Those who own their mistakes are the best among us".
With that performance, said another Central Council candidate, "Abbas became a leader".
The most trenchant criticism was, like Husam Khader's, targetted at the failure -- in fact, it was an outright refusal -- of the outgoing Central Committee to present a report accounting for mistakes made, lessons learned, and funds received and spent. In remarks to journalists in Bethlehem's central Manger Square after an Abbas spokesman gave a press briefing implying that the Conference delegates were satisfied with reports from the Conference's 18 committees as a substitute for a summary report, Qaddura Fares said that if they tried to get away with that "they would get a sifir [zero, in English], just like students who show up at an exam without their paper".
The public sparring and jostling was often, though not always, split along the "generational" lines generally used to describe factions in Fatah but which many party members say are misleading. The "older generation" includes the remaining survivors of what Fatah calls its "historical leadership". A "younger generation" is now over 40 years old, and could better be described as "transitional", and a slightly younger generation is less powerful but still hardly what has been called "politically toothless". Zakaria Zubeidi, for example, the now-amnestied former most-wanted-outlaw of a Jenin military militia aligned with Fatah was admitted to the opening session, then excluded after criticism he made was reported in an interview published by Ma'an News Agency, then readmitted and allowed to make his own statement to the conference.
Abbas' appointment as Fatah party leader was greeted with Palestinian-style celebration (including a older woman in a traditional embroidered dress calling out shrill fellahi [peasant] poetic praise). Campaigning and electioneering is over. And many delegates were relaxing in a pleasant evening around Bethlehem's Manger Square, facing the Church of the Nativity where Christ is believed to have been born.
The disputes. and a certain amount of disorganization, have delayed proceedings considerably. The Fatah Sixth General Conference was originally scheduled to end on Thursday, but is now expected to continue until Tuesday, at the earliest.
The last Fatah General Conference was held in 1989, not too long after Yasser Arafat had proclaimed a Palestinian State within the borders that existed on the eve of the June 1967 war (thus legally renouncing claims on any other territory controlled by Israel). Almost in the same breath had sufficiently denounced and renounced terrorism with all the required wording to the satisfaction of the United States so that careful official contacts were authorized. But the Palestinian leadership always insisted that their right to resist Israeli military occupation was not terrorism.
The Israelis, however, were not won over until 1993, when they agreed to exchange mutual recognition with the PLO after a year of previously-secret negotiations facilitated by and often conducted in Norway. It was Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), and Ahmad Qureia (Abu Alaa) the other main figure seated beside Abbas on the podium today as the Fatah Conference opened in Bethlehem, who participated in the Oslo track on behalf of the Palestinians (but it was the late-and-lamented Yasser Arafat who signed the first Oslo agreement, the Declaration of Principles, alongside the late-and-lamented Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in a ceremony organized by the U.S- then-President Bill Clinton on 13 September 2003.
The Olso Accords authorized the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was supposed to administer the occupied Palestinian territory (the West Bank and Gaza, which the Oslo documents say would be treated as a single territorial unit). It is to be noted that Israel approval was required every step of the way, for every single detail, including for the name of every single Palestinian employed in every PA Ministry, and for every Palestinian passport or residency document that the PA would supposedly issue.
Even so, to quiet Israeli accusations and anxieties, the Palestinians were asked to denounce terrorism yet again, and President Clinton and his wife, Hilary Rodham Clinton, travelled to Gaza in 1998 to attend a special session of the PLO's Palestine National Council that was convened specially for them. where the required words were spoken yet again. And again, resistance was not relinquished.
But today, as the Fatah General Conference convened in Bethlehem, Israeli Ministers and media expressed shock and anger as the emerging Fatah platform would make it clear that Palestinian "resistance" to the continuing Israeli occupation is a right under international law that will be retained even as the preferred option is for a peaceful solution reached through negotiations.
However, there are no negotiations at the moment.
During Israel's military in Gaza, the IDF's Operation Cast Lead that started on 27 December and lasted until 18 January, the Palestinian leadership broke off the faltering negotiations that failed, under the American-sponsored Annapolis process, to reach any conclusions, including the goal stated by former U.S. President George W. Bush -- to have a Palestinian State by the end of 2008 (or, by the very last day of the Bush administration, before the inauguration of a new President in January 2009).
Now, the Palestinian leadership is saying that it will not resume negotiations unless there are assurances of Israeli commitment to a two-state solution and an end to Israel settlement-building.
Meanwhile, at the Fatah conference in Bethlehem, the movement's Gaza delegates were supposed to vote via their mobile telephones -- although that could compromise the secrecy of their ballot -- but a member of the Conference secretariat said Sunday morning that the rival Hamas party, now the de facto governing party in Gaza, confiscated overnight all the mobile phones of those Fatah members in Gaza who were selected to be delegates to the Conference, and are thus eligible to vote. This report was not confirmed by other sources. Fatah and Hamas are engaged in a bitter political rivalry that spiked when Hamas contested elections for the first time in January 2006 -- and won. Then, saying they feared a planned coup, Hamas fighters moved against Fatah-led Palestinian Preventive Security Forces and won, this time militarily, in mid-June 2007. The antagonism has been intense ever since.
An alternative solution to accomodate the Fatah delegates blocked in Gaza was being examined before and during the voting process. "The important thing is to start, and to include the Gazan delegates", said the source in the Conference secretariat. "It may be impossible for them to continue, in which case they might declare a strike, but at least the point would have been made that they should participate simultaneously".
The importance of being a member of the Fateh Central Committee is made clear by the effort and attention that delegates to this General Conference in Bethlehem have given to this project.
A Fatah activist who was not included among the 2,230 delegates to the conference, but who is an effective operative and analyst, said that the Central Committee is "the highest address in Fatah, and they can decide everything -- they can pressure the President, and decide who the Ministers will be. If I am in this Central Committee and I want my brother to be minister, I can make it happen", he said with some ironical disapproval.
But, the Conference decided that Central Committee members could not hold another job, and must commit to devoting themselves full-time to their position, if elected.
For the last two years in particular, since the Hamas rout of Fatah Preventive Security forces in Gaza (led by Central Committee candidate Mohammed Dahlan, who was away at the time) in mid-June 2007, the Central committee has not been effective at all, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (who is also head of the overarching Palestine Liberation Organization or PLO, and who is now clearly leader of Fatah as well, after his election by acclamation on Saturday), did whatever he wanted without any effective opposition. Members of the Palestine Legislative Council (PLC), which has been unable to meet for several years, since such a significant proportion of its membership is imprisoned in Israeli jails, have protested what they call Abbas' undemocratic use of his presidential emergency powers to issue a large number of laws by presidential decree.
"The Central Committee has done nothing in the last two years. They were weak", said the Fatah activist who is not a delegate at the Conference in Bethlehem. "Now, this is the first time in 20 years that the leadership will change, and Abu Mazen will not feel that he has power as he had until two days ago".
A Fatah analyst who was stricken at the last minute from the list of those invited to attend as delegates -- in order to accomodate others who were upset and grievously offended at not having been included originally -- and who is instead working in the conference "administration", said that Abbas, in a speech he made upon his election by acclamation on Saturday, "recognized that not everybody who was attending the Conference merited being there as a delegate, and that some who were kept out of the room had had greater right to be inside".
Fatah had been weakened by internal rivalry over the past 20 years, he said, and the organization showed an absence of vitality, due to deaths, assassinations, The Wall, the situation in Gaza, the lack of communications. What this conference has done, he said, is allow an evaluation of the state of the organization, and this has shown what needed to be repaired. "The real congress will be the Seventh, now scheduled to be held in five years" -- and, he added, there will be only 800 - 1,000 delegates attending, as opposed to the 2,300 or so in Bethlehem this week.
The Revolutionary Council will decide many things that have until now been in the hands of the President only, and it will now meet every three months.
Anyone elected to serve on the Central Committee, he said, would have to resign from any other other Ministerial posts, or jobs, and would have to devote him- or her- self to the Central Committee on a full-time basis. The positions will be salaried, and the work will be full-time. "The idea is to separate Fatah and the Palestinian Authority", he said. "Before, almost all Central Committee members were also ministers or Ambassadors, and the organization lost out".
And, he said, starting with the Political committee programs that was adopted on Saturday night to guide Fatah for the next five years, "there is for the first time a vision for Palestinian society -- in all fields".
Before, he said, Fatah had only a military, political, and information departments.
The remainder of the committee reports -- economic, social, educational, etc. -- will be adopted by the conference plenary in the coming day or two. This vision, he indicated, had been developed over the last three years by officials -- experts, such as university professors in economics -- working in small teams in workshops in Palestine. A separate preparatory committee, with a team of hundreds of people, was been working on organizing the conference for the last year or so, he indicated.
This will be a program to prepare for the independent state of Palestine.
The Conference stated that Fatah is a national liberation movement whose aim is to liberate Palestine, to put and end to Israeli occupation, and to build an independent state in the territory occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem -- as well as to assure the refugees' right of return in accordance with UN General Assembly resolution 194.
Until this goal is reached, the conference decided, the Palestinian people have the right to use all forms of struggle, including armed struggle. This, the conference delegates agreed, is guaranteed by the UN Charter and international law, although the forms of struggle used will depend both on the circumstances and on the interests of the Palestinian people.
Other forms that were mentioned in the program adopted by the Conference included non-violent civil disobedience, or demonstrations such as those held every Friday at Bil'in, west of Ramallah, where villagers protest that the route of The Wall cutting them off from their lands has not been changed -- despite a court order to do so. However, those demonstrations, and similar ones at nearby Ni'lin and at Maasara near Bethlehem [the two places which were specifically mentioned by Abbas in his opening speech, though he must have forgotten to mention Bil'in], have been repressed by steadily increasing brutality by the Israeli Border Police and security forces -- six people were taken from their beds in the middle of the night in Bil'in last week on the eve of the opening of the Fatah conference, for example. However, the Palestinian leadership, and the Fatah leadership, has only been seen near those demonstrations once (when the Israeli Supreme Court ordered the Israeli military to change the route of The Wall in that area), though the demonstrations have been on-going for years.
Another form of struggle that was explicitly mentioned was a boycott of those Israeli products which are replacable by products made in or imported into the West Bank.
The Fatah Conference program specifically mentioned the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem only, not all of Jerusalem as was reported by a reporter for Israel's Kol Israel (Voice of Israel) official broadcaster. His report was picked up and published in a number of other Israeli media outlets. And the Fatah Conference program did not specify that the West Bank must be "cleansed" of Israeli settlers -- it was Israeli-Arab-Palestinian member of the Israeli Knesset, Ahmad Tibi, who made that statement in his speech that was the final statement in the opening session of the Fatah Conference last Tuesday (Tibi had been prevented from entering Bethlehem the night before by Israeli Border Police who control the main Israeli checkpoint from Jerusalem into Bethlehem.)
Nevertheless, when the Israeli government held its regular weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak complained that "the rhetoric coming from Fatah and the positions being expressed are grave and unacceptable to us."
But, there was negative Israeli reaction to a decision taken inside the Conference on Thursday, when, according to Haaretz, "Top Fatah officials on Thursday ruled that Israel was to blame for the death of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Officials on the third day of the Fatah convention in Bethlehem accepted the proposal, put forth by the chairman of the Arafat Institute, stating that Israel had been behind the 'assassination' of the late Palestinian Authority Chairman. The second clause of the proposal, following the blame on Israel, called for leaving the investigation into Arafat's death open. The third clause affirmed Fatah's request for international aid to probe the issue". This report can be read in full
here.
To show its displeasure even before this development, two Israeli F-16s made six flyovers of Bethlehem on Wednesday— twice flying low and slow — almost directly over Nativity Square and the almost-adjacent Terra Sancta conference center. Almost all the delegates were inside the session hall, and unaware of this rather direct and heavy-handed message from the Israeli political and military establishment, showing its disapproval of Fatah draft documents saying that while the group has chosen the path of peace, it would not renounce its right (under international law) to resist the on-going Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory. On Thursday, there were again five separate fly-overs by Israeli F-16s, in the morning, midday, and again at the end of the day.
Earlier, one source of anxiety has been soothed, when the Israeli Supreme Court declined to arrest five Fatah members who are attending the conference in Bethlehem. The Supreme Court judges said that this was a decision for the government, not the court".
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