As Fatah prepares for its sixth congress, it must recapture the essence of its movement if it is to redeem Palestinian politics
- Karma Nabulsi
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 21 May 2009 09.00 BST
In September 1965, two years before Israel occupied the remainder of historic Palestine (Arab Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza), the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fateh), then still a clandestine formation in its infancy, sent a statement to the third Arab summit under way at Casablanca. It introduced itself to the Arab leaders attending as "nothing more than a group of youth who have determined to regain their homeland, and around whom are gathering, day by day, hundreds of other Palestinian youth ... longing to return to their homeland."
For the better part of Fateh's existence, this captured what the movement was about in essence: mobilisation of the world's largest refugee population towards self-determination and, above all, the return to their homes and lands from which they had been expelled in 1948. This was also their great strength, uniting Palestinians with a single goal, while aiming to stand above connections with any government or attachment to any particular ideology.
Of course, as with other broad resistance movements (such as in France in 1940-44, or the ANC in South Africa), there were different strands within Fateh from the start, from the communist to the conservative, and a broad range of writers and intellectuals that developed its programmes or publicly engaged in contesting them.
Yet at a time of competing Arab claims to the representation of the Palestinian cause, Fateh declared that the ultimate say belonged to the Palestinian people, who had a right to determine their own fate, and only a popular Palestinian revolutionary movement could truly represent them. And at the zenith of the age of grand ideologies, it proclaimed none in particular, instead housing a variety of social and political sectors under its elastic roof and arguing that concrete anti-colonial practices should stand above all theories and abstractions.
Twenty months earlier, the first Arab summit held in Cairo had arrived at a decision that led to the convening of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) and the subsequent establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). The revolutionary movements were not part of this vision, seeing it as a bureaucratised body whose very purpose was containment and control by the Arab states. In a few short years, however, Fateh, along with the other Palestinian resistance parties, captured the PLO institutional apparatus, transforming it all at once into a dynamic, genuinely representative body with regional and international weight and recognition.
This was the beginning of a new phase in Palestinian politics. Palestinians – no matter where they lived – were mobilised into movements that were in turn represented in the executive body of the PLO and the legislative structure of the PNC, the parliament-in-exile. The guarantor of this pluralist mechanism was Fateh, the largest of them all.
Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), one of Fateh's founding leaders, explained it thus: "Our goal was to build an organisation for Palestine on a broad basis, one that is not confined to any stratum, section or class and that is not directed towards any aims other than liberating Palestine ... The frame in which we decided to work was that of a movement as opposed to a party or association. We chose the frame of a movement, with all what that word connotes in terms of conceptual openness, dynamism, and broad horizons."
Today, as Fateh prepares for its sixth congress at the end of next month, it is this framework that must be recaptured for it to begin the journey to become as representative as it once was, and to address the serious challenges ahead. The first of these is to restore itself as the guarantor of pluralism, working with all parties within the Palestinian national arena, foremost among them Hamas.
This crisis pervades the current Palestinian political architecture throughout executive, legislative and party levels, both in exile and in occupied Palestine. Reminiscent of the first PLO structure created by Arab regimes to control the Palestinian cause in 1965, the current organisation is largely unrepresentative. The highest body of the Palestinian people, the PNC, meant to breathe it into life through its democratic vitality, is a ghost: neither elections nor sessions have been held for years. Many of its members have died of old age.
Yet Fateh, by virtue of its size, character and in particular its historic weight, carries within itself the key to the process of necessary reform. And the malaise that grips the middle tier, and the disease that has destroyed the top of the hierarchy, reflects neither the aspirations nor the vitality of the base of the movement.
When Fateh is spoken of today, the image immediately conveyed is of a politically and financially corrupted Palestinian Authority elite: a small, unrepresentative clique, subservient to Israeli whims and American dictats. This image applies to a small group at the top of the party, but causes one to overlook the other Fateh, the older and larger Fateh.
The majority of the thousands of cadres in Fateh's middle and lower ranks are as committed to the same old principles as they are disillusioned with its current practices. They also appreciate that their party is the only one capable of redeeming Palestinian politics, because it is the only one historically accommodating enough to carry a pluralist and inclusive national agenda forward.
It is the vital first step needed to overturn the current regime of complete political, social, economic, and spatial imprisonment by Israel. Thus, the redemption of the Palestinian polity is utterly dependent upon the redemption of Fateh. And why the elusive sixth congress of the movement is so crucial, and why it is so important it be allowed to take place.
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