Al Fatah

European Pressphoto Agency

Updated: Aug. 12, 2009

Fatah, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, is the larger of the two main Palestinian political parties (the other is Hamas). It was founded in the late 1950s by Yasir Arafat and a small group of Palestinian nationalists.

Its name is the reverse acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Falastini, meaning the Palestinian National Liberation Movement. The name also means Conquest or Victory in Arabic.

In its early program, Fatah was committed to an armed guerrilla struggle for Palestine's liberation from Israel. Its official emblem shows two fists holding crossed rifles and a hand grenade in front of a map of Palestine.

It was initially based in Jordan and later Lebanon; its leadership was dispersed during the 1970s and 1980s but returned to Gaza and the West Bank in the 1990s.

Fatah became preeminent among Palestinian factions in the 1960s though a series of strikes against Israel -- in its eyes, successful military campaigns, though condemned by Israel and the West as terrorism -- and by the end of the decade it was the largest and best funded of the Palestinian organizations. It became the vehicle for Mr. Arafat's control of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the umbrella group for Palestinian movements.

In 1993 Mr. Arafat signed the Oslo peace accord with Israel, which sought to negotiate a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, based on a two-state solution. In the legislative elections for the Palestinian Authority created by the accord, Fatah captured a majority of seats, and Mr. Arafat became president. Mr. Abbas, another original member of Fatah, became president in 2005 following Mr. Arafat's death.

By then, however, Fatah had become strained by internal divisions and tarnished by accusations of corruption, and began to lose ground to the more hardline party, Hamas. In June 2007, Fatah, while remaining in control of the West Bank, was completely routed from Gaza by Hamas.  Israel, which had refused to recognize the Hamas government, responded by clamping down even tighter on the flow of goods and people in and out of the territories.

In the wake of the Israeli attack on Gaza in January 2009, Israel proposed, with the tacit agreement of Egypt and the United States, to place the Palestinian Authority — its leading party, Fatah, and its leader, Mr. Abbas — at the heart of an ambitious program to rebuild Gaza, administering reconstruction aid and manning Gaza’s borders.

But with each day the conflict continued, the Authority seemed increasingly beleaguered and marginalized, even in the Palestinian cities of the West Bank. Protesters accused Mr. Abbas of not doing enough to stop the carnage in Gaza. His own police used clubs and tear gas against those same protesters. The more bombs in Gaza, the more Hamas’s support seemed to be growing  at the expense of the Palestinian Authority, already considered corrupt and distant from ordinary people.

The war proved to be another blow to the longstanding Israeli and Western dream of propping up Fatah as a moderate, secular alternative to Hamas. Ever since Hamas began its one-party rule of Gaza, in summer 2007, Israel and the West have tried to turn Gazans against Hamas by an economic embargo and diplomatic isolation. While there is certainly anger at Hamas among ordinary Gazans, it pales beside the anger at Israel, the West and what is seen by some as Fatah’s collusion with those enemies.

While the gap between the Fatah-led West Bank and the Hamas-led Gaza is widely recognized, less appreciated is that Fatah itself, which the West trains and helps, is so internally torn that it is scarcely able to negotiate or govern. Many participants of Fatah's August 4, 2009 party conference, its first in 20 years and its first ever on Palestinian soil, said the conference might be the movement's last chance to revive.

At the conference Fatah elected a mostly new leadership committee, ushering in a younger generation and ousting some prominent veterans.The new leaders are considered more pragmatic than their predecessors and grew up locally, in contrast to the exile-dominated leadership they are replacing. But many are familiar names who have already played active roles in Palestinian society and the peace process, and their election to the committee is not expected to bring about significant changes in Fatah policies.