Fatah members will be gathering in Bethlehem in August for what will be the party’s first conference in 20 years.

The general congress of the most prominent Palestinian political party has drawn a great deal of interest, as more than 1,500 delegates will be discussing the future of the movement that shaped Palestinian history, and electing a new leadership.

Fatah is the largest party within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and arguably the most influential political movement to determine the fate of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for more than 40 years.

But the fact that members have not had a conference since 1989 has fueled accusations of corruption, stagnation and internal dissension.

Generation Gap

“Inside the Fatah committee, I believe all the members are over 70,” says Naji Shurab, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in the Gaza Strip. “They’re out of date. They have to leave a chance to the other generations.”

The real problem facing Fatah is that it lacks a democratic structure, Shurab believes, and cites the generation gap in Fatah, one of the sore points in the organization, as a manifestation of this.

Dr. Najat Abu Baker, 44, has been a member of Fatah since she was 13 but is still considered part of the movement’s young guard.

“The movement needs a leadership that’s more active than the current one,” she tells The Media Line. “More to the point, the Central Committee needs to be changed. They’re old an inactive. We not saying ‘forget about them’; we’re just saying they should be aware of us and that we want rejuvenation.”

The failure to hold a congress in so many years has resulted in older people dominating the leadership. Some argue that their insistence to hold onto the seats at any cost is precisely the reason a conference has not taken place.

Rafiq Natsheh, a former speaker of the Palestinian parliament, is a representative of this so-called older generation. ‘So-called’ because he rejects the notion of a generation gap within the organization.

“There has always been a passage of new blood into the movement,” he tells The Media Line. “They’re already part of the movement and there’s nothing stopping them from taking part. We welcome the new generation,” he says.

Fatah Without Arafat

The most memorable and influential of the older generation was no doubt Yassir Arafat, the co-founder who later became its leader and took it from armed struggle to peace talks with Israel early 1990s.

But Arafat’s real intentions are still matter of speculation among scholars and politicians. Many believe he never really made the transition from revolutionary leader to peacemaker.

The August conference will be the first to take place since his death in 2004.

Over the years, the name Arafat became almost synonymous with the Fatah movement and many thought he would take the movement down with him to the grave.

Arafat represented the personalization of politics, Shurab says.

“If we sum up Fatah in one word, I’d say: Arafat. He was everything in Fatah, and now that he’s gone, there is not one but many Fatah leaders,” he says.

Shlomo Ben Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister who negotiated with the Palestinians during the 1990s tends to agree.

“Now you don’t have Arafat and you don’t have an undisputed authority at the helm,” he tells The Media Line. “This means you do not have a polity that can deliver, in case you have a settlement.”

Ben Ami says Fatah today is “practically nonexistent.” The generation gap is one of the main reasons for its discord. “It has lost its ability to be a real interlocutor. You have no real control over the movement and it’s become fragmented,” he says,

Dissension within Fatah is nothing new.

Leading members have been disputed on core matters, one of the most divisive being talks with Israel.

Farouq Qaddoumi, for example, the Tunisia-based head of Fatah’s political bureau, still refuses to recognize the Oslo Accords, signed between Israel and the PLO in 1993, and will likely refrain from attending the Bethlehem conference.

Qaddoumi reportedly plans to stage his own rival conference outside the Palestinian territories, probably in Algeria, and will also entitle the gathering the Sixth Fatah Conference.

The main branches of Fatah have lost their strength because they operate from the Palestinian territories, under the guns of the Israeli occupation, he recently said in an interview with the Lebanese Al-Akhbar.

One of Qaddoumi’s grievances is against P.A. Chairman Mahmoud ‘Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, who is the PLO chairman.

“The authority of Abu Mazen comes from his capacity as chairman of the P.A., whose term has ended, and from his membership in the Fatah Central Committee. This doesn’t give him exclusivity in making decisions regarding Fatah,” he said.

“Farouq Qaddoumi can say what he wants,” Abu Baker says. “He doesn’t pass through the checkpoints and he knows nothing of the people who live on the land controlled by occupying forces.”

Oslo, she says, was what brought the plight of the Palestinians to the world’s attention and made them realize there was a nation in need of a country. “Why should we not accept Oslo?” she retorts.

Shurab says Qaddoumi was influential 20 and 30 years ago but this has waned over the course of time due to changes in the political landscape.

“I cannot deny that Qaddoumi still has influence in Fatah and he has many loyal supporters but I think Abu Mazen has deprived Qaddoumi of many of his privileges,” Shurab says.

As the political process began in the early 1990s, there was no certainty that Fatah would continue to survive.

Natsheh, who attended the last conference in 1989 with around 1,200 other delegates, recalls that, at the time, the movement was in real danger of collapsing. Indeed, there was speculation that Fatah and the PLO would soon be replaced by an emerging power - Hamas - as the leading power in the Palestinian territories.

The conference in Tunisia took place after Fatah members had been banned from several Arab countries and were dispersed among others.

“The fact that the movement continued to exist was surprising for observers because many people thought the PLO was finished and the movement was over,” Natsheh says.

As for Fatah today, he rejects the notion that the movement is no longer relevant.

“I believe Fatah has a future because it’s the movement of the masses; it’s progressive and it believes in humanity and in peace,” he says.

The primary faction that casts a shadow over Fatah is Hamas, which was in its very early years when the 1989 conference took place.

“No doubt Hamas had an effect” Natsheh says. “There’s a powerful faction on the ground, but this only makes it more urgent and pressing for Fatah to rebuild itself and restore its role of leadership in order to serve the public. It’s a competition that should be beneficial for the movement as well as for the Palestinian people,” he says.

Fatah – On Its Way Down Or Here To Stay?

Fatah, a reverse Arabic acronym for the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine, was founded in 1965 by Palestinians in the Diaspora who were mostly Gazan refugees who had gone abroad to study.

To this day, the mostly widely recognized Fatah member is its co-founder Yassir Arafat, who later became the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, and whose name was practically synonymous with the movement for more than three decades.

In 1967, Fatah joined the PLO, a confederation of Palestinian parties, and soon became the largest faction in the organization.

Fatah originally espoused the idea of liberation of Palestinian land through armed struggle and orchestrated attacks against Israelis.

A major change in Fatah came in 1988, when it tacitly agreed to recognize Israel’s existence. Fatah supported talks with Israel, which led to the Oslo Accords in 1993 and to the creation of the Palestinian Authority, a step towards Palestinian statehood.

The year 1988 was significant for another reason – it also marked the ascension of Fatah’s arch enemy, Hamas, established a year earlier.

Hamas has since gained power to the extent that it won the legislative elections in 2006 and took over the Gaza Strip in a violent coup in June 2007.

Hamas’ victory, just 14 months after Arafat’s death, prompted speculation that Fatah was losing favor in the eyes of the Palestinian public and starting to disintegrate.

The two organizations are currently embroiled in a standoff, where each accuses the other of arresting its members, plotting to assassinate leaders and planning to undermine its leadership. The ongoing talks in Cairo, with Egyptian mediation, are an attempt to iron out their problems but the hostility seems to be escalating.

Fatah’s General Conference is supposed to meet every five years. It is made up of members of regional congresses, armed forces and members of the Revolutionary Council.

The Revolutionary Council decides on policies when the General Conference is not in session.

Fatah’s leading political body is the Central Committee, whose members are elected by secret ballot at the General Conference.

Several armed group have developed from Fatah, including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades; Force 17, a personal security force for PLO leaders, and the Tanzim, considered an armed offshoot of Fatah.