The “National Palestinian Liberation Movement” (Fatah) has since its establishment distinguished itself from the remaining organizations and factions due to two essential and interrelated characteristics: the first is that it has represented and reflected the aspirations of the Palestinian people as a whole, with its diverse social groups and political tendencies, thus reflecting the image of this people, equally in the occupied interior and in lands of exile. Fatah was able to grasp all of the segments of Palestinian society (workers, students, economists, refugees, intellectuals, etc.), as it did the political movements that were penetrating Palestinian circles (Islamists, Leftists, Liberals, Baathists, Nasserists, etc.). All of these coexisted within a single political framework, agreeing and disagreeing within its bounds. Indeed, Fatah to a great extent came to represent the reality of the Palestinian people, as well as its outlook on the image of society and the nature of the state in the Palestinian nation for whose sake the movement worked.

The remaining Palestinian factions, on the other hand, represented specific political movements within Palestinian circles, some of them organically attached to one Arab regime or another. Thus their drive would be the ideology that they carried, and they would represent only their own ideological group. Even if some of them agreed – to such or such an extent – with movements within Fatah, these factions failed to address the Palestinian people with all of its constituents, and their role most of the time became restricted to one of two things: opposing Fatah or joining it.

On the background of such a state of affairs, Fatah constituted the backbone of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), such that the PLO’s program would be identical to that of Fatah, and that the legitimate and sole representation of the Palestinian people as consecrated by the PLO nearly coincided with that of Fatah. Meanwhile, other Palestinian factions had become mere numbers within the framework of the PLO. Some of them would leave and return according to political circumstances, but none ever objected the legitimacy of the PLO’s representation and of Fatah within it.

Late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, with his personality, style, political abilities and maneuvers, played the most fundamental role in preserving these two essential characteristics of the movement he founded with a few of his companions, and of which he fired the first bullet in 1965. Moreover, the political circumstances that followed the defeat of the Arab armies in the 1967 war constituted the drive and motive until the slogan of armed struggle launched by Fatah drew together all those who had been disappointed by the military performance of regular Arab troops.

The challenge faced by Fatah today, at the occasion of its sixth conference, is essentially represented by its ability to regain the two characteristics it has lost, especially that of being an image and a model of the Palestinian people, and a support for the work of the PLO.

The highly significant developments that have taken place since the ratification of the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority on Palestinian soil have destroyed such an image and such a model. Talk of “mistakes”, as was mentioned in President Mahmoud Abbas’s opening statement at the conference, will remain one of occasions so long as Fatah does not realize the significance of its losing the image of the Palestinian people, as it does not rearrange its political priorities and its relationship to the PLO, and as it does not cease to identify with the PA. Because each of these bodies possesses certain functions and work tools, and uniting them has clearly had harmful consequences on both the PLO and the Palestinian Authority. Indeed, Fatah has paid the price of this at the last legislative elections. Everything else remains in the framework of personal competition, some of which may be related to the experience of self-rule and what it brought in terms of influence and benefits.

The reality of identifying with the PA and its commitments concerning agreements with Israel has made of Fatah a faction that is incapable of addressing all Palestinians, or to devise new means of struggle to confront the complexities of negotiations with Israel and of the reality of the occupation and its practices. The movement has turned into a “faction”, and is no longer the image of the Palestinian people. In the absence of Arafat, Hamas has risen to fill the vacuum created by the dwindling of Fatah.

The challenge presented by Hamas is not only represented by taking control of the Gaza Strip by force of arms and expelling Fatah from it, but also by the Islamist movement seeking to become the image of the Palestinian people, and this is what it is currently presenting a model of in Gaza. Furthermore, Hamas seeks to deal with Fatah as a “faction”, one which would be acceptable and with which an agreement would be reached over the extent of its closeness to the image Hamas wishes to represent, ideologically, politically and socially. This explains its political stance towards the PLO and the doubts it raises over its representation of the Palestinian people, as it seeks for such representation to be solely its own, as was the case of Fatah before Oslo and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority.

In this sense, the sixth conference should have been not a mere renewal of the legitimacy of the movement’s leadership, but rather a conference that would lay the foundations for the coming phase, redefine the obscure relationships with the PLO and the PA on one hand, and set in place on the other mechanisms of organizational and political activity with which to restore the pulse of the Palestinian people and their aspirations towards the image of their society and their state. That is in fact the role which it is Hamas’s ambition to play