Hoping to satisfy as wide a constituency as possible, the Palestinian delegates to the Fatah conference, scheduled to conclude here on Tuesday, have tried to broadcast a message both peaceful and militant.
It was a delicate balancing act for Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian nationalist party, as it sought to rise above past failures, rejuvenate itself and head off the challenge from Hamas, the Islamic group that is Fatah’s rival.
But it remains an open question whether the weeklong conference, Fatah’s first in 20 years, has hastened or slowed the prospect of a Palestinian state.
One player Fatah did not satisfy was the Israeli government. To listen to Israeli officials, the conference has been an almost unmitigated disaster.
Not surprisingly, Israel’s hawkish foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, took the hardest line, telling a delegation of Democratic lawmakers from the United States on Monday that the “radical and uncompromising positions” emerging from the Fatah conference created an “unbridgeable gap between them and us” and “effectively buried any possibility of reaching a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians in the coming years.”
But even Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister and the leader of the center-left Labor Party, declared the language and some of the harder positions that emerged in snippets as “grave and unacceptable to us.”
The Palestinian delegates, ensconced in their own internal debates, were unfazed by the Israeli reaction.
“What did they expect from Fatah?” said Qaddoura Fares, a prominent delegate from Ramallah. “Settlements continue and they refuse to recognize our national rights.”
Riad Jubran, a delegate from Jerusalem, said the Israelis would have criticized the gathering “even if we had come here to play football.”
The political program adopted by the Fatah conference has yet to be published, pending amendments and approval by the newly elected leadership council, but its main thrust was clear. Those familiar with it said it endorsed negotiations for a two-state solution while calling for a new approach and new terms for talks, including a full cessation of Israeli settlement building, a defined end result and a limited time frame.
“It speaks about a peaceful solution,” said Sarhan Salaymeh, the mayor of the West Bank town of Al-Ram, who spent 13 years in an Israeli prison. “It is the time for nation building, not fighting,” he said. “The rifle has its own time.”
Yet Fatah, still defining itself as a national liberation movement, is reluctant to fully abandon the gun. In a statement outlining the principles of its new political charter, the party reaffirmed its commitment to achieve a just peace, but said it believed the Palestinians, as a people under occupation, retain the legitimate right of resistance “in all its forms.”
Fatah’s “constants,” the statement added, were the liberation of the land and Jerusalem, the removal of settlements, and the demand of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 and their descendants for the right of return. The statement did not specify what land or parts of Jerusalem were to be liberated, but delegates said it was clear the statement meant the areas captured by Israel in the 1967 war. Several said the political program offered nothing really new.
In addition to their annoyance over the talk about a right of resistance, the Israelis were incensed by a conference resolution holding Israel responsible for the death in 2004 of Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader who founded Fatah.
Nasser al-Kidwa, a Fatah leader and nephew of Mr. Arafat who has led a Palestinian inquiry into Mr. Arafat’s death, said in an interview that there were indications of a “high possibility of poisoning,” though still no proof.
Some explained the militant overtones at the conference as natural, reflecting respect for Fatah’s revolutionary past. Others pointed to the harder line of the Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conservative who only recently, and grudgingly, endorsed the notion of a limited Palestinian state.
“We are not Netanyahu’s friends,” said Tawfiq Abu Khoussa, a Fatah activist who fled Gaza in 2007 after it was taken over by Hamas. “Until we get our legitimate rights we are enemies.”
Despite tough talk by Fatah reformists before the conference and stormy sessions during it, there seemed to be little introspection about the infighting and mistakes that cost the party its popularity, to the point where it lost Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 to Hamas.
As elections for Fatah’s governing bodies finally got under way on Sunday evening, the party seemed united, at least temporarily. Old party veterans had entered into alliances with young reformist candidates, hoping to combine experience with new blood. Hundreds of delegates who were trapped in Gaza, prevented from leaving by Hamas, were casting their votes by phone.
Many of the roughly 2,300 delegates at the conference packed into the yard of the Terra Sancta School where the conference was taking place, lobbying for candidates and socializing. Some delegates, born into refugee families in countries like Lebanon and Syria, were in the West Bank for the first time. By early Tuesday, initial results indicated that most of the 18 elected positions on the Central Committee, Fatah’s highest governing body, had gone to the younger generation, with only a few of the old guard retaining their seats.
Meanwhile, it was as if Christmas had come early to Bethlehem, adding to the momentary feeling of cheer. The influx of Fatah members filled every hotel room, while scraps of white paper — lists of recommended candidates and other election paraphernalia — were whipped up like snowflakes in the occasional breeze.
And, in the end, nobody here could say even when the next Fatah conference might come about, let alone an agreement for a Palestinian state.
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