Fatah

Fatah   (Political party)
Socialist political party in Palestine. Not wanted by Israel and subsequently removed for Hamas.

Fatah, formerly the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, is a Palestinian nationalist and social democratic political party. It is the largest faction of the confederated multi-party Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the second-largest party in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, is the chairman of Fatah.

Origin

Unaware they're being filmed, Hamas members in Gaza beat and arrest Fatah supporters. Over in the West Bank, a Hamas sympathiser displays his Fatah-inflicted bruises. "Both my hands were injured. It went on for days". There are now two rival Palestinian governments. Gaza's borders have been closed and an economic blockade imposed. At the children's hospital, patients are feeling the affect. They can no longer travel abroad for treatment and there are no drugs in Gaza to treat them. In contrast, in the West Bank, funding is flooding in. The US is anxious to show Palestinians they'll be rewarded for turning away from Hamas. But Hamas claims it only took over Gaza because America was helping Fatah overturn the election results. "Fatah was preparing for a coup in Gaza with the help and support of the American government". Surprisingly, Efraima Helevy, former director of Mossad, agrees. "They decided to take steps to undo the results of the election". If this was the plan, it backfired. There are now effectively two Palestines. And as Hamas and Fatah continue fighting, long suffering Gazans look on in despair - Journeyman Pictures

Started as political and military organization of Arab Palestinians, Fatah was founded in the late 1950s by Egyptian Yassir Arafat and Khalīl al-Wazīr (Abū Jihād) with the aim of wresting Palestine from Israeli control by waging low-intensity guerrilla warfare. In the late 1980s it began seeking a two-state solution through diplomatic avenues, and its leaders were prominent players in the Oslo peace process that established the Palestinian Authority. Fatah attained Syrian support and came grounded in Damascus. By 1963 Fatah had developed a troop- type organisational structure. In December 1964 it carried out its first military operation when it blew up an Israeli water- pump installation. By 1968 Fatah — also centred in Jordan — had surfaced as a major Palestinian force and in March of that time was the primary target of an Israeli attack in which 150 guerrillas and 29 Israelis were killed. The strong caching of Fatah at Karameh — especially after the Arab demotion in the Six Day War of 1967 — boosted Fatah politically and psychologically. By the end of the 1960s it was the largest and best- funded of all the Palestinian associations and had taken over effective control of the Palestine Liberation Organization( PLO).

Israeli Opposition

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, later told the New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief David K. Shipler that he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both leftist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, and especially from Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as "a creature of Israel"), which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists. "The Israeli government gave me a budget" the retired brigadier general said, "and the military government gives to the mosques". Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009 that "Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation," Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. "I … suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face," he wrote. This supports claims Fatah was removed to maintain a divide and rule-tactic by allowing more violent groups to lead Gaza.

Fatah lost control in 2006 of the Gaza strip, which culminated in a small civil war.

 

Party Member

Politician	Born	Description
Mahmoud Abbas	26 March 1935	President of the State of Palestine and President of the Palestinian National Authority, for what it's worth.

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:British Jewish Zionist MP Gerald Kaufman says Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza	Speech	January 2009	Gerald Kaufman	"However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot solve this existential problem by military means. It is time for peace, but real peace, not the solution by conquest which is the Israelis' real goal but which it is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals; they are fools."
Document:The House of Zion	Essay	November 2015	Perry Anderson	Perry Anderson’s long essay, ‘The House of Zion’, is the Marxist equivalent of a Papal edict. He excommunicates the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and anoints an alternative: "the demand for one state is now the best Palestinian option available."

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This page imported content from Wikipedia on 15 October 2023.
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