Fatah, or at least its official wing, has concluded its eighth conference, introducing new figures from within the same faction. As usual, tents of celebration were held to honor the victors, while mourning tents were reserved for the losers. The winners presented the conference as the pinnacle of democracy and a step that would shift the movement’s difficult current conditions and enable Fatah to confront the next stage successfully. The losers, meanwhile, threatened retaliation against those responsible for their defeat through the manipulation that ultimately ensured determined outcomes.
In moments of triumph and the pain of defeat, much that bears little relation to reality is often said. The winners and losers are cut from the same cloth, and the conference’s ability to move the movement from one reality to another fundamentally different one is far more of a rhetorical construct than it is a reflection of practical reality capable of producing actual change in internal or political equations.
Political circumstances favored Fatah, allowing it to become the group that could claim Palestinian representation more than any other within a short period. It emerged, as its late Jordanian adversary Wasfi al-Tal once described it, as “the long-awaited child” of mass aspirations- a baby that had been eagerly anticipated and spoiled by the entire family.
After the defeat of June 1967 and Jamal Abdel Nasser’s endorsement of its historic slogan “It was born to remain,” Fatah spread across spaces far larger than its organizational capacity could absorb. Wherever there were Palestinians on the face of the earth, there was Fatah. It reinforced its presence through military and political achievements that justified these wagers. In two arenas adjacent to the homeland, Jordan and Lebanon, its influence nearly rose to that of a state within a state. It was eventually expelled from that precious territory of the Levant and redirected toward the broader political geography of the entire world.
Its historic leadership, Yasser Arafat and his fellow founders, enjoyed the trust of the Palestinian public. Thanks to this trust, they succeeded in defeating all attempts at splintering, rebellion, or manufacturing alternatives. But when the historic transition occurred- from a revolution whose leadership lived in exile to a project of governance over part of the homeland- Fatah found itself facing the people it had once led from abroad. It confronted realities for which it had not adequately prepared for: governing a population living under vicious settler occupation that had endured for decades and profoundly shaped Palestinian individuals and society alike.
The occupation did not withdraw and hand the country over to a national leadership. Rather, it remained in two ways: through it the past, when it devastated, brutalized, and fragmented Palestinians; and in the present, when the Palestinian Authority’s areas resemble besieged islands, either through direct military-settler presence or through control over the entrances and exits of cities and villages. Under the weight of this exhausting state of affairs, faith in the promised peace receded. It was replaced by collective suffering endured, as though the occupation had remained exactly as it was or had become even worse.
Fatah confronted all this through the two principal institutions of Palestinian politics: the newly established Authority and entrenched Palestinian Liberation Organization. Undeniable successes were achieved in the early stages of the peace experiment, when Israel’s Labor Party was the partner in the process and the entire world supported the historic attempt in ways that had made failure seem impossible. What had seemed impossible, however, became the only possible outcome once those who opposed any settlement with the Palestinians came to power in Israel and acquired the ability to turn the entire experiment upside down.
Since Likud at the time, the possibility of achieving a negotiated peace between Palestinians and Israelis under American and international sponsorship has effectively been neutralized. In its place came the fiercest war in the history of the Palestinian cause. It swept away, among many things, Yasser Arafat himself, with all his immense symbolic stature. It placed Fatah, which opened the peace process, at the center of an extraordinarily difficult and complex impasse. A rival emerged, and it had enormous capacities to harm both the movement and its project: political Islam. At the same time, Israel entrenched a policy aimed at dismantling whatever remained of Oslo’s advantages. Oslo was fundamentally Fatah’s project and one of the chief justifications for its leadership, and the movement thus found itself facing challenges it lacked the capacity to overcome.
Negative subjective and objective influences crept steadily into Fatah. In the absence of Arafat, whose renowned ability to unify both his movement and the broader Palestinian arena had been unmatched, Fatah found itself in a position unlike anything it had experienced throughout its long history.
In the past, its legitimacy rested on its ability to fulfill many of the hopes people had invested in it. At present, however, it is burdened with popular demands it cannot meet. Worse still, the solutions to all these crises are in the hands of the adversary: from the deteriorating economic conditions throughout the homeland, to the closed political horizon that once produced hope and helped people endure hardship, to the inability to achieve national unity after division had shaken it from its roots. What compounded the catastrophic impact of all this was the limited ability of friends, brothers, and the wider world to provide even a fraction of the support had been offered during the years of exile and the early gamble of peace.
Fatah’s eighth conference resembles its previous conferences. The old and new leaders it produced will find themselves facing not only a test of administrative or political competence (important as that may be) but also insurmountable challenges over which they have little control. That, more than anything else, is undermining Fatah’s standing, the credibility of its leadership, and faith in its ability to succeed.
