The Palestinian National Liberation Movement

Fatah was founded by men who had been children in 1948 and were engineers in 1957. After the Israeli, British and French attack on Egypt in 1956 and the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip that came with it, a group of educated Palestinians from Gaza working in the Gulf began, as the Institute for Palestine Studies’ encyclopedia puts it, to think concretely about what had long been on their minds: to create a Palestinian fighting organisation independent of the Arab governments and of the ideological parties. The core was most likely formed in Kuwait in the autumn of 1957 by five or six men — among them Yasser Arafat, a Cairo-trained engineer who had headed the Palestinian students’ union, and Khalil al-Wazir, a teacher from Ramle who had been expelled from Gaza for organising raids. They agreed a name, drafted a manifesto, and planned what they called a revolutionary organisational structure. Kuwait mattered: it was where a stateless Palestinian could earn a salary and remit part of it, and Fatah was financed for years out of the pay packets of exiled schoolteachers and clerks.

The name reached the public in October 1959, in the first issue of the movement’s clandestine magazine Filastinuna — nida’ al-hayat (“Our Palestine — The Call of Life”), published in Beirut. Fatah is the reversed acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, and also a Quranic word meaning conquest or opening. The founding argument was a single inversion. The dominant Arab nationalist slogan of the day, carried by Nasser and by the Arab Nationalist Movement, was that Arab unity is the road to the liberation of Palestine. Fatah reversed it: the liberation of Palestine is the road to Arab unity. The revolution would be, in the movement’s formula, “Palestine in origin and Arab in its development.” Palestinians would not wait for the armies of the Arab kings and presidents; they would fight themselves, and drag the Arab world in behind them. Fatah called on politically active Palestinians to drop their party labels and unite in a movement that would “organize a vanguard that would rise above factionalism, whims and leanings to include the entire people” — a deliberately ideology-light formula that let Muslim Brothers, communists, Ba’thists and unaffiliated nationalists share a single organisation, and which remains the key to both Fatah’s breadth and its incoherence.

Its military wing, al-Asifa (the Storm), carried out its first operation before dawn on 1 January 1965, attempting to blow up a pump on Israel’s National Water Carrier; the movement’s first fighter killed, Ahmad Musa, died that day. The model was explicitly Algerian, Cuban and Vietnamese, and the theory was three-staged: small fedayeen operations to wear the enemy down, then full guerrilla war, then a general people’s war. In practice the West Bank base was destroyed by Israeli security services within a year of the 1967 occupation, and it was the battle of al-Karama in the Jordan Valley on 21 March 1968 — where Palestinian fighters and Jordanian artillery together inflicted real losses on an Israeli raiding force — that made Fatah a mass movement. Tens of thousands volunteered. At the fourth Palestine National Council in July 1968 the guerrilla organisations took control of the PLO; in February 1969 Arafat was elected chairman of its Executive Committee. Then came the reversals: expulsion from Jordan after the fighting of September 1970 and the mopping-up of July 1971; the evacuation of Beirut under siege in 1982; the massacre of Sabra and Shatila that September in camps the fighters had just left. Israel assassinated Fatah’s leadership in series — Kamal Adwan, Muhammad Yusuf al-Najjar and the poet Kamal Nasser in Beirut in April 1973; Khalil al-Wazir in Tunis in April 1988; Salah Khalaf was killed in Tunis in January 1991 by a gunman working for the Abu Nidal group. In the other direction, the record includes the Black September organisation, formed by Fatah cadres after 1970, whose operations included the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in September 1972 and the killing of two American diplomats and a Belgian in Khartoum in March 1973.

The political turn is documented and dated. At the twelfth PNC in Cairo in June 1974 the PLO under Fatah’s leadership adopted the Ten Point Programme, which for the first time envisaged a “national authority” on any liberated part of Palestine. On 13 November 1974 Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly and closed: “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” At the nineteenth PNC in Algiers on 15 November 1988, with Mahmoud Darwish as the drafter, the Council declared “the establishment of the State of Palestine in the land of Palestine with its capital at Jerusalem” — a state that would rest on “a democratic parliamentary system based on freedom of opinion and the freedom to form parties,” with “non-discrimination in civil rights on grounds of race, religion or colour or as between men and women.” The accompanying Political Communiqué accepted UN Resolutions 242 and 338 and the partition resolution’s international legitimacy. The Declaration of Independence was a two-state document and everyone at Algiers knew it. Five years later Fatah signed the Oslo Accords, and Arafat returned to Gaza in 1994 as head of a Palestinian Authority whose writ ran over population centres and not over land, borders, water or movement.

Where it stands now is the hardest paragraph to write honestly. Fatah remains the largest Palestinian political organisation and the backbone of the PLO and the Palestinian Authority; Mahmoud Abbas, its chairman since Arafat’s death in November 2004, has been president of the PA since 2005 without an election since 2005, the last legislative elections having been held in 2006 and won by Hamas. The Authority’s security coordination with Israel is the most bitterly contested fact in Palestinian politics. Fatah’s most popular figure, Marwan Barghouti, has been in Israeli prison since 2002 serving five life sentences. The settler population of the West Bank has roughly quadrupled since Oslo. The movement that was founded on the proposition that Palestinians must rely on no one but themselves now administers, under occupation, the consequences of an agreement that was supposed to end it — and the argument about how that happened is the central argument of Palestinian political life.

Sources

• The Palestinian National Liberation Movement – Fatah (I) — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Declaration of State of Palestine and Political Communiqué, Palestine National Council, Algiers, 15 November 1988 — UN Question of Palestine
• Speech of Yasir Arafat at the UN General Assembly, 13 November 1974 — palquest
• Speech by Yasser Arafat, United Nations General Assembly, 13 November 1974 — al-bab.com
• Palestine Liberation Organization (II) — palquest
• Fatah — Wikipedia