The Founding of Fatah

The core group of Fatah was most likely formed in Kuwait in the autumn of 1957 by five or six Palestinians, among them Yasser Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad). They agreed on a movement that would be independent of Arab governments and of ideologically driven parties, with a single declared goal: the liberation of Palestine and the return of the refugees to their homes.

The name — Fatah, the reversed Arabic acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement — first came to public attention in October 1959, in the first issue of the magazine Filastinuna – Nida’ al-Hayat (Our Palestine – The Call of Life), published in Beirut. Cells formed in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia: a movement of refugees organizing across the map of their dispersal.

With support found first in Algeria from 1962 and then in Syria from 1963, the leadership built a clandestine military wing, al-Asifa (the Storm), which carried out its first operation inside Israel at dawn on 1 January 1965 — an attempt to blow up part of the Israeli national water carrier works, remembered as the Aylabun Tunnel Operation. It cost the movement its first fallen fighter, Ahmad Muhammad Musa. The date of that first operation is still marked as the launch of the modern Palestinian armed struggle, and Fatah would become the largest organization in Palestinian political life for the next half century.