Countdown to Fateh conference?

Xinhua has shown its emerging agility in reporting on Palestinian-Israeli developments by apparently getting hold of a copy of the “political report” that Mahmoud Abbas’s leadership will be presenting to the Fateh conference due to open Tuesday in Bethlehem.
In Xinhua’s characterization of the document, it would commit Fateh to

adopt[ing] public peaceful resistance against Israel to support peace talks between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the Jewish state, a new document showed…
“The forms of public resistance can be found in all types of boycotting, public and cultural mobilization against the occupation, escalating public activities against the occupation, its checkpoints and settlement and carrying out these activities on daily systematic process,” said the document obtained by Xinhua.
The awaited Fatah program did not mention any sort of military activities or reveal the future of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the movement’s armed wing.

However, for those hoping that Fateh would be bending completely to the will of Israel and the US, there were some shocks. Xinhua:

Meanwhile, the document stressed that settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be based on UN resolutions and Arab visions rather than the U.S.-backed Road Map peace plan or the declaration of the 2007 U.S.-hosted Annapolis peace conference.
Fatah will “stick to international references to the peace process and the Arab peace initiative and will not be drawn to alternative references that help the (Israeli) occupation disavowing its commitments.”
It also emphasized that the Palestinians can never recognize Israel as a Jewish state. “This is to protect the rights of the Palestinian refugees and the Palestinians (Arabs) who live inside the green line (Israel).”

Looks like an interesting political straddle to me.
It is also not very far from the political stance of Hamas, including as articulated to me by political bureau head Khaled Meshaal on June 4, and most recently also by Meshaal to the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon and Julien Barnes-Dacey.
We can also note, in the document reported by Xinhua, that not mentioning armed activities is not the same as disavowing them.
The latest news about the content of the proposed Fateh political platform comes while intense controversy continues to swirl about Tuesday’s conference, which will be the Sixth General Conference of Fateh, which was founded by Palestinian refugees in Kuwait in 1959.
This latest conference will, however, be the first to be held since 1989. And as I noted in this recent IPS news analysis and elsewhere, a tremendous amount of things have happened to the Palestinian people since 1989….
Including, of course, the whole fiasco– from the Palestinians’ point of view– of the so-called “Oslo process”, which has been presided over continuously since 1993 by the Fateh leaders of the PLO and the Oslo-derived Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority, PISGA.
Small wonder, then, that Fateh is in deep internal chaos.
(I have written about this fact extensively this year, including in some of the reporting I did from the West Bank in February-March. One notable blog post on this topic was this one. Other blog posts and print articles on the topic can be accessed through this portal.)
Much of the commentary in the western media has focused on whether Fateh’s rivals in Hamas (which also now gives significant support to the whole PISGA project) will “allow” those delegates to the Fateh conference who are residents of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to leave the Strip and travel to the conference site in Bethlehem, in the West Bank.
Mahmoud Abbas and several of his allies have accused Hamas of holding the Fateh members in Gaza captive.
However, matters are by no means that simple! Three Fateh conference delegates resident in Gaza have now told Ma’an news agency that though Hamas is ready to facilitate their departure for Bethlehem, it is Israel that will not allow them to go to Bethlehem.
This is a very vivid example of the fact that– as many Fateh activists both inside and outside the occupied territories have long warned– Abbas’s decision to hold the conference in the Israeli-controlled West Bank gives Israel a de-facto veto over who attends, and thus wrecks the idea that the conference will produce any authentic or legitimate expression of an independent Palestinian nationalist will.
And in addition to Israel banning the participation of some Fateh delegates from Gaza, the veteran leadership of Fateh in Gaza under Zakariya al-Agha is still actively contemplating a boycott of the conference of its own accord, over its accusation that Abu Mazen has engaged in massive packing of the conference by suddenly credentialing an additional 1,000 participants of his own choosing, to add to the 1,200 previously envisioned.
Toufic Haddad of Faster Times published a terrific article Tuesday with many details of the way in which many of Abbas’s recent decisions around the conference have served to further deepen the already severe crisis of trust and legitimacy within Fateh.
If you scroll down that page, you’ll find the handy translation into English that Haddad made of a key article that Bilal Hasan published in al-Sharq al-Awsat on July 19.
Hasan– a veteran journalist and one-time leading member of the leftist Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine– is also the brother of two of the key founders of Fateh, the late Khaled al-Hasan and Hani al-Hasan.
Bilal Hasan recounted how the committee that Abbas had originally established to prepare for the fateh conference was some while ago summarily disbanded by him. GIven that the committee was headed by longtime Fateh Central Committee member Abu Maher (Muhammad al-Ghunaim), that move already signaled a serious new fissure.
(You can find a list of all of the Central Committee’s current 13 members at the bottom of this Maan web-page.)
So Bilal Hasan doesn’t say exactly when Abu Maher’s PrepComm was disbanded, but evidently it was a number of weeks ago– before veteran Central Committee member Aboul-Lutf dropped his big bombshell by accusing Abu Mazen of complicity in the poisoning of Arafat.
Hasan wrote that after disbanding the PrepComm, Abu Mazen,

announced in an individual manner, that he was calling upon a number of Fateh cadres located in the West Bank to an emergency meeting in the presidential compound. The meeting — the majority of whose attendees derived from one political stripe — took absolute and binding decisions regarding all three issues that had been debated in the dissolved “Preparatory Committee.”

Those issues were the location of the conference– that is, under Israeli occupation, or not under it; who would participate; and the content of the party platform.
Hasan went on,

It was decided that the conference would take place inside [i.e. in the OPT] and that the delegates would be open to 1200-1600 [members of Fateh], so as to give the opportunity to change and exchange [members]. As for the [conference’s preparatory] documents [and their political line], discourse would head towards ending armed confrontation with the occupation. It [armed struggle] will remain mentioned in [the movement’s] general principles, but will be removed from the operational program.
This is what happened in the face of the Preparatory Committee, and against it. A coup by all meanings of the term. A coup inside Fateh, led and implemented by the head of the government, that aims in the end at controlling it organizationally, intellectually, and politically, and with the support of a group that represents one stream inside Fateh with respect to its political coloration. One stream [as well] as far as its membership.

Hasan described the outcome as a fairly (though not totally) definitive-sounding split within Fateh. And he warned that,

if Fateh splits, it won’t just split in two. There could be successive splits — one splitting off independently in an Arab country, another in Europe [etc.] so that we find ourselves before a series of Fateh splinters. Moreover these splits will not result in anything inevitable [such as the reform of the movement], but could bring about the gradual diminishing of the movements membership [overall], such that its [Fateh’s] body, presence and influence atrophy day after day, until one day the only part of Fateh within them is a piece of its history.
These splits point to the end and failure of the Palestinian national project that was led by Fateh, by way of the PLO, and its declared political program. They also point to the end of the revolution and the failure of the revolution. The question here is what comes after the end of a revolution and its failure?

Anyway, as Haddad writes, there are all sorts of further stories of intrigue, buy-offs, vote-packing etc involved in the preparations for the planned conference… It remains quite possible that the conference will not be held at all… And of course, the political worth of whatever comes out of it, if it’s held, will remain open to serious contestation– especially from among the ranks of still-disgruntled Fateh members.
… So, there’ll be lots to watch for over the days ahead. The best English-language news sources I’ve found are Ma’an and Xinhua. I guess I’ll also try to read some Arabic-language sources on this over the next couple of days..