While the Israeli government, US and pretty much the entire Western world place their trust in Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party (not to mention weapons and training), our “peace partners” are discussing whether or not they should once again adopt terrorism as their main tactic.
Fatah at a crossroads, conference will decide new track: peace or resistance
The sixth Fatah conference is a pivotal moment which could either be a farewell or the start of a new and stronger unity, said secretary of Fatah’s Central Committee Farouq Qaddoumi.
The Fatah leader spoke with Ma’an in Amman as he worked with the Central Committee to prepare the Sixth Fatah conference, the first since 1989. Qaddoumi will be part of several key decisions on Saturday and Sunday that will determine the character of the Fatah party for the next decade.
While Fatah has decided to hold a conference, it has not decided where it will take place, since location determines to a great extend who will be able to participate. The party has also not decided who will be invited to the conference, since the Fatah membership list has hundreds of thousands of names listed on it. Once these decisions are made, a date will be set and concrete preparations will begin.
Asked his thoughts on the importance of the coming conference, Qaddoumi noted that between the 1989 conference and today, Fatah has experimented with the “peaceful solution and political compromise.” He noted that Israel had thwarted Palestinian peace attempts in several ways, “from assassinating [former Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin to poisoning [former Palestinian President] Yasser Arafat.”
The conference will thus weigh the option of continuing with the peace-track and re-discussing the option of resistance. Qaddoumi said the second option “must be seriously considered since our other choices have failed,” and added that there were other options besides peace and resistance.
The main issue, said Qaddoumi, is to “include Palestinian, Arab and international efforts to reach a just solution which secures Palestinian rights, on top of which is the right of return.”
The return to resistance would be complicated for Fatah, given the changes in the international and political climate since the 1994 Oslo Accords. But Qaddoumi insisted that the international climate should take the Palestinian situation rather than the Palestinians taking into account what he called “political equations.”
“We should benefit from changes rather than being victims of them,” he said. He referred to Hizbullah victories, collapse of the US economy, socialist success in Latin America, Russia’s emerge and Iran’s might as factors which Fatah should take political advantage of.
Just in case you thought they had already abandoned terrorism..
