Tuesday August 4, 2009

Fatah congress to keep "armed struggle" option

By Mohammed Assadi

BETHLEHEM, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction opened its first conference in 20 years on Tuesday, set to endorse a two-state solution but keep an option of "armed struggle" with Israel.

Palestinians hold a large Palestinian flag during a Fatah rally in support of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank town of Qalqilya in this July 11, 2009 file photo. (REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman/Files)

Officials said a draft of Fatah's new programme calls for new forms of resistance such as civil disobedience against Jewish settlement expansion and a West Bank barrier Israel says is for security but which Palestinians see as a land grab.

Crucially, the draft leaves open the option of "armed struggle" if peace talks with Israel fail and does not rule out a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip if peace negotiations remain stalemated.

Fatah's 400 delegates who live in the Gaza Strip were banned from travelling to the city of Bethlehem for the conference by the territory's Hamas rulers.

A threat by Fatah officials to arrest Hamas members in the West Bank failed to persuade the Islamist group, which violently wrested control of the Gaza Strip from the veteran movement in 2007, to let the delegates go.

Tight security was in place as more than 2,000 delegates gathered for the first Fatah congress since a gathering in Tunis in 1989 and the first to be held on Palestinian soil. It is being hosted at a Christian school near the Church of the Nativity, Jesus' traditional birthplace.

The congress aims to elect a new central committee and ruling council, in the hopes of giving more of a say to a younger generation that grew up fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank since it captured the territory in a 1967 war.

POSTPONEMENT

Fatah's rules say it has to hold a congress every five years but its late leader Yasser Arafat, who wanted to avoid challenges to his authority, kept postponing meetings, citing changing circumstances such as interim peace deals with Israel.

Participants will seek at the three-day gathering to adopt a plan that distinguishes it from Hamas, which has rejected Western demands to renounce violence and recognise Israel.

But in its bid to rejuvenate and restructure, Fatah members have no plans to revise a founding charter which, like that of Hamas, calls for the Jewish state's destruction, Fatah officials said.

The charter of Fatah founded under Arafat in 1965 calls for armed struggle "until the Zionist entity is wiped out and Palestine is liberated".

Avi Dichter, a former public security minister, and currently a legislator in the centrist Kadima party, said a decision leaving open the armed struggle option would "throw them and us decades backwards".

Talks with Israel have stalled for months and Abbas has said they may resume only if Israel's right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu freezes settlement building as called for by a U.S., European and United Nations-backed peace plan.

Azzam al-Ahmad, a senior Fatah leader, said Palestinians have "the right to use all means in the fight to end the occupation until we establish the state. He said the charter "will remain as is -- it won't be subject to discussion".

Palestinian analysts said Fatah, seeking to infuse its top ranks with new blood, would find it hard to compete with Hamas if it amended its charter before a statehood deal with Israel.

Fatah has been struggling to regain the dominance it enjoyed for decades before losing a 2006 parliamentary election to Hamas.

(For blogs and links on Israeli politics and other Israeli and Palestinian news, go to http://blogs.reuters.com/axismundi)

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