Fri Mar 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

The Al Fatah

 

In 1967, Yasser Arafat founded the political-military organisation Al Fatah. It programme was extremely progressive: fight for free, lay, democratic and non racist Palestine where Jews and Arabs could cohabit in peace, the right for the millions of Palestinian émigrés expelled from their land by Zionists to return home. 

To obtain that it was necessary to destroy the gendarme racist Israeli state, the main obstacle for peace in the region. Arafat managed to transform the Palestinian problem into a guideline for discussion of world politics and, simultaneously, he gave a sense of unity to his people. In this way he became their uncontested leader and Al Fatah became the majority trend in Palestine. As part of this process the OLP was created (Organisation of Palestinian People) known as “actual national state without a territory” where most Palestinian organisations participated.

 

But after his expulsion from Lebanon by the Israeli army in 1982, after he had settled in Tunes, Arafat and the top leaders of the PLP began to go through a deep process of transformation: they no longer were the leaders who – even if bureaucratic and bourgeois – led the battle for the Palestinian rights and sought a solution along “the diplomatic way”. They started accepting the demands posed by imperialism and got farther and farther away from the struggle of the people something we could see in 1987, during the first Intifada. The process reached its top in 1993, with the signing of the Oslo agreements. Arafat and Al Fatah betrayed their historic fighting banners.

 

Rulers acquiescent to imperialism

 

Initially, the Palestinian people greeted the creation of the ANP euphorically for their historic leader, whom they believed told them so, that this was a step towards a genuinely independent state. Arafat was elected president with 80% of the votes.

One cannot get very far by sheer lying and soon the real meaning of ANP became evident. The “Palestinian police” of Al Fatah acted as if they were a foreign-bound force repressing those who wanted to continue struggling against Israel. The leaders of Al Fatah became the expression of a corrupt pro-imperialist Palestinian bourgeoisie living of the looting on the ANP budget the funds of which came from the USA, the EU, the Arabic administrations and Israel. The overcrowded Gaza Strip became “the hugest concentration camp in history” and the farming villages of the Eastern Bank have less and less land and water because Israel grabs it all for themselves. It was against this reality that the second Intifada broke out in the year 2000.

 

The murder of Arafat did nothing but to accelerate the process: Al Fatah and the Palestinian administration became totally controlled by the most pro imperialist wing (Mahmud Abbas). Let us have a look at an example of these leaders: A. Korci – outgoing prime minister – is the owner of a cement firm who sold great amount of its produce to the Zionist state to build up the “wall of the disgrace”. Even after his defeat, Abbas, in tune with imperialism and Israel, declared that he would not hand over to Hamas “unless they first abjure from their goal to destroy Israel”. It is this treason that the people have just defeated.

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