RAMALLAH - Fatah is undergoing unprecedented internal reforms to democratize the ailing movement in the face of the electoral threat from political rivals such as Hamas and Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.
The reforms include .
"Over the last few months, Fatah has undergone a change the likes of which have not taken place in the past 19 years," Azzam al-Ahmed, a Fatah leader in the West Bank, said in an interview with Haaretz. "The movement understood that without closing ranks, reorganizing from the administrative perspective and rejuvenating the cadre of members, we will have difficulty facing the two most significant challenges: Hamas and Israel."
Advertisement
But Ahmed didn't mention another threat Fatah faces: the one posed by Prime Minister Fayyad, who is not a Fatah member. The processes Fayyad has set in motion - a return of order to the West Bank's streets, raising an unusually large amount of money from abroad, and creating a clean image - have worried Fatah leaders that in the next election, the big danger will come not from Hamas but from a party such as Fayyad's Third Way.
Former Palestinian prime minister Ahmed Qureia has made it clear that Fatah is concerned about being replaced.
"If Israel and the United States insist on creating alternatives to Fatah, or a successor, that will have a decided influence on the political process," he told reporters a few days ago, apparently referring to the warm reception Fayyad received in Washington and Jerusalem. "Without Fatah, there will be no process."
The organization of Fatah's membership rolls may be the most important of the movement's reforms, which in large part got underway after Hamas took over Gaza last June.
Until now, any Palestinian who wanted to consider himself a Fatah member could do so without registering or taking any other action. This meant that a Palestinian who wanted to participate in the primary for the legislative council in 2005 could do so without any supervision.
This led to a great deal of fraud, as well as intense competition between Fatah members for a spot in parliament - thus splitting the Fatah vote and ultimately giving way to Fatah's painful election defeat by Hamas in 2006, even though a greater number of people actually voted for Fatah.
Fatah has registered some 300,000 members in the West Bank and Gaza using its recently completed registration system, which took several months to put together. Now Palestinians who want to join the movement must fill out a registration form that has been distributed in the West Bank and say how long they have been members of the organization, bringing references to vouch for them.
Once their membership is approved, they will pay about NIS 60, for which they will receive a membership card with their name, place of birth, regional affiliation and member number.
In addition, Fatah is holding elections on three levels: neighborhood, city/village and district. About half the elections on all levels are over, with elections slated to take place in East Jerusalem in two days. The next few weeks will see elections in Bethlehem, Tul Karm and Qalqilyah.
The winners in the district elections are supposed to participate in the movement's sixth general conference - the primary election - alongside representatives from Arab states, Europe and the United States. Fatah is slated to elect a new top-level leadership at the conference, though no date has been set.
It's hard to tell if the reforms will revive Fatah enough to bring it back to power in Gaza or prevent it from losing in the West Bank as well. As a leading Palestinian analyst put it, this may be a case of "too little, too late."
But Ahmed sounds optimistic.
"I can promise you, if we know how to organize the movement, the initiative will be in our hands again," he said. "In any elections that take place in the future, Hamas will not win as it did in 2006."
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
