Fatah Congress: The Year of Palestinian Democracy
In his opening address to the eighth Fatah congress, President Mahmoud Abbas laid out the official vision of Palestinian legitimacy as it stands today and as it must take shape in the near future, sounding the alarm over the dangers wrought by the continuing war on Gaza, the unprecedented pace of settlement expansion in the West Bank, the relentless Judaization of East Jerusalem, and the Israeli government’s unswerving pursuit of the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their own land — a confluence of threats he described as posing existential risks of an altogether exceptional gravity.
He called on the international community, on friends and allies, on all who champion the Palestinian cause, to work toward enabling the National Authority to assume its full responsibilities in the Gaza Strip in the name of the State of Palestine, through its official institutions and in cooperation with UN bodies and the administrative committee mandated to operate in the sector according to the outcomes of the “World Peace Council,” while firmly rejecting any arrangement that would entrench the separation of Gaza from the West Bank or give institutional form to a duality serving neither the political solution nor the building of a Palestinian state.
The congress convenes on the days of the Nakba commemoration, the 14th, 15th, and 16th of May. The president also underscored the pioneering role of Fatah as standard-bearer of the national project, and paid particular attention to the role of women and youth in the run-up to legislative and presidential elections expected before year’s end, making 2026 the year of restoring the Palestinian political order and reinvigorating its legitimacy by constitutional standards, the year, in short, of a renewed Palestinian democracy.
This is the framework within which Fatah’s political mission in the days ahead can be summarized, and from which the contours of the next phase can be drawn, together with the strategies and action plans needed to lift the cause out of its present weakness, meeting its challenges in a way that serves both the people and the homeland and restores the cycle of political life.
By Acclamation
One who looks at the congress platform will notice twenty-five portraits dominating the scene, at the centre of which presides the emblematic figure of Yasser Arafat, and beside him the martyrs of the movement’s Central Committee, barely a third of whom died in their beds, having survived both the battles and the assassins.
The shadow of the historic leadership stretches long, to the point where it cannot be stepped around without discernment and foresight. At the Tunis congress convened after the departure from Lebanon, President Arafat had opted not to have the votes cast for him counted, knowing that after 1982 no challenge to his authority could aspire to rival his stature. Just as the departure from Lebanon had been an exceptional moment, so too was the schism it produced, sustained by the Assad regime and financed by the defunct Libyan one. At the height of the battle for legitimacy, Arafat was elected by acclamation to a standing ovation, before the Central Committee had even been chosen.
This tradition carried over into subsequent congresses, as was witnessed again in Ramallah, where all present could see that President Abbas had borne the legacy of his predecessors with patience and authority, embodying each stage of Fatah’s evolution in its struggle for survival and continuity and preserving the movement’s historic place in the Palestinian collective consciousness and public life, at a time when the break with Hamas had reached its most acute point and the dangers had reached the degree that allowed enemies to unleash their war of annihilation, displacement, and erasure.
Those following the congress proceedings observe that the founding generation is still present, alongside the generation of the stone Intifada and that of the second, while the generation of the current struggle for survival adds something genuinely new to the picture. All of this belongs to three successive political orientations: the first, from the beginning, with liberation, armed struggle, and historical right as its rallying cries; then the shift toward political rights, the Authority, and the State; and now, in the wake of the war of annihilation that followed October 7, the slogan “Baqoun” — “We Remain” — captures the whole tableau of Fatah’s eighth congress: we remain so that there may be a state for the next generation.
Rescue
The image of the Gazan woman sifting through the rubble of her destroyed home for any trace of what it once was, even a broken plate at the back of her kitchen, resembles the shepherd driven from his land or the farmer who will not let go of the tree his father left him. It is for all of them that one hears the voice of President Abbas working, together with the American administration, to salvage what can still be salvaged from the Oslo Accords, while Talmudic members of the Knesset press to legislate their annulment and open the door to colonizing Palestinian cities after seizing control of “Area B,” currently under Palestinian self-rule.
This backdrop reduces the immediate tasks of Palestinian day-to-day politics to nothing other than rescue operations, pure and simple. The work program of the newly elected Central Committee can no more escape this reality than transcend it.
Given the composition and diversity of congress delegates, it is clear that the new Central Committee, with half of its nine veteran members carrying the inheritance of the founding, the armed struggle, and the stone Intifada, sees its other half constituted by a generation formed in the second Intifada, where mass mobilization and armed violence, which we subsequently renounced, were intertwined. Some among them also carry the vision of the modern state and of what Palestinian statehood must look like in any foreseeable future.
Yet these energies, seasoned, intermediate, and new, can only bear fruit if their holders work as a genuinely unified team, steering Fatah first toward political cohesion with President Abbas’s platform, then opening new channels to amplify Palestinian presence in the American arena, with the goal of stopping the open Israeli war being waged against us across all territories occupied in 1967. Without achieving this, talk of success in defending our legitimate political rights, recognized by the overwhelming majority of states in the world, will ring hollow.
The political realism that defines President Abbas is not a personal disposition; it is the product of a long sedimentation of struggle within the Fatah experience and its successive transformations, from the broad slogans that answered the aspirations of the people since the Nakba of 1948 to the acute attentiveness to people’s urgent needs after a war of annihilation. Should the National Authority succeed this year in organizing legislative and presidential elections, one could then say that the slogan “Baqoun” has been made real through the highest possible voter participation, and that what we stand to gain in the wake of those elections will make it possible to affirm that passage to a new phase is within reach, with clear-eyed awareness of the formidable challenges that stand before the Palestinian people.