Fatah

Fatah is a Palestinian political party founded in 1957 in Kuwait by exiled Palestinian activists, among them Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas. The name for this political party comes from a reverse acronym of its name in Arabic: “Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filistiniya,” or Palestinian National Liberation Movement. The shortened version, Fatah, or Fath, also means “to conquer” or “victory”.¹

Fatah was originally established as a secular, nationalist movement with the goal of liberating historic Palestine and establishing a Palestinian state.² Although Fatah originally was created with both a political and military wing, it officially renounced armed resistance in the 1990s, shifting to their current strategy of a negotiated political solution to build a Palestinian state along the Green Line, or the pre-1967 War borders. 

Today, Fatah is the dominant party of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the largest faction in the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). It is led by Palestinian President and Fatah co-founder Mahmoud Abbas.³ In the 2006 Palestinian elections, Fatah lost its majority in the Palestinian legislature to Hamas, sparking a conflict between the two and leading to a split in governance between the West Bank, held by Fatah, and the Gaza Strip, held by Hamas. Since then, despite multiple attempts at reconciliation, deep divides have persisted between the two, leading to stagnation in Palestinian party politics and an absence of popular legitimacy.