Fatah (Arabic: فتح, Fatḥ), formerly the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, is a Palestinian nationalist and social democratic political party. It is the largest faction of the confederated multi-party Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the second-largest party in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, is the chairman of Fatah.

Fatah is generally considered to have had a strong involvement in revolutionary struggle in the past and has maintained a number of militant groups. Fatah had been closely identified with the leadership of its founder and chairman, Yasser Arafat, until his death in 2004, when Farouk Kaddoumi constitutionally succeeded him to the position of Fatah Chairman and continued in the position until 2009, when Abbas was elected chairman. Since Arafat’s death, factionalism within the ideologically diverse movement has become more apparent.

In the 2006 election for the PLC, the party lost its majority in the PLC to Hamas. The Hamas legislative victory led to a conflict between Fatah and Hamas, with Fatah retaining control of the Palestinian National Authority in the West Bank through its president. Fatah is also active in the control of Palestinian refugee camps.

Founding

The core group of Fatah was most likely founded in Kuwait in autumn 1957 by five or six Palestinians, among them Yasir Arafat and Khalil al-Wazir. This core group agreed on the movement’s name, drafted its manifesto, and planned its “Revolutionary Organizational Structure.”

The name Fatah, the Arabic acronym in reverse for Harakat al-tahrir al-watani al-Filastini (The Palestinian National Liberation Movement), came to attention in the first issue of the magazine Filastinuna–nida’ al-hayat (Our Palestine–The Call of Life), in Beirut in October 1959, and cells of the group began to be formed in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

As a movement of refugees, Fatah needed support from the Arab world, which it initially found in Algeria starting in 1962, then in Syria starting from 1963. Relying on this support, the movement leadership began preparations to set up a clandestine military wing named al-ʿAsifa (storm).

In July 1968, during its second conference held in the Syrian town of Zabadani (the first conference took place in Damascus in Summer 1964), Fatah finalized its organizational structure. Its composition was based on two decision-making committees that constituted its leadership: the Central Committee, which included ten members who represented the movement’s senior leadership, and the broader Revolutionary Council, considered an intermediary body between the Central Committee and the party’s general membership.

Guiding Principles

Fatah was the first national liberation movement since 1948 to be started by Palestinians themselves and that brought together Palestinian activists from different ideological and intellectual backgrounds. It called on all politically active Palestinians to abandon their party affiliations and to be united under its banner as a movement to “organize a vanguard that would rise above factionalism, whims and leanings to include the entire people.”

The movement’s leadership saw armed struggle as its primary means of liberating Palestine. It modeled itself after the revolutionary struggles in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam.

PLO: History of a Revolution

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  • nemmybun [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I don’t think MBTI is invalid because of it’s history

    A mystery novel writer that writes a book about a southern family self-destructing at the idea that they might contain a single drop of non-white blood goes to make a personality test that’s consistently rejected as pseudoscience by scientists for 80 years. Do we really need more than that to invalidate it?

    Putting aside the much longer and complex discussion that all science can be shaped by racism, anything that specifically involves psychology or sociology absolutely can and must be examined and invalidated for racist (or homophobic, transphobic, etc) history or we are just reinforcing white supremacy.

    (if I did that, I’d have to be opposed to EVERYTHING that has something bad in its history)

    Oooor you could examine everything independently and make decisions on a case-to-case basis? No need to fall back on fallacies.

    • WhatAnOddUsername [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      But honestly, “I think you’re dismissing MBTI for mostly correct but imperfect reasons, whereas my reasons for dismissing it are better reasons” is not a hill that strikes me as worth dying on, so I’m going to tap out here.

    • WhatAnOddUsername [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Thinking about this further, I do want to acknowledge that I’ve failed to consider the element of power. Astrology is incorrect, but there’s not really a system of power that’s using astrology to oppress people, whereas there IS an infrastructure for using MBTI to oppress people.

      I’m sorry to have spent so much effort nitpicking about this.

    • WhatAnOddUsername [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Putting aside the much longer and complex discussion that all science can be shaped by racism, anything that specifically involves psychology or sociology absolutely can and must be examined and invalidated for racist (or homophobic, transphobic, etc) history or we are just reinforcing white supremacy.

      Sure, but that’s not the same thing as saying “This person said something racist, therefore we don’t need any other evidence to refute anything else they’ve ever said”. (The phrase “critical support” exists for a reason – sometimes people who are wrong about one thing are right about another). You mentioned that MBTI has been dismissed as pseudoscience by scientists for 80 years. I’m pretty sure those scientists were more rigorous than just “This person wrote a racist novel, therefore their argument is invalid”.

      No need to fall back on fallacies.

      I’m a bit confused by this. Are you saying I’m committing a fallacy (and if so, which one?) Or are you criticizing me for pointing out your fallacy (“This person was bad, therefore their theory is wrong” is just about the most textbook example of the genetic fallacy imaginable).

      • nemmybun [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Someone cannot hold a white supremacist worldview where they see non-white people as subhuman and then make a test that is designed to assign immutable personalities to people that is independent from that worldview.

        Also I’m confused why, after listing 3 reasons, you only focused on 1 and try to use the other reasons as weapons against it. For someone that claims to want precision, you sure don’t seem to spare any for your posts

          • nemmybun [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I didn’t break it out into a distinct list at this time because I was busy at the time but this statement is what I’m referring to:

            A mystery novel writer that writes a book about a southern family self-destructing at the idea that they might contain a single drop of non-white blood goes to make a personality test that’s consistently rejected as pseudoscience by scientists for 80 years. Do we really need more than that to invalidate it?

            1. A mystery novel writer, not a psychologist or someone with any kind of scientific background. Unless you consider the experimentation her mother did on her as a child to be a scientific background.

            2. The mention of the book, which was not mentioned to indicate “she racist cancel her” or whatever, but to point out that what’s in your head shapes what you put out into the world. It’s inseperable from a person. There is no death of the author in a work and there is certainly no death of the racist.

            3. Her work being rejected for 80 years. In other words, as far as scientific merit goes, this horse has been dead and beaten for a long time. There’s nothing left to add to the debunk canon.

            To reword my initial question: If, when examining her history, she’s proven unqualified, and she’s proven biased despite creating a work that’s applied to all people, and her work is shown repeatedly to be lacking scientific merit, why is that not enough to invalidate her work?

            • WhatAnOddUsername [any]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Thanks. 1 and 2 should make people suspicious of the theory, but don’t necessarily invalidate it. 3, on its own, should be enough for most people to reasonably dismiss her work (assuming scientists haven’t been systematically biased for the past 80 years).

              I guess I’m more interested in the moving parts of WHY the theory is invalid (hearing that a million studies show a certain result is certainly strong evidence, but it’s not the same thing as an explanation). In the case of astrology, knowing literally anything about what stars and planets are makes it obvious that they don’t determine people’s destinies. Whereas I suspect most people would be unable to give a technical answer as to why scientists don’t take MBTI seriously, but DO take the Five Factors Model seriously.