Fatah

Fatah, a reverse acronym of Harakat al-Tahrir al-Watani al-Filastini (“Palestinian National Liberation Movement”; the word itself means “conquest”), is the secular nationalist movement founded in Kuwait in 1959 by Yasser Arafat and his circle, the faction that has controlled the Palestine Liberation Organization since 1969 and the Palestinian Authority since its creation in 1994, and the organization whose operatives carried out some of the most notorious terror attacks of the twentieth century, including the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the 1978 Coastal Road massacre. Since 1993 it has also been Israel’s signed peace partner, which is real. It has also paid monthly salaries to convicted terrorists for decades, which is also real. Wikipedia’s lead calls it a “social democratic political party.”

Origins: 1959 to 1969

Fatah was founded in Kuwait in 1959 by a small circle of Palestinian exiles working in the Gulf, chief among them Yasser Arafat, Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) and Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad). Its founding idea was that Palestinians should not wait for the Arab states: liberation would come through their own armed struggle, waged by fedayeen raids into Israel. Its first operation came on 1 January 1965, a failed attempt to sabotage Israel’s National Water Carrier, a date Fatah still celebrates as the launch of “the revolution.”

The date is the tell. In January 1965 there were no “occupied territories” in the sense the word carries today: Jordan held the West Bank, Egypt held Gaza, and there was not a single Israeli settlement anywhere. The “Palestine” Fatah organized to liberate was Israel inside its 1949 armistice lines. Its founding constitution said so plainly: Article 12 defines the goal as the complete liberation of Palestine and the eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence, and Article 19 declares armed struggle a strategy, not a tactic, that will not cease until the Zionist entity is eliminated.

After the battle of Karameh in Jordan in March 1968, where Fatah fighters alongside the Jordanian army inflicted real casualties on an Israeli raiding force, recruitment surged. In February 1969 Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Fatah has been the PLO’s dominant faction ever since.

The record: Black September to the Coastal Road

Fatah’s armed buildup inside Jordan grew into a state within a state, and in September 1970 King Hussein went to war to expel it; thousands died before the PLO was driven into Lebanon. Out of that defeat Fatah created Black September, a covert arm run through its own apparatus and kept at arm’s length for deniability. Black September assassinated Jordan’s prime minister Wasfi Tal in Cairo in November 1971, murdered 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics in September 1972, and seized the Saudi embassy in Khartoum in March 1973, executing US Ambassador Cleo Noel, his deputy George Curtis Moore, and a Belgian diplomat.

In Lebanon the pattern repeated: an armed statelet that helped tip the country into civil war in 1975. On 11 March 1978, a Fatah squad that landed by sea hijacked a bus on Israel’s coastal highway and killed 38 civilians, 13 of them children, the deadliest terror attack in Israel’s history until October 7. The squad’s commander, Dalal Mughrabi, is not a disowned embarrassment: the Palestinian Authority that Fatah runs has named squares, schools and youth tournaments after her. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon expelled Fatah’s leadership to Tunis.

Oslo, the Authority, and the second intifada

In September 1993 Arafat signed letters of mutual recognition with Israel and the Declaration of Principles, renouncing terrorism on paper; the Oslo framework created the Palestinian Authority in 1994, and Fatah has run it from the first day to this one. At Camp David in 2000, Arafat rejected a statehood offer without a counteroffer, and the Second Intifada followed. When Arafat then refused the improved Clinton Parameters that December, Fatah’s own published explanation, recorded by Israel’s chief negotiator Shlomo Ben-Ami, was that the Parameters were “the biggest trick,” a plot to convert the conflict “into an internal Palestinian-Palestinian conflict that will destroy the Intifada.” That is Fatah, in its own voice, explaining that it rejected a state because accepting one would have meant confronting its own rejectionists. Fatah did not sit that war out: its own armed wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, carried out suicide bombings and shooting attacks and was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States in March 2002, a designation still in force. Marwan Barghouti, head of Fatah’s Tanzim militia, was convicted by an Israeli civilian court in 2004 on five counts of murder. Israel’s foreign ministry lists the victims of that campaign name by name.

Arafat died in November 2004. Mahmoud Abbas was elected PA president in January 2005 for a four-year term; in January 2006 Fatah lost the legislative elections to Hamas, 74 seats to 45, and in June 2007 Hamas expelled Fatah from Gaza in a week of gun battles. No Palestinian national election has been held since. Abbas, elected for four years, is now in the third decade of that term.

Pay-for-slay

Under PA law, Palestinians imprisoned for attacks on Israelis receive monthly salaries scaled to sentence length: the longer the sentence, and therefore the graver the attack, the higher the pay, with additional stipends to families of dead attackers. The program has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars a year of a donor-funded budget. The United States responded with the Taylor Force Act, enacted in March 2018 (P.L. 115-141), cutting most aid to the PA while the payments continue. In February 2025 Abbas signed a decree announcing the system would be folded into a general welfare institution; Israeli officials and independent monitors remain skeptical that the money has actually stopped following the deed. The full mechanism is documented at pay-for-slay.

What Fatah is not, and what it is

Honesty cuts both ways. Fatah is not Hamas: it is secular rather than Islamist, it signed mutual recognition with Israel in writing, and its security forces coordinate with Israel against Hamas cells in the West Bank, coordination Israel’s own security establishment has long valued. It administers schools, hospitals and municipal government for millions of Palestinians in Areas A and B, and its stated program since Oslo is a negotiated state alongside Israel, not in place of it. Wikipedia’s “no longer regarded as a terrorist organization” leans on a real fact: the United States never listed Fatah itself as an FTO, and its post-1993 diplomatic status is genuinely different.

But an honest lead cannot stop there. The al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades remain a designated terrorist organization; the prisoner salaries persisted through every peace process and every donor ultimatum; the movement’s sixth General Congress in Bethlehem in 2009 reaffirmed armed struggle as a retained option; and the martyrs it names schools after include the killers of children. “Social democratic political party” is a label no cold reader of Fatah’s founding charter, its record, or its budget would ever coin unprompted. What Fatah actually is: the author of modern Palestinian armed struggle, partially and incompletely converted into a governing party, that never finished choosing between the two identities.

Yasser Arafat · Mahmoud Abbas · Palestine Liberation Organization · Pay-for-slay · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the full audit · The conflict, start to finish