The historic movement of Palestinian national aspiration for freedom and statehood, the Fatah party of the late Yassir Arafat, has managed to convene its first congress inside the occupied territories, after 20 years without meeting at all. What a spectacle it offers.

Fatah today resembles nothing so much as a bloated gerontocracy, a loose aggregate of colliding, ego-driven agendas. More interested in the trappings of statehood-without-a-state than the difficult practice of statecraft, its leaders, mostly over 70 and in their gleaming cars and suits, bear no relation to a young population struggling in poverty and walled into the shrinking residue of Palestine.