Farouk Kaddoumi

The 6th Fatah conference was held in Bethlehem in August 2009. Holding the conference in the occupied territories came as a disappointment to many exiled Fatah leaders who were unable to attend and who felt betrayed by this decision; Kaddoumi being one of those leaders. A few weeks before the conference, Kaddoumi accused Abbas of conspiring to kill Yasser Arafat and claimed that he has evidence for his involvement in a plot to poison Arafat. Abbas and his aides denied those allegations and accused Kaddoumi of inflaming fitna (divisions, internal strife).

He has been living in Tunis since the early 1980s, where the PLO was based after it evacuated Lebanon. In 1985, he claimed that Leon Klinghoffer was pushed over the side of the Achille Lauro by his wife for the insurance money, when it was the four Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) hijackers of the Achille Lauro who singled out and murdered Klinghoffer, a Jew, after being refused permission by the Syrian government to dock at Tartus.

In 1976, Arafat and Kaddoumi met with Meir Vilner and Tawfik Toubi, heads of Rakah (New Communist List), which had developed after the 1965 split in the Israeli Communist Party, and from which Hadash eventually developed. This meeting led to a close cooperation.

At the beginning of the 1973, he served as the head of the PLO's political department. After the Oslo accords in 1993, which he opposed as a betrayal of the PLO's principles, he refused to move to the Palestinian territories with the rest of the leadership to set up the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). From exile, he continued to advocate a hardline stance towards Israel, refused cooperation with the PNA and repeatedly embarrassed the PLO during negotiations with Israel by making statements denying the Jewish state's right to exist. This led to him being sidelined in Palestinian politics for over a decade, as the center of power moved to Gaza and then Ramallah.

In 1958, he joined Yasser Arafat and others in forming student groups calling for the liberation of Palestine. Finally, they formed Fatah (Palestinian National Liberation Movement) that was officially declared beginning of 1965. During the time, he was working for the ministry of health of Kuwait but in 1966 was expelled from the country for political activities connected with the PLO. By 1969 he became one of key figures in the PLO and after 1973 he headed its political department in Beirut, Lebanon.

Farouk al-Kaddoumi (alternative transliteration: Faruq al-Qaddumi; Arabic: فاروق القدومي; born 18 August 1931), also known by his kunya, Abu al-Lutf, was until 2009 Secretary-General and between 2004 and 2009 Chairman of Fatah's central committee and the Palestine Liberation Organization's political department, operating from Tunisia.

Farouk Kaddoumi was born on 18 August 1931 in the town of Jinsafut near Nablus and later his family moved to Jaffa in present-day Israel. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War they fled to Nablus in the West Bank. For three years in the early 1950s he worked in Saudi Arabia for the Arab-American Petroleum Company (ARAMCO). In 1954 he moved to Egypt and while studying economy and political science at the American University in Cairo, he joined the Baath party.