Bethlehem, West Bank  - "Resistance is a right of our people," it says on a poster with an old photograph of a young Palestinian brandishing a gun.

The poster adorned the wall to the right of moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, as he addressed the opening of the first party conference of his Fatah movement in 20 years Tuesday.

It is symbolic of one of the key questions that the more than 2,000 Fatah delegates who gathered in the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem for the three-day event are to debate, as they are to decide on their movement's direction for the coming years.

Founded by the late and legendary Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Fatah started out as a liberation and guerilla movement, launching its first attack against Israel on January 1, 1965.

More than four decades later, it is searching for its identity, struggling to redefine itself.

Another poster hung in the conference hall of Bethlehem's Terra Sancta college also uses what some would call obsolete terminology: "Revolution until victory."

As they gather for the first time since 1989, delegates are to redebate whether they should keep the concept of armed struggle as part of its lexicon, or take a more moderate line of peaceful negotiations, followed since the early 1990s and advocated by Abbas.

The battle is between the young and more radical guard in Fatah, who want to see change in the movement's leadership and return to Fatah's origins as a liberation movement, and the old guard whose political work in the last 19 years focussed on negotiations with Israel as an alternative to armed struggle.

"The word resistance will never be removed from our programme," Qaddoura Faris, a leading Fatah "young guard" member, told the German Press Agency dpa as he was lobbying other Fatah members for a seat in the movement's most important body, the
21-member Central Committee.

Faris, 47, was in an Israeli prison when Fatah held its fifth conference in 1989. He was also a lawmaker in the Palestinian parliament for a decade, until the Islamist Hamas movement ousted Fatah from power in the 2006 legislative elections.

"I was born Fatah and struggled all my life as Fatah and now it is time that Fatah recognizes my sacrifices," he said, reflecting the general mood of most younger Fatah members who spent years in prison for their role in the resistance against the Israeli occupation.

Other Fatah members too, mainly of the young guard, when asked insisted on the right to resist occupation "by all means," pointing to the Charter of the United Nations.

Participants of the conference expect to have long and heated discussion over the precise wording of the conference's final statement. Some argue it should include a reference to armed struggle, others that it should speak of struggle or resistance without the word "armed."

There will be discussion over Abbas' strategy of negotiations as the only means to achieve independence and whether or not to support the current peace process.

His predecessor Yasser Arafat was criticized by the international community for dancing at two weddings by endorsing both strategies - armed struggle and negotiations - as legitimate, parallel means to achieve Palestinian national aspirations.

Abbas, for his part, is facing criticism from the opposite direction:

His main threat and adversary is Hamas, the militant movement ruling Gaza which has always placed the right to armed struggle at the forefront of its political programme.

His critics argue that nearly 16 years after the signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo interim peace accords, the path of negotiations has as yet failed to lead to a Palestinian state.

With the election in Israel of a hardline government earlier this year, it has become increasingly difficult for Abbas to sell his strategy to the opposition, not only to Hamas supporters, but even within Fatah itself.

In his almost two-hour address, Abbas therefore not surprisingly made a passionate plea in favour of the negotiations, and supported non-violent "popular resistance" against Israel.

"There are some people who say: 'What is the benefit of these negotiations?'" he said.

"As long as there is a spark of hope for our people we have to continue with the negotiations," was Abbas' answer.(dpa)