Israeli elected to Fatah council

Davis won 31st place among the 80 elected seats on Fatah's Revolutionary Council [AFP] The Fatah movement of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has elected an Israeli Jew to one of its governing bodies for the first time in the movement's half-century history. Uri Davis, a sociology professor at the Palestinian Al-Quds University on the edge of Arab east Jerusalem, was elected to the movement's Revolutionary Council, official results released on Saturday showed. Author of the books Israel: An Apartheid State, published in 1987 andApartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, published in 2004, Davis prefers to identify himself as a Palestinian Jew. "I hold Israeli and British passports but I consider myself Palestinian above all else," Davis told Fatah delegates at the party's first congress on Palestinian soil and its first since the launch of the Middle East process in 1991. The academic said he wanted to represent within Fatah's 120-member Revolutionary Council the "hundreds of non-Arab sympathisers who have supported the Palestinian cause." Davis, who first joined Fatah in 1984, won 31st place among the 80 elected seats on Fatah's Revolutionary Council. The academic, now aged 66, has long advocated a secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine, rejecting the Zionist project of a Jewish state in part or all of the Holy Land that has been supported by the vast majority of his fellow citizens.