Fatah is a Palestinian political movement and party. It has long been the biggest group inside the PLO (the Palestine Liberation Organization), and for years it was the main face of Palestinian national politics under leaders such as Yasser Arafat. Western papers often call it centre-left; what matters more on the ground is that it is a nationalist movement, generally more secular than Hamas, and not a religious party. It ran — and in the West Bank still largely runs — the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo years. In 2006 it lost the parliamentary elections to Hamas. After that, the picture is messy, not a tidy ‘government versus opposition’ cartoon: Hamas later took control of Gaza, while Fatah stayed the dominant force in the West Bank PA. So ‘the opposition’ is true in one narrow electoral sense and not true in another. You meet the name in news about Israel and Palestine. It is a proper name, always capitalised. It is not the English word fate, and it is not father.