At one time, Yasser Arafat was the embodiment of the Palestinian dreams of living in an independent state, and many worried that those dreams would die when he died in 2004.

Five years later, there are plenty of Palestinians who believe that those dreams are indeed dead.

Fatah, the group founded by Arafat and other Palestinian exiles to uproot Israel, is divided and demoralized.

While Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas serves as president of the PA, he is considered a weak leader whose term-in-office should end with elections in January. (And there are some who contend that his term should have ended last January...)

Hamas stunned Fatah by winning control of the PA parliament in 2006. The following year, Hamas hard-liners routed PA forces loyal to Abbas from Gaza and seized military control of the isolated Mediterranean strip.

Every effort to reunite the rival factions has failed, leaving the Palestinian cause fractured.

Aaron David Miller routinely calls this the "Palestinian Humpty-Dumpty."

This week, Fatah will try to put its own pieces together again when they hold their first party conference in two decades.

"The Palestinian national movement is in crisis," said Miller, a veteran U.S. State Department negotiator who's a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. "The problems that confront the Palestinians today go far beyond Fatah."

Beginning on Tuesday, more than 1,800 Fatah leaders will meet in Bethlehem to elect new leaders and debate their future.

"We have to go back to our roots and ask who we are," said Abdullah Abdullah, a Palestinian Authority lawmaker who'll take part in the conference.

"We have to regain confidence in ourselves," said Abdullah, who may run for the 21-member Fatah Central Committee that oversees the movement's policies. "If we are strong, we will regain the confidence of the public, and if the confidence is regained, we will become stronger."

One of the key things to watch at the conference will be the fate of Mohammed Dahlan, the Fatah strongman widely reviled by Hamas leaders for his heavy-handed crackdown on the Islamic group when he served as head of security for Arafat in Gaza.

One recent afternoon, two Fatah activists traveled from Tulkarem to Ramallah to meet with Ziad Abu Ein, a younger Fatah member who has pushed the party to open up.

For reasons unclear to them, both guys had been kicked off the list of Fatah members allowed to take part in the conference. And they were making an appeal to Abu Ein for help.

"The Fatah leaders have failed and disappointed us," said Allam Hatttab, who works for the PA Interior Ministry.

"There will be a split after the conference," he warned.

For people like Hattab, Dahlan is the epitome of all that has gone wrong with Fatah. He is viewed by his critics as a self-interested, corrupt, duplicitous politician who has been used by American forces to try and divide the Palestinian people.

Dahlan was at the forefront of a US-backed campaign to train and equip Fatah forces in the PA for a possible military showdown with Hamas.

That was one of the triggers for the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2007, and Dahlan's house was one of the first to be looted and burned. (Dahlan was outside Gaza when Hamas took full control of Gaza.)

Despite the criticism and skepticism, Dahlan has a good shot at winning a seat on the 21-member Central Committee.

"If Dahlan wins, then Fatah will have lost," said Mohanned Abdel Hamid, a political analayst and occasional columnist for al Ayyam newspaper. "He is dangerous and self-serving."

The conference is supposed to serve as a launching pad for Fatah so it can convince Palestinians that Arafat's movement is still the one with the best chance of making the dreams of a Palestinian state a reality.

But there are already signs that Fatah could fall short of that goal.