Yasser Arafat

Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa was born on August 4, 1929, in Cairo, Egypt, where his father, a Palestinian textile merchant from Gaza, had moved to pursue business and a legal claim to family property ^[1]. His mother, Zahwa Abul Saud, came from a Jerusalem family and died when the boy was about four years old. After her death he was sent to live with an uncle in Jerusalem for several years, an experience he later described as formative, before returning to Cairo to be raised largely by an older sister ^[2].

The question of his birthplace followed Arafat throughout his life. He often claimed to have been born in Jerusalem, but his Egyptian birth certificate, registered in Cairo, records the Egyptian capital as his place of birth, and most biographers accept the Cairo record ^[1]. The ambiguity suited a man who built his public identity entirely around Palestine.

As a teenager in Cairo during the 1940s, Arafat became involved in Palestinian political circles, reportedly smuggling weapons toward Palestine before the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. He enrolled at King Fuad I University (later Cairo University), where he studied civil engineering and led the Palestinian Students' Union between 1952 and 1956 ^[2]. He graduated in 1956, briefly served in the Egyptian army during the Suez crisis, and then took an engineering job in Kuwait, a post that gave him both income and the freedom to organize politically ^[3].

In Kuwait in the late 1950s, Arafat and a small group of Palestinian exiles, including Khalil al-Wazir and Salah Khalaf, founded Fatah, a movement dedicated to the liberation of Palestine through armed struggle led by Palestinians themselves rather than by Arab governments ^[3]. The group launched its first cross-border raids against Israel in early 1965. These operations had little military effect at first, but they announced a new, independent Palestinian actor on the regional stage.

The Arab defeat in the June 1967 war transformed Arafat's fortunes. With the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan humiliated, many Palestinians concluded that they could rely only on their own organizations. Fatah's stand alongside Jordanian forces at the battle of Karameh in March 1968, in which Palestinian fighters absorbed heavy losses but inflicted casualties on an Israeli raiding force, became a recruiting legend regardless of the disputed military details ^[4].

In February 1969 Arafat was elected chairman of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella body created by the Arab League in 1964, and Fatah became its dominant faction ^[1]. He would hold that chairmanship for thirty five years. The kaffiyeh headdress, arranged so its drape suggested the map of Palestine, and the military fatigues he wore even in diplomatic settings became his lifelong visual signature.

Arafat's PLO built a state within a state in Jordan, and tensions with King Hussein exploded into the civil war of September 1970, remembered by Palestinians as Black September. Jordanian forces defeated the fedayeen, and by mid 1971 the PLO leadership had relocated to Lebanon ^[4]. During the 1970s, groups linked to the PLO carried out hijackings and attacks abroad, including the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics by the Black September organization, actions that fixed an association between Arafat's movement and international terrorism in much of Western opinion, even as he denied direct responsibility ^[5].

At the same time, Arafat pursued political recognition. In November 1974 he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York, telling delegates he carried an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's gun in the other, and urging them not to let the olive branch fall ^[2]. The Arab League that year recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and the UN granted the organization observer status.

Lebanon proved another dead end. Israel's 1982 invasion drove the PLO out of Beirut after a long siege, and Arafat moved his headquarters to Tunis, over two thousand kilometers from the land he claimed ^[4]. He survived an Israeli air raid on the Tunis compound in 1985 and a plane crash in the Libyan desert in 1992. In November 1988 the Palestine National Council in Algiers declared an independent State of Palestine, and the following month Arafat, speaking in Geneva, renounced terrorism and accepted UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, implying acceptance of Israel's existence ^[1]. The United States opened a dialogue with the PLO in response. His support for Saddam Hussein after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait cost him Gulf funding and diplomatic goodwill, leaving the organization weakened on the eve of the peace process.

Secret negotiations in Norway produced the breakthrough that defined Arafat's later career. On September 13, 1993, he stood on the White House lawn beside Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as the two sides signed the Declaration of Principles, the first of the Oslo Accords, and exchanged a handshake witnessed around the world ^[6]. The PLO recognized Israel; Israel recognized the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people; and the agreements established limited Palestinian self rule in Gaza and parts of the West Bank.

In July 1994 Arafat returned to Gaza after twenty seven years of exile to head the new Palestinian National Authority. That October the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Arafat, Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East ^[7]. In January 1996 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza elected Arafat president of the Authority with around 88 percent of the vote in the first such election ever held ^[1].

Governance proved harder than revolution. The Authority under Arafat was criticized for corruption, patronage, and the suppression of dissent, while the peace process stalled amid continued Israeli settlement construction and attacks by Palestinian groups opposed to Oslo, chief among them Hamas. Rabin's assassination by an Israeli extremist in November 1995 removed Arafat's principal negotiating partner ^[6].

For most of his life Arafat cultivated the image of a man married only to the Palestinian cause, living austerely, sleeping little, and moving constantly between safe houses out of fear of assassination. In 1990, however, he secretly married Suha Tawil, a Palestinian Christian from a prominent Ramallah family who had worked in his Tunis office and converted to Islam; she was thirty four years his junior ^[5]. The marriage became public in 1992, and their daughter Zahwa, named for Arafat's mother, was born in Paris in 1995.

Suha Arafat lived apart from her husband during the last years of his life, residing in Paris with their daughter while he remained confined in Ramallah. Colleagues described Arafat as a workaholic with few private interests beyond cartoons he watched to relax and an obsessive command of organizational detail, including personal control over the PLO's finances, a habit that later fed accusations of hidden wealth ^[5].

The collapse of the Camp David summit in July 2000, where Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and US President Bill Clinton failed to reach a final status agreement, marked the beginning of his political eclipse. American officials placed much of the blame on Arafat's refusal of the terms offered, a judgment he and his aides rejected ^[6]. Weeks later the second intifada erupted, and the violence of the following years buried what remained of the Oslo framework.

From December 2001 Israel confined Arafat to his Ramallah headquarters, the Muqataa, which Israeli forces besieged and partially demolished during 2002. The United States and Israel declared him no longer a partner for peace, and in 2003 international pressure forced him to cede some powers to a newly created prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas ^[1]. He spent his final years in a few battered rooms of the compound, still receiving visitors and still, in the eyes of most Palestinians, their legitimate leader.

In October 2004 Arafat fell gravely ill. Flown to the Percy military hospital in Clamart, near Paris, he died there on November 11, 2004, at the age of 75 ^[8]. French doctors attributed death to a massive stroke following a blood disorder, but the underlying cause was never conclusively established, and later Swiss laboratory findings of elevated polonium-210 traces on his belongings fueled poisoning theories that subsequent French and Russian investigations did not confirm ^[8]. Denied burial in Jerusalem by Israel, he was interred at the Muqataa in Ramallah after a chaotic funeral attended by vast crowds.

Any honest Yasser Arafat biography must hold two portraits in view at once. To most Palestinians he was Abu Ammar, the father of their national movement, the man who took a dispersed refugee population and forged it into a people with a flag, institutions, and a claim on the world's attention ^[2]. To many Israelis and others he remained a terrorist who never fully abandoned violence, and critics across the spectrum faulted his autocratic governance and his rejection of the 2000 proposals ^[6].

Among Yasser Arafat achievements, the most durable are institutional: he made the PLO an internationally recognized representative of the Palestinians, secured UN observer status for Palestine, signed the first mutual recognition agreements with Israel, and founded the Palestinian Authority that still administers parts of the West Bank ^[1]. That he shared a Nobel Peace Prize while never delivering an actual state captures the unfinished quality of his life's work ^[7].

Two decades after his death, the essential Yasser Arafat facts remain contested terrain, from his birthplace to the cause of his death. His grave in Ramallah is officially temporary, awaiting reburial in Jerusalem under a Palestinian state that has not come. Few modern leaders have so completely embodied a national cause, and few have left a legacy so unresolved ^[4].