The wily and enigmatic father and leader of the Palestinian nation, Yasser Arafat for almost 40 years symbolised his people’s longing for a distinct political identity and independent state. He was 75. Arafat was once seen as a romantic hero and praised as a statesman, but his lustre and reputation faded over time. Once in power, he proved more tactician than strategist, and a leader who rejected crucial opportunities to achieve his declared goal. While many Palestinians continued to revere him, many others came to see him as undemocratic and his administration as corrupt, as they faced growing poverty, lawlessness and despair. A co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994 for his agreement to work toward peaceful coexistence with Israel, Arafat began his long political career with high-profile acts of anti-Israel terrorism. At the beginning, in the 1960s, Arafat pioneered what became known as ‘‘television terrorism’’ — air piracy and innovative forms of mayhem staged for maximum propaganda value. Arafat ordered the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. In 1986, a group linked to Arafat but apparently acting independently, seized the Achille Lauro cruise ship and threw overboard an elderly American Jew who used a wheelchair. In 2000, after rejecting a land-for-peace deal from Israel, Arafat presided over the Palestinians as they waged a mix of guerrilla warfare and terror against Israeli troops and civilians that has lasted more than four years. Indeed, shifting between peace talks and acts of violence was the defining feature of his political life. In his emotional appeal for a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly in 1974, he wore a holster while waving an olive branch. After his pledge of peace with Israel in 1993, Palestinians associated with him carried out suicide bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He officially condemned such violence while calling for ‘‘martyrs by the millions’’ to rise for the Palestinian cause. Arafat assumed many poses but the image that endures was that of the Arab fighter, the grizzled guerrilla in olive-green fatigues and his trademark checkered head scarf, carefully folded in the shape of what was once Palestine. Arafat seemed at his best when under siege. Surrounded in the spring of 2002 by Israeli tanks in two rooms of his compound in Ramallah, he invited ‘‘martyrs by the millions’’ to join his attack on Israel. ‘‘Oh God,’’ he appealed to the world, ‘‘grant me a martyr’s death’’. Though he insisted later in life that the creation of a Palestinian state —not the destruction of Israel — was his ultimate aim, he almost never lost a chance to miss an opportunity for a negotiated peace, to paraphrase a quip attributed to Abba Eban, the late Israeli foreign minister. Until 1988, he repeatedly rejected recognition of Israel, insisted on armed struggle and terror campaigns, and opted for diplomacy only after his disastrous embrace of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq during the Gulf War in 1991 left his movement politically disgraced and financially bankrupt. In September 1993, Arafat achieved world acclaim by signing a limited peace treaty with Israel, that provided for mutual recognition and outlined a transition to Palestinian autonomy in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories that Israel had controlled since its victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The agreement was blessed by President Bill Clinton and sealed with a stunning handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn. But in 2000, Arafat walked away from a proffered settlement based on the Oslo accords proposed by Prime Minister Ehud Barak — the most forthcoming compromises Israel had ever suggested. After the talks collapsed, Arafat used an inflammatory visit by Ariel Sharon to Jerusalem in September 2000 to bless a terror campaign — the ‘‘second intifada’’. This has killed more than 900 Israelis and almost 3,000 Palestinians, and plunged his fragile PA into armed conflict. Having experienced perhaps 40 attempts on his life by Israelis and Arabs, he was strengthened as a revolutionary leader. Until 1991, when Arafat wed Suha Tawil, his Palestinian secretary, and had a daughter, Zahwa, he was virtually married to his cause. He slept and ate little, took no vacations and neither drank nor smoked. Even admirers described Arafat as a chameleon. After the Oslo accords, Arafat became as controversial among Arabs, especially Palestinians: revered by many as the father of their country, reviled by others as an autocrat, a divisive and sometimes indecisive buffoon, a traitor. Even many Arab supporters of his 1993 agreements with Israel eventually came to loathe him for his political duplicity, his administration’s endemic corruption and his dictatorial tendencies. He was known by many names: Abu Ammar, his nom de guerre; the ‘‘chairman’’, after he became leader of the PLO in 1969; and the ‘‘old man’’. At the end of his life, he referred to himself as ‘‘general’’. The man who became ‘‘Mr Palestine’’ was probably not born there. He has claimed to have been born on August 4, 1929, in Jerusalem, or alternatively in Gaza. What seems certain is that this son of a lower middle-class merchant spent much of his childhood being shuttled among relatives in Cairo, Gaza and Jerusalem after his mother, who came from a prominent Jerusalem family, died when he was four. In 1949, Arafat began studying engineering at Cairo University, where he was prominent in student affairs. When Israel, Britain and France invaded Egypt in 1956, Arafat, as an Egyptian military reservist, is said to have taken a course in which he learned how to use mines and explosives. That same year, he began wearing his trademark kaffiyeh. After graduating, Arafat worked as an engineer in Egypt and moved first to Saudi Arabia, then to Kuwait in 1957, where he plunged into clandestine nationalist activities. In October 1959, Arafat and four other Palestinians founded Al Fatah, ‘‘the Conquest’’, which later became the core of the PLO. In May 1964, Egypt created the PLO under Arab League auspices. Ahmed Shukairy, the wordy bureaucrat who headed the PLO and had never even held a gun, deeply resented Arafat and Al Fatah, denouncing them as ‘‘enemies’’ of the liberation movement. The 1967 Arab-Israeli War, which brought humiliating defeat to the Arabs’ conventional armies, gave Arafat’s group a chance to become heroes to Arabs desperately in need of some. But it still took Arafat two years to wrest control of the PLO from the lower-key Palestinians. In the spring of 1968, Arafat made his first appearance on the cover of Time. That March, the Israeli army attacked Karameh where Al Fatah had set up headquarters. Arafat insisted that his commandos not retreat. After the Israelis withdrew, he staged a victory celebration around several destroyed Israeli tanks. Calling Karameh ‘‘the first victory of the Arabs against the state of Israel’’, Arafat became an instant sensation and Al Fatah became paramount among Palestinian guerrilla groups. In January 1996, he presided over one of the freest elections ever conducted among Arabs. Some 85 per cent of the electorate chose from a bewildering array of 700 candidates for an 88-member Palestinian Council. With 88 pc of the vote for him as president, Arafat became the undisputed leader of his people — no longer (or so it seemed) dismissible by Israelis as a terrorist. ‘‘This is a new era,’’ Arafat said after the 1996 elections. ‘‘This is the foundation of our Palestinian state.’’ But the PA was soon locked in increasingly bitter struggles with Hamas, which insisted on the continuing need to stage terrorist attacks not only against Israeli soldiers but also civilians inside Israel. Ever the careful balancer, Arafat insisted on making decisions alone and in private. He found himself increasingly isolated in his final years, with almost all his former close aides having been killed over the years by Israeli or Arab assassins. Plagued by a neurological illness that doctors said stemmed from a near-fatal plane crash in the Libyan desert in 1992, Arafat slowed down. No longer able to work his 18-hour days, he was forced to delegate some power, if not real authority. Despite deteriorating political and economic conditions, for many until the end, Arafat remained the symbol of Palestinian aspiration to a state, the only man who could have sold the painful compromises for peace to his people had he chosen to do so.
