Yasir Arafat

Yasir Arafat was born in 1929, probably in Cairo, Egypt. His mother was from Jerusalem and his father with a Gazan background. He spent his childhood partly in Egypt, and partly in Jerusalem, where an aunt cared him for a time following his mother’s early death. In 1944, he began a university education in Egypt.

The first Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1948, when Arafat was partway through university. Arafat was, at that point, already engaged in the Palestinian national cause, and helped to smuggle arms to Palestinian fighters. When Arab states invaded Israel, the day after its declaration, Arafat joined Muslim Brotherhood fighters who fought in Gaza. The Arab defeat in that war influenced Arafat deeply.

On his return to his studies he began more public political activity. In 1949, he was elected chairman of the Federation of Palestinian Students and, in 1953, he became the chairman of the General Union of Palestinian Students, which had branches in several countries.

In 1957, Arafat moved to Kuwait, where he took a position as a civil engineer with the state before beginning his own contracting company. Kuwait, at that time, was home to several variants of political ferment. There were Palestinian and other Arab workers from around the region; Muslim Brotherhood members who had been exiled from Egypt after having been banned in 1954 and Palestinian refugees seeking work following the establishment of Israel.

Arafat spent most of his time in Kuwait working to create an underground Palestinian organization.

In Kuwait, Arafat began working with college friends who had also landed in Kuwait to create an political organization to undermine and ultimately overthrow Israel. The name of the organization, Fatah, is an acronym (in reverse) for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Filastini, the Palestine National Liberation Movement. The movements first guerrilla attacks in the mid-1960s, were claimed under the name al-‘Asifa, the storm.

Fatah, like the other political or guerrilla groups that grew up in this period, had a nationalist and secular orientation.

By the mid-1960s, a broad Palestinian nationalist sensibility had emerged out of the chaos that followed mass dispersion in the 1950s. Under the guiding hand of the Arab League, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed in 1964 and given a home in Jerusalem (which was then under Jordanian control), an umbrella group of different Palestinian organizations.

By 1968, Arafat had become the chairman of the PLO. Fatah and other organizations had also begun cross-border armed incursions into Israel.

By 1970, the power of the PLO and the refugee community in Jordan had developed into a threat to the Jordanian government of King Hussein. When the PLO blew up several hijacked planes on Jordanian soil in 1970, Hussein retaliated with a massive battle against the PLO. Both PLO fighters and civilians were killed and the PLO resettled in Lebanon.

Both violence and diplomacy increased in the 1970s.

In the 1970s, the PLO sponsored larger scale terrorist attacks. It is widely believed to be behind the Black September group, which murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Raids on Israeli territory from their Lebanon base engaged Lebanon and Syria, as well as the PLO, in reciprocal attacks by the Israeli Defense Forces.

Arafat began to refine his political claims, and to narrow them from the original call for the destruction of Israel and a Palestinian state on all of the territory that had become Israel. Arafat was already considered the primary representative of the Palestinian cause by most Palestinians; he became recognized by the wider world after addressing the United Nations.

In 1988, Arafat stated his support for UN Resolution 242, acknowledging Israel’s right to exist for the first time. This move became the basis for exploring a two state solution in the wider international community. In 1993, he signed the Oslo accord that established a Palestinian Authority designed to be a precursor to a state. The Accord was as widely condemned by some as it was celebrated by others. Many Palestinians and supporters felt it provided little, while others saw it as a substantial step forward on a road to peaceful and equitable relations.

In 1994, Arafat, then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts.

Governing

Arafat spent the last portion of his life as the head of the new Palestinian entity in the West Bank and Gaza. His performance in that role led many to conclude that e was a better revolutionary than manager of a country. The Palestinian National Authority was unable to quell increasing violence in the Palestinian territories and attacks on Israel (and some concluded that Arafat encouraged it), and Arafat himself was viewed as a corrupt leader.

Nevertheless, when he died on November 11, 2001, at the age of 75, both Palestinians and the rest of the world remembered him as the primary symbol of the Palestinian quest for legitimacy and statehood.