Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat
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As the leader of a stateless people, Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has wandered from country to country.
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Yasser Arafat dreamed of creating a Palestinian state since he was a young man in Egypt smuggling guns into Palestine. Yet after six years as the president of the Palestinian Authority, an entity established as a step toward the goal of independence, Arafat has been unable to turn his dream into reality.
To Palestinians, he is the symbol of their struggle for a homeland. Yet to Israelis, he is the symbol of the threat to destroy their homeland -- a man whose complicity has fostered an unparalleled wave of terror attacks against Israeli civilians.
Arafat long has sought to portray himself through the struggles of his people. "I am part of my people," he has said. "I am one of the victims."
In June 2002, after more than a year-and-a-half of Arab-Israeli bloodshed, with Palestinians conducting a wave of suicide bombings and Israelis retaliating by laying siege to Arafat's compound in the West Bank, U.S. President George Bush urged the Palestinian people to elect new leaders not tainted by terrorism or corruption as a pre-requisite necessary to pave the way for a Palestinian state. The position of prime minister was created in March 2003. After a power struggle with Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas accepted the post, appointed new cabinet ministers, and his government was approved by the Palestinian legislature. Arafat retained the final say over negotiations with Israel.
Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al Qudwa al-Hussein in Cairo, Egypt, on August 24, 1929, the son of a successful merchant. His mother died when he was 4, and he went to live with an uncle in Jerusalem, a city that was ruled by the British under a League of Nations mandate (installed after World War I).
It was during those years that Arafat was exposed to the clash between Arabs and Jews, particularly Jews who immigrated to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
A student in Cairo
While attending the University of Cairo, from which he graduated as a civil engineer, Arafat undertook a study of Jewish life, associating with Jews and reading the works of Zionists such as Theodor Herzl. But by 1946, he had become a Palestinian nationalist and was procuring weapons in Egypt to be smuggled into Palestine for the Arab cause.
In November 1947, the United Nations voted to end the British Mandate over Palestine by May 15, 1948, and to partition it into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem an international city. Jews in Palestine and elsewhere readily accepted the partition.
The response by Palestine's neighbors was overwhelmingly negative. Intent on preventing any Jewish entity in the region, they rejected the plan, and in what was to be a precursor to many more wars, the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq invaded the new country with the declared intent of destroying it.
When this first Arab-Israeli war broke out in 1948, reports say that Arafat slipped into Palestine to fight the Israelis.
He later claimed, however, that he and his compatriots were disarmed and turned back by other Arabs who did not want the help of Palestinian irregulars. After Israel won the war, Palestinians suffered a significant humiliation when the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were left without a state of their own.
In the 1950s, Arafat was commissioned into the Egyptian army and fought in the 1956 Suez campaign.
After leaving the army, Arafat worked as an engineer in Kuwait. During this time, he and several Palestinian Arab associates formed a movement that became known as Al Fatah, an underground terrorist organization dedicated to reclaiming Palestine for the Palestinians. This group and others eventually became a militant wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, an umbrella organization formed in 1964.
Running Al Fatah became Arafat's full-time occupation, and by 1965 the organization was launching guerrilla raids and terrorist attacks into Israel.
But in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel emerged victorious and captured the Golan Heights from Syria, the West Bank from Jordan and Gaza and most of the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt. Frustrated with the lack of effective support from the Arab countries, Palestinians elected Arafat chairman of the PLO in 1968.
King Hussein removes PLO from Jordan
Arafat and Al Fatah relocated in Jordan. But under Arafat's leadership, the PLO and its various factions carried out a series of attacks, including hijackings in Europe and the Middle East. Arafat never personally claimed responsibility for these acts, but he did not condemn them, either. The PLO's terrorist activities troubled Jordan's King Hussein, and after a civil war in 1971, Hussein forced the Palestinians to leave.
After leaving Jordan, the PLO set up bases in Lebanon and continued raids against Israel. Arafat came to be regarded as a villain for his suspected involvement in the murder of Israeli athletes by the Black September organization at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
Despite these tactics, in 1974 Arafat was allowed to address the United Nations, and that organization voted to grant observer status to the PLO. He was the first representative of a non-governmental agency to address the U.N. General Assembly. Wearing a pistol on his hip, he said: "I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand."
Eight years later, in June 1982, Israel retaliated for a series of PLO raids by launching an all-out counterattack that destroyed PLO headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon. "I'm under siege last year. I'm under siege again this year," Arafat said. "What's the difference? What do you expect? This is a revolution, not a picnic."
After being expelled from Lebanon, Arafat established headquarters in Tunisia. He gave his organization's support to Palestinians in the West Bank and other territories who began to riot against Israel, in what become known as the first Intifada.
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In a career that has included terrorism and diplomacy, Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
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Shakes hands with Rabin
In 1988, Arafat proclaimed an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and told the United Nations that the PLO renounced terrorism. He said the PLO supported the right of all parties to live in peace -- Israel included.
By the year's end, 70 countries had recognized the PLO, but its credibility was undermined with much of the Arab world in 1990 by its support of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.
Proving himself the consummate survivor, Arafat lived when his plane crashed during a sandstorm in the Libyan desert in 1992. He developed a blood clot on his brain, but recovered from that, too.
And, in 1993, after the PLO officially recognized Israel, Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo peace accords that established a framework for an agreement aimed at bringing peace to the region. The accords called for an end to the violence, the gradual withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the West Bank, and the creation of the Palestinian Authority as the Palestinian governing body there.
After co-signing the Cairo Agreement, Rabin and Arafat were named co-winners of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, along with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. This caused controversy, as some questioned whether Arafat deserved the honor. "Does anyone take seriously Arafat's Nobel Prize?" asks former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "I think it was one of the low points of the Nobel Prize."
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Arafat, right, with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, left, and U.S. President Bill Clinton at Camp David, Maryland, in July 2000. The lack of an agreement at this summit led both Middle Eastern leaders to face political turmoil at home.
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In January 1996, Arafat won the presidency of the Palestinian Authority.
The peace process, which had been on and off since Rabin's assassination by a right-wing Israeli extremist in 1995, broke down again in 2000 and the land became mired in violence that escalated in 2001 and 2002. Arafat and Ariel Sharon, who had fought against Arafat in Lebanon when Sharon was Israel's minister of defense, locked into battle again.
Sharon, who had become Israel's prime minister, admonished Arafat to reign in repeated terror attacks by Palestinians. Arafat responded that he could not control random acts of violence by militant factions. The Palestinian violence against Israelis included suicide bombings targeting commuter buses, discos, weddings and pizzerias, gunfire in broad daylight on city streets and massacres of families attacked in their homes.
In March 2002, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield, a campaign to eliminate what it said was a terrorist infrastructure in the West Bank. As part of that operation, Israel eroded some of Arafat's security forces and started a siege of Arafat's compound that began March 29 and ended May 2.
Again, Arafat found himself in a bind. "It's a Catch-22 for him," explained David Shipler, author of "Arab and Jew." "The more moderate he becomes with the Israelis, the less credibility he has with the Palestinians. The more militant he is, the more credibility with the Palestinians, and the less conciliatory the Israelis will be."
Shipler continued: "He's a good survivor. He's not so good a s a leader who can move a situation into a different era."
As the terror attacks and the Israeli retaliations continued into the summer, it was unclear to many whether the Palestinians would be able to realize Arafat's dream of a Palestinian state as long as Arafat remained their leader.
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