Yasir Arafat (1929 - 2004) - Source Answers

Chairman of al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and president of the Palestinian Authority.

Between early 1969 and early 1994, Yasir Arafat (also Yasser Arafat) was transformed from a guerrilla leader advocating armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine to the president of the quasi-state of Palestine after negotiations with Israel, which had long denounced him as a terrorist. Despite frequent quarrels with rivals and subordinates, no other figure has been as closely identified with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or the Palestinian national struggle as Arafat. Born Muhammad Abd al-Raʾuf al-Arafat al-Qudwa, "Yasir" became Arafat's nickname during his early guerrilla days. He has since gone by Yasir Abd al-Raʾuf Arafat or just Yasir Arafat, except when using the nom de guerre Abu Ammar. Arafat and his family have always insisted that he was born 4 August 1929, in his mother's family home in Jerusalem. Nevertheless, an Egyptian birth registration exists, suggesting that he was born in Egypt on 24 August 1929. His father had been living in Egypt, but his mother may have returned to her home to give birth; others suspect that the record has been altered to give Arafat a Palestinian birthplace. He is, in any event, of old Palestinian lineage: The Qudwas (his father's line) are an offshoot of a Gaza branch of the Sunni Muslim al-Husayni (Husseini) family, whereas Arafat's mother came from the more prominent Jerusalem branch of the Husaynis. His father was a merchant trading in Gaza and Egypt; whether or not Arafat was born there, he spent many of his teenage years in Egypt and long had a detectable Egyptian accent. He was the sixth of seven children. In 1942, his father returned to Cairo, and Arafat continued his schooling there. He reportedly became an aide to the military leader of the Palestinian resistance, Abd alQadir al-Husayni, a kinsman on his mother's side. The young Yasir fought with the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza during the Arab - Israel War of 1948. Following the war, the family returned to Gaza. In the 1950s, Arafat studied at Fuʾad I University in Cairo (now Cairo University), majoring in civil engineering. He was reportedly a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and also became active as a Palestinian student organizer, heading the Union of Palestinian Students from 1952 to 1957. He then served in the Egyptian army for about a year.

Al-Fatah and the PLO

Arafat and other Palestinian activists were in Prague in 1957 when some of their colleagues were arrested in Egypt, suspected of Muslim Brotherhood activities. Arafat and the two men who were to become his closest aides until their assassinations, Khalil al-Wazir and Salah Khalaf, remained in Europe. Arafat studied engineering further in Stuttgart and then went to Kuwait. While working for the public works department, he started his own contracting firm. This engineering firm prospered, and Arafat reportedly became quite wealthy. Some accounts suggest that his personal wealth helped fund the beginnings of al-Fatah. The nucleus of al-Fatah had already been formed in the late 1950s, by Arafat, al-Wazir, Khalaf, Khalid al-Hasan, and others in Kuwait, who would become lifelong colleagues. Initially, al-Fatah was one of many small Palestinian exile groups advocating armed struggle to free Palestine. Arafat received some training in Algeria, it is believed, and in Syria, where al-Fatah's armed wing, al-Asifa, was formed. He also was imprisoned in Syria for several weeks at this time.

After the 1967 war, al-Fatah's prominence increased greatly. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), originally created under Egyptian auspices in January 1964, was overshadowed by the new guerrilla groups, which increasingly won control of the Palestine National Council (PNC). In 1968 al-Fatah fought off an Israeli attack on a base in Karama, Jordan, and its prestige increased further. In early 1969, al-Fatah and its allies won enough seats in the PNC to elect Arafat the new chairman of the PLO's executive committee. Arafat, now head of both alFatah and the PLO, set up his headquarters in Amman, Jordan. In 1970, the PLO was drawn into conflict with the government of Jordan when one of its member organizations, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), hijacked several aircraft. In the ensuing Black September of 1970, the PLO was driven out of its Jordanian operational base. Arafat, who escaped from Amman, set up his new base in Beirut, while the PLO began operations against Israel from southern Lebanon. After the Arab - Israel War of 1973, some PLO leaders began discussing the possibility of a settlement short of the previously envisioned secular state in all of Palestine. On 14 November 1974, Arafat addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations, claiming that he held both "an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun."

The UN speech marked a high point, but Arafat's career took another turn downward with the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. The PLO found itself fighting not only Maronite forces but eventually the Syrian army, though these alignments shifted as the war went on. The 1977 visit of Egypt's President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem and the 1978 peace between Israel and Egypt were yet further blows, and then in 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon. Having been driven from Jordan more than a decade before and besieged in Lebanon by Syrians and others from time to time, the PLO had nevertheless managed to maintain its base in Lebanon. In June 1982 Israel not only occupied all of Lebanon up to Beirut but also (unsuccessfully) targeted Arafat personally. Arafat and ten thousand Palestinian fighters were evicted from Beirut in August. An attempt to form a new base in Tripoli, Lebanon, failed due to Syrian opposition and an intra-Fath mutiny, and Arafat and the PLO moved to Tunis, far from the zone of Israeli - Palestinian confrontation (although in 1985 Israel did bomb PLO headquarters there in 1985, including Arafat's compound).

In 1984, Arafat entered into negotiations with King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan to seek a common ground for a joint Jordanian - Palestinian negotiating position - the so-called Jordanian Option. The effort failed, with Jordan blaming Arafat for the failure. In December 1987, the Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, began in the occupied territories. Although Arafat's al-Fatah was a major player in the Unified National Leadership of the Intifada, it was local cadres, not the Tunis leadership, who were in charge of the actual uprising. This led many analysts to once again predict that Arafat's days were numbered and that the central PLO leadership had lost its relevance. As in 1970, 1982, and 1984 - when earlier political obituaries had been written - they were wrong. One of the strengths that had kept Arafat in his position for so long, despite squabbles, plots, and even fighting and assassinations among Palestinian factions, was his ability to forge a grand coalition of very differently oriented factions, left and right, communist and capitalist. Increasingly unable to hold such a broad umbrella group together, Arafat was finally willing to gamble on seizing a moderate, pronegotiation position despite the fact that this meant the more radical factions now considered him a curse.

Peace Negotiations

In 1988, the PLO leadership - now more and more Arafat and the old al-Fatah elite - agreed to recognize Israel's right to exist, the principle of negotiating with Israel on peace in exchange for territorial withdrawal, and a renunciation of terrorism. After some adjustment, the formula finally met the United States's preconditions for a direct dialogue with the PLO, and this dialogue began with the U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, Robert Pelletreau. It was subsequently suspended in June 1990 when Arafat failed to condemn an attack on Israeli territory by a PLO faction. When the Madrid Conference was held in October 1991 with U.S. president George H. W. Bush, the U.S.-PLO talks had been suspended and Israel's Likud government under Yitzhak Shamir adamantly refused to deal with the PLO, which was still seen as a terrorist organization. Therefore, the Palestinians were awkwardly represented in Madrid by a panel of moderate Palestinians, all of whom were acceptable to the PLO but none of whom had been formally members of it. As long as Likud was in power, they were also technically half of a "joint Jordanian - Palestinian delegation." Once again, despite the insistence by the delegation that they were in coordination with the PLO leadership in Tunis, many analysts declared that Arafat and the PLO were no longer relevant to the search for a Palestinian - Israeli solution. Meanwhile, in 1992, as Arafat was flying to Sudan in a private aircraft, his plane crashed in the Libyan desert, killing the pilots and several passengers. Arafat survived, but he was badly injured and required surgery to correct further problems. His friends later indicated that his survival, when so many others had died, convinced him that he had been providentially spared for some reason. The lifelong bachelor also married, further putting his guerrilla days behind him. These factors may have helped prepare him for the decision that he soon would have to make.

As long as Likud was in power, no breakthrough was possible, and the Palestinian side of the peace talks went nowhere. But Shamir was replaced by Yitzhak Rabin and the Labor Party in 1992. Frustrated with the difficulties of negotiating with a Palestinian delegation that had little real authority to offer compromise, a secret back-channel negotiation began via Norwegian intermediaries. Ultimately, the result was the Oslo Accord, signed on the White House lawn on 13 September 1993. For the first time, Arafat - once denounced as a terrorist by U.S. presidents and forbidden entrance into the United States after his 1974 UN speech - came to the White House to be greeted by a U.S. president. Even more dramatically, at the signing of the agreement he offered his hand to Yitzhak Rabin, and Rabin accepted it, albeit with apparent reluctance. That dramatic handshake on the White House lawn underscored the fact that Arafat had survived his enemies within the PLO as well as in Israel and the United States. Arafat became the provisional head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which took over self-government in Jericho and Gaza in the summer of 1994 and, eventually, more of the West Bank as well. Arafat's entry into Jericho in June 1994 marked a personal vindication for Arafat, at least in his own view.

Palestinian Authority

Arafat formally was elected president of the Palestinian Authority during elections in January 1996. He oversaw the growth of a PA bureaucracy and a number of security and intelligence agencies. His leadership came under mounting criticism by Palestinians both inside and outside the PA. The most intractable were the Islamist movements HAMAS and Islamic Jihad, both of which vowed to continue attacks against Israel. These groups had the support of the Palestinian community, and Arafat had to balance the support extended by the Palestinian street with his needs both to placate his Israeli and U.S. peace partners and to maintain his tight grip on power in the PA. The failure of the peace process led to the violence of the al-Aqsa Intifada in October 2000, which in turn led to Israel's reoccupation of large parts of the PA, the destruction of its infrastructure, and the lengthy siege of Arafat's compound in Ramallah that began in 2002 and continued into 2004. Despite the efforts of Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to ignore and isolate him, and similar efforts by U.S. president George W. Bush, Arafat has remained head of al-Fatah, the PLO, the PA, and the Palestinian national movement generally, and no one of even remotely the same stature or power has emerged to take his place.

Arafat had never married during his long guerrilla years. In 1991 or early 1992, however, he married Suha Tawil (1963 - ), the daughter of a PLO activist father and a lawyer mother who often represented accused Palestinians in the territories. Tawil had served as Arafat's secretary. A Christian who reportedly converted to Islam, she is more than thirty years his junior. She has given a number of interviews to the Arab and Western press (and even to the Israeli press), providing for the first time an intimate view of Arafat. A daughter, Zahwa, was born to the couple in 1994. Arafat himself is a practicing Sunni Muslim and is believed to practice his faith. After the 1992 plane crash, his religious convictions were reportedly strengthened. In his younger days he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but in middle age he stands staunchly against the Islamist elements in the Palestinian movement. His health has deteriorated noticeably in recent years, but he remains a survivor in a region that recently has witnessed the passing of several long-standing Arab rulers.

Bibliography

Aburish, Said K. Arafat: From Defender to Dictator. New York: Bloomsbury, 1998.

Cobban, Helena. The Palestinian Liberation Organization: People,Power, and Politics. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Gowers, Andrew, and Walker, Tony. Behind the Myth: YasserArafat and the Palestinian Revolution. London: W. H. Allen, 1990.

Hart, Alan. Arafat: A Political Biography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Iyad, Abou, with Rouleau, Eric. My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle. New York: Times Books, 1981.

Kiernan, Thomas. Arafat: The Man and the Myth. New York: Norton, 1976.

Wallach, Janet, and Wallach, John. Arafat: In the Eyes of theBeholder. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990.

— MICHAEL DUNN UPDATED BY MICHAEL R. FISCHBACH