Even in the eyes of his many acquaintances and close associates,
Yasser Arafat remains, to a great degree, an enigma.There is no
doubt he was one of the most well-known leaders in the world.
During dozens of years of political activity, his image appeared
constantly in the television broadcasts throughout the world, and
hardly a week went by without an interview with him in one of the
major newspapers.
There were always many contradictions in all of the reports and
theories about him. He was said to be untrustworthy and a liar, an
incorrigible terrorist who couldn't be trusted; at the same time he
was "the father of the Palestinian nation," the historic leader who
brought his people from nowhere to the center of the Middle Eastern
political stage and to negotiations with the State of Israel over a
partition of the country. Did he bring achievements to his people?
Or did he bring disasters upon them? He was short, with a tendency
toward putting on weight, his gestures were always theatrical, and
his language was very limited. Within the Palestinian leadership,
wasn't there anyone better to lead the nation?
The Arafat enigma begins with the question of where he was born. He
either said he was born in Jerusalem or avoided giving a clear
answer, saying "My father was from Gaza and my mother from
Jerusalem."
The Early Years
Apparently the truth is that Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo,
Egypt. At least one of his biographers found his Egyptian birth
certificate. When it was presented to him¸ Arafat said it was
a forgery. He did grow up in Cairo, with parents who had emigrated
from Palestine, but he insisted that he was born in Jerusalem, and
that his father forged the birth certificate so that he could study
without payment in Egyptian schools.
He was born in August 1929 when he was 3, his mother died and he
was sent to the home of his mother's family, the Abu-Saud's, near
the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Western Wall in Jerusalem. He lived for
a while with his mother's family, and also in the home of his
father's family, the al-Qudwa's, in Gaza. After his father
remarried, Arafat returned to Cairo, where he did his elementary
and high school studies.This was very apparent in his Egyptian
accent, which Arafat never managed to lose.Young Palestinians who
joined Fateh after the Six-Day War in 1967 and who met Arafat for
the first time were surprised: How come the head of the Palestinian
revolution speaks like an Egyptian?
The formative experience of Arafat's youth in Cairo was his
meetings with a group of Palestinian exiles who lived there after
World War II. The group was led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj
Amin al-Husseini, who spent the war years in Berlin, and Arafat's
relative (on his mother's side) Sheikh Hassan Abu-Sa'ud. The
17-year-old Arafat established a special connection with
Abdel-Qader al-Husseini, one of the Palestinian organizers of the
Arab revolt against the Jewish yishuv (pre-state community) and the
British regime in Palestine between 1936 and1939. Arafat spent a
lot of time playing and reading passages from the Koran with the
boy Faisal Husseini, Abdel-Qader's son, who would one day become
the PLO head at Orient House in Jerusalem.
1948
In the winter of 1948, Arafat began to study engineering at Cairo
University (then Fuad University), and the great shock of his first
year of studies was the report that reached him in the middle of
April that Abdel-Qader al-Husseini had been killed in the battle of
the Kastel on the road to Jerusalem. Together with other
Palestinian students, Arafat decided to stop his studies and join
the Egyptians who had volunteered to fight in the war for the land.
Arafat participated in the battle over Kfar Darom near Gaza, but
two weeks later, on May 15, the Egyptian army invaded the country,
and ordered all of the irregular units to cease their activities so
as not to get in the way of the regular Egyptian army. Arafat would
later describe how the Egyptian took his rifle, his personal
weapon.
From the point of view of many Palestinians, including Arafat, not
only did the Arab rulers fail in the war - they added a sin to
their crime by preventing the Palestinians from fighting. For many
years afterward, when Arafat was asked what caused the Palestinian
tragedy, his answer would be, "The Arabs betrayed us."
This was the background upon which Arafat (and many other
Palestinians of his generation) developed their post-1948
worldview, which stated that it was forbidden to rely on the Arab
regimes, whose sole goal was to exploit the Palestinian problem to
benefit themselves. Arafat resolved to remain dedicated to the
Palestinian people and to them alone.
During his political career, which began in 1950 as the chairman of
the Palestinian Student Union at Cairo University, and continued
through the establishment of Fateh in Kuwait in 1959, Arafat
entered into dozens of conflicts and disputes with almost all of
the Arab leaders. He was imprisoned in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria,
and was relentlessly pursued in Jordan - always based upon his
suspicion and distrust of the Arab leaders whom he thought were
ready, at any moment, to sell out and sacrifice Palestinian
interests in exchange for their own. Even with Egypt, the Arab
country where he was born and to which he was closest, Arafat
arrived at a severe crisis in his relations with the regime after
its president Anwar Sadat, signed a peace agreement with Israel.
There were even those who said, with a bit of exaggeration, that
Arafat's loyalty to the Palestinian cause turned him into an
anti-Arab.
Founding Fateh
The Fateh organization that Arafat and his colleagues founded in
Kuwait carried out its first attack on an Israeli target, the
National Water Carrier in the Galilee, on January 1, 1965. Two-
and-a-half years later, against the background of the defeat of the
Arab states in the Six-Day War, the actions of the Palestinian
organizations against Israel increased Arafat's name as the head of
Fateh became known to the general public in the spring of
1968.
The formative experience of Fateh under Arafat's leadership was the
battle of Karama, in which Arafat took part, in the eastern Jordan
Valley in March 1968. The battle lasted for a number of hours, and
the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was forced to retreat, leaving
behind tanks and other military equipment in Jordanian territory.
Arafat described the battle as a great military victory, equal to
the Soviet victory over the Germans in the battle of Stalingrad
during World War II dimension. Arafat appeared as a mysterious
guerrilla commander, circulated stories of heroism, and his men
held a parade with the equipment the IDF had abandoned. Arafat's
stories made a great impression on people. The reason was the
tremendous yearning of the Arab masses for a little comfort after
the humiliating defeat in 1967. The Arab and Palestinian public
almost begged for heroic stories - and Arafat provided them with
such stories in great abundance.
As the years went by, it became clear that Arafat survived in a
manner that was almost beyond comprehension. He survived
assassination attempts, and turned out to be someone whom no
political enemy could defeat. Thus he survived the battles of the
civil war in Jordan (known as Black September), lived through the
IDF siege of Beirut during the Lebanon war (1982), and later
overcame, though with difficulty, the rebels within his own Fateh
movement who tried to eliminate him (1983) with the aid of the
Syrian regime.
Arafat's Greatest Success
In retrospect, it looks as if Arafat's greatest success was in
leading his people to the recognition of Israel (at the meeting of
the Palestinian National Council (PNC) in Algeria, 1988), and to a
peace process, at the end of which a partial Palestinian national
rule was established in the homeland. In 1994, Arafat returned to
Gaza and the West Bank to build the autonomy that was determined in
the Oslo Accords (September 1993). He was also elected in the free
and democratic elections that were held in the territories in 1996
as the president of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA).
With the establishment of the Palestinian governmental institutions
in the homeland, Arafat made what appear to be the greatest
mistakes of his long career. These were inefficient, wasteful and
corrupt governing mechanisms.
The Failed Transition
Arafat did not succeed in making the transition from being the
leader of an underground, revolutionary national movement to being
the leader of a state with orderly institutions. He knew how to be
the leader of a "future state," but not of a state that in many
respects had already been established. Despite the restrictions
placed on the Palestinian autonomy, it actually contained many of
the components of a sovereign state, and Arafat did not convert
that into an orderly government. He considered the Palestinian
Legislative Council (PLC) to be an inconsequential body, the
judicial system didn't really function, and the Palestinian public
rapidly developed a sense of alienation and even revulsion
concerning the governing mechanisms that Arafat headed.
With his frugal lifestyle, Arafat managed to preserve the image of
someone who had no private life, whose entire world was dedicated
to the vision of Palestinian nationalism. But the anger and
hostility of the masses toward the governing mechanisms that
surrounded them continued to grow.
Despite the many accusations, in Israel and around the world, that
Arafat planned and initiated the second intifada that broke out in
September 2000, there is much evidence that this is not true. The
PNA had invested $3 billion in tourist projects before the outbreak
of the intifada. No one invests such large sums of money in tourism
if he is planning at the same time for a war. If Arafat had
actually planned the intifada, he should have accepted the Israeli
and American proposals at Camp David for a withdrawal from 90
percent of the West Bank, which would have enabled him to begin the
intifada from a much more advantageous position. The fact that he
didn't accept those proposals indicates that the intifada was a
spontaneous, unplanned development.
Arafat was a unique leader, not only because of his politics, but
also because of his lifestyle. He devoted his life totally to his
people, at the expense of all the other spheres of his life, both
political and personal - at the expense of a loyalty to the general
Arab cause, and also at the expense of Islam (when he accepted the
idea of a democratic secular state), and, of course, at the expense
of his personal life. While all of the other Palestinian leaders
established families and had careers and businesses, Arafat had, in
essence, no personal life.
The father of the Palestinian nation died during one of the most
difficult times for his people, and only future historians will be
in a position to objectively evaluate his actions.
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