Arafat, Yasir

▪ 2005

Muhammad ʿAbd al-Raʾuf al-Qudwah al-Husayni 

      Palestinian leader (b. Aug. 24?, 1929, Cairo, Egypt?—d. Nov. 11, 2004, Paris, France), was credited with creating the Palestinian nationalist movement, but he never wholly cut his ties to terrorism and failed in the goal of establishing an independent state. By the age of 17, he was smuggling arms to Palestinians fighting nascent Israel. In 1947 he began studies at Cairo University; although his education was interrupted by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948–49, he graduated with a degree in civil engineering in 1956. He served in the Egyptian army in the Suez War (1956) and subsequently worked in Kuwait. In the late 1950s, with others, he founded the organization Fatah, which by 1969 had gained dominance within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Arafat became chairman of the PLO, which was headquartered in Jordan until it came to pose a threat to the government and was driven out in 1971. Arafat fled to Lebanon, and in 1974 he addressed the UN to demand the establishment of a Palestinian state. When in 1982 the Israelis expelled the PLO from Lebanon, Arafat moved his headquarters to Tunisia, although attacks against Israel continued. In 1988 Arafat accepted a UN resolution calling for recognition of Israel, and he formally renounced terrorism. Talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis culminated in 1993 in the Oslo Accords, which provided for mutual recognition and a transition to Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and in Gaza. The following year Arafat shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with two Israelis, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Arafat returned to Palestinian soil, and in 1996 he was elected president of the provisional Palestinian Authority, but his administration was charged with being dictatorial and corrupt. By 2000 further talks had led to an agreement that included the transfer of some 95% of the West Bank and all of Gaza to the Palestinians and to divided control of Jerusalem, an offer Arafat eventually rejected. After a second intifadah (uprising) began in September 2000, and with Arafat unable or unwilling to control militants within the Palestinian movement, the Israelis confined him to his compound in Ram Allah, where he remained until he was taken to Paris for medical treatment in the month before his death.

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