Yasser Arafat (1929 - 2004) was a Palestinian political leader who chaired the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 until his death and served as the first president of the Palestinian National Authority from 1994. [1] Co-founder of the Fatah movement, he made the Palestinian cause a permanent item on the international agenda and shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for the Oslo Accords. [2] His long career combined armed struggle with negotiation, and remains contested: to many Palestinians the symbol of national self-determination, to Israeli and Western critics a leader who did not renounce violence or conclude a final settlement. [3]
Early life and education
Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa was born on 4 August 1929 in Cairo to Palestinian parents. He studied civil engineering at Cairo University, where he became active in Palestinian student politics. [1]
After graduating he worked as an engineer in Kuwait, and there, in the late 1950s, he was among the founders of Fatah, a movement committed to armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine independent of Arab state control. [2]
Leadership of the PLO
Fatah began operations against Israel in 1965. The Arab defeat in the 1967 war discredited the established Arab leaderships and strengthened the independent Palestinian factions; in 1969 Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, transforming it into an umbrella body under Fatah's direction. [1]
The PLO's presence in Jordan led to open conflict with the Jordanian army in 1970, known as Black September, and the movement relocated to Lebanon. There it became entangled in the Lebanese civil war, and after the Israeli invasion of 1982 Arafat and the PLO leadership were evacuated from Beirut to Tunis. [3]
In November 1974 Arafat addressed the United Nations General Assembly, telling delegates he had come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun, and the PLO was granted observer status. In 1988 the Palestine National Council declared Palestinian independence and Arafat accepted United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 and renounced terrorism, a shift that opened dialogue with the United States. [2]
Final years and death
The Camp David summit of July 2000, convened by President Bill Clinton with Arafat and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, ended without agreement, and the Second Intifada broke out that September. Israel held Arafat responsible for the violence, and from 2002 he was confined by Israeli forces to his Muqata'a compound in Ramallah. [1]
His health failed in the autumn of 2004. He was flown to a military hospital at Clamart near Paris, where he died on 11 November 2004; the cause was not conclusively established, and later investigations produced conflicting findings. He was buried at the Muqata'a in Ramallah. [3]
Legacy
Arafat welded scattered Palestinian communities into a national movement with international standing. He was succeeded as PLO chairman and Palestinian Authority president by Mahmoud Abbas, and assessments of his leadership remain sharply divided. [2]
