The Blog of Death

Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian people and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, died on Nov. 11 of complications from an unknown blood disease. He was 75.

Born Mohammed Yasser Abdul-Ra’ouf Qudwa Al-Husseini, he studied engineering at the University of King Faud I in Cairo and served as a second lieutenant in the Egyptian army. Arafat was working for a contracting firm in Kuwait in 1957 when he and several Palestinian refugees founded Fatah, a secular movement committed to the destruction of Israel and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. Fatah spent the next decade training insurgent groups in Europe, Africa and the Middle East to commit international acts of terrorism.

In the mid-1960s, Fatah joined the Palestine Liberation Organization, an umbrella group of political and paramilitary Palestinian Arabs. When Israel won the 1967 Six-Day War and began attacking Palestinian resistance groups, the PLO responded by hijacking airplanes and shooting up airports. Arafat became the supreme commander of the Palestine Liberation Army, the military arm of the PLO, in 1970 and relocated to Lebanon.

During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, a Palestinian paramilitary group known as Black September kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes. Once the international community condemned the massacre, Arafat disassociated himself and the PLO from the event and denied any involvement in its planning. He also ordered members of the PLO to stop committing acts of violence outside of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, but the attacks continued.

Arafat took his place on the world stage in 1974 when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York City and made an emotional appeal for the Palestinian cause. Within two years, the Arab heads of state declared the PLO the sole legitimate representative of all Palestinians and granted the organization full membership in the Arab League.

Arafat left Lebanon in 1982 and set up operations in Tunisia. With assistance from Iraq, he was able to shore up his organization and launch more attacks on Israel. In 1988, he accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242, which called for him to renounce "terrorism in all its forms" and agree to the establishment of an Israeli state and a Palestinian state. Five months later, however, Arafat was elected president of the proclaimed State of Palestine, an entity that laid claim to the entire region, including lands owned by Israel.

The relationship between Israelis and Palestinians remained fractious until 1994 when Arafat shook hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn and affirmed a new Mideast peace accord. The deal formally recognized Israel's right to exist and granted the Palestinian people limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The pact earned Arafat, Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres the Nobel Peace Prize. Accusations of treaty violations and years of distrust led to a new round of violence in 2000. Since then, more than 4,800 people have been killed in the region, three-quarters of them Palestinians.

Although many of Arafat's people revered him as a freedom fighter and statesman, his enemies considered him a corrupt, ineffective leader at best, and at worse, a master terrorist. In recent years, his influence was weakened by the rise of Hamas and other Palestinian Islamic jihad organizations, and his inability to stop these groups from committing acts of violence on Israel. In 2001, the Israeli military confined the Palestinian leader to his West Bank headquarters. Arafat is survived by his wife Suha Tawil, and his daughter Zahwa.

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