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From an early age, Muhammad Abdul
Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, the sixth child of a Palestinian spice,
incense and grocery merchant, sensed that a high destiny awaited him. It did -
but Yasser Arafat, who has died aged 75, assuredly earned it by his own
endeavours too.
By the standard of lifelong, indefatigable, and for him
courageous dedication to a cause, he deserved the title of Mr Palestine that he
held for a whole generation of his people's struggle. But by the standards of
ultimate achievement, he didn't; rarely can a "liberator" have strayed further
from the original ideals of "liberation".
Arafat was born in Cairo, where his father had settled for
business reasons, but after the death of his mother, the four-year-old was
packed off to Jerusalem to live with his uncle in a house by the Wailing Wall
and al-Aqsa mosque.
The Zionists' passionate struggle to have exclusive control of
the traditionally Muslim-administered Wall made these holy places an emotionally
charged arena for the wider struggle for Palestine unfolding under British
mandatory rule. Arafat witnessed anguished family debates about the country's
future, and saw something of the "great rebellion", the armed uprising of a
desperate and dispossessed peasantry which served as an inspiration for the
later, equally unavailing "armed struggle" of his own making.
In 1937, on his father's second marriage, he returned to
Cairo, where middle class comforts were more than offset by the emotional
troubles which an unloved stepmother spread about her. When his father married
yet again, his elder sister Inam was assigned the task of bringing up her
siblings.
The dominating role of women in Arafat's early life probably
contributed to a compulsive desire to dominate and lead himself. Inam soon
concluded that he was "not like other children in playing or in his feelings...
He gathered the Arab kids of the district, formed them into groups and made them
march and drill. He carried a stick and he used to beat those who did not obey
his commands."
Outside Palestine during "the catastrophe" - the 1948 imposing
of Israel upon some 78% of the country - he didn't directly suffer the terrors
and humiliation of mass flight and exile. But long before that he was steeping
himself in political and military affairs. By 1946, the 17-year-old Cairo
schoolboy realised that, with the Zionists pressing their armed violence, the
Palestinians would have to fight. He became a key, intrepid figure in smuggling
arms from Egypt into Palestine.
But his adolescent exploits were wasted. As Arab armies
entered Palestine, "an Egyptian officer came to my group and demanded that we
hand over our weapons ... we protested ... but it was no good ... in that moment
I knew we had been betrayed by these regimes."
He plunged into preparation for the coming struggle -
convinced that if Palestinians relied on others to decide for them, they would
never recover their homeland. They had no decision-making institutions, so he
set about creating them. He took over the stagnant Cairo-based League Of
Palestinian Students.
Tireless, wily, domineering, he exhibited another vital trait
which helped shape his career, and, through it, the history of the Middle East.
At a congress in Prague, he suddenly donned the keffiyeh, or traditional
chequered head-dress, which, as well as hiding his entirely bald pate, became
his emblem. The gesture sprang from his delight in surprise, showmanship and the
theatrical gesture. Style is often the man, and there was surely an intrinsic
affinity between this and a remarkable ability to adapt himself and his
movement, suddenly, spectacularly, to new goals and policies in a changing
strategic and political environment.
In Prague, the 26-year-old student was already advertising his
sense of destiny, referring to himself, only half-jokingly perhaps, as "Mr
Palestine". And yet, like many contemporaries, he might well have eschewed
politics altogether, and become a self-made man of a more conventional kind.
Armed with a Cairo university engineering degree, he went to Kuwait in 1958, one
of those stateless Palestinians searching for work in the remote, uncomfortable,
undeveloped, but newly oil-rich British-protected emirate. He began as a public
works department junior site engineer. Then he set up his own company,
subsequently claiming that he had been "well on the way to becoming a
millionaire".
An exaggeration, perhaps, but his brief business foray later
consolidated a carefully cultivated, if genuine, aspect of his personality. As
the leader of his people, he disposed of billions and made canny use of them as
an instrument of policy and patronage, but led the most spartan of private
lives. Similarly, for all his reputed liaisons with women, he could claim that,
at great cost in contentment, his only marriage was to his Revolution.
Helped by the funds which his dalliance with material things
procured him, he took the first, clandestine steps that led to his emergence as
one of the household names of the age: the incarnation, however flawed, of all
their aspirations to most Palestinians; of evil and the would-be destruction of
their state to most Israelis; of their most sacred, exasperating, and
unavoidable obligations to most Arab regimes; of a gradual conversion from
"terrorist" to politician, even statesman, in the eyes of an outside
world.
In Kuwait, in 1959, with his close friend Abu Jihad, he began
publishing a crudely edited magazine, Our Palestine, which, with impetuous and
uncouth vigour, lamented the Palestinian refugees' plight and the inaction of
Arab regimes, and trumpeted the ideal of the Return, with a full-scale
"population liberation war" as the only means of achieving it. Together they
formed the Fatah guerrilla organisation's first, five-man underground cell. On
January 1 1965, ill-trained, pitifully short of both weapons and funds, the
Feyadeen (those who sacrifice themselves), mounted their first trans-frontier
raid into the "Zionist gangster-state".
Arafat's guerrillas were always a much greater challenge to
the Arab regimes than they were to the Israelis. In theory, the regimes too were
preparing to liberate Palestine - but by conventional military means in their
own good time. The first "martyr" fell victim, characteristically, to the
Jordanian army. Upon his return from a raid, Arafat himself had a spell in a
Syrian jail, amid rumours that the new Syrian defence minister, one Hafiz
al-Assad, wanted to hang him and all his comrades.
These early Arafat exploits, though mere pinpricks, gave
Israel another reason to fight a war that would end with the country gaining the
remaining 22% of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - which had
eluded it in its "war of independence". Even after the shattering Arab defeat in
the 1967 war, his guerrillas never put down roots in the newly occupied
territories, let alone original Israel proper. Arafat is said to have made his
getaway across the Jordan river disguised as a mother carrying a baby, a story
that reinforced his growing reputation for the narrow escape and an uncanny
sense of survival.
After the battle of Karameh, a small Jordanian town in which,
on March 21 1968, an ill-armed band of guerrillas inflicted heavy casualties on
a vastly superior force of Israeli invaders, the Fedayeen became the Arab
world's darlings. Volunteers flocked to join it and Fatah became a state within
the Jordanian state, with Arafat as its "spokesman". Soon he became chairman of
the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), that assembly of generally docile
notables which Egypt's President Nasser had established in 1964 as a way of
keeping in check just such ardent young men as himself.
Too many fledgling "freedom-fighters" took to swaggering
around the Jordanian capital Amman, advertising their ambition to replace the
Hashemite kingdom with their own revolutionary order - and Arafat fell victim to
his sudden, meteoric success. His movement suffered from organic defects typical
of too-rapid growth - together with those of his individualistic, haphazard
leadership style. In "Black September", 1970, King Hussein unleashed his Bedouin
soldiers against him - an Arab army dealing Arafat the first of his great
reverses.
In a new Lebanese exile, exploiting that country's divisions,
he built himself a stronger power base. Yet he was now further from his natural
Palestinian environment and his goal of "complete liberation" through "armed
struggle". After the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the partial Arab military
comeback that engendered a serious bout of American peace-making, he began
edging away from "revolution till victory" towards a "doctrine of stages". He
sought what immediate gains he could from a political settlement without
renouncing the historical right to all of Palestine. It was the beginning of a
moderation that was to take further him than he could have imagined.
For a while his diplomatic successes overshadowed his military
ones. In 1974, King Hussein, his historic Arab rival, recognised the PLO as "the
sole legitimate spokesman of the Palestinian people". Two weeks later, he
addressed the United Nations general assembly at its first full-dress debate on
the "Palestine question" since 1952, becoming the first leader of a "national
liberation movement" to be so honoured.
That triumph was followed by a dreary period of diplomatic
stagnation - and more military-strategic reverses, inflicted first by Arabs,
then Israelis, then Arabs again. He took sides in the Lebanese civil war. When
his proteges, the Muslim-leftists, were getting the upper hand, Syria's
President Assad switched sides, sending in his army to help the right-wing
Christian Phalangists. The civil war's first phase ended in 1976 with the
atrocious siege and fall of the Palestinian refugee camp of Tal al-Zaatar. At an
emergency summit, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait rescued Arafat from Syrian
onslaughts.
In 1982 it was the Israelis who invaded Lebanon. In the
three-month siege of Beirut, they hunted the PLO leader in person, using F15s as
flying assassination squads while their quarry slept on the beach and in parks
to evade them. Two hundred people died when, with a laser-guided vacuum bomb,
they flattened an apartment block he had left moments before.
With the loss of his last Lebanese politico-military power
base, Tunis became his headquarters. Though the Phalangist pogrom of defenceless
refugees in the camps of Sabra and Shatila followed his exile, these were not
his personally bleakest moments. They came 15 months later after he had slipped
back into the Syrian-controlled part of Lebanon, where Assad had helped foment a
rebellion against him in the ranks of what was left of the Fatah
guerrillas.
Arafat's bold stroke failed: bombarded by Israel from the sea,
besieged by Syria, he sailed from Tripoli under a European-arranged safe
passage. "Such," prematurely declared the New York Times, "is the bizarre ending
of a movement that, for all its daring, never found a political vision."
Three years of seemingly growing irrelevance did indeed lie
ahead. And in 1985 Israeli F15s killed 73 people at his seafront Tunis
headquarters. His nose for danger had supposedly saved him yet again: he had
been out "jogging" at the time. But his political fortunes were sinking to their
lowest ebb - at Arab hands. At a 1987 summit, to his fury, Arab leaders for the
first time put something other than Palestine - the Iraq-Iran war - at the top
of their agenda.
But within weeks the great survivor was savouring a sweet
recovery. With the spontaneous, non-armed intifada as his new asset, he found
himself in a stronger position than the long, costly "armed struggle" ever
conferred on him; the stones that youngsters hurled at Israeli soldiers were
more potent than Kalashnikovs. In 1988, he solemnly proclaimed his adherence to
the "two-state" solution, involving the Palestinians' renunciation of 78% of
their original homeland. He recognised Israel's right to exist. There began a
long dreamt of US-PLO dialogue; he called it the Palestinians' "passport to the
world".
His historic offer was a delusion, a failed gamble, such was
the continuing weakness of Palestinians - and Arabs. For Israel, he was the
unregenerate terrorist; and Washington would not gainsay its protege.
To enhance his bargaining power he looked more to a militarily
powerful, increasingly militant Iraq. And when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he
backed him, a fatuous miscalculation. In American eyes he forfeited much of the
moral and diplomatic respectability he had slowly garnered. If he had taken the
other side, he would have been better placed to secure Palestine's place in the
"new world order" the US sought to bring into being.
Still, it was a measure of his personal ascendancy that he
persuaded the Palestinians to go to the 1991 Madrid peace conference, the first
time Israel and its Arab neighbours had talked to each other across a table. But
they did so at the price of historic concessions. The Israelis chose which
Palestinians they talked to: there was no place for PLO members, let alone
Arafat, in the Palestinian delegation. They also largely set the agenda; the
Americans backed their refusal to discuss anything suggesting the Palestinians
might benefit from such a fundamental 20th-century right as
"self-determination".
Madrid got nowhere. It became tempting to speculate that he
was tiring of his devotion to the revolution, when, at 62, and to the often
disapproving surprise of his people, he took a 28-year-old Palestinian Christian
wife, Suha Tawil. Tempting, but wrong. He kept up his endlessly airborne
routine. In 1992, his aircraft crash-landed during a Libyan sandstorm. The crew
sacrificed themselves to save him - testimony to the loyalty he inspired.
One Jerusalem newspaper called his escape a "heavenly
referendum"; for many Palestinians, the relief and joy was genuine enough. Yet
before long it was the Israelis who, though they could never love him, re-cast
him as an enemy who gave them much more than they had dared to hope.
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