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| Yasser Arafat
Yasser Arafat :
Biography
Born in Cairo in 1929, Yasser Arafat
was named chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization 40 years later.
From this post, he was at the forefront of years of violence, border disputes,
and the Palestinian liberation movement, all centering on neighboring Israel.
Arafat signed a self-governing pact with Israel in 1991, at the Madrid
Conference, and together with Israeli leaders made several attempts at lasting
peace soon after, notably through the Oslo Accords (1993) and the Camp David
Summit of 2000. Stemming from the Oslo Accords, Arafat and Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres shared the Nobel Peace Prize,
but the terms were never implemented. Arafat ceded his PLO chairman post in
2003, and died in Paris in 2004. In November 2013, Swiss researchers released a
report containing evidence suggesting that his death was the result of
poisoning.
Early Years
Born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1929, Yasser
Arafat was sent to live with his mother’s brother in Jerusalem when his mother
died in 1933. After spending four years in Jerusalem, Arafat returned to Cairo
to be with his father, with whom Arafat never had close ties (Arafat did not
attend his father's 1952 funeral).
In Cairo, while still a teenager,
Arafat began smuggling weapons to Palestine to be used against the Jews and
British, the latter of which had an administrative role in the Palestinian
lands. Playing a part that he would inhabit his entire life, Arafat left the
University of Faud I (later Cairo University) to fight against the Jews during
the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, which resulted in the establishment of the state of
Israel when the Jews prevailed.
Fatah
In 1958, Arafat and some associates
founded Al-Fatah, an underground network that advocated armed resistance
against Israel. By the mid-1960s, the group had congealed enough that Arafat
left Kuwait, becoming a full-time revolutionary and staging raids into Israel.
The year1964 was seminal for Arafat,
marking the founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which
brought together a number of groups working toward a free Palestinian state.
Three years later, the Six-Day War erupted, with Israel once again pitted
against the Arab states. Once again, Israel prevailed, and in the aftermath
Arafat’s Fatah gained control of the PLO when he became the chairman of the PLO
executive committee in 1969.
The PLO
Moving operations to Jordan, Arafat
continued to develop the PLO. Eventually expelled by King Hussein, however,
Arafat moved the PLO to Lebanon, and PLO-driven bombings, shootings, and
assassinations against Israel and its concerns were commonplace events, both
locally and regionally, notably with the 1972 murder of Israeli athletes at the
Munich Olympic Games. The PLO was driven out of Lebanon in the early 1980s, and
Arafat soon after launched the intifada ("tremor") protest
movement against Israel occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The
intifada was marked by continual violence in the streets with Israeli
retaliation.
The year 1988 marked a change for
Arafat and the PLO, when Arafat gave a speech at the United Nations declaring
that all involved parties could live together in peace. The resulting peace
process led to the Oslo Accords of 1993, which allowed for Palestinian
self-rule and elections in the Palestinian territory (in which Arafat was
elected president). (Around this time, in 1990, Arafat, at 61 years of age,
married a 27-year-old Palestinian Christian, remaining married until his dying
day.)
In 1994, Arafat and Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin all received the Nobel Prize
for Peace, and the following year they signed a new agreement, Oslo II, which
laid the foundation for a string of peace treaties between the PLO and Israeli,
including the Hebron Protocol (1997), the Wye River Memorandum (1998), the Camp
David Accords (2000) and the "roadmap for peace" (2002).
Later Years
Regardless of treaties and the
best-laid plans between the two parties, peace was always elusive, and, after
issuing a second intifada in 2000 and the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, Arafat was confined by Israel to his headquarters in Ramallah.
In October 2004, Arafat fell ill with
flulike symptoms and, his situation worsening, was transported to Paris,
France, for medical treatment. He died there the following month, on November
11.
In the years since his death,
conspiracy theories regarding the true cause of Arafat's demise have abounded,
many holding Israel responsible. In November 2013, researchers in Switzerland
released a report revealing that tests conducted on Arafat's remains and some
of his belongings support the widely held thoery that the late Egyptian leader
was poisoned, with evidence from the report suggesting that radioactive
polonium—a highly toxic substance—had been used. In an interview with the Reuters news
agency published on November 6, 2013, Suha Arafat, Yasser Arafat's widow,
spoke about the recent findings: "This has confirmed all our doubts,"
she stated. "It is scientifically proved that he didn't die a natural
death, and we have scientific proof that this man was killed."
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