Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat (August 1929 – 11 November 2004), whose full name was Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini and who was known by his kunya Abu Ammar, was a Palestinian political leader born in Cairo to Palestinian parents. He co-founded the Fatah movement and led it from the late 1950s, chaired the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 until his death, and became the first President of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994. He led the Palestinians through decades of armed struggle and then into negotiation, signing the Oslo Accords and sharing the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. ^{1 2}

Arafat remains a controversial figure: Palestinians generally view him as a martyr who symbolised their national aspirations, while many Israelis regarded him as a terrorist, and Palestinian rivals, including Islamists and several PLO radicals, denounced him as corrupt or too submissive in his concessions. ¹

Arafat was born in Cairo in August 1929; the English article gives "4 or 24 August", and the Arabic article follows 4 August. His father, Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, was a Palestinian textile merchant from Gaza; Jerusalem was the family home of his mother, Zahwa Abul Saud, who died in 1933 when he was four. He was the second-youngest of seven children, and with his younger brother Fathi the only one born in Cairo. ^{1 2}

He studied civil engineering at the University of King Fuad I (later Cairo University), graduating in 1950, served as president of the General Union of Palestinian Students from 1952 to 1956, and at university embraced Arab nationalist and anti-Zionist ideas. ¹

In the 1948 war Arafat fought alongside the Muslim Brotherhood, although he did not join the organisation, mainly in the Gaza area. After the Arab defeat he moved to Kuwait in 1957 as an engineer, where with Salah Khalaf ("Abu Iyad"), Khalil al-Wazir ("Abu Jihad") and others he founded Fatah in the late 1950s — its name a reverse acronym of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement — funded by wealthy Palestinians in the Gulf, with Arafat insisting on independence from the Arab governments. On 31 December 1964 al-Assifa, Fatah's armed wing, attempted its first infiltration into Israel. ^{1 3}

After the 1967 defeat Arafat crossed into the West Bank in disguise to set up recruitment centres, was declared by Gamal Abdel Nasser to be "the leader of the Palestinians", and in 1969 was elected chairman of the PLO after Fatah joined it. Fatah's growing strength in Jordan led to military clashes with the Jordanian government in the early 1970s and the organisation's relocation to Lebanon, where it took part in the Lebanese Civil War until Israeli invasions drove it out in 1982. Based in Tunisia from 1983 to 1993, Arafat began shifting from open conflict to negotiation. ¹

Arafat directed the First Intifada from exile, in 1988 acknowledged Israel's right to exist and sought a two-state solution, and after the 1991 Madrid Conference signed the Oslo Accords with Israel. He returned to Palestine in 1994, settling in Gaza City and promoting self-governance, and engaged in the negotiations of Cairo, Taba and the 2000 Camp David Summit. Oslo brought him the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, even as Fatah's support declined with the growth of Hamas and other rivals. ¹

In his last years the Israeli army confined Arafat within his Ramallah compound, the Mukataa, for over two years. Falling ill in October 2004, he was flown to the Percy military hospital at Clamart near Paris, lapsed into a deepening coma, and was pronounced dead at 03:30 UTC on 11 November 2004, aged 75, of what French doctors called a massive hemorrhagic stroke. ^{1 2}

The cause of death remained in dispute: Russian and French investigations determined that no foul play was involved, a Swiss team concluded in 2013 that he was radiologically poisoned with polonium, and in 2015 a French prosecutor closed the inquiry, holding the polonium traces to be environmental. After a brief military funeral in Cairo, Arafat was buried "temporarily" in the Mukataa on 13 November 2004, pending reburial in East Jerusalem after the establishment of a Palestinian state; President Mahmoud Abbas unveiled a mausoleum beside his tomb in 2007. ¹

In 1990 Arafat married Suha Tawil, a Palestinian Christian who had worked as his secretary in Tunis; their daughter Zahwa, named after his mother, was born in Paris in 1995. Before his marriage he had adopted fifty Palestinian war orphans. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum. His supporters regard him as the symbol and martyr of the Palestinian national struggle. Israeli critics regarded him as a terrorist responsible for the killing of civilians, and Palestinian critics — Islamists and PLO radicals among them — accused him of corruption and of conceding too much to Israel. The articles report all of these positions, and the museum does not adjudicate between them. ¹

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