Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa Al-Hussaeini was born on Aug. 24, 1929 in Cairo. His father was a textile merchant who was a Palestinian with some Egyptian ancestry, and his mother from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem. She died when Yasser, as he was called, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, then under British rule, which the Palestinians were opposing.
He has revealed little about his childhood, but one of his earliest memories is of British soldiers breaking into his uncle’s house after midnight, beating members of the family and smashing furniture.
After four years in Jerusalem, his father brought him back to Cairo, where an older sister took care of him and his siblings. Arafat never mentions his father and did not attend his father’s funeral in 1952.
In Cairo, before he was 17, Arafat was smuggling arms to Palestine to be used against the British and the Jews. At 19, during the war between the Jews and the Arab states, Arafat left his studies at the University of Faud I (later Cairo University) to fight against the Jews in the Gaza area.
The defeat of the Arabs and the establishment of the state of Israel left him in such despair that he applied for a visa to study at the University of Texas. Recovering his spirits and retaining his dream of an independent Palestinian homeland, he returned to Faud University to major in engineering but spent most of his time as leader of the Palestinian students.
He did manage to get his degree in 1956, worked briefly in Egypt, then resettled in Kuwait, first being employed in the department of public works, next successfully running his own contracting firm. He spent all his spare time in political activities, to which he contributed most of the profits. In 1958 he and his friends founded Al-Fatah, an underground network of secret cells, which in 1959 began to publish a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel. At the end of 1964 Arafat left Kuwait to become a full-time revolutionary, organizing Fatah raids into Israel from Jordan.
It was also in 1964 that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established, under the sponsorship of the Arab League, bringing together a number of groups all working to free Palestine for the Palestinians.
The Arab states favored a more conciliatory policy than Fatah’s, but after their defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, Fatah emerged from the underground as the most powerful and best organized of the groups making up the PLO, took over that organization in 1969 when Arafat became the chairman of the PLO executive committee. The PLO became an independent nationalist organization, based in Jordan.
Arafat developed the PLO within Jordan with its own military forces before building a similar organization in Lebanon, from where he was driven out by an Israeli military invasion. He kept the organization alive, however, by moving its headquarters to Tunis. He was a survivor himself, escaping death in an airplane crash, surviving any assassination attempts by Israeli intelligence agencies, and recovering from a serious stroke.
His life was one of constant travel, moving from country to country to promote the Palestinian cause, always keeping his movements secret, as he did any details about his private life. Even his marriage to Suha Tawil, a Palestinian half his age, was kept secret for some 15 months. She had already begun significant humanitarian activities at home, especially for disabled children, but the prominent part she took in the public events in Oslo was a surprise for many Arafat-watchers. They have a daughter, Zahwa, named after Arafat’s mother.
The period after the expulsion from Lebanon was a low time for Arafat and the PLO. Then the intifada movement strengthened Arafat by directing world attention to the difficult plight of the Palestinians. In 1988 came a change of policy. In a speech at a special United Nations session held in Geneva, Switzerland, Arafat declared that the PLO renounced terrorism and supported “the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors”.
The prospects for a peace agreement with Israel now brightened. After a setback when the PLO supported Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991, the peace process began in earnest, leading to the Oslo Accords of 1993.
This agreement included provision for the Palestinian elections which took place in early 1996, and Arafat was elected President of the Palestine Authority. Like other Arab government in the area, however, Arafat’s governing style tended to be more dictatorial than democratic. — Nobel Lectures, Peace 1991-1995.
(The place of Arafat’s birth is disputed. Besides Cairo, other sources mention Jerusalem and Gaza as his birthplace.)
