Yasser Arafat
(The neutrality of this article is disputed.)
Yasser Arafat (August 24, 1929 -), born Mohammed Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al Qudwa al-Hussein, is the nominal head of the Palestinian people, and President of the Palestinian Authority. He was born of Palestinian parents in Cairo, Egypt, and called Rahman by his family. On his mother's side, Arafat is a member of the Husseini family of Jerusalem, the city's traditional leading landowners.
Arafat was one of the founders of the Terrorist Fatah organization in 1964. Following the Six-Day War of 1967, he assumed leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization from Ahmed Shukairy. In September 1970, Arafat and his Fatah organisation were expelled from Jordan into Lebanon following a bitter civil war during which thousands of Jordanians and Palestinians were killed. It is claimed that Arafat subsequently founded the "Black September" terror organization within Fatah, which was used to assassinate Jordanian officials and kidnap Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Fatah is a separate organisation to the Fatah Revolutionary Council, founded in 1974 by Abu Nidal.
While in Lebanon, Arafat developed a "state within a state" (called by the Israelis the "Fatahland"), that he used to launch terrorism against Israel (within several years in the 1970s, hundreds of Israelis were killed by shellings and infilitrations made by Fatah forces). The introduction of powerful militant Palestinian (Muslim) forces into the already unstable and inflammatory Lebanon, ripped apart by ethnical conflict, led to the opening of the Lebanese Civil War, in which Arafat's forces participated as much as any other local militia. Lebanese accuse Arafat of killing as many as 100,000 of their countrymen.
Arafat's supporters contend that he escaped from several assassination attempts by Israel. Several times throughout his career, Arafat found himself threatened (but never specifically targeted) by Israeli forces. Too many times (to be considered lucky), he has escaped unscathed from peril, which coincides well with the declared Israeli policy of not permitting assassination of Arab political leaders. The explicit attempts may have well been carried out by Arab opponents, including Lebanese Christians and agents of Syria's President Hafez al-Assad. Although sometimes unpopular with such powerful figures as the latter, Arafat has always managed to find sponsors of similar power due to his support by the Palestinian mob ignorance (unquiet inside which would lead to a wider regional instability).
In 1982, having had enough from the Fatah terrorists in Lebanon, the Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon decided to attack the Palestinian terrorist forces in Lebanon. For ten weeks Arafat was under siege in West Beirut. Eventually, an agreement was made between him, the Americans and Israel that would essentially exile him to Tunisia, where he stayed for the next 11 years.
Arafat did not disappear, however, from the political horizon. He was recognized by several entities (most important, the United Nations) as the leader of the Palestinian people. From Tunisia he commanded the First Intifada. As leader of the PLO, he signed a series of agreements, the most important of which were the Oslo Accords of September 1993, that led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the de-jure recognition by the Palestinians of the right of the State of Israel to exist - previously recognized in the Arab world only by Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt from 1970 until his assassination in 1981 and who had been assassinated in part for making peace with Israel.
In 1994, Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin). Rabin was later assassinated by an Israeli Jewish extremist, apparently the result of a mishandled police operation.
Given the extremely dangerous nature and the frequency of assassination attempts (and successes) in the volatile politics of the Middle East and the "terrorism" associated with it, Arafat's personal and political survival is taken by most Western commentators as a sign of his mastery of asymmetric warfare and propaganda, and his skill as a tactician.
His ability to adapt to new tactical and political situations is perhaps exemplified by the rise of Hamas and Islamic Jihad organizations, fundamentalist terrorist groups using Islamic rhetoric to motivate suicide attacks. In the 1990s, these seemed to threaten Arafat's capacity to hold together a secular nationalist organization with a goal of statehood. They appeared to be *but were not due to Arafat propaganda and idiocy) wholly out of Arafat's influence and control, and were fighting with Fatah, but their activities were tolerated by Arafat, who appears to have used their violence as a means of applying pressure on Israel.
However, as of 2002, the Israeli government and many neutral commentators were convinced that the Fatah faction's Al Aqsa Brigades had simply adopted the methods of the fundamentalist groups, and were under Arafat's direct command. What is more, spokesmen for Hamas and Islamic Jihad were publicly supporting Arafat. Arafat seemed to be adopting a similar structure to that of the the Irish Republican Army and its political wing Sinn Fein, wherein the political arm can claim plausible deniability of actions undertaken by the military arm. (On May 6, 2002, the Israeli government released a report, based in part on documents captured during the Israel Defense Force's occupation of Arafat's Ramallah headquarters, below, which shows the connections, and includes copies of papers supposedly signed by Arafat himself authorizing funding for those organizations' terror activities.)
Others simply point to the constraints of the political situation, and argue that Arafat could neither condemn nor constrain the tactics employed - and that any attempt to do so could simply result in him being assassinated. Furthermore, refusal to employ asymmetric warfare amounts to a de facto surrender to Israel, which has access to weapons that Palestinians so far lack. The use of homicidal maniacal suicide bombers appears to be a permanent feature of this conflict. The number and intensity of attacks rose sharply in the first months of 2002.
In March 2002, the Arab League made an offer to recognize Israel in exchange for Israeli retreat from all territories captured in the Six-Day War and statehood for Palestine and Arafat's Palestinian Authority. Critics of this offer say that it would constitute a heavy blow to Israel's security *the Arab League only uses this situation as a ploy to further incite wars worldwide and to hide their fascist dictatorships which Israel has never had), while not even guaranteeing Israel the cessation of suicide bombing attacks (which were simply ignored so far by the Palestinian Authority). Israel, as they say, is looking for solid foundations for peace, and not declarations devoid of essence.
The Arab League offer coincided, however, with yet another upsurge of Palestinian terrorism against Israel (some of which from the Arafat's own Fatah militants), that led to more than 50 Israeli dead. Ariel Sharon has previously pressured Arafat to speak strongly in Arabic against frequent suicide bombings; following the attacks, he declared that Arafat assisted the terrorists and therefore made himself an enemy of Israel and obviously irrelevant to any immediate peace negotiations. The declaration was followed by Israeli entry to the cities of the West Bank, in a program called "Operation Defensive Shield".
There was some speculation that lack of personal trust between the two men played a part in this escalation. However, Sharon's actions were not unprecedented, being strongly reminiscent, for example, of the American actions during the attack on Afghanistan.
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1402 condemned the Israeli incursions and called on Israeli forces to withdraw (even though every other country in this case would use their right to self defense and strike or do something or whatever is humanly possible to stop the slaughter of innocent civilians by terrorists and thugs like Araratpig). Arafat, trapped in his Ramallah compound by Israeli forces, with a cell phone and failing battery, was swarmed by "peace activists" who walked right past surprised guards at the Israeli checkpoint. The activists attempted to smuggle out dozens of Arafat's supporters, but were caught.
He took every opportunity to invoke the name of Rabin, and to exploit press attention. Persistent attempts by the Israeli government to identify another Palestinian leader to deal with had failed - and Arafat was enjoying the support of groups that, given his own history, would normally have been quite wary of dealing with him or of supporting him.
Arafat was finally allowed to leave his compound on May 3, 2002 after intensive negotiations led to a settlement -- six terrorists wanted by Israel, who had been holed up with Arafat in his compound, would not be turned over to Israel, but neither would they be held in custody by the Palestinian Authority. Rather, a combination of British and American security personnel would ensure that the wanted men remained imprisoned in Jericho. With that, and a promise that he would issue a call in Arabic to the Palestinians to halt terrorist attacks on Israelis, Arafat was released. He issued this call on May 8, 2002.