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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Arafat, reviled and revered, is dead


 Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died today, salutes while at his compound in the West Bank town of Ramallah in this Aug. 10 photo.
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Gregory Katz Dallas Morning News

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, the complex and controversial leader of the Palestinian cause who battled the idea and the fact of Israel for more than five decades, was pronounced dead early today at a French military hospital outside Paris. He was 75.

A one-time guerrilla leader, Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 after signing a peace deal with Israel, an agreement which later collapsed. He had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and other ailments in recent years. Known to be ill for the past three weeks, Arafat had been thought to have flu, stomach cancer and later – apparently accurately – a large gallstone.

For the Middle East, his death leaves uncertainty, and perhaps chaos, in its wake.

For Palestinians, he provided a symbol of continuity, linking the era before the state of Israel was formed – when most of the region was under British control – to the modern period when Israel became one of the most formidable military powers in the Middle East.

He spent most of his life in exile, jetting between world capitals in private planes for seemingly endless meetings and consultations. Arafat, with his familiar checked headscarf, was one of the most easily recognizable political leaders in the world, although he lacked a fixed address and a formal position as a chief of state.

His goal was always the same – to establish an independent Palestinian state to redress the loss of Palestinian land to the Israelis. To millions of Palestinians spread throughout the world, he seemed to represent the best, and at times the only, hope of regaining the land and dignity seized by Israel.

He was reviled by many Israelis, revered by masses of Palestinians and alternately courted and scorned by frustrated Western and Arab leaders who found him wily and unpredictable but possessing impressive staying power and perseverance.

Like a cat with nine lives, he survived a plane crash, assassination attempts by both the Israelis and rivals within the Palestinian camp, and near the end of his life he endured a long confinement at the hands of the Israelis, who ringed his office compound with tanks and troops.

Arafat was capable of brilliant tactical moves and also made stunning errors in judgment, including his decision to support Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. That blunder briefly made him a pariah in the West and cost him vital financial support from the Gulf states.

The future Palestinian leader was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1929, to parents who could have had deep roots in Palestine. His father was a merchant from the Gaza Strip, and his mother also came from the area.

After his mother died of natural causes in 1933, young Yasser and his infant brother were sent to live with relatives in Palestine, which the British controlled. He became steeped then in the emerging struggle between Jews and Arabs for control of the land that would become Israel.

He was brought back to Cairo, the urban center of the region, to attend high school and King Fouad University (now Cairo University), where he studied engineering.

But his were hardly ordinary college days. The young Arafat became an outspoken student leader, heading various radical organizations, and he interrupted his studies in 1948 to volunteer to join Arab military units trying to prevent the establishment of the Israeli state.

Egyptian authorities intervened to prevent the volunteers from reaching the front lines, and Arafat returned to the university, watching helplessly as Israel beat back the Arab armies to gain control of a larger section of Palestine, leaving a large Palestinian refugee population that continues to this day.

Arafat served in the Egyptian Army in 1951, learning basic military tactics, and then became active with the Muslim Brotherhood, an underground religious-based organization perceived as a threat by the Egyptian government. He was arrested and jailed several years later by Egyptian leader Gamel Abdel Nasser.

Released from prison in 1957, he went to the Gulf state of Kuwait to work in engineering. In Kuwait, he maintained close ties with other Palestinians, and in 1959 he helped found the al-Fatah organization with the goal of using armed force to topple the state of Israel.

The Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, without Arafat’s initial involvement, but the liberation group was not able to prevent Israel’s stunning victory in the Six-Day War, which in 1967 gave the Jewish state control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights.

Al-Fatah, then under Arafat’s control, eventually joined the PLO, and Arafat took control of the PLO as chairman in 1969, giving him a powerful military and propaganda platform with which to challenge Israel.

It was in the coming years that he would come to the world’s attention, first when Palestinian guerrillas made international headlines during the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Masked gunmen from a PLO splinter group ushered in the era of modern terrorism by seizing and killing nine Israeli athletes.

In 1974, Arafat was denounced by much of the world press when he broke protocol by addressing the U.N. assembly in New York while carrying a pistol.

He operated from a base in Beirut in much of the 1970s but was ousted by Israeli forces in 1982. Their advance was coordinated by Arafat’s longtime nemesis Ariel Sharon in his capacity as Israeli defense minister. He was then forced to leave Lebanon in favor of a base in Tunisia by Syrian-backed PLO dissidents.

The long battle with Israel took a new form in late 1987 with the start of the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The confrontations were organized in part by PLO operatives.

A year later, Arafat surprised the world once again when the PLO officially renounced terrorism as a tactic and recognized Israel’s right to exist. This change in policy helped set the stage for the secret negotiations that led to the signing of the Oslo peace agreement in 1993.

The 1993 landmark agreement, sealed on the White House lawn when Arafat shook hands with Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin and President Bill Clinton, gave Arafat the unlikely mantle of international peacemaker.

Muhammed el-Nawawy, a University of West Florida professor who has written two books about the conflict, said this was Arafat’s greatest achievement. He said the Palestinian leader was a cherished symbol to his people, even though he was not well understood in the Western world because of his early days as a guerrilla fighter.

The peace deal allowed Arafat to return in triumph to the Gaza Strip in 1994, the year that he won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Rabin and Shimon Peres, Rabin’s foreign minister.

A hopeful period followed in which the Israeli Defense Forces pulled back from much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as the fledgling Palestinian Authority established control, with Arafat as its elected chief.

The peace process floundered badly, however, when the two sides could not reach a “final status agreement” on key remaining issues, including the future of Jerusalem, the fate of many Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and the difficult question of whether Palestinian refugees could return to live inside Israel.

The Israelis and Palestinians came close to a final agreement during the waning days of the Clinton administration, but after talks deadlocked a new round of deadly violence broke out.

The confrontations known as the second intifada started in 2000 with Palestinian youths throwing stones at Israeli soldiers – as in the first intifada – but quickly evolved into something much more lethal.

When Palestinian radicals launched a series of suicide bomb attacks in major Israeli cities, Israeli leaders responded with large-scale military raids on West Bank towns and cities that had earlier been placed under Palestinian control.

Israeli leaders, backed by U.S. officials, accused Arafat of sponsoring the terror attacks on Israeli civilians, although some of his defenders in the Palestinian community said he had lost the ability to control youthful members of extremist groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

When radicals from the al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade linked directly to Arafat’s al-Fatah movement launched a number of suicide bomb attacks in 2002, Israeli leaders declared him an enemy of the state. Israeli tanks bashed in the walls of his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah in a dramatic challenge to his authority.

It was during this time that Arafat said he would prefer martyrdom to exile, though his wife and daughter moved back to Paris.

The Israelis kept him confined in his office for several months, threatening to deport him, but Arafat – rallying international support one more time – held on until the Israelis loosened their siege.

But the Palestinian leader was effectively confined to his Gaza City offices until his illness became acute last month, when the Israelis allowed him to be transported to a medical hospital in France Oct. 29.