David Parsons, International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, November 5, 2004

Even many Palestinians have concluded that the man who for decades has embodied their struggle for national independence became the main obstacle standing in its way.

Although his official biography places his birth in Jerusalem, Yasser Arafat was actually born in Cairo, Egypt on August 24, 1929, under the name Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussein.

His father, originally from Gaza, had moved to Cairo in the early 1920s in pursuit of business deals, though some accounts claim his family was fleeing a blood feud with another Arab clan. Arafat’s mother, originally from Jerusalem, died when he was 4, and he went to live with an uncle in Jerusalem’s Old City for a while during the British Mandate era.

By 1946, Arafat was back in Egypt attending the University of Cairo, where he earned a degree in civil engineering and even undertook some Jewish studies. But he turned into a militant Palestinian nationalist after being exposed to the fierce rhetoric of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem who had spent World War II in Berlin rousing pan-Arab/Islamic support for Hitler and the Final Solution. Arafat joined the radical Muslim Brotherhood and the armed struggle against the Zionists, procuring weapons for smuggling into Palestine.

In the 1948 War of Independence, Arafat claims he entered Gaza to fight Jewish forces but that the invading Egyptian army disarmed Palestinian irregulars and sent them back to Egypt. When five Arab armies were repelled by the newly founded State of Israel in that conflict, over 400,000 Palestinians were displaced, a ‘nakba’ (disaster) Arafat has sought to reverse ever since.

In the 1950s, Arafat completed his engineering studies, was commissioned into the Egyptian army and fought in the 1956 Suez campaign against Israeli forces.

Arafat then worked as an engineer in Kuwait and profited from his business ventures. During this time, he and several Palestinian militants (Abu Jihad, Abu Iyad, Abu Said, all now deceased, along with Farouk Kaddoumi, still head of the PLO "political bureau" in Tunis) formed a movement that became known as Al Fatah, an underground organization dedicated to reclaiming Palestine by "armed struggle."

Fatah began launching guerrilla raids and terrorist attacks into Israel, and joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization, founded in East Jerusalem under Egyptian patronage in 1964 for the express purpose of eradicating the Jewish state.

After Israel emerged victorious in the Six-Day War of 1967, Arafat led a coup against PLO founding chairman Ahmed Shukiry in 1968 and radicalized the umbrella group’s agenda even further. Arafat adopted an authoritarian style of one-man rule and relocated his base to Jordan, from where the PLO and its various factions carried out a series of terror attacks, including dramatic hijackings in Europe and the Middle East.

Troubled by the PLO’s internal threat to his country, Jordan's King Hussein ordered his Bedouin forces to drive them out in the bloody 1971 confrontation known as Black September.

Arafat and the PLO then made their home in Lebanon, again defiantly setting up a state-within-a-state and continuing terror attacks against Israel, including the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Despite these tactics, in 1974 Arafat was invited to address the United Nations, which granted observer status to the PLO after his famous "gun and olive branch" speech. Arafat also won pan-Arab recognition of the PLO as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people.

In 1975, the destructive PLO presence in Lebanon plunged the nation into a protracted civil war, and in June 1982 Israel sent in troops to end cross-border attacks and drive the Palestinian "army" north towards Beirut. Surrounded in the Lebanese capital, Arafat was escorted out and allowed to continue his "revolution" from Tunisia.

Frustrated with the PLO’s inability to advance their cause, Palestinians inside the disputed territories launched an "intifada" (uprising) against Israeli rule in late 1987, prompting King Hussein to drop Jordan’s claim to the West Bank, while Arafat sought to take credit for and control of the clashes.

In 1988, Arafat renounced terrorism before a rump session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva, thereby meeting the Reagan Administration’s conditions for opening a "dialogue" with the PLO. Arafat also declared the establishment of a Palestinian state at an Arab summit in Algiers that same year, with some 70 countries recognizing its existence.

These achievements were set back, however, in 1990 when Arafat was linked to an aborted terror assault on the Tel Aviv beaches and the PLO supported the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. After the US-led coalition forced Saddam Hussein’s troops out of Kuwait, Arafat was left out of the historic Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, with Palestinian representatives from the territories attending as part of the Jordanian delegation.

Arafat directed the Palestinian delegates to stall progress in the ensuing Madrid talks, while sending envoys to Norway for secret, direct negotiations with Israel’s Labor party. This birthed the Oslo peace process in 1993, in which Israel accepted the PLO as a negotiating partner in exchange for Arafat once again renouncing terror.

In 1994, Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with his Oslo partners, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. He also made his entry into Gaza and was elected "president" of the new Palestinian Authority in 1996.

Despite his Oslo commitments to fight terror and violence, Arafat resorted once more to the "armed struggle," reaching a separate accord with Hamas in 1995 that allowed the radical Islamic militia to continue carrying out attacks against Israelis. After decades of adopting Marxist rhetoric to please his Soviet patrons, Arafat had gradually returned to his radical Islamic roots, urging Palestinians and Arabs to join the "millions of martyrs marching to Jerusalem."

As the Oslo negotiating framework reached its conclusion, US President Bill Clinton invited Arafat and Israeli leader Ehud Barak to Camp David for final status talks in July 2000. The landmark summit ended in failure, however, when Arafat rejected Barak’s offer of a Palestinian state in 97% of Judea/Samaria and all of Gaza, with its capital in eastern Jerusalem and Palestinian control over the Temple Mount. Arafat returned to Gaza to a hero’s welcome as a modern-day Saladin.

Two months later, Arafat launched a second, more violent intifada, marked by roadside ambushes, horrific suicide bombings inside Israel and rocket attacks from Gaza. As the death toll mounted on both sides, Israelis turned to Ariel Sharon, Arafat’s old military adversary in Lebanon and elsewhere, to lead them through the difficult times.

In March 2002, escalating terrorism by Fatah and Islamic militias prompted Sharon to launch Operation Defensive Shield, a sustained IDF campaign to destroy the terrorist infrastructure that had taken root under Arafat’s regime.

Eventually, Arafat was confined to his Mukata compound in Ramallah, and both Israel and U.S. President George W. Bush refused to deal with him any longer. Bush urged the Palestinian people to elect new leaders not tainted by terrorism or corruption as a pre-requisite for Palestinian statehood.

The isolated Arafat, however, has managed to block financial and security reforms and stymied progress towards peace under prime ministers Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei. Even many Palestinians have concluded that the man who for decades has embodied their struggle for national independence is now the main obstacle standing in its way.