Who is . . . Yasser Arafat?
Angella Johnson
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has received red-carpet treatment worthy of a state president during his official visit to South Africa this week. It is a long way from the days when he was viewed as the personification of Arab evil, described by former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin as “Hitler in his lair”.
But the ageing former freedom fighter, rumoured to be suffering from Parkinson’s disease, is increasingly under pressure at home for failing to deliver nationhood.
Arafat, who has emerged as a symbol of peace in the 1990s, looks increasingly beleaguered as he battles against Israel’s intransigence over the Middle East peace deal and criticism of corruption in his Cabinet.
After staving off pressure for a year, he recently announced a Cabinet reshuffle, which critics complain left in place ministers allegedly responsible for corruption and mismanagement.
They cite the Palestinian leader’s autocratic and manipulative style of leadership, his relative lack of stature and his heavy reliance on showmanship as factors mitigating against the transformation to a democratic culture. Free and fair elections have not yet been held in strife-torn Gaza and West Bank.
Arab law-makers, elected in 1996 under the peace accords with Israel, have become increasingly frustrated at his reluctance to accept a draft Constitution that would limit the power of the Palestinian Authority, which he heads and which covers most of Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
But they have failed to carry out threats to vote “no confidence” in him – reflecting the overarching power that Arafat, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday, continues to exert.
Many Arabs blame him for accepting a deeply flawed agreement that has left almost two million Palestinians rotting in the refugee camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
Arafat is also hearing disturbing rumours that the Israeli government would prefer someone less bombastic and more intelligent than him in charge of things.
Once regarded as a comical figure in the political world, Arafat is still remembered for all those weary, hopeless proclamations he made in the early years as chair of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Sweating, shouting and sometimes weeping with emotion, he would address his Fatah guerrillas and the destitute of the Palestinian camps.
“The land of Palestine is the homeland of the Palestinians, and the homeland of the Arab nation from the ocean to the Gulf,” he announced in 1989. “The PLO offers not the peace of the weak, but the peace of Saladin.”
Edward Said, that most brilliant of Palestinian intellectuals, was driven to distraction by this seamless nonsense.
“The people loved him, of course,” Said said. “He stood on the podium and he promised them a Palestinian state and they clapped and shouted and banged their feet.”
But what on earth was he talking about? Equally confounding was his celibate “marriage to the revolution” – which in 1991 turned into marriage to a 28-year-old Palestinian Christian woman.
The PLO chair once declared Jerusalem his home town: “This is my city … This is where I was born.” But he was not born in Jerusalem, not even – as some of his comrades claimed – in the Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza, but in Cairo in 1929, the fifth of seven children of a Palestinian merchant called Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini who was killed fighting the Israelis 20 years later.
Before his father’s death, former friends say, Arafat spent hours each day studying the Qur’an. He was briefly inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood while studying engineering at Cairo University, when in a burst of nationalism and religious fervour he decided to change his name.
He abandoned his first name, Rahman, and chose “Yasser” after an Arab killed by British mandate troops in Palestine, keeping “Arafat” because it was the name of a sacred mountain outside the Muslim holy city of Mecca.
There has always been something theatrical about him. In 1953, for example, General Mohamed Neguib, the Egyptian leader, was stunned to receive a petition from the young Arafat, in three words: “Don’t forget Palestine”, written in his own blood.
The PLO leader still maintains an obsessive secrecy about his early life. His followers are supposed to remember the symbol rather than the reality, the image rather than the substance, the words rather than their meaning – which might explain the rhetoric.
Yet one cannot doubt his courage as a fighter. Arafat helped to found the first Fatah guerrilla movement, and participated in its first operation inside Israel – a typically abortive attempt to bomb a water-pumping station in Galilee.
He infiltrated Israeli army lines to organise guerrilla cells in the West Bank after Israel’s conquest of the territory in 1967, and a year later led the heroic defence of the Jordanian village of Karameh against Ariel Sharon’s commando units.
It was in his last exile, in Tunis, that things began to fall apart. The Israelis bombed his headquarters and murdered his senior lieutenants. “Do you realise that we could have killed Arafat in Beirut?” one Israeli diplomat is reported to have later bragged.
The message was clear. Arafat had been saved because he might be of use in the future. And he was. The Gulf War, the end of the Soviet Union and the United States’s new world order provided the Palestinians with the opportunity to negotiate for the first time with their enemies.
But for half-a-million Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who can never return to their pre-1948 homes in what is now Israel, it was a betrayal.
Vital Statistics
Born: 1929 in Cairo
Defining characteristics: The tablecloth on his head
Favourite people: Saddam Hussein, Bill Clinton, bodyguards, tall blondes
Least favourite people: Binyamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, barbers
Likely to say: “We are always ready to make peace”
Least likely to say: “Make mine kosher”