OpinionJournal - Featured Article:
"Who was Yasser Arafat? For starters, he was not a native Palestinian, although his parents were and he variously claimed to have been born in Gaza or Jerusalem. In fact, he was born and schooled in Cairo, spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent, and took no part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Nakba (catastrophe), which Palestinians regard as their formative national experience. Nor did Arafat take part in the Suez War, again despite later claims to the contrary.
But this was the period of Third World ferment--of the 'anticolonialist' Bandung politics of Indonesia's Sukarno, Algeria's Ben Bela, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Egypt's Nasser--and at the University of Cairo Arafat became a student activist and head of the Palestine Student Union. He also began developing the Arafat persona--kaffiyah, uniform, half-beard and later the holstered pistol--to compensate for his short stature and pudginess. The result, as his astute biographers Judith and Barry Rubin write, 'was his embodiment of a combination of roles: fighter, traditional patriarch, and typical Palestinian.'
Around 1960, Arafat co-founded Fatah, or 'conquest,' the political movement that would later come to be the dominant faction of the PLO. Aside from its aim to obliterate Israel, the group had no particular political vision: Islamists, nationalists, Communists and pan-Arabists were equally welcome. Instead, the emphasis was on violence: 'People aren't attracted to speeches but to bullets,' Arafat liked to say. In 1964, Fatah began training guerrillas in Syria and Algeria; in 1965, they launched their first attack within Israel, on a pumping station. But the bomb didn't detonate, and most of the other Fatah raids were also duds. From this experience, Arafat took the lesson to focus on softer targets, like civilians.
So began the era of modern terrorism: the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 murder of American diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan, the 1974 massacre of schoolchildren at Ma'alot, and so on. Yet as the atrocities multiplied, Arafat's political star rose. Partly this had to do with European cravenness in the face of the implied threat; partly with the left's secret love affair with the authentic man of violence. Whatever the case, by 1980 Europe had recognized the PLO, with Arafat as its leader, as the 'sole legitimate representative' of the Palestinian people. The U.S. held out for another decade, but eventually it too caved in to international pressure under the first Bush administration."
"Who was Yasser Arafat? For starters, he was not a native Palestinian, although his parents were and he variously claimed to have been born in Gaza or Jerusalem. In fact, he was born and schooled in Cairo, spoke Arabic with an Egyptian accent, and took no part in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the Nakba (catastrophe), which Palestinians regard as their formative national experience. Nor did Arafat take part in the Suez War, again despite later claims to the contrary.
But this was the period of Third World ferment--of the 'anticolonialist' Bandung politics of Indonesia's Sukarno, Algeria's Ben Bela, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Egypt's Nasser--and at the University of Cairo Arafat became a student activist and head of the Palestine Student Union. He also began developing the Arafat persona--kaffiyah, uniform, half-beard and later the holstered pistol--to compensate for his short stature and pudginess. The result, as his astute biographers Judith and Barry Rubin write, 'was his embodiment of a combination of roles: fighter, traditional patriarch, and typical Palestinian.'
Around 1960, Arafat co-founded Fatah, or 'conquest,' the political movement that would later come to be the dominant faction of the PLO. Aside from its aim to obliterate Israel, the group had no particular political vision: Islamists, nationalists, Communists and pan-Arabists were equally welcome. Instead, the emphasis was on violence: 'People aren't attracted to speeches but to bullets,' Arafat liked to say. In 1964, Fatah began training guerrillas in Syria and Algeria; in 1965, they launched their first attack within Israel, on a pumping station. But the bomb didn't detonate, and most of the other Fatah raids were also duds. From this experience, Arafat took the lesson to focus on softer targets, like civilians.
So began the era of modern terrorism: the 1972 Munich massacre, the 1973 murder of American diplomats in Khartoum, Sudan, the 1974 massacre of schoolchildren at Ma'alot, and so on. Yet as the atrocities multiplied, Arafat's political star rose. Partly this had to do with European cravenness in the face of the implied threat; partly with the left's secret love affair with the authentic man of violence. Whatever the case, by 1980 Europe had recognized the PLO, with Arafat as its leader, as the 'sole legitimate representative' of the Palestinian people. The U.S. held out for another decade, but eventually it too caved in to international pressure under the first Bush administration."
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