Yasser Arafat (24 August 1929-11 November 2004) was the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 and the Chairman of Fatah from 1959 until his death in 2004. Arafat led the two groups in an independence struggle against Israel which included both raids against Israel as well as terrorist attacks, and Arafat was called both a terrorist and a freedom fighter; in a 1974 address to the UN General Assembly, he said, "I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand," repeating his statement two more times The icon and leader of the Palestinian struggle for independence, he served as the first President of the Palestinian Authority from 1994 to 2004 after agreeing to peace with Israel in the Oslo Accords, preceding Mahmoud Abbas. Despite making peace with Israel, he would go on to instigate the Second Intifada in 2000, and he died in 2004, with some people suspecting poisoning.
Biography[]
Arafat's interview with Thames Television
Yasser Arafat was born in Egypt to Palestinian parents. Around 1959, living in Kuwait, he formed the Fatah Palestinian liberation movement. In the mid-1960s, Fatah's guerrillas made small-scale raids across the border from Jordan into Israel, but the movement was ignored when Arab states founded the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1964. The defeat of the Arabs in the 1967 Six-Day War gave Arafat a chance to transform his status. In March 1968, Israeli forces carried out a punitive raid against a Fatah guerrilla base at Karameh in Jordan. Arafat's men stood and fought, inflicting casualties on the Israelis. The contrast with teh poor performance of the Arab states in the Six-Day War made Arafat a hero. He became leader of the PLO and was seen as the representative of the Palestinian people, but his existence was precarious, surrounded as he was by faction-ridden militant Palestinian groups and insecure Arab states. In 1970, Jordanian forces defeated Arafat's guerrillas in Black September. He shifted to Lebanon, where he narrowly survived involvement in the Lebanese Civil War in the mid-1960s, only to be driven out by an Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982. This effectively ended Arafat's career as a freedom fighter.