His brothers are Jamal, Mustafa, and Fathi, and his sisters
are In‘am, Yusra, and Khadija; through his father, he also had a
half-brother, Muhsin, and two half-sisters, Mirvet and Madiha. His wife
is Suha al-Tawil, and his only child is his daughter, Zahwa.

Mystery surrounds his exact date and place of birth though it is
probable that he was born in Cairo on 24 August 1929, to a father from
Gaza who worked in commerce in Egypt and a mother from Jerusalem. He was
four years old when his mother died, so his father sent him to live
with his uncle Salim Abu al-Su‘ud in Jerusalem; four years later, he
returned to Cairo.

In 1946, while still a student at the Faruq I secondary school in
Cairo, he met the Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, head of the
Arab Higher Committee in Palestine. Following the UN Partition
Resolution on 29 November 1947 and the outbreak of violence between
Arabs and Jews, Arafat joined a group that worked under the direction of
the Arab Higher Committee, collecting weapons and mines left behind in
the western desert by the warring armies in World War II. They bought
them to equip the Army of the Holy War [Jaysh al-jihad al-muqaddas] led by Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini.

When he finished his secondary school education in 1948, he enrolled
in the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Fuad I University (later
University of Cairo). During his freshman year he volunteered to fight
for a few months with the Army of the Holy War in Gaza.

In 1949 he returned to the Faculty of Engineering in Cairo and in
1951 took part in establishing the Palestinian Students League, whose
members included Salim al-Za‘nun (Abu al-Adib) and Salah Khalaf (Abu
Iyad), later to become prominent leaders in Fatah.

At the beginning of the 1952 academic year he was elected president
of the Palestinian Students League, a position he retained until he
graduated as a civil engineer in 1956. During a visit to Gaza in 1955 he
met Khalil al-Wazir (Abu Jihad), who led small groups of guerrillas in
the Gaza Strip.

At the end of October 1956, and following the Tripartite Aggression
against Egypt, he joined the Egyptian army as a reserve officer in the
engineering unit stationed in Port Said.

In 1957, he worked for a short period as an engineer in the Egyptian
Cement Company in the town of al-Mahalla al-Kubra before travelling to
Kuwait, where he worked first as an engineer in the Ministry of Public
Works and then partnered with an Egyptian businessman to found a
contracting company. 

In the autumn of 1957 he founded (with Khalil al-Wazir, who had
joined him in Kuwait) the nucleus of the first Palestinian guerrilla
movement. On 10 October 1959 he took part in a meeting held in a Kuwait
apartment and attended by a number of young Palestinian men who had come
from several Arab countries, in founding the Movement for the National
Liberation of Palestine (which became known by its reverse acronym,
Fatah). The movement adopted as its mission the liberation of Palestine
through armed struggle and a war of popular liberation that was to begin
from bases inside Arab countries adjacent to Israel and from other
bases inside Israel itself; it would not rely on governmental action and
regular Arab armies. The entire Palestinian people had become
thoroughly disillusioned that any justice could be expected from the
West, the UN, or the Arab countries themselves.

Arafat and Fidel Castro

Following Israel’s sudden attack on Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and its
occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Golan
Heights, and the Sinai in June 1967, Arafat pushed Fatah to start armed
resistance in the West Bank at the end of August, and he infiltrated
Israeli lines in order to organize secret cells in the occupied
territories. As the number of guerrilla operations originating from
Transjordan and Israeli retaliation attacks grew, Palestinian
guerrillas, led by Arafat and supported by the Jordanian army, managed
on 21 March 1968 to repel an Israeli attack on the town of al-Karama in
the Jordan Valley and to inflict severe losses on the Israeli army. This
battle turned the armed Palestinian resistance into a mass movement
bringing in tens of thousands of guerrilla fighters and supporters, both
Palestinians and non-Palestinians. Although the Israelis succeeded in
their goal of destroying the fedayeen base at al-Karama, the Palestinian
and Jordanian military performance represented an Arab victory,
especially considering the humiliating collapse the previous year of
several Arab armies combined in a matter of days, if not hours.

With the ascent of the Palestinian resistance organizations and their
success in having their representatives control the Palestine National
Council (PNC), the fifth session of the PNC, held in Cairo in February
1969, elected Arafat chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO. He
succeeded Yahya Hammouda, who had replaced Ahmad al-Shuqairi as an
interim chairman in December 1967. Arafat remained in this post until
his death in 2004.

As the Palestinian military and political presence ended in Jordan
following the violent clashes that erupted between the guerrillas and
the Jordanian army in September 1970, an inevitable consequence of the
conflict between “raison d’état” and popular war of liberation. Arafat
moved to Lebanon, which became the base of his political and military
leadership. Palestinian resistance organizations had already gained
ground there.

In Lebanon, supporters and opponents of the Palestinian guerilla
presence were more and more deeply divided. Palestinian organizations
had gained control of the refugee camps in Lebanon and
Palestinian-Israeli operations had escalated in the South. The Beirut
government tried to reconcile the Lebanese political forces among
themselves and with the Palestinian leadership. It signed with Arafat
what was known as the Cairo Agreement in early November 1969, to
regulate Palestinian civilian and political presence in the country and
guerrilla activity across the border with Israel. Complicating matters
was a constant change in Syrian calculations and policies toward
Lebanese-Palestinian relations. Israel exploited the situation to the
full, launching continuous and horrific strikes against Lebanese towns
and villages in the South, alleging retaliation for guerrilla attacks
originating in Lebanon. Following all these developments, civil war
broke out in Lebanon in April 1975, with Arafat leading the Joint
Forces, which included PLO fighters and their allies in the Lebanese
National Movement.

In the meantime, the PLO under Arafat leadership became a state
within the Lebanese state, with its own institutions, administration,
offices, and external relations. When Israel decided to liquidate the
Palestinian military, administrative, and political presence in Lebanon,
its army invaded Lebanon and laid siege to Beirut in summer 1982.
Arafat led Palestinian and Lebanese forces to resist the invasion,
together with units of the Syrian army. On 30 August 1982, and following
an agreement brokered by US envoy Philip Habib, Arafat left Beirut with
his comrades and supporters aboard a ship raising the Greek flag and
protected by French and US warships. He moved to Tunis, making it his
new headquarters.

Building on the launch of the intifada in the occupied West Bank and
Gaza Strip in December 1987, which raised the banner of freedom and
independence, the PNC adopted the Declaration of Independence at its 15
November 1988 meeting in Algiers. The Declaration reads in part:

“By virtue of natural, historical and legal rights, and the
sacrifices of successive generations who gave of themselves in defense
of the freedom and independence of their homeland;

In pursuance of Resolutions adopted by Arab summit conferences and
relying on the authority bestowed by international legitimacy as
embodied in the resolutions of the United Nations Organization since
1947;

[…] The Palestine National Council, in the name of God, and in the
name of the Palestinian Arab people, hereby proclaims the establishment
of the State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital
Jerusalem (Al-Quds Ash-Sharif).”

During its meeting on 31 March – 2 April 1989 in Tunis, the PLO
Central Council elected Arafat President of the State of Palestine.

Since it was founded, the PLO had been shunned by the United States,
which labeled it a “terrorist” organization in deference to Israel. To
commence a dialogue with the PLO, the US imposed as a precondition the
PLO’s acceptance of Resolution 242 (1967), which included an implicit
recognition of Israel although the resolution itself makes no mention of
Palestine and the Palestinians. Under immense US pressure, Arafat was
finally forced at the end of 1988 to submit and to accept that
resolution.

Arafat with Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin

Immediately after the Madrid Conference, negotiations were pursued in
Washington, the Israeli delegation getting its instructions from a
rightist Israeli government under Yitzhak Shamir, and the Palestinian
delegation directly from Arafat. As the Washington talks were leading
nowhere and with the electoral victory of the Israeli Labor Party under
Yitzhak Rabin in Summer 1992, secret negotiations were launched in
January 1993 in Oslo between the PLO and an Israeli delegation, with
also the full knowledge and guidance of Arafat. The Oslo track led to an
agreement signed in Washington on 13 September 1993. It provided for a
five-year transitional period and the creation of a Palestinian
Authority (with a number of severe constraints and restrictions that
many Palestinians and non-Palestinian Arabs greatly decried), and it
stipulated that final status talks would be concluded within five years.
The agreement allowed Arafat to return to the Gaza Strip on 1 July
1994. In December 1994, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize jointly
with Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

In January 1996, Arafat was elected president of the Palestinian
Authority; the only other contender was Samiha Khalil, founder of the
In‘ash al-Usra Society.

Following the failure of the Camp David meetings in July 2000, which
brought Arafat together with Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and was
hosted by US President Bill Clinton, a failure mainly caused by Israeli
designs on the Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Sharif), Arafat was the
target of a concentrated US-Israeli campaign, which held him responsible
for the failure to arrive at a final settlement of the Palestine-Israel
conflict.

The second intifada began in late September 2000, and with it the
Israeli campaign targeting Arafat grew in intensity. On 3 December 2001,
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who succeeded Ehud Barak, ordered
his troops, with the full approval of US President George W. Bush, to
lay siege to Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. Bush began openly to
call for Arafat’s removal from the leadership of the Palestinian
Authority and the PLO.

Arafat had since his youth devoted all his time and energy to the
cause of Palestine. When he became chairman of the PLO, he lived a
simple and ascetic life that was intertwined with the history of the
Palestinian national movement. Under his leadership, the PLO changed
course: from calling for the liberation of the entire soil of Palestine
to acceptance (in 1974) to liberate only part of the soil of Palestine;
from the call for a democratic Palestinian state where Arabs and Jews
live together, to acceptance in March 1977 of an independent Palestinian
state on lands vacated by Israeli occupation forces; from armed
struggle as the sole path to liberation to acceptance, in November 1988,
of negotiations as a way to arrive at a political settlement leading to
the rise of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza
Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Since 1967, Arafat was the target of many assassination attempts, the
most dangerous being that which took place during the Israeli siege of
Beirut in the summer of 1982 and the other on 1 October 1985, when
Israeli warplanes bombed his headquarters in Tunis.

An official funerary ceremony was conducted at a French military
airbase attended by French premier Jean-Pierre Raffarin. His body was
then flown to Cairo where another official ceremony was held with
several foreign political representatives before being finally flown to
Ramallah, where 100,000 Palestinian men and women were waiting to
receive the body. Arafat was laid to rest at his headquarters in
Ramallah, known as the muqata‘a.

In 2012 his body was disinterred to test for Polonium poisoning.
Swiss experts considered poisoning to be probable, but Russian and
French experts attributed his death to old age. 

With information from palquest.org

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