Yasser Arafat, who has died in Paris,
was the instantly recognisable face of Palestinian nationalism
but failed in both war and peace to achieve his dream
of an independent Palestinian state.
Arafat, a 75-year-old ex-guerrilla leader
who was elected Palestinian president in 1996, was declared
dead in a Paris hospital on Thursday, medical and Palestinian
officials said. alestinians revered him as a nationalist
symbol of their quest for statehood but many Israelis
reviled him as “the face of terror”.
To admirers, he was the Middle East’s
phoenix, braving adversity time after time to stand up
for his people’s rights, firstly in exile and for
the last decade in the West Bank.
To his detractors, he was a master of
miscalculation who “never missed an opportunity
to miss an opportunity”.
Many Israelis would never forgive him
for a string of bombings, plane hijackings and other attacks
by his Palestine Liberation Organisation in earlier decades,
nor believe that he ever really changed his ways despite
a public pledge for peace. Once a guerrilla hero across
much of the Middle East and later lauded as a historic
peacemaker, he ended his days with little power, curtailed
by Israeli wrath and facing opposition from Islamists
and others who blamed his rule for corruption.
Arafat survived plots and assassination
attempts, a plane crash, isolation by Israel in his West
Bank headquarters, and military defeats both to Israel
and to Arab forces in countries where PLO guerrillas wore
out their welcome.
He won the Nobel Peace prize along with
Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin
and Shimon Peres for interim peace accords he signed with
Israel on the
White House lawn in 1993.
But Israel and the United States lost
faith in him after the failure of a U.S.-sponsored peace
summit in July 2000 and during a now four-year- old Palestinian
uprising. The Israelis and Americans accused him of fomenting
violence and declared him irrelevant. Israel destroyed
his
Gaza headquarters, devastated much of his West Bank compound
and kept him penned in there for more than two-and-a-half
years.
Arafat denied inciting bloodshed and vowed
to press on with his struggle for Palestinian statehood
despite repeated Israeli threats to “remove”
him. At times looking ill and weak, at others bolstered
by the support of Palestinians who rallied to his side,
Arafat fended off
Israeli attempts to bypass him and remained the dominant
figure in Palestinian politics.
In guerrilla uniform to the last: Short
and bald, with the stubble of a beard on a face framed
by a chequered black and white headdress, he cut an unlikely
figure as a guerrilla leader despite the olive drab uniform
and the pistol he bore for so long on his hip. A hero
to many of his
people and a symbol of the battle for self-determination
in much of the Third World, Arafat was the incarnation
of Palestinian armed struggle for three decades.
