Arafat, Yasser, real name Mohammed Abed Ar'ouf Arafat 1929-
Palestinian resistance leader

Yasser Arafat was born in Jerusalem. He was educated at Cairo University (1952-56), where he was leader of the Palestinian Students' Union. He co-founded the Al Fatah resistance group in 1956 and began work as an engineer in Kuwait. Three years later he began contributing to a new Beirut magazine, Filastinuna ('Our Palestine'), which expressed the anger and frustration of Palestinian refugees, who felt betrayed and neglected by the Arab regimes.

In 1964 the Arab states founded the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a body consisting of many factions that were often in disagreement with one another. Within five years, Arafat's Al Fatah group had gained control of the organization, and he became its acknowledged (though not universally popular) leader. He skilfully managed the uneasy juxtaposition of militancy and diplomacy, and gradually gained world acceptance of the PLO; the organization was formally recognized by the United Nations in 1974, and Arafat addressed its General Assembly in the same year. Under his leadership, the PLO's original aim - to create a secular democratic state over the whole of the pre-war Palestine - was modified to one of establishing an independent Palestinian state in any part of Palestine from which Israel would agree to withdraw.

In the 1980s the growth of factions within the PLO reduced his power and, in 1983, he was forced to leave Lebanon, while members of the organization dispersed widely to Tunisia, the Yemen, Syria, Jordan and other Arab states. Arafat, however, remained leader of the majority of the PLO. In 1985 he agreed with King Hussein of Jordan to recognize the state of Israel, provided that territory which had been seized was restored. This initiative failed but, in July 1988, Hussein surrendered his right to administer the West Bank, indicating that the PLO might take over the responsibility. Arafat, to the surprise of many Western politicians, persuaded the majority of his colleagues to acknowledge the right of Israel to co-exist with an independent state of Palestine.

In 1993 Arafat and the Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin negotiated a peace agreement at the White House (signed in Cairo in 1994), by which Israel agreed to withdraw from Jericho and the Gaza Strip. Arafat and Rabin, together with Israel's Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for peace in 1994. The same year, Arafat returned to the occupied territories as head of a Palestinian state, and reached agreement the following year on further Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank. In January 1995 he signed a further agreement of co-operation with King Hussein of Jordan. The following month he met Hussein, together with Rabin and President Mubarak, in an attempt to revitalize the peace process. Events later in the year, the encroachment of Israelis into new settlements on the West Bank, suicide attacks by Hamas terrorists, and above all the assassination of Rabin in November, did little to encourage peace.

Having invited the terrorist group Hamas to talks on the future of Palestine (1995), he was elected president of the Palestinian National Council, with 88 per cent of the vote, in January 1996. In May, Shimon Peres was narrowly defeated in the elections in Israel, and was replaced as Prime Minister by the conservative hard-liner Binyamin Netanyahu.

Bibliography: A Hart, Arafat (1994); A Gowers and T Walker, Behind the Myth: Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Revolution (1992).