Yasser Arafat

Biography

Yasser Arafat was born on August 24, 1929, in Cairo, Egypt, though he claimed Jerusalem as his birthplace to reinforce his Palestinian credentials. He co-founded Fatah, the Palestinian nationalist movement, in the late 1950s and became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969 following the PLO's transformation into a broader umbrella organization. After being expelled from Jordan following Black September 1970, Arafat moved the PLO's operational headquarters to Beirut, where it became a state within a state, exerting considerable influence over Palestinian refugee camps housing some 300,000 people. The PLO's presence in Lebanon was both a cause and an accelerant of the civil war. Arafat's fedayeen fighters conducted cross-border raids into Israel from Lebanese territory, triggering Israeli reprisals that inflicted enormous civilian casualties on Lebanese villages and undermined the Lebanese state's authority. Lebanese Christians resented the PLO's armed presence, while Lebanese Muslims and leftists largely supported it as part of the Arab resistance to Israel. This fundamental disagreement was one of the fissures that opened into civil war in 1975. During the civil war, the PLO and its allied Lebanese National Movement forces initially dominated the conflict before Syrian intervention in 1976 blocked their victory. Arafat survived multiple assassination attempts, Israeli strikes, and internal Palestinian power struggles from his Beirut base. The Israeli invasion of 1982 fundamentally changed everything. After a ten-week siege of Beirut, Arafat negotiated an evacuation that dispersed his fighters across eight Arab countries. He sailed from Beirut harbor on August 30, 1982, saluting the city that had been his base for twelve years. Expulsion from Lebanon effectively ended the PLO's capacity to conduct conventional military operations and pushed Arafat toward the diplomatic track that eventually produced the Oslo Accords in 1993. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 and returned to Gaza as president of the Palestinian Authority. He died on November 11, 2004, in Paris under disputed circumstances, with French and Palestinian doctors citing uncertain causes.

Key Battles