Yasser Arafat

Biography

Yasser Arafat was shaped by the Six-Day War more than by any other event. He had founded Fatah — the Palestinian nationalist movement — in 1959 and launched small cross-border raids against Israel in the years before 1967. But in June 1967, when the Arab armies that had promised to liberate Palestine were destroyed in six days, Arafat drew a decisive conclusion: Palestinians could not rely on Arab states to fight their war. They had to fight it themselves. The Battle of Karameh in March 1968 — when PLO and Jordanian forces fought off an Israeli raid at high cost — made Arafat a hero and brought a flood of Palestinian recruits. He became PLO chairman in 1969 and the defining symbol of Palestinian resistance. His methods included terrorism that earned him international condemnation; his eventual turn to negotiation at Oslo earned him a Nobel Prize. He died in 2004 without achieving a Palestinian state, his legacy forever contested.

Key Battles