He worked as a civil engineer in Egypt for a while in 1956. He later found a job in Kuwait. He lived in Kuwait from 1957 to 1965. While doing engineering, he also worked to gather Palestinians scattered all over the Arab world into a single organization.
Palestinian politician. Founder and leader of al-Feth (Palestine Liberation Organization), which started the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, he has been the chairman of the Executive Board of the Palestinian National Authority since 1969. He was born in Jerusalem in 1929. It is said that his real and full name is Abdurrahman Abdürrauf Arafat al-Kud al-Husayni. He is also known among the Palestinians and in the Arab world under the pseudonym Abu Ammar. Little is known about his life before gaining international fame. An important part of his life is covered with a veil of secrecy known only to him and his relatives. It is written in the official documents of the Palestine Liberation Organization that he spent his childhood in a house very close to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini (August 1929 – 11 November 2004), popularly known as Yasser Arafat or by his kunya Abu Ammar was a Palestinian political leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) from 1994 to 2004. Ideologically an Arab nationalist and a socialist, he was a founding member of the Fatah political party, which he led from 1959 until 2004.
After the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, he immigrated to Gaza with his family. Gaza was temporarily under Egyptian rule at that time. He went to Cairo for a university education. He studied civil engineering at Cairo University. During his student years in the Egyptian capital, he founded and chaired the Palestinian Student Union. In the following years, he met many of his friends, with whom he founded al-Feth (Palestine National Liberation Movement) and later worked with both within al-Feth and the Palestine Liberation Organization, during this period when he was the president of the Palestine Students' Union. He also received military training while he was a student. He worked as a leader and trainer of Palestinian and Egyptian commandos. He participated in the 1956 Arab-Israeli War with the Palestinian Union in the ranks of the Egyptian army. He fought against British and French forces in Port Said and Abu Kabir as an explosives and sabotage specialist.
After the 1956 War, he worked for a time as a civil engineer in Egypt. He later found a job in Kuwait. He lived in Kuwait from 1957 to 1965. While doing engineering, he also worked to gather Palestinians scattered all over the Arab world into a single organization.
He based his work on the Palestinians living in Kuwait. He initiated the establishment of secret cells among Palestinian students in Kuwait and West Germany. During the eight-year period he lived in Kuwait, he traveled frequently to carry out the work of the organization.
One of the most important turning points in his life is his participation in the establishment of al-Fath, which started the Palestinian armed struggle for liberation. Being one of the founders and leader of Al-Fath paved the way for him to become the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969, and in this way to become one of the most important politicians in international politics and recent history. Abu Iyad (Salah Halaf), one of the founders of al-Fath and one of the notables of the Palestine Liberation Organization, explains that al-Fath was founded on October 10, 1959, by a few people gathered in a house in Kuwait, giving the following information: It is no accident that it was founded in Kuwait, many of us held important positions there. Yasser Arafat was a respected and valued engineer of the Ministry of Public Works. Faruk Kaddumi (Abu Lütuf) was one of the general directors of the Ministry of Health; Halit al-Hasan and Abdulmuhsin al-Kattan were high civil servants. Khalil Ibrahim al-Wazir (Abu Jihad) and I were high school teachers.”
Although he lived in Kuwait for years after the establishment of al-Fath, he continued his work in various Arab countries. He tried to publish a magazine as the first thing to spread the views of the underground movement. The journal called Palestineuna (Our Palestine), which spread the views of al-Fath, began to be published in Beirut in 1959. The magazine then advocated that the Palestinian question should be removed from being a general Arab issue in international politics and should be "Palestinian", in other words, the Palestinians should take their own destiny into their own hands instead of waiting for the promises of Arab states and international organizations for their liberation.
Another turning point in Arafat's life was his involvement in the wing advocating the initiation of armed struggle at a secret al-Fath conference convened in 1964. Beginning in 1962, al-Fath's underground cells focused all their efforts on military action. An organizational conference was convened in 1964 to discuss this issue. The majority decided to start the armed struggle on 1 January 1965. Arafat commanded the armed detachment that carried out the first military operation against Israeli targets on January 1, 1965, which is considered the event that symbolized the Palestinian people's taking their own destiny into their own hands and is considered the start date of the Palestinian Revolution.
In June 1967, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were defeated by Israel. The Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, Syria's Golan region, and the West Bank (West Bank), the remaining part of the Jordanian-dominated Palestinian territory, came under Israeli occupation. Arafat secretly crossed into the occupied Palestinian territories and engaged in the organization of the internal resistance movement. Abu Iyad describes this section of his life in these words: “We had received reports from Yasser Arafat, who had been living in the occupied territories secretly since mid-July 1967. Friends who had done a similar task to his, and Arafat himself, were delighted to see that the peoples of the West Bank of the Sharia and Gaza, not demoralized by the Arab defeat, favored the continuation of the war at all costs. Although he concealed his true identity, Arafat was welcomed, nurtured, and housed everywhere. Like his friends, he did not have the slightest difficulty in getting from place to place, and was even able to enter his native city of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv several times.”
Arafat left the occupied territories in August 1967 and went to Jordan. After the Arab debacle, he organized efforts to escalate the Palestinian guerrilla struggle against Israel. He established guerrilla bases along the Jordan River, which separates the Kingdom of Jordan from the West Bank under Israeli occupation. He led guerrilla warfare. After the Autumn of 1967, his name became known internationally. In the same year, he was announced as the spokesperson of the organization by al-Fath, who kept the confidentiality of all executive cadres. Thus, he appeared before the international community as the representative of the nascent armed Palestinian struggle.
Another important event in his political life was the appointment of al-Fath, first as spokesperson and then as the Chairman of the Executive Board of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in addition to his leadership. In 1969, at the Fifth Meeting of the Palestinian National Council, he argued that the organization, briefly known as the PLO, should be an umbrella organization that gathers all Palestinian guerrilla organizations. al-Fath actively participated in the Fifth Meeting of the Palestinian National Council (PLO's Parliament).
The meeting ended when the organization attained the structure Arafat wanted and he was appointed as the chairman of the Executive Board. With this task, Arafat also had the opportunity to play a role in Arab diplomacy. During the bloody civil war in 1970-1971, in which Palestinian guerrillas were forced to leave Jordan and approximately 40,000 people lost their lives, he survived several times in danger of death. He led Palestinian forces during the civil war. He left Jordan in 1971 and moved the political and military center of the Palestinian struggle to Beirut, the capital of Lebanon.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was declared the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people at the Arab Heads of State and Government Summit held in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, in 1974. The diplomatic weight gained by the PLO was largely Arafat's work. In the same year, the PLO was admitted to the United Nations as an observer. Thus, for the first time in its history, the United Nations accepted an organization that did not have the status of a sovereign state for membership. He also attended the United Nations General Assembly as a speaker. “I came here with a liberation fighter's rifle in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand. War breaks out from Palestine, but peace also sprouts from Palestine,” he concluded. In the period after his United Nations speech, he distinguished himself as a master diplomat who changed the image of the Palestinian armed struggle in international politics and sought a peaceful solution to the Palestinian problem.
The years 1975-1976 were a difficult period of his political life. In the Lebanese Civil War that broke out in these years, he resisted the armed forces of the front formed by Lebanese Christian organizations, on the one hand, and the attacks of the Syrian army, which entered Lebanon in alliance with the Lebanese Christians, on the Palestinians. The Lebanese Civil War resulted in the de facto partition of the country. In areas under Palestinian control, the Palestine Liberation Organization took the form of a state. He also focused on diplomatic efforts. By the 1980s, the PLO had established diplomatic relations with more than 100 countries.
Thanks to his increasing political weight, Arafat mediated between Egypt and Libya in 1977. After the occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, Iran and the US tried to mediate between the two countries over the Iran-Iraq War that broke out in 1980. He proposed to mediate between Turkey and Greece for the solution to the Cyprus problem.
He spent the most difficult days of his life with ups and downs in the political, military, and diplomatic fields between 1982 -1983. In June 1982, Israel invaded all of southern Lebanon and besieged Beirut. Arafat had returned to Beirut from Saudi Arabia, where he was at the time, upon the start of the occupation of Southern Lebanon, in order to assume the military administration of the Palestinian guerrillas. In Beirut, under the siege of Israel, he led the toughest urban resistance in history for nearly two months. Although Israel was the target of height, on the one hand, he put up a solid resistance and prevented Israeli forces from entering the city he was besieging. On August 30, 1982, he left Beirut, where he led the Palestinian struggle for 12 years, where he realized that the Palestinian issue was at the top of the international political agenda, and went to Tunisia. He established the new headquarters of the PLO in Tunisia. After the most depressing experience of the Palestinian struggle, he was re-elected as the Chairman of the PLO Executive Board at the 16th Session of the Palestinian National Council, which convened in Algeria in February 1983. When the traditional conflict with Syria broke out again in May 1983, the capital of Syria was expelled from Damascus; He was asked not to enter Syria again, and he lost direct contact with the Palestinian forces in Syria and Lebanon, the most important fighting zone bordering Israel.
In the same period, he faced an uprising against him in al-Fath, supported by Syria and Libya. After years of unchallenged leadership of the Palestinian struggle, doubts have been raised about the continuation of this position. Based on his experience in international diplomacy, and especially his reputation among the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, he sought to counter the threats to his leadership.
Arafat's whole life is like a mirror of the stages of the Palestinian cause. Arafat is the only Palestinian politician who can unite a fragmented people, 60% of whom live outside their lands and scattered around the world, 40% of whom live under occupation, around his own name. He has never been married. The saying that he was "married to the Palestinian Revolution" is famous. Israeli journalists investigating the youth periods of his life stated that during his student years in Cairo, he was not interested in girls, he did not drink alcohol, and he was not fond of luxury and comfort; They wrote that he created a legendary personality around him with his extraordinary courage, humility, simplicity, and devotion to his followers.
His daily life is as mysterious as his private life. He survived several assassination attempts. The most serious assassination attempt was made in 1971 when his car was ambushed while he was inspecting Palestinian troops in Syria, and his driver was killed, but he himself escaped injury. It was rumored that he had not slept in the same place two nights in a row while he was living in Beirut, in order not to be assassinated by his numerous enemies. He was also the direct target of Israeli attacks several times. Israeli commandos, who launched an operation in Beirut on April 10, 1973, killed three important officials of the Palestinian struggle, Mohammed Yusuf Neccar (Abu Yusuf), a member of the PLO Executive Board and co-founder of al-Fath, Kemal Advan, one of the leaders and founders of al-Feth, and They killed the PLO spokesman, Kemal Nasser, but could not find Arafat. In 1979, a private security officer was killed in an assassination targeting him. In July 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the work office in Beirut; As a result of the air attack in which 300 people lost their lives, some floors of the headquarters were destroyed, and he was saved again. During the siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, he escaped unscathed from countless bombardments.
In his active political life, Arafat was arrested three times: in Syria, on the grounds that he was responsible for the 1965 sabotage of the Tapline oil pipeline; a year later, again in Syria by Hafez Assad, who was then the Syrian Minister of Defense, and shortly after his release, near the Lebanese-Israeli border, in Lebanon when he was about to launch a military operation against Israel. During his last detention, he spent three weeks in Beirut's Sablons Prison.
He made his main reputation in international life as a man of action. His ideological views were hardly reflected. He gained a reputation as a pragmatic politician and a master of survivability, especially able to get through the most desperate conditions. Even the American press counted him among the top 20 world leaders of the 1980s. A politician who adheres to the rules of "Realpolitik" (Balance of Powers Doctrine), he was described as an agile leader who determines politics by taking into account the inter-Arab and international balances. While he never came to the fore, his ideological stance changed over time. It is claimed that during his student years in Cairo, where his political thoughts were formed, he had a close relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood organization and the ideas of the organization in question, which was very active in Egyptian politics at that time and put forward the slogan of liberating Palestine from Israel. Some Israeli journalists write that he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in their biographies about Arafat. His close colleagues, on the other hand, state that although he had close relations with the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1950s, he was never a member of the organization. Like al-Fath's other founders, most likely, its relations with the Muslim Brotherhood were driven by its militant stance towards the Palestinian cause.
His political views and ideological stance are most concretely seen in the ideological-political line of al-Fath and later the PLO. The principle to which it has most firmly adhered to date is the independence of the Palestinian movement. By this, the decisions of the Palestinian movement must be taken by the Palestinians, not by the Arabs; It is aimed to explain that the role of the Arabs should not go beyond supporting the Palestinians and creating favorable conditions for them to continue their struggle. To this end, he defended the formula that "no Arab State should interfere in the internal affairs of the Palestinian Revolution, whereas the Palestinian Revolution should not interfere in the internal affairs of any Arab State". This formula provided him with the opportunity to establish close relations with every Arab regime and leader of various colors across a wide political spectrum. Due to the same principle, he sometimes engaged in fierce conflicts with Arab regimes and leaders who wanted to keep the Palestinian struggle under control. With this attitude, he can be considered the father of a kind of "Palestinian nationalism". In a broad sense, it can be accepted within the Pan-Arab nationalism that emerged in the person of Egyptian leader Nasser in the 1950s. While describing the Palestinian struggle in the late 1960s, he often said, "The body of the Palestinian Revolution is Palestinian, its heart is Arab".
Arafat also advocated the idea of a secular and democratic Palestinian State, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews could freely coexist on Palestinian lands. To this end, he pointed to the need for dialogue with Jews, increasingly with Israelis, and even with Zionist Israelis who recognize the Palestinian people's right to self-determination. As he defended the dialogue between Jews and Arabs, he also put forward the principle of resolution of inter-Palestinian conflicts through democratic dialogue. In this respect, he contributed to the establishment of the political institutions of a people most of whom lived in exile through democratic mechanisms, and although he was described as a terrorist by Israel and its supporters for many years and sometimes emphasized his warrior character, he drew a type of politician who is unique with these characteristics. He took his place among the most interesting statesmen in recent history.