In his youth, Arafat acquired the nickname Yasser, meaning "easy," though he was anything but. He was forever hyperactive, impulsive, manipulative and easily piqued. Politics was an early passion. He was an ardent student activist at King Fuad I University (now Cairo University), where he studied civil engineering. When the first Arab-Israeli war erupted in 1948, Arafat, then 18, fought with forces of the Muslim Brotherhood, the original Egyptian fundamentalist group, in the area around the Gaza Strip. Though apparently never a member of the Brotherhood, Arafat in those days was a fellow traveller and remained an observant Muslim throughout his life.
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Among Fatah's founders, Arafat was the most impetuous; he was the leader of the so-called "mad ones," urging the group on to armed action while the "sane ones" preferred to build up the infant organization first. Fatah's 1965 debut attack on Israel fizzled when locals discovered the unexploded dynamite the infiltrators had placed in a water canal. Arafat himself moved in and out of the West Bank, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon in various disguises: a peasant, a priest, a woman carrying a baby, a certain Dr. Mohammed. Once, Israeli troops nearly caught him in Ramallah, arriving to find his bed still warm. Fatah was never much of a fighting force, but Arafat proved a dexterous recruiter and fundraiser, convincing Palestinian boys to sign up as soldiers and Arab leaders to bankroll the group.
Arafat's struggle for an independent Palestinian movement gained force after the 1967 war, in which the Israeli military defeated the Arab armies in six days, seizing the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt. By the end of the year, Fatah had joined and become the dominant faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a heretofore impotent creation of the Arab states. Fatah's popularity soared in March, 1968, when its forcesultimately with the support of the Jordanian armyamazingly repelled an Israeli onslaught on a Fatah encampment in Karameh, a Jordanian border village. In February, 1969, Arafat was named chairman of the P.L.O. Under his leadership, the Palestinian Liberation Army would grow to 15,000 men, while P.L.O. assetsfrom taxes levied on Palestinians in the diaspora, donations by Arab countries, and investments would rise into the billions of dollars.
From 1969, the P.L.O. made Jordan its home, creating a state-within-a-state, much to the alarm of Jordan's King Hussein. In 1970, the king unleashed his army on Arafat's men in the bloody civil war known as Black September. Ultimately, the P.L.O. was driven out, regrouping in Lebanon. Hussein and Arafat never forgave one another; until Hussein died in 1999, the two kept a wary watch on each other.
With victory impossible in a head-to-head clash with Israel, the P.L.O. in the early 1970s embarked on a bloodthirsty campaign of terrorism, including hijackings, hostage-takings and massacres of Israeli civilians. Two of the more gruesome acts were a raid on an Israeli school in Maalot in which 21 children were killed, and the infamous attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics that left eleven dead. While the mayhem served to spotlight the cause of the Palestinians, a people who otherwise would have received far less press, in the eyes of Israelis, it marked Arafat as a genuine demon, delaying the date when Israel would finally sit down to negotiate peace with him.
Despite the stain of the terrorist atrocities, the P.L.O. under Arafat gained enormous international stature. In 1974, the Arab leaders, at a summit in Rabat, recognized the group as the "sole, legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people. That same year, Arafat addressed the U.N. General Assembly, saying he'd come "bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter's gun." (In fact, his holster was empty.) Subsequently his organization became an official U.N. observer. Eventually, the P.L.O. would be granted full diplomatic status by some 90 countries.
In Lebanon, as in Jordan, the P.L.O. created its own fiefdom, generating tensions that contributed to the Lebanese civil war. Sick of P.L.O. incursions from Lebanon and the Beirut government's inability to stop them, Israel invaded its northern neighbor in 1982. After Israel's three-month seige of Beirut, the U.S. negotiated the safe exit from the city of the P.L.O. leadership. Enroute to the last boat out, Arafat emerged from his headquarters, flashing the victory sign and a huge smile to photographers as if the routultimately to Tunis, 1500 miles from the frontwas some kind of triumph. All the while, an Israeli sniper had the defeated chairman literally in the crosshairs. "I can kill him now," the shooter told his superiors.