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Contributing to the fedayeen mystique is their shadowy organization, which somehow manages to appear to be everywhere in the Arab countries. At the airport of Amman, dark-suited youths sidle up to customs officers as crates marked "Palestine Nation, Amman" or "Freedom Fighters against Israel, Amman" are unloaded, and whisper, "For the fedayeen." Customs formalities are cut short, and the supplies are whisked away. The goods may be headed for any one of more than 50 bases maintained by the fedayeen in the Jordanian mountains east of Wadi Araba, the desert valley that stretches from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba.
No one knows how many Arab commandos roam about in that desolate stretch, from which raiders set out nightly, but estimates range upward from 10,000. Besides their base camps, there are other installations as well. The feda yeen maintain at least a dozen underground field hospitals and supply depots, as well as training camps for ash-bals, or tiger cubs—refugee children who are taught the art of guerrilla war beginning at age eight.
Ambassador Extraordinary
The fedayeen are most secretive of all about their high command, though the largest organization, Arafat's El Fatah, is said to be ruled by a committee of wealthy civilians in Damascus. Nor does anyone really know very much about Yasser Arafat, though everyone in the Arab world knows who he is. As El Fatah grew and felt the need for a visible spokesman, he became its ambassador extraordinary to the Arab world, its chief fund raiser and its field commander in Jordan. Arafat (his code name is Abu Ammar) sits at a wooden desk in his headquarters in Amman, dealing with a procession of couriers like a general on a field of battle, which in a sense he is. When a guerrilla comes in to report a successful raid, Arafat's eyes, bulging almost to the panes of the dark glasses he wears day and night, dance with delight. He speaks softly and turns aside all questions about himself: "Please, no personality cult. I am only a soldier. Our leader is Palestine. Our road is the road of death and sacrifice to win back our homeland. If we can not do it, our children will, and if they cannot do it, their children will."
Arafat's career in a way mirrors the history and thrust of the fedayeen. Born in Jerusalem, he spent his early childhood in a house within a stone's throw of the Wailing Wall. The area today is marked by the Israelis for bulldozing. Of that prospect, Arafat says bitterly: "We will see that our homes are re built." Descended from Palestinian no bility, Arafat learned early what dispossession meant. According to one story widely told in the Middle East, his family has been disinherited of enormous wealth for 150 years through a legal tangle that deprived it of land once owned in downtown Cairo. Arafat's father spent a lifetime trying to reclaim the land in the Egyptian courts but was overruled first by King Farouk and then Nasser. There are those who suspect that that may be one factor in Arafat's occasional lack of enthusiasm for Egypt's ruler.
A teen-age gunrunner in the 1948 war with Israel, Arafat afterward enrolled at Fuad I (now Cairo) University, where he majored in civil engineering—and in Palestinian nationalism as president of the Palestine Student Federation.