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After graduating, he worked in Kuwait, editing an ultranationalist magazine on the side. In 1955, he appeared in Cairo attending officers' school, where he specialized in explosives. He graduated as a lieutenant just in time to share in another Arab defeat, at Suez a year later.
That debacle only confirmed Arafat's conviction that the Arabs could never de feat the Israelis with conventional armies. Throughout the 1950s, he had organized "cells" among Palestinian students abroad and studied the techniques of Algerian guerrillas. At that time, Nasser had organized forerunners of today's fedayeen among Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and used them to stir up the border, a role they took on with sufficient enthusiasm to help bring about Israel's decision to launch the 1956 war.
After Suez, El Fatah-was founded as a strictly Palestinian force outside Nasser's reach.
Not until 1964 was El Fatah ready for its first raid, sabotaging an Israeli water-pumping station. It was an "experimental era," recalls Arafat, when El Fatah staged only one raid a week, testing out attack techniques, taking notes on Israeli defenses and reaction times, and filing away the information to be used in future battle plans. "We were also experimenting with public opinion all through this period," Arafat's top aide told TIME Correspondent Edward Hughes last week. According to the dictum of Mao Tse-tung, guerrilla fighters must be able to live among a friendly population like fish in water. But El Fatah at that time "had no audience. Without the people to listen to us, we had no sea to swim in—the fish had no oxygen."
The Expansion of the War
After last year's war, El Fatah found itself not only swimming in popular support but also possessed of a sudden bequest of weapons left by the retreating Arab armies. The battlefields were littered with arms, and for two weeks, El Fatah teams took camels into the Sinai desert to collect machine guns, rifles, grenades and bazookas before the Israeli salvage squads. Four heavy trucks were found in Golan, along with two tons of ammunition and weapons. A Bedouin offered to sell 150 Kalashnikov rifles for $140. El Fatah gave him twice as much. Another Bedouin found a Syrian helicopter and built a tent to hide it for the El Fatah men. But when they arrived, they had no helicopter pilot along, so the craft was destroyed. A cache of eight tons of TNT, too heavy to carry away, was buried in the Sinai: "We don't have to carry explosives into that area. It's there waiting for us," Arafat says.