Where is yasser arafat from

She was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister. Toussaint L'Ouverture was a leader of the Haitian independence movement during the French Revolution. Dodi Fayed was an Egyptian heir and film producer who dated and died with Princess Diana of Wales in a Paris car crash. Benazir Bhutto became the first female prime minister of Pakistan in She was killed by a suicide bomber in Maximilien de Robespierre was an official during the French Revolution and one of the principal architects of the Reign of Terror.

Yasser Arafat was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization from until his death in , a tumultuous period in which clashes with neighboring Israel were prevalent. Olivia Rodrigo —. Megan Thee Stallion —. Bowen Yang —. The upshot of the inevitable scramble is likely to be a truncated authority with limited credibility; a leadership that reflects the lowest common denominator rather than the popular will.

Exasperating even to his most ardent admirers, Arafat was never an easy man to read, with few of the obvious characteristics of leadership. His Egyptian accent, acquired during his childhood in Cairo, marked him out as an ostensible outsider — an unlikely contender for the leadership of an often fiercely insular national movement. His untiring work ethic was one of his most powerful assets: this was a man who took no break or time off during the five decades or so of his active political career, which stood him in good stead when compared with the generally more relaxed pace of most of his lieutenants and associates.

He manipulated his time to suit his purposes: staying up very late at night to challenge the endurance of his friends and adversaries. He would think nothing of summoning lieutenants, emissaries, journalists, or scheduling political meetings at 2am; a test of faith and dedication laced with macho challenge, as if those who could not keep up with him were not really serious enough to warrant his attention.

He made up for this brutal schedule by napping during the afternoon when normal people had normal duties to attend to. From its very early stirrings in the late 50s, the Palestinian struggle was complicated by the geographic and demographic divisions separating the clusters that constituted the Palestinian political universe. Welding these disparate elements together, and maintaining them on some consistent political course was a constant challenge.

Unlike most national liberation movements, the Palestinians never acquired an independent base or long-lasting territorial haven. They were subject to severe constraints imposed by foreign powers and vulnerable to outside intrusions. His occasional economies with the truth were politically driven. If he lied, it was, he believed, only in the service of his people and to make best use of whatever tactical opportunity it could afford him — including protecting those to whom he felt some obligation.

Never heard of him! Yet, despite his reputation, Arafat could be nonplussed when confronted with someone with an apparently greater capacity for mendaciousness. But lies and hard work were not his only method. Like a practised politician, he knew well how to charm his audience, directing his undivided attention towards relative juniors and making a special effort to claim familiarity and remember names.

He was capable of wit and had a dry sense of humour. While visiting Yemen, he was greeted by dancing tribesmen whom he leapt up to join with a bit too much enthusiasm, tripping and falling to the ground.

Solicitous and unfailingly polite, he would insist on hosting visitors, serving them their dinner with his own hands usually simple chicken, cheese and honey. His attempts to put his interlocutors at ease were genuine, if sometimes gauche, verging on the farcical. He constantly jiggled his knees, his eyes darted around, his pronouncements were opaque, if not incoherent, at times deliberately so, and his line of thought confusing — at least to those more accustomed to western discourse.

He could lapse into extended and embarrassing silences lasting for hours. He may not have had the most rigorous formal education, but his unquestionable intelligence, piercing political sense, and tactical acumen were polished by years of clandestine activity and informed by numerous plots and schemes, both real and imagined.

He was not an intellectual or a man of ideas. A pragmatist and activist to the core, he had little time for theory and long-winded analyses, and tended to dismiss his more literary-inclined critics as kataba scribes. His knowledge of the world outside Palestine was limited by the necessities of dedication to the struggle, the constraints of opportunity, and the vagaries of fate.

Until he became uncontested Palestinian leader in the s, he had seen little of the world. When he subsequently pursued a preposterously long itinerary of international visits including a record 25 trips to the Clinton White House , his understanding of global affairs remained relatively parochial, a product of his 50s schooling. Apart from an alleged taste for American cartoons, Arafat seems to have had no interests besides politics. Despite a genuinely austere lifestyle that hardly changed with his rise to global prominence, Arafat remained susceptible to affairs of the heart until his marriage at the age of His paternalistic view of his role allowed him to be generous with his favours and his cash.

In the absence of a healthcare system, he effectively ran a one-man health service for the Palestinian people and made a special effort to cover the medical needs of those who approached him, which helped to sustain his authority and popularity. Yet he was no stranger to bursts of anger, petulance or vindictiveness. Those who knew him best suffered from his moods most.

Indeed, reading his mood grew into an art at which aides and colleagues competed, almost to the point of obsession. Arafat's mother died when he was four, and his father sent him to live with a married uncle in Jerusalem. As a teenager in the s, Arafat became involved in the Palestinian cause. Before the Arabs were defeated by Israel in , Arafat was a leader in the Palestinian effort to smuggle arms into the territory.

After the war, Arafat studied civil engineering at the University of Cairo in Egypt. He headed the Palestinian Students League and, by the time he graduated, was committed to forming a group that would free Palestine from Israeli occupation. In he founded Al Fatah, an underground terrorist organization. New York: Vintage PB, Eloquent critique of the Oslo Accords by a leading Palestinian-American intellectual. Savir, Uri. New York: Random House Hopeful inside view by chief Israeli negotiator.

Tessler, Mark. A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, PB, scholarly and balanced. Quandt, William B. Washington, D. Arafat: From Defender to Dictator. Gowers, Andrew. The Biography : London: Virgin Books, Revised and updated publication. Hart, Alan. Arafat: A Political Biography. Sympathetic account largely dependent on many interviews with Arafat.

Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder. New York: Lyle Stuart,