Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat (born Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa, 1929–2004) was the dominant figure in Palestinian nationalist politics for more than three decades. He co-founded the Fatah movement in the late 1950s and took over the chairmanship of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1969, transforming it from an Arab League–sponsored body into an organization led by Palestinians themselves.

Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in November 1974, the first representative of a non-state entity to do so, in the speech often remembered for the line about carrying "a freedom fighter's gun and an olive branch." That year the General Assembly granted the PLO observer status (Resolution 3237).

After years of armed struggle and exile in Jordan, Lebanon, and Tunisia, Arafat shifted toward diplomacy. In 1988 he announced the PLO's acceptance of UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and recognition of Israel's right to exist. This opened the path to the Oslo Accords: the Declaration of Principles signed at the White House on 13 September 1993 with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Oslo II in 1995. For these efforts Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Shimon Peres.

Arafat returned to the Palestinian territories in 1994 and was elected President of the Palestinian National Authority in January 1996. The Camp David summit hosted by US President Bill Clinton in July 2000 failed to produce a final-status agreement, and the Second Intifada erupted soon after. Israeli forces confined Arafat to his Ramallah compound, the Muqata'a, from 2002 onward.

He fell ill in October 2004, was flown to a French military hospital, and died on 11 November 2004. Mahmoud Abbas succeeded him as PLO chairman and later as PA president. Arafat remains a polarizing figure: celebrated by supporters as the father of Palestinian national identity and condemned by critics for tolerating violence and weak institution-building.