About some people there seems to be no middle ground of opinion: They are considered to be either demons or heroes. It should not be surprising that there is such polarization one way or the other, because indeed some people are so much better or worse than the average person, and as objects for study they are less than fascinating. The presence of excessive amounts of good or evil in a person is not on the face of it that interesting. Far more interesting are those figures from history that polarize opinion both ways, about whom it is alleged that they are both demons and angels, put here on earth to save us all, or destroy us all. Yasser Arafat - president of the Palestinian Authority from 1996 to the present, chair of the Palestine Liberation Organization from 1969 to the present, and a Nobel laureate who has led the Palestinian people in their efforts for statehood û is one such person, and this paper examines his life, the historical circumstances that have brought him to power, the ways in which his personal strengths and weaknesses have informed the ongoing struggles in the Middle East and continue to do so, and what role he may play in the future of the ever-shifting and usually violent world of Middle Eastern politics.
Historical Background and Personal Strengths and Weaknesses
Yasser Arafat (his first name is also often transliterated into English as ôYasirö) was born in 1929 as Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, the sixth of seven children in either Egypt or Jerusalem (official records differ on this issue) and raised in Jerusalem, Egypt, and the Gaza area. When Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949, Arafat fled to Egypt. In 1956 he earned an engineering degree from Cairo University. He studied at Cairo University from 1952 to 1956, receiving an engineering degree in 1956. During his college years, he ran guns from Egypt into Israel, his first known action against the...