State of Israel; soon after graduation, he began recruiting and training Palestinians for military operations against Israel.
In the early 1960s he helped found Fatah, a Palestinian guerrilla group committed to opposing Israel militarily. In 1968 Arafat in part merged Fatah into the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which coordinated several groups opposed to Israel (Aburish, 1999, p. 21).
It is impossible to discuss the importance of Arafat without placing him within the context of the Palestine Liberation Organization (or the PLO as it is more commonly called). The PLO is, to describe it in the most neutral possible terms, a political body working to create a state for Palestinian Arabs in the historic lands of Palestine now controlled by Israel. However, it is rarely described in neutral terms: Israel and its supporters tend to see the PLO as controlled most of the time by either thugs or terrorists or both. Arabs tend to see the PLO as a champion in the region against the Jew, who has no right to be there at all. Neutral observers outside the region û to the extent that anywhere in the world there are neutral observers of the situation in the Middle East û tend to view the PLO as both a guardian of the rights of the Palestinian people and as too quick to violence, too little interested in compromise, and as fundamentally partisan (Wallach & Wallach, 1997, p. 38)
The PLO was founded as a direct response to the creation of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent wars between Israel and Arab nations, which displaced many Palestinians from the places where they were living (in some cases their residence there was very recent, in others the same families had been there for generations) (Rubenstein, 1995, p. 27). Founded in 1964 as a channel for Palestinian demands for a state, the PLO grew in prominence after Israel gained control of the largely Palestinian-inhabited West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War of 1967. Years o...