Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 82, 86

Middle East History—It Happened in October

Yasser Arafat Emerges as Leader of The Palestinians

By Donald Neff

It was 39 years ago, on Oct. 10, 1959, that a small group of fewer than 20 Palestinians met in Kuwait and secretly formed Fatah, the resistance movement that eventually led the Palestinian conflict with Israel. Fatah is an acronym standing for Harakat Al-Tahrir Al-Watani Al-Filastini—the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine. In Arabic, HTF means death; when reversed to FTH it means victory. Among the founders were Yasser Arafat, 28, an engineer; Khalil Wazir, 22, a teacher who assumed the non de guerre Abu Jihad; and Salah Khalaf, 25, aka Abu Iyad.¹

Abu Jihad was assassinated by an Israeli hit team in 1988 and Abu Iyad was assassinated in 1991, apparently by a PLO enemy.² It took until 1993, after much blood and agony, for Fatah, as the leading faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to win Israeli recognition of Palestinians as a separate people.³

Arafat, known by the nom de guerre Abu Amar, was a short, soft-spoken engineer, and he soon emerged as the leader of Fatah. His background is murky, as is usual with underground fighters worried about their safety.⁴ Arafat has said that he was raised in Jerusalem, studied at Cairo University, fought in Jerusalem and in Gaza as an Egyptian volunteer in 1948, and successfully headed construction companies in Kuwait—“I was well on my way to being a millionaire.”⁵

Fatah evolved as an essentially non-ideological movement, careful not to be dominated by any Arab nation. It attracted mainly Muslim activists unencumbered by political slogans of the right or left. Its concentration was on the liberation of Palestine through armed attacks inside Israel by fedayeen, Arabic for self-sacrificers.⁶ Fatah’s willingness to keep the conflict confined within Palestine earned it the support of the more conservative Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.⁷ In its early years, the main activity of Fatah was recruiting members and publishing a highly politicized magazine in Lebanon called Our Palestine . The first edition appeared in 1959.⁸

By 1964, Fatah had gained enough respect that the People’s Republic of China agreed to receive on March 20 Arafat and Abu Jihad, the first major country to receive the Palestinian guerrilla leaders.⁹ The Chinese allowed Fatah to establish an office in Beijing and man it with a permanent semi-official representative to serve as a channel of communications. This was at a time when the Soviet Union was maintaining a cool attitude toward the Palestinian movement and had refused to receive any of the Fatah representatives in Moscow.¹⁰ The next year China became the first major power officially to recognize Fatah and grant it diplomatic privileges.¹¹ Arafat would later declare: “China was the first outside power to give real help to Fatah.”¹² The Soviets waited until 1974 before officially welcoming Arafat to Moscow, although he had been there several times previously as an unofficial guest.¹³

It was the Palestinians who bore the brunt of the 1967 defeat.

Two months after Arafat’s visit to China, the Palestine Liberation Organization was founded. Unlike Fatah, which was an underground movement, the PLO was publicly proclaimed as the first major organization dedicated to the liberation of Palestine.¹⁴ A total of 338 Palestinian delegates met between May 28 and June 2, 1964, in Arab East Jerusalem at the Hotel Ambassador. The congress adopted a charter of 29 articles declaring that the Palestinian people “has the legitimate right to its homeland” and that “the liberation of Palestine from an Arab viewpoint is a national duty.” It declared the 1947 U.N. partition of Palestine illegal and labeled Zionism “aggressive and expansionist in its goals, racist and segregationist in its configurations and fascist in its means and aims.”¹⁵

Scholar Walid Khalidi wrote: “The very creation of the PLO reflected the Palestinian shift in orientation from a Pan-Arab to a more particularistic self-image. This shift in itself was an indication of loss of faith in the ability of the Arab countries to help the Palestinian cause.”¹⁶ While the PLO posed as the representative of the Palestinians, it was in reality largely controlled by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Many of the guerrilla groups, especially Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, remained outside of its embrace.¹⁷

The PLO’s leader was Ahmad Shuqairi, a Nasser flunky. The head of the U.N. observers in the region, General Odd Bull, considered Shuqairi “a lawyer who managed to do the cause with which he was supposed to be identified incalculable harm. He was a fanatical windbag whose bloodthirsty speeches were a godsend to the Israeli propaganda machine.”¹⁸ Observed historian Patrick Seale: “Far from a call to arms, the PLO was a sort of corral in which the Palestinians could charge about harmlessly letting off steam. The whole idea was to placate nationalist sentiment while denying Israel a pretext for war.”¹⁹

It was on Jan. 1, 1965 that Fatah announced its first raid into Israel. In reality it did not take place until Jan. 3 and was minor in nature. But for public relations reasons it was set at the first of the year. Thus Jan. 1 became the generally accepted date of Fatah’s launching of operations and thereafter became known as “Fatah Day.”²⁰

Fear and Retaliation

In Israel, the raids sent a shock of fear through the country.²¹ Its response was to mount a series of heavy retaliatory raids that took increasing tolls of death, mainly in neighboring Jordan.²² By Jan. 30, United Nations Secretary-General U Thant was concerned enough about the rising tensions that he announced he was sending a special mission to investigate the upsurge of incidents on the Israeli-Jordanian frontier. He said the incidents indicated a “serious deterioration in the situation there.”²³

From this point on, relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors sharply deteriorated. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched suprise attacks and captured Jordan’s West Bank, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, including the Gaza Strip, and Syria’s Golan Heights. At the same time, Israel turned 323,000 Palestinians into refugees. Of these, 113,000 were second-time refugees from the 726,000 who were made homeless by the 1948 war.²⁴

A fateful consequence of the rout of the Arab armies in 1967 was the explosive growth of Palestinian guerrilla groups and terrorists.²⁵ It was the Palestinians who bore the brunt of the defeat, in that hundreds of thousands more of them lost their homes and the last remaining shreds of their land. The totality of the defeat made it obvious that the Palestinians could not depend on other Arabs to secure their fate. The Palestine Liberation Organization had been a complete failure during the war, doing nothing to combat Israel’s force of arms.²⁶

Ten years after founding Fatah, Arafat emerged as the recognized leader of the Palestinians by becoming chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization on Feb. 3, 1969.²⁷ He continued as the head of Fatah and vowed to intensify the “armed revolution in all parts of our Palestinian territory to make of it a war of liberation. We reject all political settlements.”²⁸

Fatah’s major competitor within the guerrilla groups was George Habash’s aggressive PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. It was the PFLP that began the series of spectacular skyjackings of commercial airliners in 1968 to the horror of most of the world. In the words of Arafat biographer Alan Hart: “[The PFLP] was, essentially, a small group of embittered intellectuals who discovered Marxism and Leninism in the way drowning men find floating wreckage to cling to. But they knew that selling Marxism to the Palestinian masses would be no easy job, since communism and Arabism are not natural allies. So their first aim was to capture the imagination of the Palestinian masses by attacks on Jewish interests, and then to educate and brainwash. In this way, generally speaking, the PFLP thought it could compete with Fatah for popular support and eventually build a mass organization of its own.”²⁹

Ultimately, the PFLP’s cruel tactics proved too revolting to the Arab states and on Oct. 28, 1974, the Arab League designated the Palestine Liberation Organization as “the sole legitimate representative” and spokesman for the Palestinians. The unanimously adopted communiqu’ affirmed the “right of the Palestinian people to return to their homeland” and the “right to establish an independent national government under the leadership of the PLO, in its capacity as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, on any part of Palestinian territory to be liberated. This government, once it is established, shall enjoy the support of the Arab states in all domains and at every level.”³⁰

The Arab League action was a tremendous personal victory for Arafat. The league action not only anointed Arafat as leader of the Palestinians but also meant that the PLO finally gained legitimacy as the officially recognized representative of the Palestinians, allowing it to open diplomatic missions around the world. Within two weeks, Arafat made a dramatic appearance at the United Nations and called on the world community to decide between an “olive branch or a freedom fighter’s gun.”³¹

Arafat declared: “The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. Whoever stands by a just cause and fights for liberation from invaders and colonialists cannot be called terrorist. Those who wage war to occupy, colonize and oppress other people are the terrorists....The Palestinian people had to resort to armed struggle when they lost faith in the international community, which ignored their rights, and when it became clear that not one inch of Palestine could be regained through exclusively political means....Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Though Arafat has been viciously vilified by the U.S. media over the decades, his leadership of the Palestinians has been remarkable in many ways. He managed to convince his colleagues to abandon terrorism in 1988 and to gain the recognition of the world—particularly the United States and Israel—of the Palestinians as the core of the conflict. The latter was an historic achievement, won at considerable cost. Arafat has given up claim to the losses of Palestinian land in 1948, the reason Fatah and the PLO were established in the first place. Currently he is fighting to regain only 13 percent of the West Bank on top of the 3 percent he has already gotten as exclusive Palestinian land.

To his critics, Arafat has surrendered too much to Israel. His supporters cite the old Arab proverb about a camel getting its nose under the tent—even a little opening can lead to bigger things.

RECOMMENDED READING:

*Abu Iyad with Eric Rouleau, My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle, New York, Times Books, 1978.

*Bull, Odd, War and Peace in the Middle East: The experiences and views of a U.N. Observer, London, Leo Cooper, 1976.

*Cobban, Helena, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1984.

*Cooley, John K., Green March, Black September: The Story of the Palestinian Arabs, London, Frank Cass, 1973.

*Hart, Alan, Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker?, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985.

*Hirst, David, The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

*Livingston, Neil C. and David Halevy, Inside the PLO: Secret Units, Secret Funds, and the War Against Israel and the United States, New York, William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990.

*Neff, Donald, Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East, New York, Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984.

*Seale, Patrick, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988.

*Sheehan, Edward R. E., The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger: A Secret History of American Diplomacy in the Middle East, New York, Reader’s Digest Press, 1976.

*Yodfat, Aryeh Y. and Yuval Arnon-Ohanna, PLO: Strategy and Tactics, London, Croom Helm, 1981.

FOOTNOTES:

1 Many aspects about Arafat and Fatah itself have been deliberately obscured for reasons of security and to mythologize the man and the group. Thus the time of Fatah’s founding is given by various authors as early as 1956 and as late as the early 1960s. Cobban, The Palestine Liberation Organization, p. 23, says Fatah was actually founded as late as 1962. The confusion appears centered on the timing of the establishment of underground cells and the formal founding of Fatah as an organization. The actual name of Fatah was not chosen until 1959 and thus it could be argued that date represents the real founding of the group.

2 Youssef M. Ibrahim, New York Times, 1/16/91; Cooley, Payback, p. 209.

3 Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, 9/14/93; Ann Devroy and John M. Goshko, Washington Post, 9/14/93.

4 Confusion shrouds Arafat and his birthplace. There are various versions of his birthplace ranging from Jerusalem to Cairo to Gaza. According to Arafat in one of his interviews, he was born Rahman Abdul Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini in 1929 in Gaza. His family on his mother’s side was of the Abu Saud of Jerusalem, a distinguished family that claimed to trace its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. His father, Abdel Rauf Arafat, was from the Qudwa family of Gaza and Khan Yunis, of the Husseini clan, meaning Arafat was related to Haj Amin Husseini, who in 1922 was appointed Mufti of Jerusalem and thus was the leader of the Palestinians up to World War II. See an interview with Arafat in Playboy, Vol. 35, No. 9, September 1988. But his chief biographer, Hart, in Arafat, says he was born in Cairo. Israeli intelligence says he was born in 1928 in Cairo; see Livingston and Halevy, Inside the PLO, p. 62. Also see an excellent profile of Arafat which indicates he had deliberately confused the issue of his birthplace: T.D. Allman, “On the Road with Arafat,” Vanity Fair, February 1989, reprinted in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Vol. VIII, No. 5, September 1989.

5 Interview, Playboy, Vol. 35, No. 9, September 1988.

6 Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, p. 48.

7 Yodfat and Arnon-Ohanna, PLO Strategy and Tactics, pp. 24-25; also, Abu Iyad, My Home, My Land, pp. 32-35.

8 Hart, Arafat, pp. 121 and 129; Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, p. 33.

9 Hart, Arafat, p. 157; Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, p. 216.

10 Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, p. 217.

11 Cooley, Green March, Black September, p. 175. Also see Hart, Arafat, p. 157; Yodfat and Arnon-Ohanna, PLO, p. 78.

12 Cooley, Green March, Black September, p. 177.

13 Yodfat and Arnon-Ohanna, PLO: Strategy and Tactics, pp. 86-90.

14 Reuters, New York Times, 5/29/64.

15 Text of the charter is in Harkabi, The Palestinian Covenant and Its Meaning, Appendix A; Yodfat and Arnon-Ohanna, PLO: Strategy and Tactics, Appendix Two.

16 Walid Khalidi, “The Palestine Problem: an Overview,” Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1991, pp. 11-12.

17 Yodfat and Arnon-Ohanna, PLO Strategy and Tactics, p. 22; also, Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 273.

18 Bull, War and Peace in the Middle East, pp. 72-73.

19 Seale, Asad, p. 121.

20 Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch , pp. 276, 282; Hart, Arafat, p. 183.

21 Bull, War and Peace in the Middle East, p. 84.

22 Neff, Warriors For Jerusalem, pp. 54-55.

23 New York Times, 1/31/65.

24 UN A/6797*, “Report on the Mission of the special Representative to the occupied territories, 15 Sept. 1967.” Also see Davis, The Evasive Peace, p. 69; Neff, Warriors for Jerusalem, p. 320. Davis puts the second-time refugees at 145,000.

25 Cooley, Green March, Black September, pp. 98-99; Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 251.

26 Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch , p. 273; Cobban, The Palestinian Liberation Organization, pp. 29-30.

27 Hart, Arafat, p. 287.

28 Facts on File 1969, p. 52.

29 Hart, Arafat, pp. 286-87.

30 Abu Iyad, My Home, My Land, p. 146. The text is in Journal of Palestine Studies, “Arab Documents on Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Winter 1975, pp, 177-78.

31 Arafat spoke for 100 minutes. See Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 335. The text is in Journal of Palestine Studies, “Palestine at the United Nations,” Winter 1975, pp. 181-92. Also see Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger, pp. 152-53.