Yasser Arafat: a gentle terrorist?

Press, 15 July 1982, Page 17

Yasser Arafat: a gentle terrorist?

From

COLIN SMITH

in Beirut

At a Palestinian position confronting the Israelis, holding the Lebanese University's Faculty of Science, one ’of those places involving much sprinting between buildings and diving through windows to avoid snipers, an illequipped platoon of fedayeen were discussing the future. All around them the local Lebanese Shia Muslim householders were flying white flags from their homes in anticipation of Israel’s final assault on West Beirut. Yet the Palestinians, whose ages ranged from about 15 to 25, seemed resigned to fight to the end.

But surely there was no dishonour in surrender to overwhelming odds? They thought about this for a moment. Then, with a sudden flash of inspiration, one curly-haired youth asked: "Would you have expected Churchill to surrender, to leave Britain?"

It was not a bad reply for undoubtedly Yasser Arafat — nom de guerre Abu Ammar ("the Builder") but affectionately known to most of his followers as al Khutyar (“the Old Man") - is the Churchill or the Tito or the Castro or the Ho Chi Minh of the Palestinian revolution.

No other figure within the Palestine Liberation Organisation enjoys anything like his stature. If he went, the alternative would probably be disintegration and factional feuding with the more extremist parties vying to outdo each other in acts of terrorism against the Zionists and .their imperialist backers. There have been at least two attempts on his life in the last 10 years and normally he is a lucifugous creature, moving only after dark whenever possible.

But in these last days of siege he has made himself more visible than ever before. For a start, he needed

to dispel a malicious rumour that he had taken shelter in the Soviet Embassy, abandoning his men to their fate. Therefore, he has been photographed filling ‘sandbags, playing chess with a reporter — perhaps a risky piece of public relations for a man facing checkmate — and kicking a football around with some of his off-duty troops. Although he is of aristocratic lineage, Arafat is one of the most determined populists to walk the face of the earth. The headdress of the Palestinian peasant, which covers an almost entirely bald pate, has become the very symbol of his revolution. So has the nail-scissored grey stubble on his cheeks, a fashion he once explained he had adopted because he had calculated that abandoning the razor saved him an hour’s working time a week. Close associates say the real reason is that if he attempts to shave he comes out in a terrible skin rash. The chairman of the P.L.O. has always shrouded everything he is or does with mystery. The known facts are that he was bom Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al Qudwa al Husseini in December, 1929. His mother was a member of Jerusalem’s prominent al Husseini family and was connected with the Mufti of Jerusalem, a proNazi who was a thorn in the side of the British administration during the period of the Palestine Mandate. His father was a wealthy merchant with business interests in Cairo and Gaza.

Arafat always maintains he was bom in Jerusalem which, being almost as sacred to the Muslims as it is to Jews and Christians, is a good place for Arab

leaders to be bom. His detractors say this is not true and that he first saw the light of day in either Gaza or Cairo.

Certainly, he spent his adolescence in Gaza, then part Of British-occupied Egvpt, where he attended the Zeitoun secondary school. It was there that one of his teachers supposedly nicknamed him Yasser.

Like many of the Palestinian generations to follow, he became involved in politics at an early age. Despite the sort of unprepossessing physical characteristics that can be a bar to youthful advancement — short in stature, blubbery lips and bad acne — he became leader of the Gaza youth section of an anti-Ziohist organisation called .al Faoutouwa. The fact that one of his relatives on his . mother’s side, Sheikh Abdel Qader al Husseini, was its founder may well have had something to do with it. Nevertheless, he proved he could maintain the respect of his age group and claims to have fought in the first ArabIsraeli war in 1948.

The fifth of seven children, in December, 1950, Arafat followed his brothers to Cairo University where, in the heady atmosphere of revolution which preceded the overthrow of King Farouk, he began to study engineering. He straight away threw himself into politics again, joined the Muslim Brotherhood, then the most potent opposition group but shortly to be betrayed by Nasser and his "Free Officers," and. the Union of Palestinian Students, of which he was president from 1952-56. Commissioned into the

Egyptian Army, he fought in the 1956 Suez war as a second-lieutenant in a demolition squad, acquiring a knowledge of explosives that was to prove useful in his subsequent career.

After the Suez war, with Egyptian nationalism at full flood, he began to have doubts about Nasser’s ability to recover Palestine. Fearing arrest in Egypt for his Muslim Brotherhood activities — he first heard of the Egyptian Secret Service’s interest in him while he was attending a student conference in Prague in 1957 — he found an engineering job in Kuwait at the Ministry of Public Works. He also demonstrated some of his father’s business acumen by setting himself up as a private contractor.

It was in Kuwait, with its large community of Palestinian exiles, that the seeds for Al Fatah, the largest, of the Palestinian guerrilla groups, were sown. Two old friends from Cairo, Salah Khalaf and Khaled al-Wazir (later known by the noms de guerre of Abu Ayad and Abu Jihad); founded Fatah in October, 1959. It was one of many parties and secret, societies in the region that were an offshoot of Nasser’s, vibrant Pan-Arabism and a very minor one at that. But gradually the new powers in the Third World began to show an interest. In December, 1962, Arafat visited Algiers and attained the blessing of President Ben Bella who took him to visit Peking with an Algerian delegation the next year. It was about at this point that Arafat’s personal life underwent change. Although never exactly a bon viveur, he had until then lived much of his life according to his upbringing. When he was in Beirut, for instance, he stayed at the St Georges, an establishment long since destroyed in the civil war.

Now, needing the patronage of regimes like Algeria and China, he began to adopt a manner more befitting a representative of the struggling masses. He became almost monkish in his tastes. He does not drink, smoke, or take coffee, and. instead offers guests a herbal tea which he sometimes sweetens with honey. He is not a vegetarian but he avoids eating meat when he can. He has never married, often declaring that he is “betrothed to the revolution.”

He has always been quick to adapt. He was bom a Sunni Muslim, but in the early days of Fatah never made much of religion or appeared particularly devout and did not get around to making a pilgramage to Mecca until November, 1978, a few months after the Iranian revolution had declared its support for the Palestinian cause.

Now, in the day of the Islamic revival, he lets it be known that he prays five times a day, fasts for Ramadhan, and prefers that his guards do the same. His only known relaxations are watching cartoon videotapes, some of which he plays over and over again, and fast driving. He has been know to terrify his escorts by insist-

ing on taking over the wheel of his limousine and driving at breakneck speeds down darkened roads. '

In the last 20 years Fatah has been the dominant guerrilla faction within the Palestine Liberation Organisation, of which Arafat was elected chairman in February, 1969, The fact that he has been able to. hold this group together for so long is ample tribute to his political skill. One has only to look at the disarray in the Arab world to understand this was no mean feat;

There, are eight guerrilla groupings within the P.L.O. They include such mavericks as the Marxist Dr George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which from the late 1960 s to the mid-1970s .was responsible for many of the operations, often with the assistance of foreign terrorists, which for many made the name Palestinian synonymous with terrorist. •

Arafat has always represented the moderate wing of the P.L.O. The only attack on civilians he has publicly condoned was the bombardment of Israel’s fortified settlements in northern Galilee. Asked last year about the deaths of women and chi'l-

dren there, he replied: "I am against it but it happens. You have to ask these citizens why they are living in my homeland?"

If one charts Arafat’s progress on the world stage from the first time he made the cover of “Time" in 1968. to his "gun. and the olive branch" speech to the United Nations in 1974, and to the almost-state reception, accorded him by Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky in Vienna three years ago. so the emphasis on his minimalist policies has increased. Since 1974 he has been hinting that, if the Israelis would only withdraw from the territories they occupied after the 1967 war, he would accept a mini-State consisting of the West Bank and Gaza.

But while he may hint at these, things to the ’West, he needs to moderate his moderation when talking to people like Habash or the boys from the camps who want to hear about revolution until victory. Because of this Arafat has never dared accept the one thing that would have brought the United States recognition he yearns for: acceptance of United Nations Resolution 242.

This resolution calls for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories but also upholds Israel’s right to exist. Last, year, pressure from the Left wing, including the inner councils of Fatah itself, obliged him to withdraw his original support for a Saudi Arabian proposal that was very much on the lines of 242. Some of Arafat's critics within the P.L.O. accuse him of always being too much of a politician and not enough of a statesman. They think he should have been bolder and cut away the rejectionists like Ha bash: even had the sort of night of the long knives by which the Phalangists ruthlessly gained control of the Maronite Christian camp.

Perhaps, in the end, he is too gentle for that. He used to resist pressures from President Carter to recognise Israel through 242 by saying that recognition. was "the only card in his hand." Now it looks as if he does not even have that. — Copyright, London Observer Service.