Yasir Arafat

Yasir Arafat died just as he lived most of his life, giving mixed signals to the world, provoking rivalries among intimates and arousing wild speculation from allies and enemies alike.

It's not easy to take the measure of a man whose career has been obscured by so much propaganda and mythmaking. Especially in America, Arafat has been demonized as an arch-terrorist and derided as a bumbling rejectionist. Even as he lay on his deathbed, the New York Times repeated the accusation, branding him as "the man who refused to say yes" to Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak's inadequate and insulting Camp David 2000 settlement offer.

We in the West too often ignore what no Palestinian will ever forget: After the Palestinians' catastrophic defeat of 1948, when some 750,000 were expelled from their homeland and began living in destitution in refugee camps scattered across half a dozen countries, forgotten by the world, abused and cynically exploited by Arab despots and demagogues, it was Arafat who, along with a few comrades, gave birth to the Palestinian liberation movement. It was the PLO, under Arafat's leadership, that restored Palestinian pride and helped to forge a nation out of a population that was geographically dispersed and politically divided. And it was Arafat who led the PLO, in the face of fierce internal resistance, into adopting the two-state solution in the mid-1970s. But his conciliatory peace offering at the UN General Assembly in 1974, and numerous subsequent peace feelers, were met with persistent rebuffs from Israel and the United States.

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