Twenty years after his death, Yasser Arafat’s dream of Palestinian liberation seems as distant as ever. As Israel wages a war of destruction in the Gaza Strip with the aim of destroying Hamas, the Islamist party with which Arafat’s Fatah movement was frequently at odds, the Palestinian leader’s rejection of a land-for-peace deal at Camp David in 2000 still looms over events.
After conducting violent guerrilla and terrorist campaigns against Israel for decades, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chairman sought peace in 1993 by signing the historic Oslo Accords (Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts). Arafat had already accepted Israel’s right to exist in 1988. He had given up on reclaiming all of the Palestinian land in 1974, two years after Palestinian terrorists massacred Israeli athletes at the Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany.
But the Oslo process ended in failure, giving way to the Second Intifada and Arafat’s confinement by Israel at his West Bank headquarters preceding his death in 2004. Throughout the last years of his life, Arafat was blamed for failing to control Palestinian factions responsible for suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Omar Rahman, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, discusses Arafat’s legacy in light of events since the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. 7. For all his many faults, Arafat was the last Palestinian leader to reach a major peace agreement with Israel.
“He oversaw the heights of the Palestinian national movement and the lows… He resurrected Palestinian national identity after it had been destroyed in the nakba and Palestinian society was fractured and in ruins in the refugee camps. He gave them something to fight for, and he built a strong liberation movement that had achieved recognition by the international community,” Mr. Rahman said. “But he also represented a period of one-man rule.”
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