The facts of Yasser Arafat’s birth, shrouded in mystery and confused by contradiction for over four decades, are now established beyond doubt. Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat Al Qudua Al Husseini, to give Arafat his full original name, was born in Cairo of Palestinian parentage on 24 August 1929. Mohammed Abdel Rahman was his first name; Abdel Raouf his father’s name; Arafat his grandfather’s; Al Qudua is the name of his family; and Al Husseini is the name of the clan to which the Al Quduas belonged. The sequence of names has nothing mysterious in it; at this time it was still the accepted pattern.
The confusion surrounding the structure of his name, its change to Yasser Arafat and indeed much of what happened in his early years has greatly engaged biographers and chroniclers. The importance of these details has been misunderstood, deliberately inflated and dramatized to mystify and on occasions glamorize his early life. In fact the Mohammed Abdel Rahman element – the combining of Mohammed and another name – though not unusual throughout the Middle East, was more common in Egypt among religious families and remains so to this day. The Mohammed part is often dropped, as in the cases of Mohammed Anwar Sadat and Mohammed Husni Mubarak, and what is more interesting was Arafat’s decision not to use Abdel Rahman either. The dropping of an old clan name (Al Husseini in this case) or an old family name, and exclusive reliance on a more recent innovation (I myself never used the clan name Hammad and stop at Aburish, a name adopted by my grandfather in 1912), is an unsurprising general practice. What is significant is Arafat’s adoption of the name Yasser, about which more later.
Arafat himself has further muddied the waters. His reluctance to explain certain things to biographers is an example of the perverse gamesmanship common to political leaders who did not assume power through an open political process. In contrast, the reasons for the mystery surrounding his place of birth are straightforward and understandable. Early in his career, when the young Arafat sought to establish his Palestinian credentials and promote his eventual claim to leadership, he could not afford to admit any facts which might reduce his Palestinian identity. Indeed, that is why he dramatized it by describing himself as ‘the son of Jerusalem’. While it is impossible to assess the importance of this decision after so many years and so many changes in the political picture of the Middle East, it was probably a wise move. Admitting his Egyptian birth, and that his father was half Egyptian, could have affected his chances of success, particularly during periods when the Palestinians were inclined to separate themselves from the rest of the Arabs, whose efforts on their behalf had disappointed them. In the 1950s and 1960s, before he rose to prominence and became subject to scrutiny, Arafat insistently perpetuated the legend that he had been born in Jerusalem and was related to the important Husseini clan of that city, the leading political family in Palestine and claimants to a lineage that stretched back to the prophet Mohammed. This is what he told dozens of journalists and writers with diverse interests and agendas – people like Milton Viorst, Elizabeth Ferber, Christopher Harper, William Stewart, and Janet and John Wallach.1 It was a myth-making exercise which was eventually overtaken by events – the discovery of documents showing his actual place of birth.
This tale reveals something else about Arafat, too. It suggests either that he had not counted on success and being put under the microscope in the manner of the famous and important, or that he was in the habit of creating legends without giving much thought to their long-term consequences, even when they could lead to accusations of lying. Now, after relatively recent revelations by some biographers and because his leadership position is firm enough to withstand questions about his origins, Arafat has changed his story. On the subject of his birth, loyalist biographer Alan Hart admits Arafat was born in Cairo; but he did so only after Janet and John Wallach had unearthed an Egyptian birth certificate2 and Andrew Gowers and Tony Walker had discovered Arafat’s personal files at the University of Cairo.3 The rest of the material on his early years, which once obscured his origins, has also been amended by those who have written about him.
Arafat’s father, Abdel Raouf Arafat Al Qudua Al Husseini, was a small-time textile merchant and one-time policeman with the administration of Ottoman Turkey who moved his family from Gaza to Cairo in 1927. Portraits of the man, mustachioed, wearing a fez, looking serious to the point of reverence and staring at the camera from behind thick glasses, are representative of a particular class of Palestinian in the 1920s. The moustache confers dignity; the Turkish fez denoted belonging, or pretending to belong, to the baquat (notables) class of people, whom he emulated; and smiling or looking happy was not in keeping with his assumed dignity or status – I am always amazed by how severe my own ancestors appear in similar photographs. The total absence of pictures of Arafat’s mother or sisters is in keeping with Abdel Raouf’s social position; his was a traditional Muslim household where women occupied a secondary position and were seldom photographed. Finally, the fact that there are no pictures of the infant Yasser confirms the family’s conservative inclinations and modest circumstances. Most of these families could not afford cameras; more important items like radios came first.
The posed photographs of Arafat’s father exaggerate the basic facts. The Gaza Husseinis were only on the edge of being notability and, despite the similarity of name, unrelated to the real Husseini notables of Jerusalem, the family of Hajj Amin Al Husseini, the then Mufti of Palestine and leader of the Palestinian nationalist movement for the first half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the Arafats of Gaza were not related to their namesakes in the Palestinian towns of Nablus, Safad and Lydda and, in a part of the world where family legend abounds, there is very little to recall about their history. So the Arafat Al Qudua name belongs exclusively to Gaza, where to this day there is an Al Qudua Street. But the existence of the street appears to indicate where Yasser’s ancestors had lived rather than to celebrate lofty social position or heroic achievement by any of them – in the same way, the area of Bethany where my family lives is called Housh Abu Rish, or the Abu Rish district.
Nor was Abdel Raouf, though a totally honourable man who on occasions tried to extend his commercial activities and dabble in the import-export business, a big-time merchant as stated by some members of the Arafat family when interviewed by journalists and biographers. Still, as with the claim that he had been born in Jerusalem, the Husseini name was to be used by Arafat during his formative leadership years, and the extent to which the real Husseinis helped with his pretence will be discussed later. What is of immediate concern is the purpose of Abdel Raouf’s move to Cairo with five children at a time when people seldom left their countries and when the mere act of resettling in a town 30 miles away was tantamount to emigrating, with the attendant social trauma and admission of failure. People moved when they could not make it where they were, and in a highly traditional, static society it took a long time for them to be accepted.
Like many people with aspirations but without the ability to make it on their own, Abdel Raouf was chasing a dream: he left Gaza for Cairo in pursuit of a land inheritance. His Egyptian mother was from the well-known Radwan family (because of the geographical closeness, marriage between Gazans and Egyptians was comparatively common), and he believed that much of the valuable land in the district of Abbasiya in Cairo had belonged to her and, after her death, should have become his property.4 The land had not in fact been in the Radwan name for 150 years, but the area in question was large enough and valuable enough for Abdel Raouf’s law suit to merit coverage in several Egyptian newspapers. And despite what appears to have been a morbid preoccupation with the subject, Abdel Raouf managed to support his family in a comfortable manner and to house them in a spacious apartment in the Sakakini district of the city, then a mixed neighbourhood which had many Christian, Jewish, Armenian and Lebanese residents. This confirms the general impression of Abdel Raouf, for though not an aristocratic Husseini nor rich, he seems to have been a solid, old – fashioned family man who was anxious to provide well for his family. One thing is clear: regardless of success or failure, the family never depended on outside financial help.
Cairo was where Mohammed Abdel Rahman (today’s Yasser) and his younger brother Fathi were born, and it was where their young mother, by all accounts a comely, decent homemaker, died of a kidney ailment in 1933 when Yasser was five. Abdel Raouf, the hard-working, dream-chasing merchant, was left with seven children: daughters Inam, Khadija and Yusar and sons Khalid, Mustapha, Mohammed Abdel Rahman and Fathi. He remarried soon afterwards, but it ended in divorce after a few months: one of the reasons for the break – up was his children’s hatred of his new wife,5 to this day a common Arab reason for divorcing a second wife. Although he was a strict disciplinarian the burden of bringing up seven children without maternal supervision became too heavy; the oldest daughter, Inam, was still in her early teens and unable, as tradition would have dictated, to raise her younger brothers and sisters, so Abdel Raouf decided to send the two youngest ones to their maternal relations in Jerusalem.
This is Yasser Arafat’s direct connection to Jerusalem. His mother was born Zahwa Abul Saoud, a member of a well-known, old Jerusalem family which produced men of learning, teachers and religious figures. Although not wealthy, numerous or politically important, the Abul Saouds were a substantial notch higher on the social scale than the Gaza Al Husseinis and obviously in a better position to take care of the children than Abdel Raouf’s Al Qudua relations in Gaza. By all accounts, Arafat’s maternal uncle Selim Abul Saoud welcomed him and his brother Fathi as members of his family.
We have only a general picture of the type of life Arafat led in Jerusalem. As with other aspects of his life, the lack of clarity is clouded further by the passage of time and the massive changes which have taken place in the Middle East. Writers unequipped to understand or relate to the atmosphere in the households of families like the Abul Saouds have only been able to speculate. What we know is that Uncle Selim lived in the old city, an area steeped in tradition where people very seldom sold houses – properties were kept in the same family for centuries. His own house was near the Wailing Wall, the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of Omar, but was unfortunately demolished to make room for Jewish worshippers after the June 1967 War and the occupation of the whole of Jerusalem by Israel. Furthermore the Abul Saouds, always small in number, have all but vanished, and those who remain in Jerusalem are reluctant to speak of young Yasser for fear of contradicting what he promotes or any part of his legend. And Arafat himself, having had to amend many of the stories he spread about his childhood during his early career, now refuses to discuss his Jerusalem period. This is why the size of the house, a measure of the status of the occupants, is unknown. Furthermore, although they kept their old houses, in the 1920s and 1930s the truly rich families moved outside the crowded old city where most of the houses were small and lacked modern amenities. So while Arafat’s stay in Jerusalem and the happy atmosphere which surrounded it are established beyond question, the precise location of the house, its size – and a big house would be remembered – and what Uncle Selim did for a living remain unknown.
What little is known about young Yasser during this period suggests a hyperactive, intelligent child who, despite being undisciplined, was capable of easy achievement and of endearing himself to the people around him – what might be called a naughty charmer. He attended the ordinary local school but, because the school no longer exists and such establishments did not keep organized files anyway, his scholastic record is not known. There are no friends from that period who remember him under any of his names. At home, his uncle did not beat Yasser6 as his father had done; in fact, he doted on him and his brother. By all available accounts Selim Abul Saoud took care of his wards in a modest but comfortable manner, and in turn the children were fond of their uncle and his wife.
Arafat liked Jerusalem much more than he did Cairo. Important in terms of his later pretensions and achievements is the attachment he appears to have developed for the atmosphere of Jerusalem – the alleys, shops and smells of the old city and the religious aura created by the Muslims, Christians and Jews who not only lived there as neighbours but responded to the Holy City in a special way. According to many of his close associates, Arafat remembers and relates to Jerusalem’s uniqueness much more than to the Cairo of his daydreaming father, his mother’s traumatic death, his hated stepmother and a community of expatriates who hunddled together for mutual support. Jerusalem would become the place of Arafat’s mental birth. It was the home of the respected family which gave Arafat a substantial name in keeping with his father’s pretensions, and provided him with emotional warmth. This is why the original misrepresentation of his place of birth deserves our sympathy. An attachment to love and comfort is understandable, and the Arabs accord family background greater importance than most. A normal child, not least one who had been wounded by dislocation from his roots and the loss of his mother, would relate to both.
The happy days in Jerusalem came to an end after four years, in 1937. Abdel Raouf recalled Yasser and his brother Fathi to Cairo and the supervision of their eldest sister, by then in her late teens. By all accounts, the energetic Inam did an excellent job with the boys and she maintains an endearingly close relationship with her two youngest brothers to this day. However, home life under Abdel Raouf was never happy: despite the hopelessness of the situation, the old man continued to squander his income in pursuit of his elusive inheritance, and to his children he remained a remote, forbidding disciplinarian. Moreover, a third marriage proved as unsuccessful and short-lived as the second and, despite Inam’s efforts to create a model home life, it contributed towards a deterioration in the relationship between the children and their parent. This is why Arafat now rarely mentions his father, and why he did not attend Abdel Raouf’s funeral in 1952 or visit his grave after his dramatic return to Gaza as head of the Palestinian Authority.
It was during this period that the first signs of the Arafat we know today began to surface. During the formative and often rebellious years of nine to fifteen Inam tried her utmost to protect her brothers from their strict father, but when her efforts failed Yasser often fled briefly to a family of Cairo relations, the Awad Al Akhbars. Although the purpose of running away was simply to avoid confrontation with Abdel Raouf and possible punishment, it also exposed Yasser to a heavier Islamic atmosphere. Al Akhbar spent hours reciting the Koran and recalling the sayings of the prophet, and succeeded in making his young relation memorize a great deal of both. But Koranic learning, though essential to mastering the Arabic language, was separate from overall scholastic achievement, and the side-effects of his uneasy home life showed in the young Arafat’s neglect of his school work.
Too hyperactive to be studious, he now found an outlet for his ever-present energies through running a gang of neighbourhood children. He bullied and organized them, taking pleasure in ordering them around and marching them up and down the streets while hectoring them like a tough, rough-speaking sergeant from the films of that time. It was tantamount to creating a small army at an early age and it reveals a great deal about his natural ability to command, be it through persuasion or coercion. Inam and his brothers loved Yasser and what he did. He was the one family member with imagination and flair, but his father saw no benefit or amusement in his son’s activities and this undoubtedly widened the gulf between them. His admiring biographer Alan Hart notes Arafat as saying that he paid little attention to his studies; other biographers take a harder line and speak of him being ‘a bad student’, extending this to support a contention that he had a questionable education.7 The evidence suggests his father would have agreed with them. Despite all his faults the elder Arafat showed considerable interest in his children’s education.
Since the Oslo Peace Accord of 1993 Arafat has taken to recalling from this time only that Muslims and Jews lived amicably together in the Sakakini district of Cairo, and that he himself had close contact with Jews; but there is no evidence to support this selective bit of remembrance beyond the fact that the neighbourhood was indeed a mixed one. Furthermore, the one trait which Abdel Raouf managed to transmit to his family without conflict was a deeply religious outlook which was strengthened by Yasser’s occasional escapes to the Al Akhbar household. This and the attachment of the children to their Abul Saoud background – particularly in view of the Abul Saouds’ and Al Akhbars’ traditional anti-Jewish Islamic stance – would have precluded all but the most perfunctory of contact with non-Muslim neighbours, particularly Jews. Christian and Jewish children would have been reluctant to join the ragtag army of young Yasser because an army needed an enemy, which in this case would have been either the Crusaders or the Jews; only the children of Muslim families would have joined him.
Eventually, the more important development which was to have a lasting influence on Arafat’s life pulled him in the opposite direction, into severing whatever contact existed with Jewish neighbours, and it originated in the place he loved so much, Jerusalem. The end of the Second World War provided direction to the restlessness of the Palestinian-Egyptian teenager. Beginning in 1945, Palestine, which had become a British mandate territory after the First World War, was on the boil. The Jewish claim to it, contained in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, set against the justified, solid determination of the Arabs to keep it, was surfacing as the major international issue of the times, one which preoccupied Arabs of all ages and political persuasions. For Arafat this general picture was more intense than for others, augmented as it was by the arrival late in 1946 in Cairo of Hajj Amin Al Husseini, the Mufti of Palestine, undisputed leader of the country’s Arabs. He was a man whom Arafat came to adore and emulate, and whose name he later used as his own.
Others saw the austere Mufti from a distance, but young Arafat had direct personal access to him from the age of seventeen. Among the Mufti’s entourage was Sheikh Hassan Abul Saoud, the head of the Abul Saoud family of Jerusalem and a distant maternal relation whom Arafat called ‘uncle’. A Palestinian nationalist leader whom the British administration in Palestine had exiled to the Seychelle Islands, Sheikh Hassan was the Mufti’s chief assistant and adviser.8 But, although an undoubtedly talented Muslim cleric and a graduate of Al Azhar University, the leading centre of Islamic learning, he owed his elevated position mainly to his membership of the Shafi’ school of Sunni Islam to which most Palestinians belonged. The Mufti came from the Hanafi school, a minority sub-sect which had risen to prominence under the Ottoman Empire, which was also Hanafi. He had sought Sheikh Hassan’s support in the early 1920s to appear non – partisan to the Shafi’ Palestinians and because the unassuming Abul Saoud did not represent a challenge to his leadership. Indeed Sheikh Hassan, despite his position, was more of a religious figure than an aspirant to high political office.
Family ties were stronger then among Arabs than they are today, and Sheikh Hassan valued family connections and loyalty. He knew of the unhappy situation in the Arafat household and took Abdel Raouf’s family under his wing. To young Yasser this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and he had a mature understanding of what it meant: he made greater efforts to endear himself to the Mufti than did his brothers. The legendary Arab lack of organization was evident among the Palestinians in Cairo; in particular, chaos surrounded the Arab Higher Committee, the Mufti’s political organization. Yasser turned himself into a voluntary assistant to Sheikh Hassan and wasted no time in making himself indispensable. He hand-delivered important letters from the Arab Higher Committee to visiting Arab leaders and the offices of the Arab League, the grouping of Arab countries, set up in 1945 to promote economic and political cooperation; he collected money from sympathetic donors; and he reported on pro-Palestinian activities in Egyptian schools and universities. All these functions were extremely helpful in giving him an understanding of the workings of Arab politics. In between, he was at Sheikh Hassan’s side, doing everything from sharpening his pencils to providing him with cold drinking water and spreading his prayer rug; in the process he was privy to what the old man said and did, becoming the custodian of secrets which were not usually entrusted to someone of his age.
Despite his preoccupation with politics, Arafat still managed to enter King Fuad I (later Cairo) University in 1947, probably with financial help and a push from Sheikh Hassan and the Mufti, who had become admirers of the energetic young activist. But being a politically active Palestinian in exile was more to his liking than academic pursuits. The many pictures of Arafat during this period show a young politician in the making, always at student political meetings and Palestinian gatherings. The bulging eyes and protruding lower lip are clearly visible, and his hair has already started to recede. The possessor of these less-than-attractive physical attributes wears an expression of perpetual surprise – the eyes seem to betray wonder at what he is seeing and to be transmitting it to a restless mind. Arafat is always conservatively attired in these photographs, mostly wearing a tie and a nondescript grey suit, and accompanied by Palestinian students from important political families. At the university he participated in debates, helped to organize Palestinian students in Cairo and, using his influence with Sheikh Hassan, got some of them local scholarships. By the end of 1947 he began participating in the more important activity of buying arms and shipping them to the Mufti’s Arab partisans in Palestine.9
Arafat may have been neglecting his studies, but he was certainly broadening his experience. Arms buying, collecting and shipping to Palestine was a task only for the able, well-connected and trusted. The arms in question were rifles, light machine guns and sub – machine guns discarded in the the Second World War – the rusty leftovers of the British, German and Italian armies who had fought over the Western Desert. Sheikh Hassan, acting on the Mufti’s orders, organized the procurement of thousands of such weapons mostly from Bedouins in today’s Libya and sent them to the Holy Strugglers, the Arab irregulars of the Arab Higher Committee who were already fighting the better-equipped and better-trained Jewish forces in Palestine.
Once again, Arafat’s stories of his involvement in an important activity do not totally correspond with the facts. That he participated in this unique effort is undoubtedly true, and a most revealing and impressive achievement for someone of nineteen, but he was not the major player in this field of his myth-making. Many others did the same, and Arafat’s presentation of himself as the innovator of this activity is utterly false. In fact, because my Uncle Ibrahim was one of the leaders of the Holy Strugglers and my father was a Mufti supporter who worked closely with them, I knew many others who were equally if not more deeply involved in the efforts to arm the Palestinians with Second World War weapons. Nor is there substantial evidence that Arafat was very close to the leader of the Holy Strugglers during this period. This was the Mufti’s cousin and then frequent visitor to Cairo, the most honoured Palestinian hero of them all, who later died fighting in the battle of Jerusalem – Abdel Kader Al Husseini. That the two knew each other is true – they often found themselves in the Mufti’s Cairo offices at the same time – but Abdel Kader’s close associates were an older group of men, most of whom had fought with him in Palestine during the 1936–9 Arab revolt against the British. Furthermore there was no reason for the commander of a militia such as Abdel Kader to view what Arafat had to offer as something special.
The culmination of Arafat’s political activities in Cairo occurred in 1948, when the British withdrew from Palestine and the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. Although he could have remained in Cairo near his important relation, and his age and the demands of university life would have justified it, he could not wait to abandon his studies and join the fray. He eventually managed to reach the southern part of Palestine around Gaza with a number of his Palestinian classmates. For unknown reasons he did not get to Palestine as a member of the Mufti’s forces, the Holy Strugglers, but with units of Al Ikhwan Al Muslimeen (the Muslim Brotherhood), the original Egyptian Islamic fundamentalist movement which despatched its own armed irregulars to retrieve and protect Muslim rights and honour in Palestine.
This is a very curious landmark in Arafat’s life. For while the Mufti and Muslim Brotherhood cooperated on many matters, only the religiously committed ended up fighting in Palestine with the Brotherhood, and there were very few Palestinian fighters among them. It is further evidence that Arafat’s Islamic upbringing had taken hold, confirms that he was accepted as an Egyptian, and renders more credible the allegation that the Arafat household were members of this organization.10 It also renders implausible his supposed close friendship with Abdel Kader, who saw the Brotherhood as competitors, and it certainly makes his claims of friendship with the Jews in the Sakakini district less credible.
The record of this period is even more muddled and Arafat’s performance in Palestine, like most of his early life, is also subject to exaggeration – though never total invention or fabrication as some biographers have stated or implied. That Arafat fought bravely in the area around Gaza, the battleground of the regular Egyptian army and Egyptian irregular forces, is confirmed by many who were with him. They speak of him being utterly fearless and often going on personal forays without authorization or support. However, that falls short of his claim to Alan Hart that he personally stopped the advance of a column of ten Israeli armoured personnel carriers by knocking out the first and the last and trapping the rest.11 The Israelis did not have ten armoured personnel carriers in that sector, if anywhere. Furthermore, the various testimonies which state that he operated only in the Gaza theatre belie his later version that he was a special military assistant to Abdel Kader Al Husseini during the battle of Jerusalem.12 Abdel Kader’s deputy commander at the time was named Kamel Irekat and his other military assistants were also known; these facts are not in dispute and were common knowledge to everyone who lived around Jerusalem at the time, including myself at the age of thirteen. Moreover, the Muslim Brotherhood forces, to which Arafat belonged, never got to the Jerusalem area and certainly did not fight there during the critical early months of 1948. Because of a lack of logistical support, they returned to Cairo in early 1949 at the same time as Arafat. His version of events is not an exaggeration but a rewrite of the record, and it is clear that he began spreading stories to embellish the myth of himself as a hero and to benefit from the lustre attached to the legend of Abdel Kader. Arafat did this more often later, during his early leadership days, when he needed to create a story line to support his pursuit of Palestinian primacy.
The young veteran who returned to Cairo after the 1948 Arab defeat in Palestine was even more restless than the student who had left it only a few months before. He took his time before re-entering the school of civil engineering at the university, and was full of war stories which he related to others voluntarily but with considerable emotion. Some were true, and indeed heroic, but, as usual with him, many were adapted or invented, such as tales of his fighting in Jerusalem. This aside, he never deviated from the conclusions he had drawn from his brief fighting experience. Arafat believed that the Arab governments who had fought the Israelis – Egypt and Jordan, supported by Iraq and Syria – had lost because of corrupt and incompetent leadership and that, left alone, the Palestinians would have won the war. It was these two beliefs which propelled him forward and which, because he was reluctant to admit other influences, many accept as the basis of his political philosophy to this day.
The anger which Arafat directed at the Arab governments differed from Palestinian anger in general. Traumatic as his military experience in Gaza must have been, his family did not suffer from the Arab defeat in the way most Palestinians did – he was not a child of Al Nakba or the disaster, as Palestinians call the 1948 defeat, nor did his father lose the source of his livelihood (of the former region of Palestine only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip remained unoccupied by the Israelis, and up to seven hundred thousand Palestinians were dispossessed). Those who became refugees or were directly affected by the defeat, particularly those who lived in the centre of the country, knew that Palestinian leadership was as corrupt and incompetent as that of the rest of the Arabs. But Arafat’s first-hand experience of these things was under Egyptian tutelage and it did not affect his attitude towards Palestinian capabilities – only towards Egypt and the other Arab governments.
Was there anything new in his perception of the reasons for the Arab defeat? Attributing it to the inadequacies of their governments was what most inhabitants of Arab countries did. Corruption was very near the surface in the Arab Middle East. It showed clearly in the way the Arab armies behaved, and Arafat’s proximity to the Egyptian army fighting in Palestine probably produced disturbing evidence of this. It took no special talent to determine that Egypt’s forces suffered from lack of training, out-of-date weaponry and an absentee officer class who readily abandoned their men to play squash or return to Cairo to see their favourite belly dancer.
Arafat’s personal experience was augmented and given final shape by the teachings and attitude of the two political organizations to which he was connected. This mattered considerably more than his pure ‘anger towards his Arab brothers’, which Israeli biographer Dany Rubenstein believes ‘shaped his political course’.13 Both the Arab Higher Committee of the Mufti and Sheikh Hassan, and the Muslim Brotherhood under the religious zealot Hassan Al Banna, came out of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War condemning the unpreparedness of the Arab armies and the corruption of the regimes behind them without admitting that they were guilty of the same faults. However justified, both political organizations exaggerated the legend of a stab in the back, the existence of a corrupt Arab leadership with less commitment to the war than to making money out of commissions on arms purchases. Both organizations celebrated the qualities of the individual Arab soldier while questioning the qualifications of the officer class. Both issued pamphlets and leaflets to that effect – mostly rehashes of revelations on the subject made by enterprising Egyptian journalists; Arafat, once again a student activist but how a proud one with first-hand military experience, helped prepare some of them and distribute a great many more.
The second of Arafat’s allegations – that, left alone, the Palestinians would have won the war – was adopted by the Arab Higher Committee. The Mufti had objected to the participation of the Arab regular armies in the war for fear of diminishing his claim to exclusive leadership of the Palestinians. But the Muslim Brotherhood, which viewed fighting in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims and not the restricted domain of the Palestinians, did not accept this. The one thing both organizations agreed on was to hold the Arab governments responsible for the dismal performance of their forces. Like the leading perpetrator of this claim, the Mufti himself, Arafat managed to accommodate the contradiction between the positions of the Arab Higher Committee and the Muslim Brotherhood. He adopted the Higher Committee’s stance of separating the efforts of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood from the failure of the Arab armies, and he heaped praise on the Arab fighters who belonged to popular movements and distinguished them from the governments of their countries. Then, as later, Arafat believed what he preached to the point of blindness. A more enquiring, educated mind would have realized that the Palestinians were no match for the Israelis. There were many reasons for this, including the quality of the Mufti’s leadership, the unsuitability of the arms which he and Hassan Abul Saoud provided, and lack of attention to the most fundamental military training.
In Arafat’s case, blaming defeat exclusively on Arab governments and believing that the Palestinians would have won alone produced a contradiction that the Mufti would not accept. The latter was Palestinian through and through, but Arafat, with his Egyptian birth certificate, passport and accent, had fought with the Muslim Brotherhood and continued to have a close association with them. A year or two earlier he had taken to calling himself Yasser Arafat, and had abandoned using most of his given names altogether. This, along with years of residence in the Sakakini district of Cairo, concealed his Palestinianness.
Indeed, the adoption of the name Yasser and the dropping of his other names was a confirmation of where he belonged. Yasser bin Ammar was a celebrated Muslim warrior and companion of the prophet Mohammed, and calling himself after this great historical figure must have enhanced Arafat’s religious credentials. Years later, the rest of Yasser bin Ammar’s name was appropriated when Arafat assumed a nom de guerre and became Abu Ammar, ‘father of Ammar’, in keeping with the Arab tradition of being father of someone as a sign of respect. The greater the name one ‘fathered’ the higher the respect one was due, and there was no greater respect accorded than to those who emulated the heroes of early Islam.
The issue here is whether Arafat’s condemnation of the Arab governments reflected an Egyptian or Palestinian outlook. Judged by the activities he undertook, and again in keeping with later contradictory behaviour, it was both. On returning to Cairo, Arafat joined the Egyptian Union of Students. This was a significant step: the students were in the forefront of political agitation aimed at remedying the causes of the 1948 defeat and punishing King Farouk for it. Membership of this body was closed to Palestinians, so Arafat’s joining meant that he was an Egyptian acting against the Egyptian government. This move, however, did not cancel his Palestinian identity, because what the Egyptian students were calling for – the purging of the Egyptian government and forcing it away from Western control and tutelage – coincided with what the Palestinians were demanding.
But simultaneously Arafat became a member of the Federation of Palestinian Students. Belonging to both organizations was highly unusual, reflecting a deep restlessness in Arafat and an urge to be involved in the Arab politics of the day regardless of country or ideology. It also implies that Egyptian problems were very close to Arafat’s heart, something which later events confirmed. After joining the Federation of Palestinian Students, Arafat once again worked directly for Sheikh Hassan and the Mufti and preached the gospel according to the interpretations of the Arab Higher Committee. Whether with Egyptian or Palestinian students, his attachment to the Muslim Brotherhood continued and, because the Brotherhood was committed to an inclusive Islamic picture which was bigger than a mere Palestinian or Egyptian identity, this was the bridge which Arafat used to accommodate his Palestinian and Egyptian selves without manifesting a conflict of loyalty.
If mere membership of both organizations revealed the chameleon in the man, then his election to the chairmanship of the Federation of Palestinian Students confirmed it. In 1951 Arafat became a friend of Salah Khalaf, who was later to become one of his closest associates, and the legendary Abu Iyad, subsequently of Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization but then a card-carrying member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a student at the principal centre of Islamic scholarship, Al Azhar University. The Brotherhood had expanded its non-Egyptian base and enlisted many Palestinian students and activists. It was Abu Iyad, the literature student from Gaza who never pursued personal glory, who used his membership of this organization to gather support for Arafat and get him elected as chairman.
Was Arafat himself a member of the Brotherhood? There is no solid evidence, though many biographers and news correspondents accept it. There is proof, however, that the Islamists supported his election and that he won on a platform which incorporated many of the Brotherhood’s demands. Biographers Hart, Gower and Walker, Rubenstein, and even the Egyptian Rasheda Mahran attribute his success to Muslim Brotherhood backing, some in more direct terms than others. But none of them has been able to unearth any evidence that he was a card-carrying member.
Arafat the young politician was a natural publicist. Intense, elusive, small at 5 feet 4 inches, delicate and impulsive, he was always late for meetings and highly disorganized, but full of ideas and energy. Some time in 1949, acting as speedily on an appealing idea as he does today, Arafat began publishing a magazine called The Voice of Palestine. Full of polemics and promises to fight ‘the Zionist entity, the cancer in our midst, the agent of imperialism’ and its Western supporters, it was Arafat’s handiwork – short on reasoned analysis and in-depth reporting and, except for Abu Iyad’s later efforts, of a deplorable standard of writing. Significantly, though, the meagrely educated young man would not be discouraged by his poor showing. In fact, he never worried about the quality of what he did. Though to this day an uninspiring public speaker whose style is to repeat himself in an old-fashioned way unique to Muslim cultures, he made frequent speeches which were unreasoned but highly emotional and left him so exhausted that he would cry openly. To his studies or the development of his natural mechanical aptitude (he could build ham radios and repair car engines of automobiles) he paid little attention; he was devoted to politics, but without any specific ideology. He succeeded in making a name for himself by continuing to help needy Palestinian students and to use his contacts to gain them entry into Egyptian universities. Much-needed financial help was obtained for Palestinian families, many of whom he also visited on a regular basis to help them with ‘difficult’ tasks such as paperwork. The man is still genuinely touched by human misery; this commendable attribute is revealed by the expression of despair sometimes seen on his face, and when confronted by poverty and the results of violence he is often near tears. Despite all that he has seen and the violent activities in which he has undoubtedly been involved, his emotional make-up allows him to separate distant events from individual suffering.
Here it is important to understand the significance of what Arafat had achieved when he was elected chairman of the Federation of Palestinian Students and later, in 1953, of the much larger General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS), a similar but older organization with branches throughout the Arab countries. Though these achievements may appear only peripheral to many of Arafat’s Western watchers and biographers, they were considerable. Above all, after the Arab Higher Committee GUPS was probably the most important Palestinian political organization of the time, and student organizations in the Middle East provided the talent for future leadership.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s success in Palestinian politics, within or outside Palestine, was still the exclusive domain of the establishment families. Members of these families, including some Husseinis, Toukans, Dajanis, Alamis and Ghosseins, were in Cairo at the time, and the chairmanships of the Federation of Palestinian Students and GUPS were important positions to which many of them aspired. So Arafat’s success deserves analysis with this consideration in mind. In fact, this is a good place to examine the nature of his leadership at this early stage of his life, especially since these student elections were freer than any he would ever face in the future and the odds were stacked against him.
There is little doubt that his relationship with Sheikh Hassan Abul Saoud made a difference, but, although he nurtured it carefully, it does not account fully for his later more substantial successes. His strange connection to the Muslim Brotherhood has already been mentioned: he manipulated it to advantage, directly and through card-carrying members, most probably without ever joining the organization. But, even combined, these two reasons are not enough to explain Arafat’s success, particularly when many establishment Palestinians who coveted the student posts had their own close links with the Arab Higher Committee and the Muslim Brotherhood, and some were related to the Mufti.
The existing evidence supports the contention that Arafat possessed three distinct advantages over all his competitors. Then as now, he was endowed with near-superhuman energy. He was a tireless worker who always seemed to be everywhere, and for the most part his rivals shunned hard work. He was also more convincing than the rest: not a better public speaker, but endowed with that rare quality of being able to talk people into following him and doing his bidding. Thirdly, he was fearless at a time when timidity and lack of assertiveness were the trademark of others. None of his competitors would have dared speak to Palestinian leaders in the way he did, nor would they have started magazines without knowing how they were going to finance them. Biographers who attribute his success to being all things to all people, and to having misled different political groups with different agendas, are offering too simplistic an interpretation. It is true that he was a chameleon, but he was never subservient and made a virtue out of being stubborn and uncompromising; on occasions he resorted to browbeating people, while others found him actually using his fists.14
His early success was a reflection of a single-mindedness which others did not possess, an extension of the inherent qualities he used to charm his Uncle Selim and which made him the leader of the neighbourhood gang of kids. These were the qualities which he moulded to meet more complex situations for the rest of his life. In addition, his experiences in Palestine in 1948 made him a great story-teller, with a facility to amuse people and make them laugh. He was a natural improviser, and what he related touched his listeners in a very special and endearing way which overcame his curious looks, his lack of physical stature, his dismal performances on the podium and the obvious fact that he was exaggerating or telling outright lies. Of course, he was also an ascetic non-smoker and non-drinker who showed little interest in women at a time when fashionable young men thought smoking was smart, drank whisky, ogled belly dancers and frequented whore-houses. And finally Arafat was a great salesman, an Arab Billy Graham.
While there are conflicting dates for Arafat’s graduation from university, his biographers Gowers and Walker, who conducted the most thorough examination of his academic background, have determined that he finished the first year of his university course in 1950 with nothing more than a pass grade. Obviously, at twenty-two he was already lagging behind; this fact and the statement made to me by a former classmate that he had to repeat the required mathematics course for three years explain Arafat’s reluctance to discuss his higher education. He just scraped through, graduating in civil engineering in 1956.15 This is scarcely surprising given his continued obsession with politics and utter lack of interest in any other career. Indeed, he continued to chair GUPS and involve himself in other political activities until the end of 1956 – it became his full-time occupation.
Unfortunately for Arafat, his commitment to ‘the cause’ during this period is marred by the record and his own admissions. Some time in 1953–4 Arafat applied for admission to the University of Texas, which is interesting on many counts. Obviously the anti-Americanism he preached in articles and speeches was not serious enough to deter him from wanting to go to America; it was no different from the anti-Americanism of most Arabs, which has always fallen short of boycotting the USA or taking concrete action against it. Arafat himself puts a good face on things and pretends that after being accepted by the University of Texas he decided not to go after all, but there is ample reason to doubt his story. Having gone to an American university in the early 1950s myself, I know what the entrance requirements are: there were three which Arafat probably could not meet. The first is proficiency in English. But his weak academic performance and the fact that he actually improved his poor command of the language while in exile in Tunis in the 1980s suggest that thirty years earlier his English would not have been good enough. In addition at that time the Americans required both a clean political slate and proof that foreign students had the means to support themselves. The University of Texas does not maintain a file on old applications, but it is unlikely that Arafat could meet these requirements, particularly the last. However, his wish to leave Cairo did not end there, and he then applied to emigrate to Canada.16 It is not known how far this application went, and Arafat’s early inclinations to admit it have been supplanted by a more recent wish to overlook the subject.
Still in Cairo, his activities continued unabated. Suddenly there was more to them than pamphleteering, making speeches and establishing political contacts. In the early 1950s the corrupt and extravagant Egyptian monarchy under King Farouk was falling apart. His people were also demanding the immediate withdrawal of the British troops which were occupying the country’s Canal Zone on the basis of a treaty signed in 1936 by Egypt and Britain, which was anxious to safeguard the short sea route through the Canal to India. When the Egyptian governments of the time – and they came and went in quick succession – failed to negotiate a new treaty which called for immediate British evacuation, the Egyptian people took matters into their hands and followed the lead of radical groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the fascist Young Egypt. These organizations and others began sending volunteers to harass the British forces occupying a long strip of land along the Suez Canal known as the Canal Zone.
Arafat had gone to the Canal Zone late in 1950 with units of the Muslim Brotherhood. This curious event adds to the legend of Arafat, the divided Palestinian–Egyptian. Unlike the war in Palestine, the fighting along the Canal Zone was an all-Egyptian affair in which, except for a handful of non-Egyptian members of the Brotherhood such as Abu Iyad, other Arabs and Muslims did not participate. Arafat had resorted once again to his Egyptian persona to accommodate the urge which burned in his political psyche. He continued to do so on and off for the next couple of years, but in 1952 two major events occurred in his life – a formative political one and a revealing personal one. The political event was the overthrow of the monarchy by the Egyptian army, and the eventual emergence of Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser as leader of Egypt and the Arab world. The personal one was the death of his father in Gaza, the city to which Abdel Raouf had returned as a broken man after losing the legal battle for his inheritance.
The total effects of Nasser’s assumption of Egyptian and Arab leadership will be detailed throughout this book and represent a major influence on the development of Arafat and the PLO, but the death of his father was a simple matter which can be judged by the way Arafat subsequently behaved. Even with the benefit of hindsight and having learned enough about Arafat’s relationship with his father to accord him considerable understanding and sympathy, I find the fact that he did not attend his father’s funeral unacceptable, particularly in Arab and Muslim terms. To Arabs and Muslims death is ‘the great uniter’, the one thing people have in common. Reverence for it and for the dead person is supposed to supersede all feuds, misunderstandings and quarrels. Yet Arafat, to this day a religious person who prays, does not eat pork or drink alcohol and has made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, still ignored his father’s funeral. Nor has he ever tried to excuse this act of omission.
The 1952 army coup in Egypt was a popular one. It eliminated much of the need for the disaffected and disenfranchised to cluster around opposition parties and induced them to support the new government. King Farouk was sent into exile and a fatherly general by the name of Mohammed Naguib took over the running of the country. Naguib, a pipe-smoking, conservative officer and gentleman of the old school, was reputed to be on friendly relations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and the militant organization supported him. Even today, Islamic movements appeal to conservatives and militants at the same time.
It soon became clear, however, that the true leader of the officers who had overthrown Farouk was a charismatic colonel by the name of Gamal Abdel Nasser. The maxim of revolutions devouring their infants asserted itself, and there was a one-year power struggle between Naguib and Nasser. With the army solidly behind him Nasser eventually triumphed, despite Muslim Brotherhood support for Naguib.
There are two questions to be asked about Arafat during this period of turmoil: did he support Naguib against Nasser, and was the latter an acquaintance of his as many of Arafat’s friends and associates have asserted? There is no record of what Arafat did during the struggle for Egyptian leadership, but there is little doubt that his natural sympathies lay with Naguib, the choice of the Muslim Brotherhood. Furthermore, in 1953, acting on orders from pro-Nasser officers, the secret police deported Abu Iyad, then in his last year at Al Azhar University and Secretary General of GUPS, to Gaza. With him went two Palestinian activist friends of Arafat and members of the Muslim Brotherhood, Selim Za’anoun and Fathi Balawai.17 The exile of his friends and political associates in this manner could not have endeared Nasser to Arafat, but it suggests that he himself was not a member of the organization.
There is also nothing to substantiate the claim that Arafat knew Nasser beyond a possible chance meeting at a student gathering in 1954 or 1955, though Nasser had offered his services to the Mufti and volunteered to resign from the Egyptian army in order to fight with the Arab Higher Committee irregulars in Palestine in 1948.18 Arafat’s uncharacteristic inertia during this period suggests that Nasser and the band of officers who had ousted Farouk did not tolerate activists. Furthermore, the fact that Arafat was not deported along with his friends implies that the authorities considered him to be Egyptian rather than Palestinian or both. The second explanation gains added weight in the context of what happened in 1954.
The Muslim Brotherhood continued to agitate and conspire against Nasser well after the issue of Egyptian leadership had been settled. Nasser responded by outlawing the organization and imprisoning many of its members. Refusing to bow to the ways of the new Egyptian leadership, the Brotherhood made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Nasser in October 1954 while he was making a speech in Alexandria. Nasser, just as courageous and as capable of pulling off a piece of theatre as Arafat, continued with his speech and used the attempt against his life to dramatize its contents. The wave of arrests which followed was wider than anything that had been seen hitherto in modern Egypt.
Among those detained during the sweep against the Muslim Brotherhood was Yasser Arafat. This, the first of many arrests and periods of detention, lasted over two months. Today Arafat says that he was released after the intercession of Egyptian army officers whom he had known in Palestine and during the anti-British Suez campaign,19 but it is impossible to verify his statement. It is more likely that he was arrested because of information in the extensive Egyptian police files, but that it revealed nothing to justify detaining him any longer and he would have been freed anyway. It was the leadership and the hard core of the Muslim Brotherhood whom the police were after: these figures were well known, and they excluded Arafat.
After his release, in the first expression of what was to become a habit, Arafat resorted to convenience and tried to find common ground with the Nasser government. Nasser’s adoption of Arab nationalism meant a militant stand against Israel, which in turn meant active support of the Palestinian paramilitary groups, the fedayeen (‘self-sacrificers’), who were conducting raids against Israel from the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip. This is where Arafat the irrepressible went, and where his activities added to the legend of the fearless fighter and leader of men. Both accolades were deserved: the record of Arafat’s personal penetration of Israeli lines and commando activity is rock-solid. It was in Gaza that he met the talented and methodical Abu Jihad, the nom de guerre of Khalil Al Wazir, another Palestinian member of the Muslim Brotherhood who headed a small group of fedayeen and was later to become Arafat’s deputy commander after the formation of Fatah in Kuwait. Arafat also re-established contact with the Abu Iyad group and became leader of the Palestinian fighters. Although there was no room for individual leadership and they acted as a team, Arafat was its moving spirit and it was a group which placed Palestine and its problem ahead of all else. Abu Jihad himself had been born in Ramla and was a refugee in Gaza: although he was an Islamist, his Palestinianness came first. Abu Iyad, also a Gaza refugee but originally from Jaffa, started viewing his earlier Muslim Brotherhood association as something that had been aimed purely at helping the Palestinian cause. The unselfishness of both men and their acceptance of Arafat’s primacy was to remain with them until the very end.
Arafat, responding to this atmosphere and his Gaza roots, all but gave up his Egyptian inclinations – certainly the political aspect of his Egyptianness. He had overall Egyptian supervision of the guerrillas, but complained bitterly that Nasser kept them on a tight leash for fear of Israeli reprisals, which limited their effectiveness. When the Egyptians decided to place the interests of Egypt first and took to exercising even stricter control over the fedayeen, Arafat became even more Palestinian; in a way Nasser forced it on him. Later, when the Egyptians curtailed the guerrilla activity altogether and imprisoned these Palestinians who refused to obey their orders, including Arafat’s comrade Mohammed Yusuf Al Najjar, Arafat resigned himself to returning to Cairo.
In 1955, life in Nasser’s capital was confining. Arafat was without his friends, and the prison and Gaza experiences must have left an imprint. Moreover, his chances of endearing himself to the Nasser government or acquiring another serious student leadership role all but vanished when the Arab Nationalist Movement, which had been based in Beirut, began operating in Cairo.20 This organization competed with Arafat’s earlier efforts; it was secular, committed to Nasser’s Arab nationalism and had a large following among Palestinian and Arab students. Arafat maintained contact with his Gaza group and lay dormant until the Egyptian government, in the midst of a major diplomatic crisis over the evacuation of British troops along the Suez Canal, decided to send all young men of his age for military training. As an Egyptian citizen Arafat was, according to Time magazine of 13 December 1968 and other sources, trained as a bomb disposal officer. It was a relatively brief course lasting only three months, and he finished as a first lieutenant. But it was followed by another period of inactivity, brought about by the popularity of Nasser and his use of it to neutralize all political action except what originated with him.
In August 1956 Arafat made his first journey overseas in the company of Abu Iyad and Zuheir Al Alami, another member of the executive committee of GUPS. They travelled to Prague to attend a meeting of the International Students’ Congress. During this journey and in Prague, Arafat once again showed his flair for the dramatic and unusual. Without forewarning his companions, he donned an Arab kuffiya during the sessions of the conference.21 It was a white one, unlike the chequered ones which were to become his trademark in the future, but it served its purpose and the presence of the odd – looking young man with an easy smile, impeccable manners and a faraway look, wearing this native headgear, was one of the highlights of the conference. But there was more to this than most of the other delegates realized: during the 1936–9 anti-British rebellion the kuffiya had been the emblem of the Palestinian fighters, the undeniable symbol of Palestinianness. There was more drama as they wandered about the city; Arafat and Abu Iyad cried openly on seeing Israeli Jaffa oranges on sale, which were unobtainable in Gaza and Cairo.22
The Suez Canal crisis exploded into open warfare soon after the delegation’s return to Cairo, in October 1956. France and Israel conspired with Britain to attack Nasser and reduce him to size. Their military campaign ended with Israel occupying the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula, and Britain and France occupying Egyptian cities along the Canal Zone. At this time the Israelis summarily executed several hundred Gaza-based fedayeen.23 The short-lived affair gave rise to another Arafat exaggeration – that he served in the office of the then Egyptian Chief of Staff, Abdel Hakim Amer. That he was called to active duty is true, but the rest is highly doubtful, certainly not a matter of record and denied completely by a former adviser to Nasser.
For Arafat and his band of Palestinian activists, what followed the Suez affair was considerably more important than the event itself. The United Nations, United States and USSR undertook moves which eventually obliged the invading forces to vacate Sinai and the Gaza Strip, but only after the installation of a United Nations Emergency Force, or UNEF, as a buffer between the Israelis and the Egyptians. This move, accepted by Nasser, was aimed at one thing only: stopping whatever was left of the Palestinian guerrillas from conducting raids against Israel from Gaza. The Egyptians immediately began to round up those who violated their agreement with the UN. This blow to Arafat and his Palestinian colleagues, the forced cancellation of whatever plans they had to reinvigorate the fedayeen and conduct an armed struggle against Israel, was made worse by the most important fall-out from the war. The Arab masses, seeing in Nasser another Saladin who was willing to fight the West, gave him their undivided support. Suddenly Arafat and his friends were operating in a vacuum, neutralized by an unexpected UN presence and the emergence of a pre-emptive force, Nasser and his Arab nationalism. What else could they do but seek greener pastures?
Arafat’s first choice was Saudi Arabia and in 1957 he applied for a Saudi visa, but the paperwork took too long and he abandoned the idea.24 Instead he got a visa to Kuwait based on his acceptance of a job as a civil engineer with the Ministry of Public Works. This was to be the beginning of another phase, another life. Arafat’s Egyptian days were over. Fatah and the PLO followed.