Terrorist And Statesman

CBSNews.com's Dean Cox examines the life and times of one of the Mideast's most controversial and influential political leaders.

His unshaven face, olive-drab uniform and black-and-white checkered keffiyah head-scarf were once the most recognizable symbols of a violent Palestinian struggle to establish an independent state.

He has survived plane crashes and attempts on his life. He has lost close friends and comrades-in-arms to assassins' bullets and Israeli bombs. He has called for death to Israel and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yet his international stature, once the shining star of the Palestinian fight for statehood, has dulled considerably since he snubbed a White House proposal in 2000 that offered another large step toward Palestinian independence.

At one time it appeared his Palestinian flock would follow him either in terror or in peace. But the man who in high school was given the nickname Yasser, meaning "easy-going," has seemed uncharacteristically insecure in the past few years as the de-facto leader of the Palestinian people.

He seems unwilling or unable to end a bloody 18-month Intifadah that has led to the death of more than 1,000 Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis. As the Palestinian attacks on Israeli citizens and troops have grown more ferocious, so has the Israeli response.

During an interview with 60 Minutes, the embattled Palestinian president asked for international intervention to help stop the surge of renewed bloodshed.

"I am begging you to help me to stop this tragedy," Arafat told 60 Minutes in October 2000, just when the Itifadah was on the verge of erupting into uncontrollable tit-for-tat exchange of Palestinian suicidal bombings and retaliatory Israeli military strikes.

"I am asking the American people, I am asking the whole international community, to save the peace process," Arafat said.

The political landscape has been altered drastically since that appeal. The election of President Bush produced a hands-off U.S. approach to the Middle East peace process. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks further diverted U.S. attention from the region until very recently.

The battle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, meanwhile, has raged on, and the physical and mental strain on Arafat is beginning to show.

It was noticeable during that 60 Minutes interview, and even more so now that his lower lip has a tremor from an early stage of Parkinson's disease.

In the past year, the skill of his leadership has been sharply questioned by many Arab leaders and by some of his own people. His relationship with Israel - which for almost a decade had been positive and groundbreaking in forming peace initiatives - could hardly be worse.

Following the latest round of bombings, Israel again declared Arafat an enemy and turned him into a virtual prisoner of the Israeli army. He was forced to take cover in a windowless ground floor room in Ramallah as Israeli tanks shelled his three-story office building. It was the second time in as many weeks that Israeli troops had surrounded his headquarters.

"They want me under arrest or in exile or dead, but I am telling them, I prefer to be martyred," Arafat said during a telephone interview with Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite television channel. "May God make us martyrs."

The ominous tone of his statement closely reflected statements he made during the earlier, violent years of his struggle for an independent Palestinian state.

Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini in Cairo, Egypt, on Aug. 24, 1929. As a young boy, he lived with relatives in Palestine, a region then under British rule.

While Arafat was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, Palestine's Jews and Arabs fought the British and each other for control of the region. Both viewed the barren strip of land on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea as their homeland.

During his college days in Cairo, Arafat joined the Union of Palestinian Students in 1944 and later worked as a gunrunner, helping to smuggle arms from Egypt into Palestine. Fighting between Palestine's Jews and Arabs was escalating after surrounding Arab states rejected a United Nations resolution supporting the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab sectors.

As a respected student leader, he went on to study guerrilla tactics, recruited and trained Palestinian students and served as guerrilla leader in the early 1950s. He was jailed in Egypt in 1954 following the discovery of a plot to assassinate President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

In 1956 Arafat founded al-Fatah, an underground terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of the new state of Israel. Following the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Arafat entered the tumult of Middle East politics, becoming the chairman of the PLO, a guerrilla group absorbed by al-Fatah.

The PLO was implicated in several sensational hijackings during the 1960s and '70s and was responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

From its base in Jordan, Arafat's PLO increased guerrilla activities until he was evicted from Jordan in 1971. He fled to war-torn Lebanon.

During the PLO's tumultuous years, Arafat also began pursuing diplomatic means to achieve independence for Palestine. Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, Arafat spoke while brandishing a "freedom fighter's" gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other.

Back home in the Middle East, more trouble was brewing. Arafat was forced once again to find a new base of operations almost a decade after his U.N. speech when Israel invaded Lebanon, hoping to decimate the PLO and possibly kill its leader.

In 1982, Arafat and his followers were forced to leave Beirut, which was encircled by Israeli forces. He moved his headquarters to Tunis in northern Africa. From the Tunisian capital, he would try to shift his image to respected statesman and the PLO would make a decision to focus on the political issues and not just terrorist activities. The dramatic change altered the organization's image from barbaric to a movement with legitimate claims.

Five years later, the first Palestinian Intifadah erupted in the Israeli-occupied territories. Despite Arafat's formal renunciation of terrorism, Israel still refused to deal with the PLO.

"We are fed up with this bloodshed. We are looking to have peace for our children and also for their children," Arafat told "60 Minutes" in his first interview in 1989, during the first Intifadah. "Otherwise we have to blame ourselves and they have to blame themselves and the next generations will not respect us. This is an historical chance. If we lose it, we are criminals."

In 1988, in a move that stunned the world, Arafat recognized the right of the state of Israel to exist and denounced the PLO's former terrorist activities. Visions of a Palestinian state continued during the early '90s, when secret peace talks in Oslo, Norway, resulted in an historic agreement. A PLO-Israel peace plan was sealed with handshakes on the White House lawn on Sept. 13, 1993.

In return for recognizing Israel's right to exist, Palestinians were given limited self-rule of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. With U.S. President Bill Clinton escorting the two leaders to the table, Arafat signed the Declaration of Principals with Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The agreement earned Arafat the following year a shared Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

Arafat returned to Gaza triumphant - one step closer to his dream of an independent Palestinian state. The terrorist-turned-peacemaker was elected president of the Palestinian Authority almost 40 years after founding al-Fatah, the underground terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of the then young Jewish state of Israel. He continues to serve as the chairman for the Executive Committee of the PLO, which to this day still acts as an umbrella organization representing the world's non-Jewish Palestine population.

His attempts to complete the peace process with Israel have hit many potholes since his presidential election. Hurdles to creating an independent nation are becoming more difficult to clear.

Turning the territories around economically has been a struggle. The infrastructure was in ruins and Palestinian residents have not shaken their economic dependence on Israel. Some of Arafat's Palestinian Authority colleagues have challenged his autocratic manner. Many criticize his dealings with Israel too lenient, while others say he is too aggressive.

His rejection of a plan - presented by Clinton in July 2000 at Camp David - may have doomed him from using the statehood card to create a crisis in hopes of a diplomatic rescue from the United States.

When the agreement failed Clinton placed most of the blame on Arafat for not accepting Israel's concessions. Arafat, in his defense, said the plan offered too few Israeli concessions in favor of the Palestinians. Frustrated with no clear future, Palestinians once again picked up rocks and guns. Israel, predictably, has retaliated with military might.

If the self-declared former enemy of Israel tries to combine diplomacy and violence once again, his actions will certainly force many of his former supporters, including world leaders, Arab statesmen, Israeli citizens and Palestinians, to openly question his commitment to reaching lasting peace with the Jewish nation.

By Dean Cox