It is the business of leaders of resistance movements to make legends of themselves. Yasser Arafat, born Mohammed Abder Rauf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseni, had a propensity to create myths about himself. He once claimed he was born in Jerusalem. He was actually born in Cairo. Despite this, Arafat did come to acquire legendary status within the movement to secure a Palestinian homeland and on the bigger canvas of West Asian politics. His impact on the Palestinian Liberation Organization was not always salutary. He was the co-founder of the Al Fatah resistance group in 1956, and this group gained control over the PLO once it was established in 1964. Arafat became the chairman of the executive committee. But his leadership did not enhance the unity of the PLO. On the contrary, fissures appeared and his own power within the PLO was much reduced in the Eighties because of factionalism. Similarly, he failed to curb the violent activities of rival organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Arafat?s own hands and conscience were not free from the blood spilled by terrorism. Some outfits associated with his own organization were complicit in terrorist attacks against Israelis. In many ways, Arafat?s career was the embodiment of the old ?ends and means? paradox. Only the ardent Zionist would deny the validity and the nobility of his overall goal and vision. He wanted to retrieve the homeland of his people which had been taken away from Palestinians through conspiracy on the part of the British and aggrandizement on the part of the newly-formed state of Israel. But in the pursuit of this vision, the PLO and Arafat often engaged in actions that endangered and took away the lives of innocent people. Arafat?s fight for freedom was another person?s terrorism. His complicity with violence lowered the level of public sympathy for the PLO and its cause. Arafat further damaged his reputation by supporting Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait in 1990.

When historians begin their evaluation of Arafat, they will have to remember that throughout his life he fought the two most powerful states in the world: Israel, and through Israel, the United States of America. The scale of his opponents and Arafat?s own relatively puny resources gave to his project a heroic dimension. Even some of his gestures had this heroic quality. In 1988, when Jordan surrendered its claims on the West Bank, indicating that the PLO could begin administering the area, Arafat surprised everybody by getting the PLO to formally acknowledge that Israel had the right to co-exist with an independent state of Palestine. Arafat fought for a homeland but he had no home to call his own. He moved from Cairo to Jordan to Beirut to Tunis till 2001 when he was put under house arrest by Israel in Ramallah in the West Bank. Yasser ? carefree ? did not know what it was to be free of care.