By Judith Sudilovsky
Catholic News Service
(From the issue of 11/18/04)

JERUSALEM — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was a Nobel peace laureate, but was unable to completely shake off his image of a terrorist and supporter of violence.

A Muslim, Arafat was largely supported by the Christian population and knew the importance of maintaining good relations between Christians and Muslims. He met often with delegations of foreign bishops and local Christian leaders.

Arafat, 75, died in a Paris military hospital Nov. 11 after being in a coma for more than a week. The cause of death was not immediately announced.

Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah of Jerusalem was among a delegation of five Christian representatives who left Jerusalem for Cairo, Egypt, to attend Arafat's Nov. 12 funeral. Delegation members also planned to attend Arafat's burial in Ramallah, West Bank.

Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

But even as his deputies were exalting him as a leader who would be remembered by history as the man who "saved Palestinian national identity from extinction" and the man who "initiated the peace of the brave," those less emotionally attached to him described him in less glowing terms.

"Arafat will assuredly be remembered by his people as ... a father of the nation, even though one who did make grave mistakes that cost his people dearly, such as his support of Saddam Hussein in his invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990," said Franciscan Father David Jaeger, a canon lawyer, expert on church-state relations in the Holy Land and a close observer of politics and religion in the Holy Land and the Middle East.

"What is undoubted and will redound to his credit is that ... he radically redrew the map of Palestinian national goals, by accepting the 1947 U.N. Resolution that led to the creation of the State of Israel," Father Jaeger said.

Father Jaeger, like other Christians, expressed hope that Arafat's successor will continue his tolerance of Christians in the Holy Land.

"President Arafat led a national movement that was expressly secular in its original inspiration and stated goals, and it is to be hoped that the eventual republic of Palestine will keep faith with the goal of a secular democracy and overcome any temptation to endow the state with a theocratic or Islamist character," the priest said.

In 2000, Arafat and Vatican officials signed an agreement that promised freedom of religion and conscience in Palestinian lands, complete equality for Palestinian Christian citizens, observance of the internationally sanctioned legal regime in the major holy places, and preservation of the rights acquired by the church previously.

Some critics said that Arafat, enchanted by the romantic image of a revolutionary freedom fighter, was never quite able to change uniforms from that of a leader of a revolutionary military group to that of a true statesman.

They said he used his position as chairman of the Palestinian National Authority to pass out jobs and favors to cronies and was unable to relate to the mundane details needed for running a state. Under his leadership, the Palestinian National Authority was rife with accusations of corruption, financial and otherwise.

Arafat's father, a wealthy Palestinian merchant with Egyptian ancestry, took his family from their home in what was then British-ruled Palestine to Egypt in the late 1920s. Yasser Arafat was born in Cairo as Abdel-Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini Aug. 24, 1929.

Arafat's mother died when he was 5 years old. He spent most of his youth and formative years in Cairo, except for four years after his mother's death, when he was sent to stay with an uncle in British-occupied Jerusalem.

As a teenager, Arafat was involved in smuggling arms into British Palestine to be used by the Arabs against the British and the Jews, who had national aspirations of their own.

While still an engineering student at the predecessor to Cairo University, Arafat left Egypt to fight the Jews in what is now the Gaza Strip. He returned to Egypt to finish his studies, concentrating most of his efforts on activities with Palestinian students. While working in Kuwait in 1958 he helped found the Fatah national movement, which advocated armed struggle against Israel.

He left Kuwait and began organizing raids into Israel from Jordan in 1964, the same year the Palestine Liberation Organization, a consolidation of various national Palestinian groups, was founded by the Arab League. In 1969 he became chairman of the PLO executive committee.

He was always something of an outsider among Arab countries and spent most of his life nursing the image of a homeless fighter, struggling for his people. He was expelled from Jordan by King Hussein in 1970 because the king feared Israeli reprisals following PLO attacks into Israel. Arafat later was exiled from his haven in war-torn southern Lebanon by the Israelis in 1982 and regathered his forces in Tunisia.

In a speech at the United Nations in 1988, Arafat renounced terrorism and accepted Israel's right to exist, and five years later he signed the Oslo accords with Israel, paving the way for his arrival in the Palestinian territories.

Arafat is survived by his wife, Suha, a Greek Orthodox woman 34 years his junior who spent a large chunk of her life in Paris and who was not well-liked by her husband's closest deputies.

Suha Arafat converted to Islam for the marriage, which was kept secret for more than a year. They had a daughter, Zuhwa, now 9, who was born in Paris because Suha Arafat said conditions in the Gaza Strip, where they were living, were "unsanitary."

Suha Arafat, who reportedly continued to celebrate Christian holidays, left for Paris shortly after the outbreak of the 2001 Palestinian uprising, or intifada, and had not seen her husband in more than three years. But it was only she, according to French law, who had the power to allow the announcement of the death of her husband.

Since 1995, when Arafat arrived in the Palestinian territories following the Oslo accords, he attended Christmas Mass at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity until 2001, when the Israelis would not allow him to leave his compound in Ramallah.