He dreamed of dying a martyr like his "brave" peace partner, Yitzhak Rabin. But in the end, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat succumbed to a brain hemorrhage in a Paris hospital, a week after the ninth anniversary of Rabin's assassination and long after their Oslo deal had collapsed.
In an interview with Al-Jazeera he once said, "I say to them... Allah, give me martyrdom in... [Jerusalem], the place from which the Prophet Muhammad ascended to the heavens."
With his stubbly beard and trademark keffiyeh arranged to look like the map of Palestine, whether as a terrorist or a diplomat, Arafat was the symbolic leader of the Palestinian struggle for statehood for more than four decades. But while he generated international attention for his people, he failed to etch out a space for them on the map of nations.
He captured world respect when he agreed to a peace deal with Israel under the Oslo Accords. Arafat, along with Rabin and then-foreign minister Shimon Peres, all received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for their work on that agreement.
His stint as peacemaker was short, as both Israel and the United States blamed Arafat for the failure of Oslo once he rejected a land-for-peace deal at Camp David in 2000.
Also known as Abu Amar or sometimes as "the Old Man," Arafat's formal name is Muhammad Abdel-Raouf Arafat al- Qudwa al-Husseini. He added the name Yasser himself in honor of a slain Palestinian rebel. As a testament to his mythic status, the exact details of his life are hard to pin down.
Arafat always claimed Jerusalem as his birthplace, though documents show it was actually Cairo. His Palestinian parents had recently moved there. Some biographers speculate that in spite of this, it's possible his mother returned to her parents' home in Jerusalem for the actual birth in 1929.
Following his mother's death in 1933 from liver disease, Arafat lived in Jerusalem for a number of years with his uncle near the Western Wall. The house was torn down by Israel after 1967 when the area was rebuilt to accommodate worshipers.
As a child, Arafat watched Arabs fight British rule and understood that the Zionists were his enemy.
He was sent back to Egypt to live with his father and some biographers say that at age 17 he helped smuggle arms from Egypt into Palestine.
When war broke out in 1948, he temporarily left his studies at what is now Cairo University to join the fighting in Gaza. Although he received an engineering degree when he returned, politics drew his attention on campus. He worked briefly as a civil engineer in Kuwait before turning to terrorism and politics in hopes of crushing Israel.
"Isn't it better to die bringing down your enemy than to await a slow, miserable death?" asked Arafat in 1969. "As long as the world saw Palestinians as no more than refugees standing in line for UN rations, it was not likely to respect them. Now that the Palestinians carry rifles, the situation has changed," he explained.
In the late 1950s, he created Fatah, an underground guerrilla movement that led attacks against Israel from Jordan. In 1969, he became the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, originally created by Egypt and the Arab League as a puppet organization in 1964. Under Arafat it became an independent organization, which, until the late 1980s, became synonymous with terrorism.
According to Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, the PLO committed more than 8,000 terrorist acts between 1969 and 1985. It was responsible for the deaths of more than 650 Israelis, 28 Americans, and scores of people from other countries. Among its more notorious acts were the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972 and the attack on a school in Ma'alot in 1974 that led to the deaths of 21 schoolchildren.
Israelis were not the group's only target. In 1971, the PLO assassinated Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tel. It kidnapped and killed US ambassador to Sudan Cleo Noel and deputy chief of mission Curtis Moore, as well as a Belgian diplomat, in 1973. The organization also hijacked four planes in the 1970s and the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985.
In the midst of this violence, Arafat took a stab at diplomacy when he became the first representative of a nongovernmental agency to address a plenary session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. "I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun," Arafat told the UN when he first addressed it in 1974 while wearing a holster. The PLO was soon an official UN observer.
Arafat always swore he had a nose for danger. He survived an Israeli air raid on his PLO headquarters in Tunis in 1985 and a plane crash in the Libyan desert in 1992.
It was not unusual for him to leave a building seconds before an attack.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, then an army commander, tried repeatedly to kill him by bombing apartments he believed Arafat was occupying. In the 1960s, he heard Israeli soldiers coming for him and leaped out the widow. On the run he took nothing for granted, eating only food that had been inspected for poisoning. It was a fear based on reality.
Arafat's tactics of fomenting violent dissent against the Jordanian government forced King Hussein to exile him in 1971. Beirut became his next home, but he was driven out by Israel in 1982. He lived in exile in Tunis until 1994, when, under Oslo, he was allowed into Palestinian areas for the first time in 26 years.
In 1988, at a UN session, he renounced terrorism and accepted Israel's right to exist. He stated that it was "the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, and Israel and other neighbors."
That declaration persuaded the US to end a 13-year ban on talking to the PLO and put pressure on Israel to negotiate. Still, the Americans cut off the dialogue 18 months later when Arafat failed to punish a PLO leader, Muhammad Abbas, for an abortive sea raid on Israel in 1990.
His international credibility further declined when he supported Iraq during the first Gulf War.
