2008 Woodie Awards
Arafat, the leader and symbol of struggle for Palestinian state, dies
Courtesy of KRT
Issue date: 11/11/04 Section: Front Page
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Pursued by the Israeli army, dismissed by many in the West as a terrorist, expelled from the city that his Palestine Liberation Organization had made its home, Arafat was about to begin a 12-year exile in Tunisia.
Yet as chaos erupted around him, the Palestinian icon flashed his trademark defiance. Asked where he was going, Arafat replied: "To Palestine."
Arafat, who died Thursday in a hospital outside of Paris at the age of 75, never saw the state he envisioned, partly because of his flaws and errors as a leader. But time and again, it was his clever maneuvering and indestructible determination _ whether realistic or not _ that allowed him to remain the enduring symbol of his people's struggle for freedom and recognition.
He was an uncanny survivor. He transformed himself from shunned militant into the unlikely winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, frequent visitor to the White House and president of a semi-autonomous Palestinian Authority that many hoped would be the prototype for a state.
But the latest Palestinian rebellion shredded Arafat's image as a peacemaker, and the conflict raised doubts about his professed commitment to the 1993 Oslo peace accords and his claims to have renounced violence.
In the eyes of many, Arafat's greatest mistake was failing to respond to what was billed as a generous peace offer by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the Camp David summit in 2000. While Arafat insisted that the offer was unjust and insufficient, his position raised questions about whether he ever had a strategy to attain Palestinian independence, or whether he preferred to end his days as the heroic fighter he always saw himself as.
As a leader, Arafat was unpredictable, indecisive and aloof, famously failing to exploit opportunities or read sea changes in world affairs. In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, his refusal to rein in Hamas suicide bombers left him on the wrong side of the U.S.-led coalition against terrorism and allowed Palestinian militants to steer the intifada into a far more violent stage.