Word: arafats
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...Arafat's PLO broke the mould, demanding an independent voice and control over Palestinian destiny - a course that ultimately set it on a collision course not only with Israel, but also at various points with many of the Arab regimes. It was a combination of guerrilla resistance, hijackings and other high-profile terrorist operations and skillful diplomacy - all undertaken on Arafat's watch although often with layers of plausible deniability between the PLO chairman and specific actions - that introduced the world to the Palestinians in the early 1970s...
...only one year after Pan-Arab nationalism's final defeat at Israel's hands, Arafat became the first non-head of government to address the UN General Assembly, and the Arab League anointed the PLO "the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people," formally transferring responsibility for Palestinian fate into Palestinian hands. And if Arafat's personage became the symbol of this new nationalist voice suddenly recognized in the Arab world as the revolutionary head of state of a stateless people, his mystique was burnished by his uncanny ability to beat the odds...
...after the disastrous "Black September" insurrection against King Hussein saw his organization driven out of the Hashemite kingdom and into Lebanon. There, too, he once again escaped the noose, fleeing into a new exile in far-off Tunis in 1982 after Ariel Sharon's army had vanquished his fighters. Arafat seemed irretrievably doomed in 1991 when his disastrous miscalculation of supporting Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait saw the PLO reduced to pariah status in almost every Arab capital. But within two years, he popped up on the White House lawn shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin under the matrimonial smile...
...Strategic necessity and shifting political reality created a survivor's flexibility in Arafat's politics. Out in the wasteland of his exile in Tunisia, he saw the limits of military and diplomatic efforts based in the Palestinian refugee Diaspora - they could claim headlines, but ultimately do little to displace Israeli power in pursuit of the goal of Palestinian sovereignty. In 1988, for the first time, Arafat led his organization to advocate a two-state solution to the conflict, based on creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza rather than insisting on the implausible goal of ?liberating...
...resilience of the intifada generation that brought Arafat back from the political dead after the Gulf War, and ultimately brought him home, recognized by the U.S. and Israel as the head of the newly minted Palestinian Authority in 1994. The U.S. and Israel were willing to overlook corruption, cronyism, autocracy and repression in Arafat's administration as long as he kept a tight rein on Hamas and other militants. And Arafat himself maintained the ambiguity, never quite facing up to the limits on the deal he'd signed with Israel, preferring to hold his movement together by saying different things...