Word: yasser
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News of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s rapidly deteriorating medical condition elicited a broad spectrum of emotional reactions on a campus still bitterly divided by the Arab-Israeli conflict, with some members of the Harvard community preparing to grieve and others jubilant...
...Yasser Arafat is if he’s still alive—was, if it’s in the past tense—the world’s most notorious terrorist, a man who not only practiced but preached killing as a way of life,” Wisse said...
...epic irony of Yasser Arafat's final hours or days is the growing sense that he may facilitate, by his death, what he failed to achieve in the course of his storied life. As recently as a week ago, Palestinian statehood had seemed like nothing more than an abstract wish for the foreseeable future; now, suddenly, with the Palestinian leader reportedly in a terminal coma, Palestinian statehood is once again being discussed in the realm of the possible. It's not simply Arafat's passing from the scene that has enabled the shift. The Bush administration is facing rising pressure...
...Yasser Arafat had three distinct roles in Palestinian politics - president of the Palestinian Authority, chairman of the PLO and head of the Fatah organization. It is generally agreed by Palestinian analysts that there will be no new Arafat, in the sense of a single individual who controls so much of Palestinian political life, and a new leadership is likely to be more collective and consultative in nature (a process that can complicate as well as facilitate negotiations). But the overriding concern among the key Palestinian factions is to avoid a chaotic succession struggle that will further weaken their national movement...
...Gaza security chieftain Mohammed Dahlan and his former West Bank counterpart Jibril Rajoub may have their eyes on the prize. But in its most recent survey of Palestinian political opinion, the widely respected Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found the second-most popular leader after Yasser Arafat to be Marwan Barghouti. Barghouti, of course, is unlikely to be a contender right now, for the simple reason that he's serving five consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison for his role in the current intifada. But if no Palestinian leader will ever recapture the national mystique...