|
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s date and place of birth are disputed; while he claims to have been born August 4, 1929, in Jerusalem, some allege that a birth certificate gives the date as August 24, 1929, in Cairo, Egypt. One of seven children of a wealthy merchant, Arafat is related on his mother’s side to the Husseini family, a prominent Sunni Muslim family in Jerusalem.
His mother died when Yasir, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine, then under British rule. Palestinians then were fighting against the occupying force “Britainâ€. He has revealed little about his childhood, but one of his earliest memories is of British soldiers breaking into his uncle’s house after midnight, beating members of the family and smashing furniture.
But by 1946 aged only 16, he had become a Palestinian nationalist and was procuring weapons in Egypt to be smuggled into Palestine for the Arab cause.
In November 1947, the United Nations voted to end the British Mandate over Palestine by May 15, 1948, but also took a immoral step of dividing the land into two states one for the majority Palestinians and other for the minority Jews who had taken shelter from the forces of Hitler who had killed 6 million Jews out of 9.5 million, and also declared Palestinians capital Jerusalem as international city. The Palestinians were outraged as there Muslim home land for centuries was being divided by a border. The Jews were hilarious. As a result war between Arab nations and Israel broke out, during the war Arafat left his studies at the University of Faud I(later Cairo University) to fight against the Jews in the Gaza area. The defeat of the Arabs and the establishment of the state of Israel left him in such despair that he applied for a visa to study at the University of Texas. Recovering his spirits and retaining his dream of an independent Palestinian homeland, he returned to Cairo University to major in engineering, the young Arafat studied at Cairo University from 1952 to 1956, graduating with a degree in civil engineering. While attending college, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood and was president of the Union of Palestinian Students. Commissioned into the Egyptian army, Arafat served in the Suez campaign of 1956. Shortly afterwards, he moved to Kuwait to work as an engineer and then later successfully running his own contracting firm.. He spent all his spare time in political activities, to which he contributed most of the earned profits. In 1958 he and his friends founded Al-Fatah, an underground network of secret cells, which in 1959 began to publish a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel. At the end of 1964 Arafat left Kuwait to become a full-time revolutionary, organizing successful Fatah raids into Israel from Jordan. It was also in 1964 that the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was established, under the sponsorship of the Arab League, bringing together a number of groups all working to free Palestine for the Palestinians
 
|
|
| 