Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa, was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from 1969 to 2004 and President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) from 1994 to 2004.
Yasser Arafat was a complex and often problematic personality.
I deeply understand how he symbolized the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence and his importance to almost every Palestinian I know.
I had been invited to see him many times, I didn’t go. When I tried to schedule a meeting with him on at least two occasions, the people who were in charge of his schedule blocked me when they learned what I wanted to speak to him about. They told me I was welcome at anytime, but that I could not present to him my criticism of the mistakes I believed that the PLO was making.
The picture above was taken not long before he died (Arafat passed away on November 11, 2004). I tried to have a conversation with him about the work we were doing in IPCRI – we had 12 joint Israeli Palestinian professional teams working on final status issues and I did not want someone, falsely speaking on behalf of Arafat, to claim that Arafat was against what we were doing. I also tried to have a conversation with him about the problems in Palestinian text books and the need to engage in peace education. Arafat was already too sick and it was impossible to conduct a coherent conversation – he could not focus. He insisted that I stay for lunch and had me sit next to him. He kept feeding me from the food from his own plate.
That was Arafat.
