Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are opening
a file that is, let's just say it's heavy. We're
tackling a figure who didn't just participate
in the history of the 20th century. He, I mean,
he grabbed it by the lapels and shook it. He
really did. Yeah. And depending on who you ask,
and you mean this literally, right? Which side
of a border you're standing on. This man is either
a Che Guevara style icon of liberation. Right.
A revolutionary hero. Or he's the absolute godfather
of modern political violence. It is so rare to
find a single human being who holds such diametrically
opposed titles. We are talking about a man who
won the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, he stood on
the White House lawn for that. Yet for decades,
he was considered by Israel, by most Western
intelligence agencies as an arch terrorist. The
number one target on the list for a long, long
time. We are talking, of course, about Yasser
Arafat. And I feel like even if you don't know
all the ins and outs of Middle Eastern politics,
you know the image. Oh, absolutely. If I close
my eyes and just picture the news from the 70s
or 80s, I see him. The military fatigues, the
stubbly beard, and that black and white checkered
headscarf. And even that was a calculated piece
of branding. You know, he didn't just throw that
on. What do you mean? He folded it specifically
on his head so that the tail of the scarf would
drape over his right shoulder in the rough shape
of historic Palestine. Whee! Absolutely. Every
single time. He was a master of iconography,
of branding, before we really use that word in
geopolitics. He understood the power of the visual.
I mean, he wore a holster into the United Nations
General Assembly. A holster. It created this
whole aesthetic of the eternal revolutionary.
So here is our mission for this deep dive. We've
got a comprehensive biographical dossier in front
of us. It's built from, you know, a huge range
of sources. And we want to try and strip away
the caricature, the guy on the T -shirt or, you
know, the villain in the cartoons and figure
out who was the actual man. How did he survive?
I mean, really, how did he survive assassination
attempts that would have killed a fictional action
hero? And how did he take a scattered, desperate
group of refugees and turn them into a national
movement with a seat at the global table? To
do that, we have to look strictly at the factual
records. We have to try to move past the mythology,
which is, I mean, it's thick on both sides, and
look at the engineer, the strategist and the
survivor. And we have a lot of ground to cover.
We're going from his disputed birth to the caves
of Jordan, the siege of Beirut, the diplomatic
halls of Oslo, and finally, the very, very mysterious
circumstances of his death. So let's start at
the beginning. Or I guess the disputed beginning.
Because I was really surprised to learn that
even his birth certificate is an argument. That
is the first contradiction. In a life that is
just full of them. If you asked Arafat himself,
and he gave many, many interviews on this, he
would tell you, I was born in Jerusalem. Right
in the heart of it. Right in the shadow of the
Al -Aqsa Mosque. It's a powerful origin story.
I mean, it ties him physically and spiritually
to the holy site he claimed he was fighting for
his entire life. It gives him instant legitimacy.
Exactly. The paperwork tells a different story.
Yeah. His official birth registration, which
was dug up by biographers years later, it clearly
puts him in Cairo, Egypt in August 1929. So his
father was Palestinian? His father was a textile
merchant from Gaza, but the family was living
in Cairo at the time of his birth. So he was
an Egyptian -Palestinian. Is that fair to say?
Culturally, in many ways, yes. And this is a
detail that you have to understand really shaped
his psychology. He grew up in Cairo. He spoke
Arabic with a distinct, noticeable Egyptian accent.
Ah, and other Palestinians would pick up on that.
Oh, they used it against him for his entire career.
His political rivals, when things got heated,
they'd mock the way he spoke. They'd say, he's
not really one of us. He's an Egyptian. That's
got to leave a chip on your shoulder. You're
fighting for a national identity that people
are telling you you don't fully possess. Absolutely.
And his childhood, from all accounts, wasn't
easy to begin with. His mother died when he was
just four years old. Oh. That's a trauma that
stays with you. Yeah. His father, seemingly overwhelmed,
shipped Arafat and his brother Fathi off to Jerusalem
to live with an uncle for a few years. So he
did live in Jerusalem. He did, but briefly. Yeah.
That was his real, tangible, physical connection
to the land. He eventually went back to Cairo,
and his relationship with his father was, let's
call it toxic. Distant. Very distant. Very strict.
When his father eventually died, Arafat didn't
even go to the funeral. Wow. OK, sans speaks
volumes. But this friction at home, it might
have pushed him outward toward politics. And
looking through our notes, there is this one
incredible anecdote from his teenage years in
Cairo that I think just unlocks his whole mindset.
The synagogue visits. Yes. This blew my mind.
So we're talking about the 1940s. Arafat is a
teenager living in Cairo and he starts sneaking
out to attend services at local synagogues. It
sounds made up, doesn't it? But it's documented.
When his father found out, he reportedly beat
him for it. But when his sister asked him why
on earth he was doing it, Arafat didn't say he
was converting or anything like that. He said
he wanted to study the Jewish mentality. He was
a teenager doing opposition research. He was.
He was reading works by Theodor Herzl, the father
of modern Zionism. He wanted to understand his
enemy. That is wildly precocious. I mean, most
kids are sneaking out to smoke cigarettes or
see a movie. He's sneaking out to do reconnaissance
on his future adversaries. It shows that even
then, He was analytical. He treated the conflict
not just as, you know, a religious fight or a
street brawl, but as a puzzle to be solved. He
wanted to know how the other side thought. And
that analytical streak, it makes so much sense
because, and this is another fact people often
forget because of the military uniform, he wasn't
a soldier by trade. Not at all. He was an engineer.
A civil engineer. He graduated from the University
of King Feud I. That's a very specific way of
thinking. Engineers look at structural stress.
They look at leverage, how to build things. And
how to break things. And how to break things.
The engineer in the keffiyeh. It doesn't have
the same ring to it as the gorilla, but in many
ways it's more accurate. So what does he do with
this degree? Well, in the late 1950s, he moves
to Kuwait. He gets a job working in construction.
And this period in Kuwait is arguably the most
important time in his entire life. If you want
to understand the PLO, you have to understand
Arafat in Kuwait. Why Kuwait? Was it just for
the job? It was for the money and it was for
the freedom. Kuwait in the late 50s was a boomtown.
Oil money was flowing everywhere. And it was
full of educated, professional Palestinians who
couldn't go home. A diaspora community. A very
active one. And Arafat meets key people there.
Khalil al -Wazir, who becomes known as Abu Jihad,
and Salah Khalaf, who becomes Abu Yad. They're
all there. They start a movement. They call it
Fatah. I've always wondered about that name.
I know Fatah is the political party now, but
is it just a random word? No, it's a clever linguistic
trick. The full name in Arabic is Harakah al
-Tahrir al -Watani al -Filistini, the Palestinian
National Liberation Movement. If you take the
first letters of those words in reverse order,
it spells F -T -H, Fatah. Wait, why reverse order?
Because the forward acronym HHTF or HATAF means
sudden death in Arabic. Ah, not great for branding.
Terrible branding for a liberation movement.
So they reversed it to FAPA, which has this powerful
historical resonance. In an early Islamic context,
it means conquest or opening. like opening a
city to Islam. It's invocative. Very. But here
is the real innovation of Fatah, and this is
the key takeaway if you want to understand the
politics of that era. Okay, hit me. What made
them different from all the other groups? Independence.
Before Arafat, most Palestinian groups were essentially
puppets. They were funded by Egypt or by Syria
or by Iraq. So they had to toe the line? They
had to do what those governments wanted. They
were pawns in a bigger Arab chess game. If Egypt
wanted to annoy Israel, they'd tell the Palestinians
to launch a raid. If Egypt wanted quiet, they'd
tell him to sit down. And Arafat, the engineer,
looked at the schematics and saw a fundamental
design flaw. Exactly. He realized, if they pay
us, they own us. So he decided to change the
funding model entirely. He went to the wealthy
Palestinians working in the Gulf oil fields,
you know, the engineers, the doctors, the teachers
making good money, and asked them to tithe a
portion of their income directly to Fatah. He
crowdfunded the revolution. He essentially did.
He built a war chest that was completely independent
of Nasser in Egypt or the Baathists in Syria.
And that financial independence allowed Fatah
to make its own decisions. It was a huge deal.
It turned the Palestinian cause from a foreign
policy tool of Arab states into a uniquely Palestinian
national movement. That's the whole ballgame.
He basically privatized the liberation movement
to safeguard it. But a movement needs more than
money. It needs a myth. It needs a defining battle.
You can't build a revolution just on bank transfers
from Kuwait. You're absolutely right. And that
brings us to 1968 and a dusty, forgotten town
in Jordan called Karameh. This is listed in our
timeline as the turning point. So set the scene
for us. This is just after the Six -Day War,
right? Right. And to understand Karameh, you
have to understand the mood of 1967. The Six
-Day War was an absolute, unmitigated catastrophe
for the Arab world. A humiliation. A total humiliation.
Israel defeated the combined armies of Egypt.
Jordan and Syria in less than a week. The Arab
populations were demoralized. The conventional
armies had failed utterly. Into the guerrillas.
Exactly. Arafat and Fatah had set up a base in
Jordan, and they were launching these small but
annoying cross -border raids into the Israeli
-occupied West Bank. Israel decided they needed
to stamp this out. So they planned a major raid.
A huge raid on the Fata headquarters in the town
of Karameh with tanks and helicopters to wipe
them out completely. And typically in guerrilla
warfare, rule number one is when a regular army
advances with tanks, you melt away. You run.
You live to fight another day. That was the standard
operating procedure. In fact, the Jordanian army
intelligence got wind of the attack and tipped
off Arafat. They told him, they're coming. You
need to leave. You can't fight tanks with AK
-47s. But he made a different call. A fateful
one. He ordered his men to stay and fight. Why?
That sounds like a suicide mission. It was about
the narrative. He told his commanders, we need
to break the image of the fleeing Arab. He wanted
to show that Palestinians would stand their ground
and die for their land even against impossible
odds. So what happened in the actual battle?
Did they win? Tactically, no. It was a defeat
for the Palestinians. The camp was destroyed.
Many of their fighters were killed or captured.
Arafat himself barely survived. But this is the
big but. The outcome was different. The Israeli
army took unexpected casualties. They lost tanks.
They lost other vehicles. They were surprised
by the ferocity of the resistance. And significantly,
the Jordanian army's artillery eventually joined
in to support the Palestinians. So he lost the
battle, but he won the war of public opinion.
Massively. It was a psychological victory that
completely eclipsed the tactical defeat. And
the story that went out wasn't Fatah loses camp.
No. The story was someone finally stood up to
the Israeli army. Almost overnight, Arafat's
face was on the cover of Time magazine. And that's
when everything changes. Everything. Recruitment
skyrocketed. Thousands of young Arab men flocked
to Jordan to join Fatah. Karameh transformed
Arafat from a nuisance leader into a national
hero. He became the face of the cause. But this
success in Jordan, it seems like it kind of went
to his head, didn't it? It feels like Fatah got
a little too comfortable there. Hubris is the
perfect word. By 1970, just two years later,
Fatah had created what was essentially a state
within a state in Jordan. What does that mean
in practice? They were controlling entire cities
and refugee camps. They were setting up their
own roadblocks, collecting their own taxes. They
were driving around Amman heavily armed, openly
humiliating the Jordanian police. They were acting
like they owned the kingdom. I can't imagine
a king taking that lightly for very long. Ki
Hussein of Jordan was patient, but he had his
limits. The breaking point was the Dawson's Field
hijackings. Right. That was a huge international
incident. The PFLP, which was a more radical
faction under Arafat's PLO umbrella, hijacked
several international jets and flew them to a
remote airstrip in the Jordanian desert. And
blew them up. And blew them up in front of the
world's media. It was a massive embarrassment
for the king. He decided enough was enough. And
this is what became known as Black September.
Yes. In September 1970, the king ordered the
Jordanian army to crush the militias. It was
a brutal, bloody civil war. Thousands of Palestinians
died. The refugee camps were shelled. It was
a massacre. And Arafat, the survivor, had to
flee for his life again. He did. I read about
the escape. There are all these rumors. Did he
really dress up as a woman to get out? That's
the persistent rumor. The stories say he slipped
out to Syria, possibly disguised in women's clothing
to get through the checkpoints, or that he was
smuggled out in the trunk of a Kuwaiti diplomatic
vehicle. We might never know the exact truth.
No, but the fact remains. He escaped when many
of his top lieutenants didn't. So he gets kicked
out of Jordan and he moves the whole operation
to Lebanon. And the cycle seems... to just repeat
itself. It does. It's a pattern. Lebanon had
a very weak central government, which was perfect
for the PLO's purposes. They established a new
base, a sort of mini -state called Fataland in
the south of the country. But Lebanon was a powder
keg. A sectarian powder keg. And the PLO's massive
armed presence helped light the fuse. Arafat
tried to play the different factions against
each other, but eventually the PLO became a major
combatant in the Lebanese civil war. And this
leads to another one of those massive confrontations
with Israel, the 1982 invasion. Right. Israel
invades Lebanon with the explicit goal of rooting
out the PLO once and for all. They besiege West
Beirut. For weeks, the city was under relentless
bombardment. And Arafat, with his flair for the
dramatic, declared Beirut the Hanoi and Stalingrad
of the Israeli army he was digging in for a glorious
last stand. But again, he survives. I feel like
the theme of this deep dive is, and then Arafat
escaped. It really is. Yeah. A U .S. brokered
deal negotiated by Philip Habib allowed Arafat
and his fighters safe passage out of Beirut.
It was a surreal moment. He left on a ship escorted
by French naval vessels. And he's on the deck
flashing the victory sign. Like he had just won
the World Cup, even though he was being exiled
to Tunisia, thousands of miles away from the
borders of Israel. Tunisia? That's a long way
from the West Bank. It is, and that distance
changed everything. He was a leader without a
land, operating out of a hotel in Tunis. But
before we get to the politics of that era, we
have to talk about his personal survival skills.
Because looking at the sheer volume of attempts
on his life, the fact that he died of illness
is, frankly, statistically improbable. OK, let's
run through the greatest hits of his survival,
because it sounds like a spy novel. It puts spy
novels to shame. In Beirut, Ariel Sharon, who
was the Israeli defense minister, created a special
task force. The codename was Saltfish and later
Goldfish. And their only job? To track and kill
Yasser Arafat. That's it. They were bombing buildings
he was supposed to be in, sometimes just minutes
after he had left. So he became paranoid. Rightfully
so. He claimed in an interview in 1988 that he
never slept in the same bed two nights in a row.
He would schedule meetings in one location and
then show up in a completely different one. He
kept his own security team guessing. And then
there was the raid in Tunisia. Right. Even 1
,200 miles away, he wasn't safe. Operation Wooden
Leg, 1985. Israeli F -15s flew all the way across
the Mediterranean to bomb his headquarters in
Tunis. They flattened the building. 73 people
died. Arafat survived. Do you know why? Why?
He decided to go for a jog that morning. You
are kidding me. A jog? A jog. If you'd been at
his desk working, you would have been vaporized.
Then jump forward to 1992. This one wasn't even
an assassination attempt, just pure chance. He's
on a private plane flying over the Libyan desert.
And a sandstorm hits. A massive sandstorm. The
plane has to crash land. And a plane crash in
the desert. That's usually the end of the story.
The pilots were killed. Several of his aides
were killed. Arafat. He walked away with some
bruises and a concussion. He was famously dubbed
the cat with nine lives. It's incredible. But
while he was dodging death, his political strategy
was starting to shift. We see this move from
the gun to the olive branch. That phrase comes
directly from his famous 1974 speech at the U
.N. He was the first representative of a non
-state entity to ever address the General Assembly.
And he said that line. He said, I have come bearing
an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's
rifle in the other. Do not let the green branch
fall from my hand. And he was wearing an empty
holster during that. speech? The symbolism was
everything. I'm ready to talk, but I am still
a soldier. But the real substantive shift happened
in 1988. From exile in Tunis, he's watching the
first Intifada erupt back home. Without him?
Without him. He's becoming irrelevant. He needed
to get back in the game. So he formally renounced
terrorism and accepted UN Resolution 242. Which
effectively meant recognizing Israel's right
to exist. Implicitly, yes. And for the Palestinian
movement, this was a massive seismic concession.
It was what allowed the U .S. to finally open
a dialogue with the PLO. But then Arafat, true
to his complex and often contradictory nature,
made a colossal blunder that almost ruined everything.
The Gulf War. 1990. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.
And the entire world, including most of the Arab
states, condemns Saddam. Arafat. He supports
him. Why? I mean, we just talked about how Kuwait
gave him his start. Kuwait hosted... thousands
of Palestinians who were funding the PLO for
decades. It was a disastrous miscalculation.
He was betting on the Arab street, which, you
know, loved Saddam's fiery anti -Western rhetoric.
He thought Saddam might actually win or at least
reshape the entire region. And the Gulf states
were furious. Livid. They expelled hundreds of
thousands of Palestinian workers. They cut off
all the funding. The PLO went nearly bankrupt
overnight. Arafat was isolated diplomatically
and totally broke financially. And paradoxically,
being broke and isolated might have been the
very thing that pushed him toward peace. Exactly.
He needed a lifeline. He desperately needed a
way back onto the world stage. And that desperation
led to the secret back channels in Oslo, Norway.
The Oslo Accords, 1993. The famous handshake
on the White House lawn. You have Bill Clinton
spreading his arms like a parent, separating
two fighting kids. You have Yitzhak Rabin looking
visibly uncomfortable. And Arafat beaming. Beaming.
The deal was mutual recognition. The PLO recognizes
Israel's right to exist. Israel recognizes the
PLO as the sole legitimate representative of
the Palestinian people. And it set up a framework
for gradual self -rule. And they all got the
Nobel Peace Prize for it. Arafat, Rabin, and
Shimon Peres. Which was incredibly controversial
at the time. But in 1994, Arafat did something
he hadn't done in decades. He went home. He crossed
the border into Gaza to lead the newly formed
Palestinian National Authority. That must have
been a euphoric moment for his supporters. It
was hysteria. People were weeping in the streets,
climbing on his car. But this is where the story
shifts dramatically. It goes from the revolutionary
to the authority. And Arafat found out that governing
is very, very different from leading a guerrilla
movement from afar. Let's unpack his governance
style. Because he didn't exactly set up a transparent
Scandinavian -style democracy like Western donors
might have hoped for. No, not at all. He set
up a patronage system. He centralized all power.
directly in his own hands. He appointed the mayors.
He controlled all the different security services.
And most importantly, he controlled the money.
The money is a huge topic here. There were allegations
of massive widespread corruption. It's complicated.
The scale of the money involved was immense.
An IMF audit in 2003 found that Arafat had personally
diverted about $900 million in public funds into
accounts that he alone controlled. So he stole
it. Well, the IMF was careful to note that the
money wasn't necessarily stolen for personal
luxury. A lot of it was used for Palestinian
investments, but it was completely off the books.
No oversight. But there was also a secret portfolio,
wasn't there? Yes. U .S. investigators later
found a secret portfolio worth close to a billion
dollars. We're talking about investments in a
Coca -Cola plant in Ramallah, a Tunisian cell
phone company, venture capital funds in the U
.S. So what was the purpose of hoarding all this
cash? Was he just greedy? It wasn't about greed
in the sense of... buying yachts and sports cars.
It was about loyalty. Dennis Ross, the U .S.
negotiator, called it walking around money. It's
a system political scientists call neopatrimonialism.
How did it work? If a Klan leader in Nablus was
causing trouble, Arafat would pay him off. If
a security chief needed new equipment or cars
for his men, Arafat wrote a personal check. He
built a system where everyone, every single faction,
depended on him personally for their money and
power. So the corruption was actually the glue
holding his authority to yes. Slightly. But it
completely rotted the institutions from the inside
out. And meanwhile, his wife, Sukha, was living
a very different life. That was a source of major
resentment among Palestinians. Huge. Yeah. Arafat
married Sukha Tawil in 1990. She was much younger.
She was a Christian who converted to Islam. And
she lived in Paris on a very generous monthly
stipend from the Palestinian Authority. While
people in Gaza were struggling. Exactly. Arafat
himself lived pretty modestly. He always wore
the same uniforms, ate simple food. But the perception
of corruption around his inner circle and his
family was incredibly damaging. So we have this
corrupt or at least non -transparent authority.
But the peace process was still technically alive.
Until Camp David 2000. This is the tragic climax
of the entire diplomacy era. Bill Clinton brings
Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
to Camp David for one last big push for a final
agreement. And Barak puts a significant offer
on the table. A very significant offer. A Palestinian
state and about 90 % of the West Bank and all
is Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem, is
more than had ever been offered before. And Arafat
said no. He said no. And critically, he didn't
make a counteroffer. He just walked away. Why?
What was the final deal breaker? Jerusalem. Specifically,
sovereignty over the Temple Mount, or as it's
known to Muslims, the Haram al -Sharif, where
the Al -Aqsa Mosque is. What was the offer for
that? Barak wanted to keep Israeli sovereignty
over the site, but offered the Palestinians custodianship.
Arafat famously told Bill Clinton, the Arab leader
who would surrender Jerusalem is not born yet.
He was afraid of being seen as a traitor. He
was convinced that if he signed away sovereignty
over the holy sites, he would be assassinated
by his own people the next day. He felt the weight
of the entire Islamic world on his shoulders,
not just the Palestinians. So the summit collapses.
And very shortly after, the second intifada begins.
And this was a much more violent uprising than
the first one. Much more. Suicide bombings in
Israeli cities, a massive militarized response
from Israel. It was a full -blown conflict. And
the big question has always been... Did Arafat
plan it or did he just get swept up in it? It's
fiercely debated. Some analysts say he simply
rode the wave, that the anger was spontaneous
after the peace talks failed, and he just tried
to stay in front of it to remain relevant. But
others say he orchestrated it. Others, including
some Hamas leaders like Mahmoud al -Zahar, later
claimed that Arafat actually gave them the green
light. And there were documents seized by Israel
from his compound that seemed to show him authorizing
payments to militant groups. This marked the
absolute end of his relationship with the U .S.
and Israel. Completely. George W. Bush declared
him a failed leader. Ariel Sharon, who is now
the prime minister of Israel, called him irrelevant.
And then Sharon did what he'd been trying to
do for decades. He cornered him. The siege of
the Mukata. His compound in Ramallah. For over
two years, from 2002 onwards, Arafat was confined
to just a few rooms. Israeli tanks surrounded
the building. Bulldozers literally tore down
the walls around him, bit by bit. He was a prisoner.
He spent his final years in ruins, surrounded
by the dust of the peace process he had helped
start. He was ostensibly the president of Palestine,
but he was prisoner in his own headquarters.
Which brings us to the final, and maybe the biggest,
mystery. His death. It all happens very fast.
It's October 2004. Arafat is in the besieged
compound, and he suddenly falls ill during a
meeting. He's vomiting. He can't stand up. At
first, his personal doctor said it was just a
bad case of the flu. But it got worse. Much worse.
His platelet count dropped dramatically. Eventually,
Israel agreed to let him be flown to France,
to the Percy Military Hospital outside Paris.
He lapsed into a coma and died on November 11,
2004. He was 75. And the official cause of death
was? A massive hemorrhagic stroke. caused by
a blood condition called disseminated intravascular
coagulation, or DIC. But, and here's the mystery,
the doctors couldn't find the underlying cause
of the blood condition. They couldn't figure
out what triggered it. Exactly. They ruled out
cancer. They ruled out AIDS. Despite all the
rumors circulating at the time, there was no
clear explanation. And immediately the theories
started flying. The Israelis poisoned him. That
was the belief on the Palestinian street from
day one. But for years, it was just a theory.
There was no proof. Until 2012. The Al Jazeera
investigation? Right. The news network Al Jazeera
worked with a top Swiss forensic institute to
test... Arafat's personal belongings, his toothbrush,
his hat, his coffee, which had been preserved
by his widow, Suha. And they found something.
They found polonium -210. Polonium? That's a
highly radioactive isotope. That's the same stuff
that was used to kill Russian spy Alexander Levinenko
in London. Exactly. It's an incredibly sophisticated
poison. You don't buy it at the corner store.
Its presence implies a state actor was involved.
The Swiss... found unusually high levels on his
clothes. So this led to his body being exhumed.
It did. It was a surreal scene. Arafat's body
was dug up from his mausoleum in Ramallah for
testing. Three separate international teams took
samples. A Swiss team, a French team, and a Russian
team. And did they all agree? Of course not.
That would be far too simple for the end of Yasser
Arafat's story. So what were the findings? The
Swiss team said the levels of polonium they found
in his bones were 18 to 36 times higher than
the average and that the results reasonably supported
the poisoning theory. One prominent forensic
scientist called the presence of that much polonium
a smoking gun. But the other teams disagreed.
The French and Russian teams both claimed that
the polonium was likely from environmental contamination
after his death and concluded that he died of
natural causes. The French closed their inquiry
in 2015. So even in death, there's no consensus.
No consensus at all. Just conflicting narratives
inextricably linked to the conflict itself. For
many Palestinians, the Swiss report is the final
word. They believe he was assassinated. So let's
try to sum this all up. We've looked at the engineer,
the guerrilla, the statesman, and the prisoner.
At the end of the day, what is the legacy of
Yasser Arafat? It depends entirely on where you
stand. To many, many Israelis, he was the ultimate
obstacle to peace. He was a man who had the chance
to build a state at Camp David in 2000, but chose
violence instead. Ariel Sharon called him a Jew
murderer. They see him as the man who legitimized
terrorism as a political tool on the world stage.
And to Palestinians. He is the father. He's the
symbol of their struggle. You have to remember,
before Arafat, the Palestinians were often seen
by the world simply as refugees, a humanitarian
problem to be solved with tents and food aid.
He gave them a political identity? A national
identity. He forced the world to recognize them
as a people with a political cause. He put Palestine
on the map. Even his fiercest critics within
Palestine, and there were many who hated his
corruption and his authoritarianism, even they
would have to admit that he kept the cause alive
against absolutely impossible odds. He was, above
all else, a survivor. He outlasted Nasser. He
outlasted King Hussein. He outlasted Sadat. He
outlasted the Soviet Union. But in the end, he
couldn't outlast the failure of the peace process.
It's a heavy story. But here's a thought to leave
you with, something to chew on as we wrap up.
We talked about Cam David in 2000. It's one of
the biggest what -ifs in modern history. If Arafat
had said yes. Exactly. Just think about it. If
he had accepted that deal, 90 % of the West Bank,
a capital in East Jerusalem, what would the Middle
East look like today? Would there be a thriving,
peaceful Palestinian state? Would Hamas have
ever taken power in Gaza? Or would he have been
assassinated by his own people the moment he
signed it, just like Anwar Adat was in Egypt
for making peace? It is the ultimate counterfactual.
And the fact that we are still asking that question
all these years later shows just how much one
man's decision or indecision can shape the lives
of millions. Thanks for diving deep with us.
We'll catch you on the next one.