...In his patchwork uniform, which combined a military tunic with a traditional kaffiya, the Old Man, as those who had known Yasir Arafat the longest called him, was a strange and defiantly contradictory person. He was the father of the Palestinian nation, and the successor to the Muslim conquerors of Jerusalem, Omar Ibn al-Khattab and Saladin. His official title was rais of the Palestinian Authority, a title that is ambiguously translated as "chairman" or "president." Arafat was also the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the head of Fatah, the PLO's central faction, which he founded in Kuwait in the late 1950s. The title that came first on his personal stationery was head of Fatah, which means "conquest"—a backward acronym for Harakat al-Tahrir al-Falistiniya, the Palestinian Liberation Movement. Spelled forward the acronym yields "Hataf," which means "death."

Arafat's failure to conquer Jerusalem did not shatter his conviction that history was moving in his favor: under pressure from within and without, isolated in the world, the State of Israel would eventually crack apart and dissolve, to be replaced by Arab Palestine. "We will continue our struggle until a Palestinian boy or a Palestinian girl waves our flag on the walls, mosques, and churches of Jerusalem, the capital of our independent state, whether some people are happy about it or not," he promised. "He who doesn't like it may drink the water of the Dead Sea." Arafat understood his actions as part of an unfolding within the long duration of historical time rather than as disembodied headlines on CNN. The inability of his diplomatic interlocutors to understand what he was driving at exposed the fatal limits of the Western conception of politics as a way to find a happy medium between competing interests.
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Arafat's given name, Muhammad Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Raouf Arafat al-Kidwa al-Husseini, provides close readers with a biography in brief of the man who created a nation out of the Arab refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The boy Muhammad Abd al-Rahman was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929, and grew up in the city's Sakakini district. Both his parents were Palestinians. His father, Abd al-Raouf, was a merchant from Gaza. In the late 1920s Abd al-Raouf left Gaza to prosecute a claim to a large chunk of Cairo that he believed was the rightful property of his family. The claim was futile, and preoccupied him until the day he died. Arafat seldom mentioned his father and didn't attend his funeral. His mother, Zahwa, for whom he named his only child, was a daughter of the al-Saud family, whose home in the Old City of Jerusalem was part of the neighborhood that was bulldozed by the Israelis after the 1967 war to create a plaza in front of the Western Wall. Although not born in Jerusalem, as he often claimed, Arafat did live in the al-Saud family house for several years with his brother Fathi after his mother died, in 1933. Arafat's grandfather was named Arafat, and his family name was al-Kidwa. His clan was the al-Husseinis of Gaza, not the famous Jerusalem family. "Arafat" was the only part of his given name that he would carry into adulthood; "Yasir" was a childhood nickname related to the word for "wealthy" or "easy." He didn't like school, and showed an early talent for organizing the neighborhood kids. "He formed them into groups and made them march and drill," his sister Inam told a biographer. "He carried a stick to beat those who did not obey his commands. He also liked making camps in the garden of our house."...