An Overview of Yasser Arafat's life
...he Suez canal crisis. In the years following the Suez Crisis, Arafat moved to Kuwait and founded the “Fatah” movement. This movement called for a united Palestinian state where Israel and Jordan currently lie. Fatah drummed up a lot of support from anti-Israeli nations such as Syria and started terrorist acts against the Israeli’s. At the end of 1964 Arafat left Kuwait to become a full-time revolutionary, organizing Fatah raids into Israel from Jordan. It was also in 1964 that the PLO was created, under the sponsorship of the Arab League, bringing together a number of groups all working to free Palestine(Israel and Jordan) for the Palestinians. The Arab states favored a more diplomatic policy than Fatah's, but after their defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, Fatah emerged from the underground as the most powerful and best organized of the groups making up the PLO. Fatah took over that Organization in 1969 when Arafat became the chairman of the PLO executive committee. The PLO was no longer to be a puppet Organization of the Arab states, wanting to keep the Palestinians quiet, but an independent nationalist Organization, based in Jordan. After some scuffles with King Hussein of Jordan where the PLO hijacked western airliners and blew them up in Jordan, Arafat moved the PLO to Tunisia in order to keep the PLO alive. Even with the PLO changing its home base, this did not stop it from committing terrorist acts against Israel and its supporters. One such attack was against Israeli athletes at the 1972 summer Olympics in Munich, Germany where close to a dozen athletes were murdered by militants from the Fatah movement. In the late 1980s the PLO changed its focus, it renounced Terrorism and supported “the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors”. With this declaration denouncing Terrorism, there was a new outlook for peace in the Middle East. There was a slight setback in the peace process during the early 1990s when the PLO supported the Iraqi’s during the Persian Gulf War. But in the mid 1...