The terrorist who turned statesman

The Great Survivor is no more. For as long as anyone could remember Yasser Arafat had been known as the Old Man of the Palestinian struggle for statehood, the terrorist-turned-statesman who for more than 40 years devoted his life to the fight to establish an independent state.

With his grey, half-shaven jowls, fleshy lower lip and ever-present keffiyeh artfully folded about his head, his was the internationally recognisable face of the Middle East conflict: a people's cause distilled in one man.

It was an identification that suited Arafat just fine. Ever the egotist, he was a leader ruthless in ensuring the revolution and the man were seen as one. Yet when history comes to deliver its verdict, it seems likely that he will be judged a failure.

Undeniably, he got some of what he fought for. He lived his last years in Palestine, on areas of land once under Israeli occupation. His peace initiative, notably his handshake with former Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin, won him global praise and a Nobel Prize.

But despite years of struggle, he died without achieving his goal of becoming first president of an independent Palestine. And he left many of his people disillusioned with his leadership.

Mohammed Abdul Rauf Arafat al Qudwa - he picked up the nickname Yasser, or "carefree", early on - was born in 1929, son of a merchant in either Cairo or Khan Younis in the then Egyptcontrolled Gaza Strip, though he often claimed he was born in Jerusalem.

He became involved in the Palestinian cause as a teenager, leading efforts to smuggle arms, and in 1948 suspended engineering studies in Cairo to join Arab forces fighting to control the Holy Land. He earned a reputation for fearlessness - and exaggerating his role.

Ten years on he formed Fatah, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine, and in 1965 launched the first of a series of guerrilla attacks on

Israeli targets. He justified acts of terror as necessary to highlight the plight of a forgotten people uprooted from their home by the 1948 creation of the Jewish state.

After Israel's 1967 victory in the Six-Day War, Fatah suffered a hardfought defeat in the Battle of Karameh. But this cemented Arafat's reputation and drew in thousands of recruits.

By 1969 he had united the Palestinian factions as chairman of the Palestine Liberat ion Organisation - while making enemies of his hosts. When he used Jordan as a launch pad for attacks against Israel, the late King Hussein bombed PLO targets and expelled the guerrillas.

Moving on to Lebanon, Arafat set up a state-within-a-state nicknamed "Fatah land" - a colonisation which led to the Lebanese civil war and three Israeli invasions of her northern neighbour.

The turning point came in 1974, when he gave a famous speech to the UN General Assembly. His holstered gun at his side, he told delegates he came "bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun - do not let the olive branch fall from my hand". He was rewarded with a standing ovation and growing international recognition for the PLO.

The organisation's troubles were far from over, however. The PLO was chased from its fortress camps in the Lebanon, successively by the Syrians, the Israelis in 1982 and then by pro-Syrian Palestinian forces the following year.

Despite numerous assassination attempts, Arafat led a charmed life. A pinpoint air raid on a building in Beirut came minutes after he left it. And when, legend says, Israeli snipers had him in their sights as he left Beirut for exile in Tunis, they were told not to shoot - an order Ariel Sharon would later admit bitterly regretting.

In 1992, when his plane crashed in the Libyan desert, two pilots and the engineer were killed but the PLO leader escaped with minor injuries.

Arafat adapted well to life as a nomad. He travelled light, had few personal possessions and, it was said, for years never slept twice in the same bed.

He did not smoke, drinking only tea or water. His morning cornflakes were soaked in tea and honey. An insomniac who would not finish work until 4am, his only diversions were comics and Tom And Jerry cartoons. Through the Eighties the Palestinian struggle polarised. In the region itself power shifted to the street with the first intifada against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arafat, meanwhile, drifted from armed struggle to negotiation, forced into it partly by his support for Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War - a stance which alienated Arab supporters and lost him muchneeded Gulf state funding.

In 1991 he set up secret channels with the Israelis which, by 1993, yielded the Oslo peace accord. Israel's right to exist as an independent state was endorsed and the Palestinians gave up their claims beyond the West Bank and Gaza. But it was left to the future to sort out the fate of 3.5 million Palestinian refugees - those who fled in 1948 and 1967, together with their descendants - the international borders of Palestine, and the status of Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestinians were allowed to set up an "authority" under him while the Israelis slowly withdrew.

But within four years of being photographed shaking hands with Rabin on the lawn of the White House, hopes of a peaceful settlement lay amid smouldering ruins and controversy as a new wave of suicide bombers took to the streets in defiance of the accord.

In the view of many on both sides, Arafat was out of his depth in negotiations with the Israelis. He was much criticised for his failure to get a written commitment to bring an end to the building of illegal Jewish colonies on the West Bank and Gaza.

In July 2000 he met Ehud Barak, then Israel's prime minister, for final status talks under the auspices of President Bill Clinton at Camp David.

Two weeks went by, the talks collapsed, and Arafat was blamed for not taking an Israeli offer that had gone further than any before, including control over 85 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza.

But this fell far short of Palestinian demands - Jerusalem was the deal-breaker - and Arafat knew that incompetence and corruption in his Palestinian Authority had so alienated ordinary Palestinians that, if he had taken it, he would have been killed.

He clung doggedly to power, however, and ironically it was Israel's attempts to sideline him which led to his winning back much of the Palestinian support he had lost.

Confined since December 2001 to his battered headquarters in Ramallah, challenges to his power came and went. But today, after four decades, there really is a vacancy at the top. For the Palestinian people, for peace in the Middle East, this could be a decisive turning point.