A Rebel's Bloody Odyssey

摘要

To his palestinian followers he was abu Ammar, the kaffiyeh-clad warrior king who had brought them from the wilderness to the brink of statehood. To his Israeli enemies he was an unrepentant terrorist, a backstabber who spoke of peace in English but refused to acknowledge in Arabic that Israel had a right to exist. Yasir Arafat, who died at a Paris hospital in the predawn hours Thursday at 75, engineered one of the most astonishing self-transformations in history, rising from guerrilla leader to Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Yet he spent his last years as an international pariah, shunned by world leaders, effectively jailed in the wreckage of the Moqata, his Ramal-lah headquarters. Four years of conflict had reduced the Palestinians' cities to rubble, devastated their economy, left more than 3,000 of them dead. Many of Arafat's closest associates had started to question his judgment.