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https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/arafat-elected-leader-of-palestine?cmpid=email-hist-tdih-2021-0 [login to see] 1&om_rid=&~campaign=hist-tdih-2021-0120
Yasser Arafat is elected president of the Palestinian National Council with 88.1 percent of the popular vote, becoming the first democratically elected leader of the Palestinian people in history.
Arafat, the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), originally employed guerilla warfare and terrorism against Israel in his struggle for an independent Palestinian state. However, in the late 1980s, he stunned Israel and the world when he began seeking diplomatic solutions in his quest for a Palestinian homeland. Arafat persuaded the PLO to formally acknowledge the right of Israel to coexist with the independent state of Palestine and in 1993 signed the historic Israel-Palestinian Declaration of Principles with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. One year later, Arafat and Rabin signed a major peace agreement granting Palestine limited self-government in territories occupied by Israel. In 1995, Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for his peace efforts. In the Palestinian people’s first democratic election, in 1996, he won an overwhelming electoral majority, consolidating his rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas granted autonomy in the 1995 agreement.
In 2000, though, hopes were dashed that the Oslo Accords might finally bring peace to the troubled region when Arafat, dogged by self-doubt and criticism at home that he was compromising too much, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak were unable to negotiate a final peace.
Yasser Arafat is elected president of the Palestinian National Council with 88.1 percent of the popular vote, becoming the first democratically elected leader of the Palestinian people in history.
Arafat, the founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), originally employed guerilla warfare and terrorism against Israel in his struggle for an independent Palestinian state. However, in the late 1980s, he stunned Israel and the world when he began seeking diplomatic solutions in his quest for a Palestinian homeland. Arafat persuaded the PLO to formally acknowledge the right of Israel to coexist with the independent state of Palestine and in 1993 signed the historic Israel-Palestinian Declaration of Principles with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. One year later, Arafat and Rabin signed a major peace agreement granting Palestine limited self-government in territories occupied by Israel. In 1995, Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres for his peace efforts. In the Palestinian people’s first democratic election, in 1996, he won an overwhelming electoral majority, consolidating his rule over the West Bank and Gaza Strip areas granted autonomy in the 1995 agreement.
In 2000, though, hopes were dashed that the Oslo Accords might finally bring peace to the troubled region when Arafat, dogged by self-doubt and criticism at home that he was compromising too much, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak were unable to negotiate a final peace.
Yasser Arafat elected leader of Palestine
Posted from history.com
Palestine
Elections
Voting
Peace
Israel
Posted 4 y ago
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Arafat led the PLO to disaster in the Black September fiasco in Jordan. During the complex Lebanese Civil War there were something like 9 factions ranging from the Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese armies to the Druse and Marionite militias and the PLO, and seven phases of fighting. Under Arafat's leadership, the PLO was the only faction that fought in every phase of the that mess, and the only faction that was on the losing side in every phase. Then he backed Saddam in the Gulf War, losing most monetary support from the wider Arab world and leaving the PLO almost entirely dependent on the UN. Rumor among my friends in the spook community is that the Mossad worked very hard to keep him alive and in charge of the PLO, figuring any replacement would have to be more competent.
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