00:00The Nobel Prize
00:14The Nobel Peace Prize 1994 was awarded jointly to Yasser Arafat, Shimon, Paris, and Itzhak Rabin
00:26for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.
00:30In 1974 Yasser Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly.
00:35He said he was holding an olive branch for peace in one hand and a freedom fighter's pistol in the other.
00:42Twenty years later he and the Israeli leaders Paris and Rabin received the Peace Prize
00:49for having opted for the olive branch by signing the so-called Oslo Accords in Washington.
00:58The agreement was aimed at reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.
01:04Mohammed Abdel Rauf Arafat S. Kadwal Hassigni was born on August 24th 1929.
01:15His mother was from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem.
01:19She died when Yasser, as he was called, was five years old
01:24and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of the British Mandate of Palestine.
01:32In Cairo, before he was 17, Arafat was smuggling arms to Palestine to be used against the British and the Jews.
01:42At 19, during the war between the Jews and the Arab states, Arafat left his studies at the University of Ford I
01:51to fight against the Jews in the Gaza area.
01:55He spent all his spare time in political activities, to which he contributed most of the profits.
02:02In 1958, he and his friends founded Al-Fatah, an underground network of secret cells,
02:10which in 1959 began to publish a magazine advocating armed struggle against Israel.
02:17At the end of 1964, Arafat left Kuwait to become a full-time revolutionary, organizing Fatah raids into Israel from Jordan.
02:29It was also in 1964 that the Palestine Liberation Organization was established, under the sponsorship of the Arab League,
02:40bringing together a number of groups, all working to free Palestine for the Palestinians.
02:47Arafat developed the PLO into a state within the state of Jordan with its own military forces.
02:56King Hussein of Jordan, disturbed by its guerrilla attacks on Israel and other violent methods,
03:03eventually expelled the PLO from his country.
03:07Arafat sought to build a similar organization in Lebanon, but this time was driven out by an Israeli military invasion.
03:17He kept his organization alive, however, by moving its headquarters to Tunis.
03:24He was a survivor himself, escaping death in an airplane crash, surviving any assassination attempts by Israeli intelligence agencies
03:35and recovering from a serious stroke.
03:38In 1988 came a change of policy.
03:42In a speech at a special United Nations session held in Geneva, Switzerland,
03:48Arafat declared that the PLO renounced terrorism and supported the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace and security,
04:01including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors.
04:06The prospects for a peace agreement with Israel now brightened.
04:11After a setback when the PLO supported Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1991,
04:19the peace process began in earnest, leading to the Oslo Accords of 1993.
04:26This agreement included provision for the Palestinian elections, which took place in early 1996,
04:34and Arafat was elected President of the Palestine Authority.
04:40Like other Arab regimes in the area, however, Arafat's governing style tended to be more dictatorial than democratic.
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