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So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands.<ref>Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist, [http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/11/arafat_the_monster/ Arafat the monster], '' Boston Globe'', November 11, 2004.</ref>}}
So let us recall them: Ilana Turgeman. Rachel Aputa. Yocheved Mazoz. Sarah Ben-Shim'on. Yona Sabag. Yafa Cohen. Shoshana Cohen. Michal Sitrok. Malka Amrosy. Aviva Saada. Yocheved Diyi. Yaakov Levi. Yaakov Kabla. Rina Cohen. Ilana Ne'eman. Sarah Madar. Tamar Dahan. Sarah Soper. Lili Morad. David Madar. Yehudit Madar. The 21 dead children of Ma'alot -- 21 of the thousands.<ref>Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist, [http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/11/arafat_the_monster/ Arafat the monster], '' Boston Globe'', November 11, 2004.</ref>}}
National columnist, author:
{{quotebox-float| There had been no Palestinian Arab nationalism during the long centuries of the Ottoman Empire. But the conditions of living under British rule after World War I, while a new Jewish national society was being built up at breakneck speed around them, had certainly given the Pales- tinian Arabs a very different experience from that of peoples in any other part of the Arab world. And the experience of the hundreds of thousands who fled their homes or were expelled by Israeli forces in the 1948 war into the miserable refugee camps, with their bizarre but significant combination of excellent basic health care, superb education, and otherwise awful conditions, made that national experience more distinctive still. If the Palestinian Arab people were not a cohesive national group in 1948, they certainly were twenty years later.
The real Yasser Arafat.
Yasser Arafat dominated the Palestinian national movement for forty years, with dire results for his own people. In many important respects, he was not at all what he appeared to be.
Arafat claimed to have been born in Jerusalem, but was actually born in Egypt and grew up in Gaza. He presented the PLO as a fashionably Marxist-socialist revolutionary movement—a stance that won him a quar- ter-century of loyal support from the Kremlin. But there is convincing
evidence that he started his underground career, and made his first power base in revolutionary Arab politics, with the Ikhwan, the Muslim Brotherhood in Gaza and Egypt.
He presented to the world an image of being an incorruptible, selfless revolutionary, but he stashed away billions of dollars during his long domination of the Palestinian national movement, and his Fatah was always mired in corruption and incompetence.
Arafat presented to the world the face of an Arab region unified in its opposition to Israel, but he killed many Arabs during his long career. In his heyday, every Arab country that gave refuge to him and the PLO was ruined and plunged into civil war as a result. King Hussein of Jordan drove the PLO out of his country in September 1970. Lebanon then took them in. They established a powerful enclave in southern Lebanon known as "Fatahland." But unlike the much more formidable Hezbollah, which eventually succeeded them, they proved militarily useless against Israel except for a handful of raids that slaughtered Israeli civilians, including more than twenty children in at school in Ma'alot in 1974. Starting in 1975, the PLO plunged Lebanon into fifteen years of civil war and anarchic violence that eventually took 150,000 lives.<ref>Sieff, M. (2008). The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East. United States: Skyhorse Publishing, pp.111-[https://books.google.com/books?id=ScguBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA112 112]</ref>}}
==Early life==
==Early life==
As part of an effort to present himself to the world as the epitome of "Palestine", Arafat would often claim to have been born in Jerusalem (sometime he would identify Gaza as his place of birth). The truth of the matter is that he was born in Cairo, Egypt. Even in his later years his accent and dialect was typical of Egyptians rather than "Palestinians".<ref>[http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48909857.html - Yassir Arafat, 1929-2004], Aish,
As part of an effort to present himself to the world as the epitome of "Palestine", Arafat would often claim to have been born in Jerusalem (sometime he would identify Gaza as his place of birth). The truth of the matter is that he was born in Cairo, Egypt. Even in his later years his accent and dialect was typical of Egyptians rather than "Palestinians".<ref>[http://www.aish.com/jw/me/48909857.html - Yassir Arafat, 1929-2004], Aish,