Yasser Arafat, the great revolutionary with the keffiyeh

Hundreds of books have been written, and hundreds of thousands of documents and articles have been written about the immortal Yasser Arafat, the leader of Palestine, which has always been at the forefront of the Arab nation, and the leader of the Palestinian resistance since it launched a roaring revolution that revived the nation and advanced it, and played with swords and fists, as it dealt with the great and the lackeys in 1965 and after the Nakba in 1948, until his exciting, shocking and honorable death in 2004 at the hands of the evils of biblical myths, robbery, the Hellman and aggression against humanity.

Yasser Arafat - who, 20 years after his passing, still fills our ears and eyes - is found with millions of stances, looks, smiles, anger, bullets, greetings, kisses, handshakes, torn papers, and piercing eyes for the sake of Palestine. Everyone who met him or interacted with him possessed him, so each of us has a piece of him, and how can the icon not be on everyone’s chest?

You can look at the wounded pens when writing about him, in addition to the pictures, interviews, videotapes, and what you find in books of memoirs of men about the president on the one hand, and in the words of his friends and millions of his fans, even if they disagree with him.

And a number of his haters and envious people who were asking for what was impossible, so they got upset and assumed that their presence on the sidewalk of the resistance, revolution, and national struggle was the result of Yasser Arafat and not of their lack of ambition and bad nature. They are those hypocritical, mercenary, and self-serving people.

Yasser Arafat carried a weapon in one hand and an olive branch in the other, and beside him were Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Abu Salma, Haroun Hashem Rashid, Khaled al-Hassan, Majed Abu Sharar, Abdul Wahab Kayali, Baha al-Bukhari, Abu Arab, Ghassan Kanafani, Hani al-Hassan, Hani Jawhariya, Sulafa Marsal, Munir Shafiq, Dr. Mahjoub Omar, Ahmed Abdel Rahman, and Nabil Amr... among the great intellectuals, artists, media figures, and thinkers of Palestine and the nation. The "old man" pledged allegiance to his contemporaries, the pioneers, such as Abu Jihad, Abu Iyad, Saad Sayel, Abu Maher Ghoneim, Farouk al-Qaddoumi, George Habash, Nayef Hawatmeh, Abu Ali Mustafa, Abdul Rahim Mallouh, Abu Abbas, and Bassam Abu Sharif... and the many who fought for the revolution until victory.

He never failed to pay attention to the obstacles in the way, so he opened side and bypass roads to the north and right, because when you are in an Arab-global quagmire in which the nation has drowned, it is necessary to take an offensive position without abandoning the lifelines, otherwise you and the cause will be swallowed up as a matter of course.

The owner of the keffiyeh (the revolutionary Arab resistance headdress) and the victory sign that was raised before him by "Churchill" who achieved victory for his country in the Second European War described as global, even though the latter does not deserve to be imitated, because he is one of the fools who presented Palestine as a "gift" to the Zionist movement, but the victory sign in the hands of Yasser Arafat continued to accompany him during periods of ups and downs.

Brother Abu Wadih Erekat writes about the beginnings of the hero who did not understand that he could breathe except through Palestine and on his tongue: “John Foster Dulles says: Unfortunately for this people, they came under the feet of elephants. The old die and the young forget. And the martyred leader and symbol Yasser Arafat responds to him in the first Cubs’ camp in Al-Baqaa in Jordan: I am speaking to the bones of “John Foster Dulles” by saying to his bones, come and see who are those who fight in defense of Palestine. These are the Cubs of Palestine. The children of Palestine do not forget.”

He wrote himself in red pen at the end of his turbulent, eventful, threatening, fluctuating, turbulent and profound life: “They want me as an outcast, or dead, or a prisoner, and I tell them: Martyr, martyr, martyr,” repeating his call to the Arab and Islamic nation in which he believed and made himself and the Palestinian resistance the vanguard of the caravan for its horses and polished swords: “We are going to Jerusalem as martyrs by the millions.”

Abu Ammar, who visited, went around, spoke and talked with all the leaders of the revolutionary world, or most of them, was born in the heart of the battle. He did not abandon his ambition for a democratic Palestine for all believers except to the whistle of missiles over the heads of the Palestinians, then over his head when he was besieged three times in Beirut, then in Tripoli, then in Ramallah.

The Palestinian tiger, or lion (which is from the sign of the lion, which is not a preferred term in comparison to the lion), remained daring, understanding the meaning of progress and retreat, and understanding the equations and all the threads between his fingers in the immunity of strength when linked to the idea of liberation, especially with a people who made patience, steadfastness, perseverance and endurance their school since the Messenger, may God bless him and grant him peace, decided, by the command of God Almighty, that here in the Levant and in Palestine lies the nation of jihad, struggle and steadfastness.

The Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, said: “A group of my nation will continue to be victorious over their enemies, and those who oppose them will not harm them except for the hardships that befall them, until the command of God comes to them. And they will be like that.” They said: “O Messenger of God, where are they?” He said: “In Jerusalem and the environs of Jerusalem.”

Abu Ammar's eyes never closed a single night to Palestine, whether on the plane that was transporting him from one country to another, or when he was carrying his gun in the face of the great conspiracy or in the face of the occupier who was disturbed by his sick "Tanakh" understanding and his belief that he was leading the world in his pure capacity, where you find no difference in the equation of ethnic, religious, or intellectual (ideological) purity between all extremist ideas, whether they were ISIS, Christian (Lord's Army), Nazi, fascist, extremist Hindu, right-wing "Tanakh-Torah", or Zionist, as they all eat from the same oppressive plate.

Yasser Arafat, when you write about him, the ink runs out, and you assume that you are sitting for a long time in front of a computer screen, or in front of tearful papers, which have been abandoned in the age of artificial intelligence and the revolution of corrupt visuals that corrupt the mind and soul.

Yasser Arafat, as you write or when you look at him smiling or angry, the big question arises in your mind: What does he mean? What does he want? And here he is ready to send dozens of messages. Do not think for a moment that he meant you.

Those who wrote against him with slander and filth outside the meaning of due criticism, are the same people who sat all his life on the side of the road of resistance and struggle led by the old man. They were nothing in his life, and they did not put a breath in the nostrils of the purebred Arabian horse! They thought that in light of modern technology and the spread of speech, most of which is worthless and the least of which is valuable, they could pass on in their books or their visual meetings on the Internet what they could not say in the face of the man who was never a saint, nor a fraudulent prophet, nor a “guide” for this regime nor for that group that claims infallibility and the true religion without the Muslim nation!

Yasser Arafat rejected with all his strength the idea of coercion and compulsion through sanctification, an idea in which the sacred competes with all others. There is absolutely no success that can be felt from any angle of your point of view when you are in front of the (sacred) as a guide or a divine party or a leader with a clean hand from whose eyes the sun is supposed to shine! Rather, he adopted the doctrine of love for Palestine and the doctrine of difficult and arduous dialogue as his school. No matter how much they disagreed with him, rebuked him, and fought him with poisoned spears, he would lean on them with the cloak of embrace that would include them all.

Yasser Arafat, no matter how much you or others write about him, explaining, clarifying, defending and protecting him, and no matter how much you say about him politically and operationally (pragmatically), he is a great father in the form of a leader. He is a weak human being with the skin of a lizard or a white Palestinian Arab tiger, and you will not find anyone like him except a few.

In the midst of the fascist aggression on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, many wondered what the "old man" would have done in the shadow of this Zionist terrorist quagmire? How would he have acted? Among them were leaders, thinkers, great writers, and prominent media figures whom we read, who did not abandon the cloak of loyalty to the man, so they mentioned him in every article or breath they took. Yes, this is how Abu Ammar was, who was martyred to create from his soul an eternal space of sharing, whose resistance, revolutionary spirit, patriotism, Arabism, Islamism, civilization, and openness would be transmitted by everyone who walked or thought about walking on this thorny, difficult, and explosive path.

He went through the ordeal and witnessed the scenes, and was even the one who made them. He was the one who refused to step aside, for Palestine was always in the middle. His thoughts were interrupted by all the regimes of tyranny and oppression in the Arab world, whose leaders were removed accompanied by thousands of curses. But when it came to Yasser Arafat, they stopped, not knowing what to say! If they did well, they did not bring anything new, and if they did badly, they were told, “Where were you!? And who are you!?”

Yasser Arafat, a man of overwhelming charisma, possessed the charm of a resistance fighter, an ascetic, a devoted worshipper, and he also possessed the boldness, courage, and equality of a man of peace. When he deviated from that path, he would present to everyone the justifications for his faith, and work on winding roads to open new paths. He did not waver for a moment from Palestine, which he sought piece by piece, until it was finally completed as one, unified, beautiful, pure, and pure entity.