Yasser Arafat was an unprepossessing little midge. Indeed, without his scarf he looked like a short ’n’ stubby Levantine salesman which, in some ways, is what he was. But to see only the little despot is to miss his achievements, and it was these that drew hundreds of thousands into the streets of Gaza to mourn his passing.

He wasn’t actually who he claimed to be. Or rather, in the manner later adopted by the punk generation, he wasn’t too happy with who he was so he changed. The boy born in Cairo as Muhammad al-Qudwa became Jerusalem-born Yasser Arafat.
But he was a child of Palestine and, like many Palestinians, he was enraged by the ease with which Israel established itself there and the weakness of Arab resistance to the establishment of the new state. The dispossession of tens of thousands of those he identified as his people especially rankled.
He also noted how the Israelis went about their business. That terrorism was a key component in their success was not lost on the defeated Palestinians.
Those preaching a new crusade do not like to be reminded that Zionists, principally the Stern Gang and the Irgun, planted bombs in marketplaces and had no compunctions about killing the innocent.
Not only that, but when the new state was established, some of these terrorists went on to achieve very high office. Menachem Begin even became prime minister of Israel.
He wasn’t by any manner or means the first gunman to do so. We had more than a few ourselves. But the Palestinians understood what had happened. Put bluntly, they saw that Zionist brutality and terror worked. As a result, they adopted terrorism as one strand of their political approach.
I am not justifying their actions. Arab terrorists have been guilty of many appalling atrocities. When the strategy didn’t work, they upped the ante. We are living with the consequences.
They are blamed for most evils under the sun now, including the rise of Islamism. That’s unfair. They had no idea that the Americans would arm and support Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. Nor could they know that the same Americans would arm and train and support mujahedeen in Afghanistan, one of whom would turn out to be Osama bin-Laden.
The Palestinians also saw how wars of liberation had evolved since the Irish uprising of 1916 and how in post-colonial situations those once reviled as terrorists were accepted and respected as statesmen. How were they to know that they’d be the exceptions to prove the rule?
Nowadays we are conditioned by what has happened since. We see the images of the Black September Palestinian terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. It was a seminal moment and marked a sea change in both global terror and Arab militancy. It was the first of many such atrocities.
You can go back forever, litanising the who-did-what-to-whom. We do that too. But the seed of modern Islamist fundamentalism lies in the relentless and never-ending humiliation, principally by Israel, of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular.
The echoes keep repeating. What is unfolding now in Iraq mimics to an extraordinary degree what happened in Lebanon a generation ago. Baghdad and Fallujah are replicas of Beirut and Tripoli, right down to the brutal kidnappings and murders.
Well, doesn’t matter to Arafat now. The dead don’t care. Once you’re dust you’re dust. That’s another thing we forget.
Talking to Irish people after his death I met a genuine sorrow for Arafat and the Palestinians. I am not suggesting sympathy for the terror or the evil genies he unleashed. No, it was just a sense that he was a small and imperfect human being trying to establish some dignity and respect for his people against insurmountable odds. We empathise with that.
The contrast with George Bush could not be more pronounced. The American president was born with a silver salver in his cot. His father was an ambassador. Later on he was head of the CIA. After that he was President.
The worst thing is that, not unlike Iraq after the odious Saddam Hussein’s downfall, the Palestinian proto-state may now collapse into bloody strife.
You might not have liked Arafat but at least he kept the lid on things. He was the midge who roared. The alternative may be an awful lot worse. Expect more extremism and Islamic fundamentalism. Expect more atrocities.
As the Gary Larson cartoon had it, ‘trouble brewing’.