Thread: Where was Arafat born?

You are correct. He was born in Cairo to Palestinian parents.

Well I say either bury him in Cairo, or the town or village his family came from. Burying him in Jerusalem is purely politically motivated.

Originally Posted by Ray

Was he born in Cairo?

Any authentic links?

How come that the news reports are not stating this?

Plenty.

Yasser Arafat was born Muhammad Abdul Rahman Abdul Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini on 24 August 1929 in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. His father, a Palestinian merchant living in Egypt, died during the first Arab-Israeli war 20 years later.

Arafat's youth is surrounded by uncertainty.

He claimed to have been born in Jerusalem but his Egyptian accent always revealed his Cairo upbringing.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/890161.stm

Arafat, who was born in Cairo in 1929, is renowned in the Arab world for pushing the Palestinian cause, while deemed a murderer by Israelis who blamed him for blocking peace and backing terrorists.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/...ain/index.html

Arafat Had Many Ties to Cairo

CAIRO, Egypt — Yasser Arafat's (search) ties to Cairo go way back: It's the city where he was born, went to school and got his start in political activism.

So it was fitting that his funeral should be held there on Friday, even though he was to be buried in the West Bank.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,138369,00.html

Key Events in Yasser Arafat's Life

Nov 10, 2004 — Key dates in Yasser Arafat's life:

Aug. 4, 1929: Born in Cairo, Egypt, fifth child of Palestinian merchant Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=243713

Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini in Cairo, Egypt, on Aug. 24, 1929. As a young boy, he lived with relatives in Palestine, a region then under British rule.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/...in655010.shtml

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_...5E1702,00.html

Arafat 'born in Jerusalem'
From correspondents in Paris
November 16, 2004

THE death certificate issued for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by French authorities last week indicates his place of birth as Jerusalem and not Cairo, officials said today.

Municipal officials at Clamart, the suburb of Paris where Mr Arafat died last Thursday, said they issued the document on the basis of a family record book itself issued by the French foreign ministry in 1996.

The issue is symbolically important because Israel considers Jerusalem as its eternal capital, while Palestinians want to make east Jerusalem, occupied by the Jewish state since 1967, the capital of their promised state.

Mr Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Rawf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussaini, on August 4, 1929.

The official version of his life history records he was born in Jerusalem. However numerous biographers agree that he was, in fact, born in Cairo, where his father, from Gaza, owned a business.

Having researched the topic briefly for an editorial letter, where my thesis was that Arafat was indeed born in Jerusalem, based mostly on the death certificate issued by French authorities, I concluded:

The document was based on a family records book, "livret de famille", which inter alia is used as proof for someones legal competency to get married in France, which Arafat did.

It does not, it seems, as such give any valid confirmation of nationality.

Originally Posted by lemontree

Arafat was Egytian. His mother was related to some mufti of Jerusalem.
Arafat was also enrolled in the Egytian army, he was part of the 1956 Suez conflict. He was cofounder of "Fatah", and since PLO was Egytian backed he would have been the ideal choice, being Egyptian himself.
Everything esle is hogwash to make him acceptable to the Palestienians, as one of their own.

Well, in that case the hogwash worked pretty well, don't you think....

My agenda was less to repeat all that than to point out that the french authorities/doctors' death certificate after all probably doesn't alter what is common knowledgde, that he was born in Cairo.

I think there are few serious researchers that truly believed he was born in Jerusalem.

Still, the death certificate that stated otherwise was widely quoted, such as in news.com.

The official French document is not, I take it, part of the "hogwash to make Arafat acceptable."

It merely indicated that he could have been right after all, but as I tried to point out, the source is not reliable qua confirmation of nationality.