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The paramount features of Palestinian victimhood are its refugee status and its identity as a people living under occupation. Amazingly, the father of the Palestinian revolution has suffered neither: Yasser Arafat has never been a refugee nor has he ever lived under Israeli occupation (except during the last few months). In fact, he isn’t even a Palestinian.

Arafat’s given name is Abd el-Rahman Abd el-Rauf Arafat el-Qudwa el-Huseini. He was born in Cairo on Aug. 24, 1929. (Aware of the power of symbolism and legitimacy in Arab culture, he claims to have been born in Jerusalem, but many of his biographers disagree.)

Together with university friends, Arafat founded Fatah during the late 1950s. His association with the Muslim Brotherhood — a radical Islamic movement birthed in Egypt in early 20th Century — as well as his involvement in Fatah’s «military operations» earned him incarceration in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria in the 1950s and 1960s. Fatah joined the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968, and the following year Arafat became its chairman, a position he still holds today.

During his tenure, the PLO was expelled from Jordan (1970) and Lebanon (1982), and it would have been thrown into exile once more — this time from Israel (2002) — were it not for the pressure that the international community exerted upon Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The Palestinians were massacred by the Jordanians in 1970, by the Christian Falangists in 1982 and by the Amal Muslim Shi’ites in 1985. They were evicted from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in 1991 — all as a result of their leader’s mistakes.

By the early 1990s, Palestinians in the territories were still under Israeli rule, and most of the Palestinians in the diaspora were still confined to miserable camps; Arafat’s PLO had not «liberated» one inch of historic Palestine after three decades of struggle.

Then came Oslo: a political life-vest thrown by the Israelis to a sinking revolutionary organization. Arafat quickly embraced it, and he was almost instantly rehabilitated — from bloody terrorist to statesman of international stature. He was given land and power (which came as a result of Israel’s political miscalculation more than Arafat’s own merit). Like an inverted Midas, everything that the Palestinian revolutionary touched became cursed. The 8-year experiment in Palestinian self-government confirmed this reality.

In the late 1980s, according to historian Efraim Karsh, after decades of Israeli administration leading up to the intifada, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were the fourth fastest growing economy in the world, ahead of Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea and even Israel. But the first intifada, the peace process, Palestinian autonomy and the latest intifada have drastically reversed the trend. «He promised he would build a Singapore in Palestine. Instead he delivered a Somalia,» complained one Palestinian.

In reality, Arafat’s real successes were in the realm of public relations. His pinnacle moments of glory included appearing on the cover of Time (1968), addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York (1974), shaking hands with the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House (1993), and being awarded the Nobel Peace prize (1994).

No less significant, however, has been the impressive size of PLO assets and the chairman’s deft management of the organization’s finances. According to estimates by the CIA and the British National Criminal Intelligence Service, the value of PLO assets in the early 1990s varied between $10 billion and $14 billion. In 2000, Israeli intelligence put the figure at around $20 billion.

If we were to rank the PLO among the companies listed in the Fortune 500, we would be astonished to learn that PLO assets of the early 1990s today would place it above those of Kellogg’s, Continental Airlines, Nike, Colgate-Palmolive and Apple Computer. As if this vast organizational wealth were not sufficient, Arafat also has been showered with American, European and Japanese money since the beginning of the peace process. Yet, not one single Palestinian refugee’s life has improved as a result.

Indefatigable fighter, despised terrorist, eternal revolutionary, small dictator, respected Nobel laureate, failed statesman, celebrated media personality and savvy financial manager, Arafat is all and nothing at the same time. In the final analysis, he is a leader who failed his people on most counts; a seller of broken dreams. He is a man whom — as veteran journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote in the 1970s — history eventually will reduce to his true proportions.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst and journalist in Washington D.C.