📍Heliopolis (Masr el-Gedida), Cairo, Egypt
1929 – 2004“I was born Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa on the 24th of August 1929 in Cairo — though I always said Jerusalem. I became the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1969 and the symbol of Palestinian national identity for the following thirty-five years. I led the PLO from exile in Jordan, then Lebanon, then Tunisia, always in the keffiyeh that became the most recognised piece of clothing in the world. In 1993 I shook hands with Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn and received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Oslo Accords promised a Palestinian state. It has not yet come. I died in 2004, in Ramallah, under circumstances that included a mysterious illness. Cairo and the Palestinian diaspora — the life of a people in exile — were the ground of everything.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Rubin, B. & Rubin, J. Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (2003), Oxford University Press; Aburish, S. Arafat: From Defender to Dictator (1998), Bloomsbury