It's hard to discuss Yasser Arafat in full without discussing the last years of his life, which were perhaps the most influential in how many people understand him today. Without that, we're left to a biography that is incomplete, and that largely ends before the formative Camp David Summit, where many got some of their best interpretations of what Arafat truly wanted, as well as during the Second Intifada that followed. It is for this reason that it is hard to piece together a narrative of Arafat in full without those years, but I can give you at least a general sense of who Arafat was over the years. He was, without a doubt, the most influential player in the Palestinian national movement in its history, even more influential in my view than Hajj Amin al-Husseini, for his ability to coalesce the movement behind him and his goals. He was a masterful political player, and one who brought disparate personalities under his control with his unique understanding of people. And he was, without a doubt as well, a master of narratives. It was this that led many who knew him to describe, sometimes glowingly and sometimes not so much, how he would respond to questions posed with a long, winding narrative that related in some way back to the points he wanted to make.

So who was Arafat?

Let's give the bare facts first. Arafat was born in Cairo, Egypt. This, interestingly, was something he never admitted. As I mentioned, Arafat was acutely aware of the power of narrative, and claimed he was born instead in Jerusalem. His birth certificate, however, revealed a birthplace in Cairo. Not to be deterred, Arafat claimed he was born in Jerusalem, but his father had forged his birth certificate. Suffice to say there is no clarity beyond to say that the document and intelligence services agree that he was born in Cairo, and taken to Jerusalem at age 4 when his mother died.

Arafat's family of Palestinian Arabs, in the late 1920s, was not welcomed in Egypt. They faced discrimination, and when his father remarried, Arafat was sent to Jerusalem to live with his mother's family. Arafat was in the area when the Arab Revolt of 1936 broke out, and was there until the end of the Revolt. He may have seen the events of the Revolt, but was too young to participate. In 1939, he returned to Cairo, and began to immerse himself more in religion, reportedly gathering neighborhood kids and "shouting Islamist slogans", to quote one biography. His family was dysfunctional; his father remarried multiple times, and Arafat did not have a happy childhood by all accounts.

Little documentation or proof exists of Arafat's doing in the 1940s, but it's clear that as they went on, he began to involve himself further in politics at an early age, at least according to his own statements. Arafat claimed that he learned greatly from Hasan Abu Suud, an advisor to Palestinian nationalist Hajj Amin al-Husseini (who infamously worked with the Nazis during WWII), who he claimed as a distant relative on his mother's side. Arafat also claimed to have worked with Abd al-Khadar al-Husseini, a Palestinian military leader who was killed in 1948 when he mistakenly walked into a Haganah military camp. Of course, Arafat's claims here are suspect. He claimed to have been the man's personal secretary, but he also claims that he stopped an Israeli tank column on his own, and told stories about tricking Zionist agents left and right. How much is true is unverifiable.

I'm going to skip ahead now to the point at which Arafat became a truly prominent leader, since I think you've now gotten a decent idea of who Arafat was as a child and how he viewed himself. Those things may contribute to an understanding of whether or not Arafat was truly self-interested, and what he wanted. It's clear that, at the very least, he was very interested in embellishing his own life, and he may have carried that into the political sphere. To what end is something more detailed to discuss. But more on that later.

One important point to mention before heading to the leadership is that Arafat, at one point, reportedly worked with the Muslim Brotherhood. The group, then mainly Egyptian and Islamist, was not one who Arafat fully agreed with. He did not look heavily into societal transformations. He was not, in short, a socialist leader, or a strong proponent of the Soviet Union, as many other members in his movement later would be. But his goals were nationalist: he wanted a restoration of traditional Arab society at this point, with Islam included. This gave him a more Islamist sense than many other more secular Palestinian groups and leaderships (like the PFLP), and is reflected in his choice of underground alias. He chose the name Abu Ammar, he once said, because Yasir Abu Ammar was "the first martyr of Islam whose name became the symbol of total fidelity to one's faith and beliefs in the Arab world." This could have been, and indeed appears to have been, how Arafat felt in his late teens and early 20s, and may have stuck with him later. Of course, it could also have simply been a bit of political theater, like so much else we can't fully know.

Arafat was, during the 1950s, in university and even briefly working in the Egyptian military. He saw the overthrow of the King in Egypt, and the rise of Nasser. He saw what narratives and a strong understanding of media could provide to a leader willing and able to use them, and he took on leadership among the Palestinian student movement. By 1956, Arafat was a mildly politically active graduate, with a short stint in the military (which he, with characteristic flourish, claimed included heroic defenses of Egyptian positions in the Suez Crisis), and who had an engineering degree focusing in sanitation. He had no wife or children, and was 27 years old. And in 1957, he took stock and realized he had advantages and the ability to take control of a vacuum; no one else was vying seriously for leadership of the Palestinian national movement from within it. Indeed, until at least 1967, most of the movement's momentum was propelled by Arab states sponsoring groups, and Arafat knew he could take advantage of that. But he also had larger designs, and friends who could help him. Among them were Abu Jihad (Khalil al-Wazir), who led a minor fedayeen force with Egyptian backing in attacks on Israel (and posed no threat to Arafat), and Abu Iyad (met Arafat at university, and who had a family story that was gripping, about escaping Deir Yassin in 1948). Arafat decided to leave Egypt and go to Kuwait, where he met others who would help him essentially reorganize the entire national movement. Together, in 1959, they founded Fatah, who did not carry out a single operation until announcing itself formally in 1965. They issued thousands of articles and editorials through their own media publication, however, and in it they sought to lay the groundwork for success. They knew Nasser was the great hope of the Palestinian movement, but should he fail, an ideology would have to replace his pan-Arabism. And when it did fail, Fatah was poised to reap the benefits: they had set the groundwork with an ideology blending Islamism, Marxism, pan-Arabism, and Palestinian nationalism. Somehow, they managed to work disparate ideas into something that could serve as an umbrella for the Palestinian movement, and Arafat's personal story of having previously worked with Islamists (Muslim Brotherhood) and also a history of revolutionary ideology helped sell it.

(Read my reply to this comment for the subsequent parts of my answer)