Yasser Arafat embodied

"Die a martyr? Yes. Is there anyone in Palestine who does not dream of martyrdom?"- Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat, who has died in Paris, was the instantly recognisable face of Palestinian nationalism but failed in both war and peace to achieve his dream of an independent Palestinian state.

Palestinians revered him as a nationalist symbol of their quest for statehood but many Israelis reviled him as "the face of terror".

To admirers, he was the Middle East's phoenix, braving adversity time after time to stand up for his people's rights, firstly in exile and for the last decade in the West Bank.

To his detractors, he was a master of miscalculation who "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity".

Many Israelis would never forgive him for a string of bombings, plane hijackings and other attacks by his Palestine Liberation Organisation in earlier decades, nor believe that he ever really changed his ways despite a public pledge for peace.

"The thing that keeps me going, the most precious thing that is always on my mind, is the regaining of dignity for the Palestinian people and restoring the name of Palestine to the map of the Middle East," he said.

Once a guerilla hero across much of the Middle East and later lauded as a historic peacemaker, he ended his days with little power, curtailed by Israeli wrath and facing opposition from Islamists and others who blamed his rule for corruption.

Mr Arafat survived plots and assassination attempts, a plane crash, isolation by Israel in his West Bank headquarters, and military defeats both to Israel and to Arab forces in countries where PLO guerillas wore out their welcome.

He won the Nobel Peace prize along with Israeli leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for interim peace accords he signed with Israel on the White House lawn in 1993.

But Israel and the United States lost faith in him after the failure of a US-sponsored peace summit in July 2000 and during a now four-year-old Palestinian uprising.

The Israelis and Americans accused him of fomenting violence and declared him irrelevant. Israel destroyed his Gaza headquarters, devastated much of his West Bank compound and kept him penned in there for more than two-and-a-half years.

Mr Arafat denied inciting bloodshed and vowed to press on with his struggle for Palestinian statehood despite repeated Israeli threats to "remove" him.

At times looking ill and weak, at others bolstered by the support of Palestinians who rallied to his side, Arafat fended off Israeli attempts to bypass him and remained the dominant figure in Palestinian politics.

Short and bald, with the stubble of a beard on a face framed by a chequered black and white headdress, he cut an unlikely figure as a guerilla leader despite the olive drab uniform and the pistol he bore for so long on his hip.

A hero to many of his people and a symbol of the battle for self-determination in much of the Third World, Mr Arafat was the incarnation of Palestinian armed struggle for three decades.

"We say that there can be no peace without Jerusalem and no peace with (Israeli) settlements," he said in 1997, outlining his official goal of a state with East Jerusalem as its capital and shorn of Israeli settlers.

He remained the leader of the PLO through its violent ejection from Jordan in 1970 and expulsion from Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion.

Palestinian fight for statehood

His shift from warrior to peacemaker brought him home in triumph to the Gaza Strip in July 1994. To Palestinians, even those lukewarm to his leadership, Arafat was simply Abu Ammar, his Arabic nom de guerre, or plain al-Khityar - "The Old Man".

For the world, the abiding image is of a beaming Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn with his former nemesis Rabin in 1993 to seal the Oslo interim peace accords.

The Oslo deals with Israel brought Palestinians a measure of self-rule for the first time. They also brought Mr Arafat international legitimacy in return for recognising the Jewish state and renouncing violence.

Israel recognised the PLO, but the accords did not secure Palestinians the state Arafat aspired to lead.

A US-backed peace "road map" in 2003 envisioned a Palestinian state in 2005, but the plan was derailed by persistent violence. It was further overshadowed by a unilateral Israeli plan to pull out of Gaza that Palestinians say will entrench Israel's hold on the far larger West Bank and kill dreams of a state on lands Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

Vowing to die for his cause if Israeli forces ever tried to pluck him from his West Bank headquarters, he said: "Die a martyr? Yes. Is there anyone in Palestine who does not dream of martyrdom?"

To detractors, however, Mr Arafat was prone to miscalculation. They say he repeatedly misjudged the political wind until his disastrous support for Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War cost him the backing of wealthy Gulf oil states and forced him to the negotiating table and an unequal accommodation with Israel.

His "peace of the brave", finally accepting Israel's right to exist within borders it established on much of historic Palestine in 1948, split the PLO. It also put him firmly at odds with Islamic militants who were to form the most potent opposition to the Oslo peace deals.

Many Israelis found it hard to believe Mr Arafat could change into a man of peace, a perception that hardened during the most recent Palestinian uprising when Islamic militants killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks.

Palestinian critics said Mr Arafat installed a one-party system in the West Bank and Gaza rife with cronyism and run so single-handedly that only he could sign public sector cheques.

In recent months Mr Arafat faced unprecedented Palestinian unrest, including kidnappings and clashes in Gaza, as rivals vied for power in his greatest internal challenge in a decade. To many Palestinians, his administration turned a blind eye to corruption, misrule and human rights abuses by the entourage that returned with him from exile.

Mr Arafat never groomed a successor, either as chairman of the PLO or as president of the self-rule Palestinian Authority.

When forced to appoint a prime minister under international pressure to share responsibilities and carry out reforms, he guarded his powers jealously.

The first prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, quit after four months. The second, Ahmed Qurie, battled Mr Arafat for control of the security forces.

Mr Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini on August 24, 1929, to a modest trading family.

Leading biographies say he was born in Cairo where his merchant father had settled, although Mr Arafat himself claimed to have been born in Jerusalem.