Yasser Arafat, the terrorist leader bent on destroying Israel who insisted he wanted to die a martyr to the Palestinian cause, managed instead to die of natural causes last night at a hospital in Clamart, France. He was 75.

A consummate survivor, Arafat fused his own personality with the political aspirations of the Palestinian Arab people. He did this while waging a lifelong war against the existence of the state of Israel through terrorist means that included involvement in the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and the development of airline hijacking as a weapon in the terrorist toolkit.

More recently, Arafat claimed to be powerless to prevent suicide bombers from Palestinian territories detonating themselves at discos and aboard buses in Israel.

In 1974, Arafat stood before the General Assembly of the United Nations and said, “I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” Despite international condemnation for being the only leader ever to come before the international body armed, Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization was subsequently granted official observer status.

Yet, given the choice of peace, Arafat repeatedly chose war, most dramatically in recent decades with his support of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, his rejection of the 2000 Camp David accords, and his tacit support of the second intifada.

Arafat spent recent years in relative isolation, barricaded at his compound in Ramallah on the West Bank, trying to keep order among his fractious countrymen. Meanwhile, Israel began constructing a wall to separate itself from cross-border insurgents. If the West Bank had ever formed the nucleus of a Palestinian state under Arafat, it would have been a state dramatically impoverished and wracked by years of war, much of it possibly avoidable.

Perhaps Arafat’s most remarkable attribute was his survival, especially considering the number and magnitude of his errors, both tactical and strategic.

He survived the PLO being besieged and defeated in Jordan in 1970; being rousted from Beirut by the Israeli army in 1982 (Ariel Sharon is on record regretting that he did not “liquidate” Arafat when he had the chance); and an airplane crash in 1992 in the Libyan desert with only minor injuries.

Most dramatically, he survived the partial demolition of his Ramallah compound with bulldozers in 2002. In that case, at least, Arafat knew that America had forbidden Mr. Sharon from liquidating him; perhaps that is why Arafat insisted so loudly at the time that he sought martyrdom.

Indeed, Arafat owed his survival in large measure to his chameleon-like ability to color himself as “the man to see” for peace for the world community, even while embodying the spirit of armed struggle against “the Zionist entity” in the imagination of Israel’s enemies.

Uncounted millions in aid ran through his coffers from generous Arabs and international donors alike. If Arafat’s power could be said to have a single locus, it was as the holder of the PLO purse strings, and he successfully resisted near-universal calls to account for how he spent the money.

So thoroughly was power vested in his person, that Arafat never developed meaningful succession plans, leaving his deputies struggling to prevent chaos after his death.

Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini on August 4, 1929. He claimed to be a native of Jerusalem, but most authorities agree that he was born in Cairo, where his family lived in the city’s small Palestinian section.

Arafat was the fourth of seven children of a successful wholesale merchant with businesses in Jerusalem and Cairo. After his mother’s death in 1933, Arafat moved to Jerusalem, where he was related to the mufti, who became a World War II collaborator with the Nazis. Arafat returned at age 8 to Cairo, where he was educated. As an engineering student in Egypt, he was close to the Muslim Brotherhood – the movement that has since inspired the creation of extreme Islamist groups throughout the Arab world.

During the 1948 war that followed the founding of Israel, Arafat was among the student leaders who burned their textbooks to demonstrate their desire to fight. He later claimed various unlikely wartime heroics, including single-handedly stopping an Israeli tank column. A more likely story was the one quoted in John and Janet Wallach’s “Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder” (1990), which said that he tried to enter Israel to join in the fighting, but had his weapons confiscated by Arab soldiers contemptuous of Palestinian irregular volunteers. The peace treaty from the 1948 war left the Palestinians stateless.

Arafat claimed he took part in sabotage operations against the British at the Suez Canal, and after graduation, as a specialist in sanitation, stayed involved in political discussions, while finding work as a civil engineer. While working in Kuwait in 1959, Arafat was among a group of exiles that founded Fatah, actually a reversed acronym of “Palestinian Liberation Movement” in Arabic, which also happened to mean “conquest.”

On New Year’s Day of 1965, Fatah staged its first raid into northern Israel, an attempted bombing of a water system. It went awry when the bomb failed to work underwater. More raids would follow, and Fatah’s fame grew. Arafat took as his nom de guerre “Abu Ammar.”

The Six Day War of 1967 was an unmitigated Arab disaster as Israel destroyed the air forces of Syria, Jordan, and Egypt, and then captured the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and West Bank, and East Jerusalem. Arafat himself, although uninvolved in the fighting, was said to have fled the West Bank into Jordan over a bridge, posing as a woman with a baby.

Yet the story is told of Arafat when meeting another Palestinian militant leader, George Habash, heard him bemoan the fact that “Everything is lost.” But Arafat replied: “George you are wrong. This is not the end. It’s the beginning.”

So far as Arafat was concerned, it vindicated his position that guerilla war was the weapon of choice for Palestinians, rather than waiting for liberation to come from Arab armies.

Large numbers of Palestinian refugees had settled in Jordan over the years, and Arafat’s Fatah found a ready pool of recruits there while mounting cross-border raids. In 1968, it bloodily defended against an Israeli retaliatory strike at the Battle of Karameh, giving Arafat greater legitimacy across the Arab world and in the Western press. By 1969, Arafat was elected leader of the PLO, which had its charter rewritten to declare that “Armed struggle is the only way to liberate Palestine.”

In September 1970, its militancy brought it into conflict with the young King Hussein of Jordan, who decided to reassert his authority and sent in his army to crush the Palestinian armed groups in a civil war known as “Black September.”

This was the name adopted by Palestinian Arab guerrillas as they launched a campaign of international terrorism, including the infamous hostage-taking and killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Having left Jordan, the PLO reconnoitered in south Lebanon, building its own state-like structures. The organization’s independent presence in the area that came to be known as “Fatahland” helped destabilize Lebanon and bring on the country’s civil war in 1975.

By then, after the upheaval of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the PLO became the darling of revolutionaries and Third World governments around the world. The Arab League recognized the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people” and in 1974 Arafat was invited to address the United Nations. Arafat had become, in the words of his recent biographers Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, “the Che Guevera of the Middle East.”

Like Che, Arafat seemed uncomfortable with accepting peace, and he denounced the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, in which Palestinian autonomous zones were to be created in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

After Israel was provoked by more raids from Lebanon in 1982, Mr. Sharon launched an invasion that crushed PLO resistance, and Arafat fled, returned, and was humiliatingly ejected once more by a coalition of forces including the Syrians. Arafat and the PLO regrouped in Tunis, while struggling to preserve his tenuous grip on power from even more radical Palestinian elements.

The outbreak of the first intifada in late 1987 drew international attention to the plight of Palestinian refugees, and gave new impetus to the possibility of a solution including Israel’s ceding of territory. In 1988, Arafat spoke at the United Nations at Geneva (America had refused to let him visit New York), during which he renounced terrorism and said he wanted to live in peace with “Palestine, Israel, and other neighbors.” It was this speech that was quoted in his Nobel Prize citation of 1994,but like many of his peaceful proclamations and promises to the Palestinian people, it was more propaganda than a change of heart. Later in 1988, he named himself president of a virtual Palestinian “state.”

America opened a dialogue with the PLO and 70 nations recognized the Palestinian state. But in 1990 Arafat almost threw away international goodwill by declaring he would stand “in the same trench” as Mr. Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait. Hussein later repaid the gesture by paying cash bounties to families that supplied suicide bombers to the intifada.

Somehow the peace process got underway in the Gulf War’s aftermath. The result was the Oslo Accords, in which Israel for the first time agreed to negotiate directly with the PLO, and which Arafat signed in 1993, granting (once again) limited autonomy for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Shimon Peres, but even before the award was given, Palestinian suicide bombers had begun to poi son the atmosphere. Then Rabin was assassinated by one of his own countrymen, and in 1996 Binyamin Netanyahu was elected prime minister, promising a less conciliatory stance toward the Palestinians.

That same year, Arafat was elected president of the Palestinian Authority, the provisional government of the occupied territories. The PA periodically tried to suppress the bombers from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but was accused of operating a “revolving door” at the jails – one moment jailing extremists and the next releasing them back into the streets.

Under a new Labor government led by Ehud Barak, it seemed that the end of the century-old conflict between Arab and Jew was close at hand in 2000, but the Camp David negotiations collapsed amid mutual recrimination.

In September 2000, Mr. Sharon, the then-opposition Likud leader, visited the al-Aqsa mosque, built on the site of the biblical Jewish temple, with a retinue of 1,000 police officers and sparked the Palestinian uprising that propelled him to power.

The second intifada arose and Arafat seemed increasingly incompetent or unwilling to do anything about it, hunkered down, surrounded in his compound, with an automatic pistol strapped to his belt. Both Mr. Sharon and Washington refused to consult him over peace negotiations, and the wall began going up. Arafat steadfastly refused to make succession plans, and undercut his deputies whenever he allowed power to devolve upon them.

“Eight years ago [Arafat] came to Gaza and Jericho and said, ‘I’ll make it into Hong Kong.’ Instead he made it into Somalia,” a Palestinian schoolteacher told Newsweek in 2002. Unable to learn new tricks but with a hard-earned ability to hold onto power whatever the cost to his people and to peace, he managed to hang on for two more years.