Repost: Oriana Fallaci interview with Arafat
Introduction to The Interview
This post republishes, in full, Oriana Fallaci’s 1972 interview with Yasir Arafat from Interview with History. Fallaci was not a neutral interviewer. Her method was confrontational, skeptical and permissive: she allowed political figures to speak at length, interrupting only when evasion became explicit. The result is a primary historical document. Leaders explain themselves in their own words, at a moment when they believed history was bending their way.
The interview with Arafat takes place at a particularly revealing point. He had already consolidated power within the Palestinian resistance, received Soviet training and networks, and was openly preparing for prolonged war rather than negotiation. “Abu Ammar” is his nom de guerre, a kunya associated with endurance and struggle, not a personal detail. Throughout the interview, Arafat rejects compromise, minimizes borders, and frames death as politically useful. These are not hostile summaries but statements he makes voluntarily, under questioning.
Below is the archived text from one long introductory portrait, the interview, and below that are selected excerpts from the book’s additional interviews. The full scan is available at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/InterviewWithHistoryByOrianaFallaciInterviewArtEbook .
Yasir Arafat (Interview with History)
Oriana Fallaci; 1972
When he arrived, on the dot for the appointment, I remained for a moment uncertain, telling myself no, it couldn’t be he. He seemed too young, too innocuous. At least at first glance, I noticed nothing in him that showed authority, or that mysterious fluid that always emanates from a leader to assail you like a perfume or a slap in the face. The only striking thing about him was his mustache, thick and identical with the mustaches worn by almost all Arabs, and the automatic rifle that he wore on his shoulder with the free-and-easy air of one who is never separated from it. Certainly he loved it very much, that rifle, to have wrapped the grip with adhesive tape the color of a green lizard, somehow amusing. He was short in height, five feet three, I’d say. And even his hands were small, even his feet. Too small, you thought, to sustain his fat legs and his massive trunk, with its huge hips and swollen, obese stomach.
All this was topped by a small head, the face framed by a kassiah, and only by observing this face were you convinced that yes, it was he, Yasir Arafat, the most famous guerrilla in the Middle East, the man about whom people talked so much, to the point of tedium. A very strange, unmistakable face that you would have recognized among a thousand in the dark. The face of an actor. Not only for the dark glasses that by now distinguished him like the eyepatch of his implacable enemy Moshe Dayan, but for his mask, which resembles no one and recalls the profile of a bird of prey or an angry ram. In fact, he has almost no cheeks or forehead. Everything is summed up in a large mouth with red and fleshy lips, then in an aggressive nose, and two eyes that, though screened by glass lenses, hypnotize you: large, shining, and bulging. Two ink spots.
With those eyes he was now looking at me, courteously and absent-mindedly. Then in a soft, almost affectionate voice, he murmured in English, “Good evening, I’ll be with you in two minutes.” His voice had a kind of funny whistle in it. And something feminine.
Those who had met him by day, when the Jordanian headquarters of Al Fatah was thronged with guerrillas and other people, swore they had seen around him a stirring excitement, the same as he aroused every time he appeared in public. But my appointment was at night, and at that hour, ten o’clock, there was almost no one. This helped to deprive his arrival of any dramatic atmosphere. Not knowing his identity, you would have concluded that the man was important only because he was accompanied by a bodyguard.
But what a bodyguard. The most gorgeous piece of male flesh I had ever seen. Tall, slender, elegant, the type who wears camouflage coveralls as though they were black tie and tails, with the chiseled features of a Western lady-killer. Perhaps because he was blond and with blue eyes, I had the spontaneous thought that the handsome bodyguard was a Westerner, even a German. And perhaps because Arafat brought him along with such tender pride, I had the still more spontaneous thought that he was something more than a bodyguard. A very loving friend, let’s say.
In addition to him, who soon turned on his heel and disappeared, there was an ugly individual in civilian clothes who gave you dirty looks as though to say: “Touch my chief and I’ll drill you full of holes.” Finally there was the escort who was to act as interpreter, and Abu George, who was to write down questions and answers so that they could later be checked with my text.
These last two followed us into the room chosen for the interview. In the room there were a few chairs and a desk. With a provocative, exhibitionist gesture, Arafat put his automatic rifle on the desk and sat down with a smile of white teeth, pointed as the teeth of a wolf. On his windbreaker, of gray-green cloth, a badge stood out with two Vietnam Marines and the inscription “Black Panthers against American Fascism.” It had been given to him by two kids from California who called themselves American Marxists and had come with the pretext of offering him the alliance of Rap Brown, but in reality to do a film and make money. I told him so. He was struck by my judgment but not offended.
The atmosphere was relaxed, cordial, but unpromising. I knew that an interview with Arafat is never good for obtaining memorable responses, and even less for getting any information out of him.
The most famous man in the Palestinian resistance is also the most mysterious; the curtain of silence surrounding his private life is so thick as to make you wonder if it doesn’t constitute a trick to increase his publicity, a piece of coquetry to make him more precious. Even to obtain an interview with him is very difficult. With the excuse that he is always traveling, now to Cairo and now to Rabat, now to Lebanon and now to Saudi Arabia, now to Moscow and now to Damascus, they keep you waiting for days, for weeks, and if then they give it to you, it is with the air of presenting you with a special privilege or an exclusive right of which you’re not worthy.
In the meantime, you try, of course, to gather information on his character, on his past. But wherever you turn, you find an embarrassed silence, only partly justified by the fact that Al Fatah maintains the greatest secrecy about its leaders and never supplies you with their biographies. Under-the-table confidences will whisper that he’s not a communist, that he never would be even if Mao Tse-tung himself were personally to indoctrinate him. He is a soldier, they repeat, a patriot, and not an ideologue.
Indiscretions by now widespread will confirm that he was born in Jerusalem, sometime in the late twenties, that his family was noble and his youth spent in easy circumstances. His father owned an old fortune still largely unconfiscated. Such confiscation, which took place over the course of a century and a half, had been imposed by the Egyptians on certain land estates and on certain property in the center of Cairo. And then. Let’s see. Then in 1947 Yasir had fought against the Jews who were giving birth to Israel and had enrolled in Cairo University to study engineering. In those years he had also founded the Palestinian Student Association, the same from which the nucleus of Al Fatah was to emerge. Having obtained his degree, he had gone to work in Kuwait. Here he had founded a newspaper in support of the nationalist struggle, and he had joined a group called the Muslim Brothers. In 1955 he had gone back to Egypt to take an officers’ training course and specialize in explosives. In 1963 he had helped especially in the birth of Al Fatah and assumed the name of Abu Ammar, that is, He Who Builds, Father Builder. In 1967 he had been elected president of the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a movement that now includes the members of Al Fatah, of the Popular Front, of Al Saiqa, and so forth. Only recently he had been chosen as the spokesman of Al Fatah, its messenger.
At this point, if you asked why, they spread their arms and answered, “Well, someone has to do that too, one person or another, it doesn’t make any difference.” Of his daily life they told you nothing, except for the detail that he didn’t even have a house. And it was true. When he wasn’t staying with his brother in Amman, he slept on the bases or wherever he happened to be. It was also true that he was not married. There were no known women in his life, and despite the gossip of a platonic flirtation with a Jewish woman writer who had embraced the Arab cause, it really seemed that he could do without them, as I had suspected seeing him arrive with the handsome bodyguard.
You see, my suspicion is that, except for whatever details might serve to correct any inexactness, there is nothing more to say about Arafat. When a man has a tumultuous past, you feel it even when he conceals it, since his past is written on his face, in his eyes. But on Arafat’s face you find only that strange mask placed there by Mother Nature, not by any experience for which he has paid. There is something unsatisfactory about him, something unrealized. Furthermore, if you stop to think about it, you realize that his fame burst out more through the press than through his exploits. Even worse, it was pulled out of the shadows by Western journalists and particularly by the Americans, who are always so skillful in inventing personalities or building them up. Just think of what they did with the bonzes in Vietnam, and with that nobody called the venerable Tri Quang.
Of course, Arafat cannot be compared to Tri Quang. He is truly a creator of the Palestinian resistance, or one of its creators, and a strategist, or one of its strategists. But this doesn’t mean, all the less did it mean when I met him, that he was the leader of the Palestinians in war. The real brains of the movement, at the time, was Farouk El Kaddoumi, called Abu Lotuf. And, in any case, among all the Palestinians I met, Arafat remains the one who impressed me least of all.
Or should I say the one I liked least of all? One thing is certain: he is not a man born to be liked. He is a man born to irritate. It is difficult to feel sympathy for him. First of all for the silent refusal that he opposes to anyone attempting a human approach. His cordiality is superficial, his politeness, when it exists, is formal, and a trifle is enough to make him hostile, cold, and arrogant. He warms up only when he gets angry. And then his soft voice becomes a loud one, his eyes become pools of hatred, and he looks as though he would like to tear you to pieces along with all his enemies.
Then, a lack of originality and charm characterizes all his replies. In my opinion, it is not the questions that count in an interview but the answers. If a person has talent, you can ask him or her the most banal thing in the world; he or she will always find the way to answer you brilliantly or profoundly. If a person is mediocre, you can put the most acute questions in the world to him or her; he or she will always answer you as a mediocrity. If then you apply such a law to a man struggling between calculation and passions, watch out. After listening to him, you’re likely to end up empty-handed.
With Arafat I really found myself left empty-handed. He almost always reacted with indirect or evasive discourses, turns of phrase that contained nothing beyond his rhetorical intransigence, his constant fear of not persuading me.
He had no wish to consider, even as part of a dialectical game, the point of view of others. Nor is it enough to observe how the encounter between an Arab who believes in the war and a European who no longer believes in it is an immensely difficult encounter. Also because the latter remains imbued with her Christianity, with her hatred for hatred, and the other instead remains muffled inside his law of an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, which is the epitome of any mistaken pride.
But there comes a point at which such pride fails, and it is there where Yasir Arafat invokes the understanding of others or insists on dragging anyone who is disturbed by doubts behind his own barricade. To be interested in his cause, to admit its fundamental justice, to criticize its weak points, and therefore risk one’s own physical and moral safety, are not enough for him. Even to this he reacts with the arrogance that I mentioned, the most unjustified haughtiness, and that absurd inclination to pick a quarrel. And aren’t these the characteristics of mediocrity, of insufficient intelligence?
The interview lasted ninety minutes, a great part of which was wasted in translating the answers that he gave me in Arabic. He insisted on this himself, so as to ponder each word, I suppose. And each of those ninety minutes left me dissatisfied on the human level as well as on the intellectual or political.
But I was amused to discover that he doesn’t wear dark glasses in the evening because he needs them to see. He wears them to be noticed. In fact, whether by day or night, he sees very well. With blinkers, but very well.
Hasn’t he even made a career in recent years? Hasn’t he got himself elected head of the whole Palestinian resistance and doesn’t he travel around like a chief of state? As such, doesn’t he go to the UN where he shouts, “An olive branch in one hand and a gun in the other hand,” thus disturbing the best friends of the Palestinian cause?
Nobody could ever accuse me of denying the rights of the Palestinians. I’m convinced that they will win because they must win. Yet it is bitter to see their rights advanced by inadequate people. And here is my personal judgment on Arafat: someone that history will inevitably reassess, like Kissinger, and restore to his real proportions.
ORIANA FALLACI: Abu Ammar, people talk of you so much but almost nothing is known about you and…
YASIR ARAFAT: The only thing to say about me is that I’m a humble Palestinian fighter. I became one in 1947, along with the rest of my family. Yes, that was the year when my conscience was awakened and I understood what a barbarous invasion had taken place in my country. There had never been one like it in the history of the world.
O.F.: How old were you, Abu Ammar? I ask because there’s some controversy about your age.
Y.A.: No personal questions.
O.F.: Abu Ammar, I’m only asking how old you are. You’re not a woman. You can tell me.
Y.A.: I said, no personal questions.
O.F.: Abu Ammar, if you don’t even want to tell your age, why do you always expose yourself to the attention of the world and let the world look on you as the head of the Palestinian resistance?
Y.A.: But I’m not the head of it. I don’t want to be. Really, I swear it. I’m just a member of the Central Committee, one of many, and to be precise the one who has been ordered to be the spokesman. That is, to report what others decide. It’s a great misunderstanding to consider me the head. The Palestinian resistance doesn’t have a head. We try, in fact, to apply the concept of collective leadership, and obviously the matter presents difficulties, but we insist on it since we believe it’s indispensable not to entrust the responsibility and prestige to one man alone. It’s a modern concept and helps not to do wrong to the masses who are fighting, to our brothers who are dying. If I should die, your curiosity will be exhausted. You’ll know everything about me. Until that moment, no.
O.F.: I wouldn’t say your comrades could afford to let you die, Abu Ammar. And, to judge by your bodyguard, I’d say they think you’re much more useful if you stay alive.
Y.A.: No. Probably instead I’d be much more useful dead than alive. Ah, yes, my death would do much to help the cause, as an incentive. Let me even add that I have many probabilities of dying. It could happen tonight, tomorrow. If I die, it’s not a tragedy. Someone else will go around in the world to represent Al Fatah, someone else will direct the battles. I’m more than ready to die. I don’t care about my safety as much as you think.
O.F.: I understand. On the other hand, you cross the lines into Israel once in a while yourself, don’t you, Abu Ammar? The Israelis are convinced that you’ve entered Israel twice and just escaped being ambushed. And they add that anyone who succeeds in doing this must be very clever.
Y.A.: What you call Israel is my home. So I was not in Israel but in my home, with every right to go to my home. Yes, I’ve been there, but much more often than only twice. I go there continually, I go when I like. Of course, to exercise this right is fairly difficult. Their machine guns are always ready. But it’s less difficult than they think; it depends on circumstances, on the points chosen. You have to be shrewd about it. It’s no accident that we call these trips “trips of the fox.” But you can go ahead and inform them that our boys, the fedayeen, make these trips daily. And not always to attack the enemy. We accustom them to crossing the lines so they’ll know their own land and learn to move about there with ease. Often we get as far as the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Desert. We even carry weapons there. The Gaza fighters don’t receive their arms by sea; they receive them from us, from here.
O.F.: Abu Ammar, how long will all this go on? How long will you be able to resist?
Y.A.: We don’t even go in for such calculations. We’re only at the beginning of this war. We’re only now beginning to prepare ourselves for what will be a long, a very long war, certainly a war destined to be prolonged for generations. Nor are we the first generation to fight. The world doesn’t know, or forgets, that in the 1920s our fathers were already fighting the Zionist invader. They were weak then, because too much alone against adversaries who were too strong and were supported by the English, by the Americans, by the imperialists of the earth. But we are strong. Since January 1965, since the day Al Fatah was born, we’re a very dangerous adversary for Israel. The fedayeen are acquiring experience, they’re stepping up their attacks and improving their guerrilla tactics; their numbers are increasing at a tremendous rate. You ask how long we’ll be able to resist. That’s the wrong question. You should ask how long the Israelis will be able to resist. For we’ll never stop until we’ve returned to our home and destroyed Israel. The unity of the Arab world will make this possible.
O.F.: Abu Ammar, you always invoke the unity of the Arab world. But you know very well that not all the Arab states are ready to go to war for Palestine and that, for those already at war, a peaceful agreement is possible and can even be expected. Even Nasser said so. If such an agreement should take place, as Russia too expects, what will you do?
Y.A.: We won’t accept it. Never. We will continue to make war on Israel by ourselves until we get Palestine back. The end of Israel is the goal of our struggle, and it allows for neither compromise nor mediation. The issues of this struggle, whether our friends like it or not, will always remain fixed by the principles that we enumerated in 1965 with the creation of Al Fatah. First: revolutionary violence is the only system for liberating the land of our fathers. Second: the purpose of this violence is to liquidate Zionism in all its political, economic, and military forms and to drive it out of Palestine forever. Third: our revolutionary action must be independent of any control by party or state. Fourth: this action will be of long duration. We know the intentions of certain Arab leaders to resolve the conflict with a peaceful agreement. When this happens, we will oppose it.
O.F.: Conclusion: you don’t at all want the peace that everyone is hoping for.
Y.A.: No. We don’t want peace. We want war, victory. Peace for us means the destruction of Israel and nothing else. What you call peace is peace for Israel and the imperialists. For us it is injustice and shame. We will fight until victory. Decades if necessary, generations.
O.F.: Let’s be practical, Abu Ammar. Almost all the fedayeen bases are in Jordan, others are in Lebanon…
Y.A.: We can’t fight on the basis of “ifs.” It’s the right of any Arab state to decide what it wants, including a peaceful agreement with Israel; it’s our right to want to return home without compromise… Even now we are in Palestine.
O.F.: We’re in Jordan, Abu Ammar. What does Palestine mean?
Y.A.: We don’t bring up the question of borders… Palestine is a small dot in the great Arabic ocean…
O.F.: But what are the geographical borders of Palestine?
Y.A.: As an indication, we may decide that the borders of Palestine are the ones established at the time of the British Mandate…
O.F.: That includes Cisjordania.
Y.A.: What you call Cisjordania is Palestine.
O.F.: How is it possible to talk of Arab unity if such problems arise with Arab countries?
Y.A.: Every revolution has its private problems…
O.F.: The Popular Front is communist.
Y.A.: There are fighters among us representing all ideas…
O.F.: That involves civilians.
Y.A.: Civilians or military, they’re all equally guilty…
O.F.: What do you think of Moshe Dayan?
Y.A.: I hope that one day he’ll be tried as a war criminal…
O.F.: Are you capable of respecting your enemies?
Y.A.: As fighters, sometimes yes. As persons, no…
O.F.: How many Israelis do you think you’ve killed?
Y.A.: I can’t give you an exact figure…
O.F.: And do you pay an equally heavy price?
Y.A.: Losses to us don’t count…
O.F.: How many fedayeen are there?
Y.A.: I would have to ask permission…
O.F.: Fifteen thousand?
Y.A.: Fifteen thousand.
O.F.: You’re an unfair man.
Y.A.: You Europeans are always for them…
O.F.: This is your war, not ours.
Y.A.: You want to pay your debts with our blood…
O.F.: Is that why you wear dark glasses?
Y.A.: I wear them so as not to let people know whether I’m asleep or awake…
O.F.: You aren’t married.
Y.A.: I’ve married a woman called Palestine.
Amman, March 1972
Outro
Little has changed. The Palestinian cause still boasts about entering Israel in order to learn the land before attacking it. Peace is still impossible because peace is still explicitly refused by one side. War is not a tragic outcome to be avoided but a goal to be prolonged, even across generations. Figures continue to emerge with opaque biographies, strategic silences, and carefully managed myths. And the contradiction Fallaci exposed remains unresolved: people born in Cairo, Kuwait, or elsewhere insist on native, eternal indigeneity to the Levant, while Jews, whose language, religion, and history are inseparable from that same land, are told they are foreign interlopers.
The vocabulary has been polished and Westernized since 1972, but the underlying logic has barely moved an inch.
This is precisely why Interview with History is worth reading. Fallaci had an unmatched ability to let power talk itself into clarity. And to skip over a ChatGPT overview, here’s some highlights from the book:
Henry Kissinger, “Power is the great aphrodisiac.”
A single sentence that collapses diplomacy, ego, and ambition into one admission. Kissinger later called this interview a serious mistake.Muammar Gaddafi, “I am not a president, not a king, not a ruler. I am a guide.”
Fallaci lets him speak until revolutionary mysticism curdles into naked authoritarian fantasy.Golda Meir, “Peace will come when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”
Delivered without triumph or cruelty, as a grim diagnosis rather than a slogan.Indira Gandhi, “People talk of dictatorship as though it were something imposed. Circumstances create it.”
(Leader of India during the Emergency period, when civil liberties were suspended.)
A chillingly calm justification of authoritarian power presented as necessity.Willy Brandt, “Guilt is not inherited, but responsibility is.”
(West German chancellor, shaped by exile, Nazism, and postwar guilt.)
One of the rare interviews in the book where power speaks with restraint instead of intoxication.
