Visitors to complex in Ramallah will be able to view former Palestinian leader’s modest living quarters and belongings

Twelve years after Yasser Arafat’s death, a museum of the life of the Palestinian leader opens this week in the West Bank complex where he spent his last years under Israeli siege.

Costing $7m (£5.6m) to construct, and years in the making, the Yasser Arafat Museum traces a life indelibly associated with the Palestinian experience and includes the preserved suite of modest rooms he inhabited in the muqata, his Ramallah headquarters.

It traces almost 100 years of Palestinian history, taking in the Nakba – “the catastrophe”, as Palestinians call the period leading up to and following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 - up to Arafat’s death in still contested circumstances near Paris in 2004.

The museum’s inauguration, and its deliberate appeal to the memory of the single overarching political figure in recent Palestinian history, comes at a time when Arafat’s Fatah movement, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), and indeed the Palestinian people, have never appeared more divided, with Fatah ruling on the West Bank and the Islamist group Hamas controlling Gaza.

The museum is housed in a sleek white building a short walk from Arafat’s mausoleum, where his body was brought from France for burial. An aerial walkway links the museum building to Arafat’s cramped old office and bedroom.

The bedroom in particular belies the international status of the man pictured on the nearby walls with some of the period’s highest-profile figures including Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the north Vietnamese commander Võ Nguyên Giáp, the former Zambia president Kenneth Kaunda, and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.

Visible behind a glass screen is a single bed covered in a cheap blanket, a small cupboard with four uniforms and a pile of the keffiyeh headscarves that became his trademark, as well as a small television.

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In the main exhibit are the sunglasses that Arafat wore when addressing the United Nations in 1974 and his Nobel peace prize and medal, awarded for his role in the defunct Middle East peace process and received jointly with Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

One problem facing the museum’s curators is how much of Arafat’s possessions were lost after his death and during his travels. The Nobel prize is so far the only item to have been recovered from Arafat’s old Gaza headquarters, returned by Hamas in undisclosed circumstances.

Nasser al-Qudwa, Arafat’s nephew and one of the figures behind the museum, said at a press conference two weeks ago that some of Arafat’s possessions from the coastal strip had reportedly been spotted in Gaza markets.

“Lots of belongings were lost in Arafat’s long exodus from Beirut to Tunis to Gaza and Ramallah,” al-Qudwa said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A member of the museum’s staff displays one of Yasser Arafat’s notebooks. Photograph: Peter Beaumont/The Guardian

Also on display will be one of the many notebooks in which Arafat handwrote his thoughts on events including meetings with figures such as Leonid Brezhnev, the then secretary general of the Soviet Communist party. It is one of a number of notebooks to have been recovered, but many are still missing.

“His legacy is in many ways too big for a single museum to hold,” the museum director, Mohammad Halayqa, said on Tuesday. “He was a symbol of unity for the Palestinian people, a national leader, a freedom fighter and a father.

“His life overlapped with the Palestinian experience, so we have tried to tell both stories together without intruding Arafat in events where he does not belong.”

The opening of the museum on Wednesday – by his increasingly beleaguered and unpopular successor Mahmoud Abbas – comes two days before Palestinians commemorate the 12th anniversary of Arafat’s death in a hospital near Paris from unknown causes.



Palestinians, including members of Arafat’s family, accuse Israel of poisoning the Palestinian leader, a claim Israel emphatically denies. For its part France, which investigated the allegations, closed its inquiry last year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An Israeli army tank and armoured jeeps outside Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah in 2002. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP

The museum follows Arafat’s life from his birth in 1929 – which it places in Jerusalem, although other historical sources have suggested he was born in Cairo – through his emergence as Fatah’s leader at the height of the armed conflict against Israel, which saw Arafat move around bases in the Middle East including Tunis and Beirut, including the plane crash he survived in the Libyan desert.



Perhaps most striking, however, is the material relating to the second intifada when Arafat was under siege a few paces from the site of the new museum, including video footage of Israeli tanks crashing through the walls of his headquarters.

And in keeping with a thoroughly modern museum, there is inevitably a gift shop with a range of Arafat merchandise including sweatshirts and baseball caps bearing Arafat’s image, mugs with the museum’s logo, books about his life, and a gift-boxed keffiyeh.

Asked whether Arafat’s life – and the museum – represented a period of greater agreement and unity than in Palestinian society today, Halayqa answered diplomatically.

“People miss Arafat. This is a reminder he still exists in people’s memories. Hundreds come to visit his tomb. I’m not certain all are sure why they are coming but they do. And now there is the museum.”