Yasser and Fathi Arafat remembered, 20 years after their deaths

4 days ago 3

Cairo, Egypt – The reception of the Palestine Hospital was busy as usual in early November, but the mood among the Palestinian staff was clouded by an approaching anniversary.

On November 11, 2004, a thunderbolt announcement on all major networks: PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat had died in Paris – poisoned with polonium-210, according to an investigation by Al Jazeera and French, Swiss and Russian scientists.

Yasser Arafat was not the only icon the Palestinian people lost that year – his brother Fathi was deathly ill as well, in a coma due to his stomach cancer.

As Yasser lay ill and dying, Fathi woke from his coma suddenly and asked, “Where’s Yasser, is he OK?” Fathi’s son Tarek told Al Jazeera.

He replied, back then, “He is fine, Dad, in Ramallah,” to avoid stressing his father out.

Fathi soon passed away as well, as if the two brothers had a supernatural connection, Tarek says.

“When the news about their deaths spread, we at the hospital would recheck all the channels to make sure it was true,” Rafiq Tawel, who was a nurse there at the time, says.

“During those days, you would find people in every corner, crying.”

Today, in the hospital Fathi established in 1979, Tarek works to keep his father and uncle’s memories alive as he grapples with the relationship he had with two larger-than-life men.

Cairo: The early years and the shaping of a conscience

Sitting in his office in the hospital, surrounded by photos of his father and uncle, Tarek begins to speak, telling the tale of his famous relatives.

Egypt is where the Arafat brothers grew up and shaped their engagement, and the more than 100,000 Palestinian refugees living there mourn their absence still.

Born in 1929 in Jerusalem, Palestine, Yasser was four years old when his younger brother Fathi was born, and when their mother died 40 days later.

After a few years living with their uncles’ family in Jerusalem, the motherless brothers moved to Cairo in 1937 to join their older sister Khadija and father – who had been a merchant there for years already.

The family lived in a rented ground-floor apartment in the district of Heliopolis, where the Palestine Hospital was later established. Tarek adds that they had to rent because “they could not afford to buy”.

As Yasser entered his late teens, news from home came of Zionist militias attacking Palestinians to take their towns and villages in 1948.

Yasser and Fathi had to watch from Cairo.

Yasser began working “as a go-between in efforts to procure arms” to the Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini’s troops, write his biographers Andrew Gowers and Tony Walker.

By 1950, the brothers were both attending King Fuad I University, later Cairo University – Yasser studied engineering and Fathi medicine.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Cairo was deep in political turmoil, as British troops tried to quell protesters demanding an end to colonial rule, especially on university campuses.

Yasser was among the dozens of Palestinians swept up in the fervour, learning about revolutionary methods to later apply to their cause, Gowers and Walker wrote.

Fathi was not as immersed as his brother.

After their university lectures were over, the brothers gave private literacy lessons to make extra money but Yasser, Tarek says, would sometimes be in trouble because of his activities as head of the Palestinian Students Union, leaving his brother to teach both of their lessons.

“You have two different personalities here,” he continues. “Fathi was a member of the union, but he also enjoyed art; focussed on building a family.

“Yasser was sometimes too serious, there was no fun in his life; he was fully devoted.”

The brothers complemented each other though.

Yasser worked to build a strong Palestinian political movement internationally by establishing the Fatah Party and later taking the helm of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation while Fathi focused on social support, providing support and healthcare for Palestinians.

Social support for a people dispossessed

“I remember, at the time I used to see my dad [once] every three or four months,” adds the 56-year-old.

“I would know that he is coming because they would wash his car,” Tarek says sadly of his younger years at home while Fathi and Yasser were constantly on the move, working for Palestine.

Fathi established the Palestinian Red Crescent Society(PRCS) in 1968, out of the same building as the Palestine Hospital.

PRCS built 72 hospitals in Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq – of which 57 were destroyed – and 31 health centres for more than five million Palestinian refugees registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Tarek did not see Yasser much either – an old picture with him and his cousins is one of the few pictures he has with “the leader”.

“Even the leader [Yasser Arafat] I did not see him a lot either … I knew he was busy, that he had other plans and that already there were a lot of people asking him for things.

“So normally, I would [only] go see him when he called me and said: ‘Tarek, where are you?’”

The faces of the two absent father figures still fill Tarek’s office as if it were a capsule of nostalgia.

“I wish I could have learned more from my father about things like life experience, marriage, love, death, war … I just started to know him more later,” he continues.

“The day he died, I remember wishing that my achievements could be at least 5 percent of his life achievements. With that, I would be content.”

Growing up in Cairo, Tarek became a biomedical engineer and eventually worked in Canada, the United States and more than 70 countries as a board member of the Flying Eye Hospital Orbis.

“I kind of thought: ‘I have my own personality, I am not going to work as the son of Fathi Arafat, I will work as an engineer.’”

When his uncle and father died, he became more involved in the PRCS and the Palestine Hospital, where he stands up to walk around.

“After what happened in Gaza we’ve worked to come up with initiatives to help our people here,” he boasts with pride.

“We expanded the capacity of the dialysis department, with nine machines working three shifts a day. Anybody coming from Gaza after October 7 can be treated for free.”

Funded by the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the fees the hospital charges Palestinians were already cheaper than any other Egyptian hospital, and have been cut further with a 35 percent reduction for any Palestinian in Egypt since Israel started attacking Gaza.

A man enters the reception area. His father died last March and the family had nowhere to bury him in Egypt, so he resorted to Tarek and the Palestine Hospital for help. Now, he wants to visit the grave.

“Fathi Arafat built a cemetery for the Palestinians in Egypt where we accept anybody, the first one buried there was my Uncle Mustafa,” Tarek explains as the man leaves.

“This is not just a hospital, it’s a community centre.”

‘The same way they came, others will come next’

Since its founding, the building has not only hosted the PRCS and the hospital, it has also given a floor to a nursing academy, a temporary hostel for Palestinians in need, a heritage house and the Falooja group for Palestinian Arts and Folklore.

“Fathi was one of the people who most believed in the power of art and the need to preserve our heritage while being far from Palestine,” Tawel, the hospital worker who is also a longtime member of the Falooja group, says.

“He built this place as a home to any Palestinian in Egypt. I wouldn’t be able to live without it, I wouldn’t be able to work easily elsewhere as a non-Egyptian nurse.”

Newcomers, who arrived since Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, and Palestinians whose families had to settle in Egypt after the Nakba in 1948 are among the staff and visitors in the busy hospital corridors.

Pictures of the brothers who built the place hang on the walls of almost every one of the seven storeys. It is as if they were watching the events taking place in front of their eyes.

Twenty years after their passing, the fruits they planted in Cairo remain alive as the work to assist displaced Palestinians continues.

“They would both always say, ‘They cultivated for us to eat, let us cultivate for generations to eat.’ It was a philosophy,” believes Tarek.

Yasser’s old house is a few minutes’ drive from the hospital. A mango tree he planted decades ago still grows in the abandoned garden.

“At the time, he said he wanted a mango tree, but I believe it was a symbol. He planted a tree that until now is growing fruits in the same way that his brother planted this hospital and wanted us to continue growing it for people.

“They were growing a revolution, and in the same way that they came, others will come next.”