He has done a tremendous and successful job to keep the Palestine question on the world's agenda. Without him and his propaganda effort (though I often had the impression that he did it at least as much for himself as for his people) their plight might have been less prominent. I'm sure they'll keep him in mind as a great leader and revolutionary.

On the other hand, he was a failure as a statesman. If the Palestinians would have gotten a state instead of a permanent state of revolution they might have chased him away quickly. He was a monarch in the original sense of the word like Kim, Fidel and Gaddafi still are. There was no question of accountability for him. He did what he felt like. The monies went on his private accounts. That does not mean he kept all (or even most) of it for himself. He very often was moved by a story from an individual person to give this person money to help, but who was helped and who wasn't was a question of his personal whim and emotion. Monies paid for specified tasks by the EU were diverted to wherever he thought they were needed.

People questioning and criticising this style of governing lived a dangerous life. He had ten different secret services to help him keep the grip on his people. All these were accountable only to him personally and more or less uncontrolled. Rumours of torture and illegal killings have never been answered convincingly. He signed more death penalties on a per capita basis than a former governor in Texas did and other than in Texas, executions were open to the public.

Despite his smiling front appearance, he was a very hard man. He talked smoothly and compromising to journalists from the West and, sometimes even on the same day, was belligerent and uncompromising in a talk to his people in Arabic. Perhaps a people in a state of revolution needs such a leader, but one should wish them now that they soon get someone who doesn't behave like a monarch. He was and talked enigmatic and perhaps for that reason could keep himself in power for that long for different people could read different sense in his speeches:

There has never come a proper well-formed Arabic sentence out of his mouth. (The way) he articulated was a chaos of words, slogans, adjectives and prepositions juxtaposed in defiance of the rules of the Arabic language. His coworkers(personell) had to guess which intentions and ideas did hide behind the hodge-podge of his words. That's how also the politics looked over the years that Arafat was making in the name of the Palestinian people. (my translation from German)
(Salman Masalha, Palestinian lyricist, in his obituary)

Wolfgang