Israel-Palestine Mega Fact Check!

There is indeed a 2012 clip of Yasser Arafat’s widow, Suha Arafat, saying that after the failure of Camp David Yasser told her he would start an uprising.

However, most historians do not think Yasser Arafat in fact started the Second Intifada.

According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Arafat was “blamed by Israel and its allies for being a warmonger who, immediately after returning from Camp David, encouraged the Second Intifada. The myth here is that the Second Intifada was a terrorist attack sponsored and perhaps even planned by Yasser Arafat. The truth is, it was a mass demonstration of dissatisfaction at the betrayals of Oslo, compounded by the provocative actions of Ariel Sharon [when he toured the holy Temple Mount].”

Similarly, Yossi Ben-Ari, a former senior member of Israel’s intelligence service who was tasked with going through all the raw intelligence material to find out who “gave the order” to start the Second Intifada, reported in this Sept 2020 Haaretz article that he could not find any sign that Arafat or any other Palestinian leader had planned the uprising.

The Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee, chaired by George J. Mitchell, concluded in its final report in May 2001 that Ariel Sharon’s visit was provocative but did not cause the Second Intifada. It also stated that there was “no basis on which to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the PA to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity; or to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the [Government of Israel] to respond with lethal force.”

Source: Ten Myths about Israel (2017) by Ilan Pappe, pp.107-110.