ONE man's terrorist has always been another man's freedom fighter.

And if ever an individual was perceived in this bisected manner by the world, it was Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat, who died last week at the age of 75.

For four decades he had been the leader of the Palestinian people in their struggle to gain a homeland in some part of what had been British Mandatory Palestine until 1948, when the state of Israel was established in most of that territory.

Concurrently, the Egyptians and Jordanians occupied the Gaza Strip and what is now known as the West Bank, placing the Palestinians in a stateless form of limbo under military rule that continues to this day ? although they did exchange their Arab occupiers for Israeli as a result of the 1967 Six Day War.

Just who was Yasser Arafat, beloved by his Palestinian people, reviled by his political enemies as a ruthless terrorist?

To find an answer to that question you will have to understand the historical and social contexts in which he was born and the position the Palestinian people find themselves in, perhaps the only people left in the modern world who continue to wage a violent struggle to gain the right of self-determination and to claim a national homeland of their own.

Yasser Arafat was born on August 4, 1929; the same year Arabs in Palestine were becoming increasingly concerned about the rising levels of Jewish immigration from Europe and Russia. Battles broke out between the two peoples, an embryonic confrontation that had all the appearances of a civil war.

Although the number of people killed on both sides was below 500, the British ? who had been granted a mandate to rule the old Turkish province of Palestine by the old League of Nations in the aftermath of World War One ? became concerned enough to promise the Arabs that a limit would be put on Jewish immigration.

At that time the Palestinian Arab still had a population edge in relation to other population groupings in Palestine. There were about 535,000 Muslims, 70,000 Arab Christians and 85,000 Jews living in this very small strip of land, surrounded by countries with majority Arab populations and bordered by the Mediterranean sea.

The Palestinians had become greatly suspicious of the motives of the British who had, along with the French, failed to grant the Arabs Independence as had been promised during the war if they were to take up arms against the Ottoman Turks.

Instead, certainly in the case of Palestine, a betrayal of sorts had taken place even before the end of the war when, in 1917, the UK government's Belfour Declaration promised the Jews a "homeland" in what would later become Israel ? but with the understanding that nothing would be done against the natural rights of the Arab majority.

But, of course, that promise would count for nothing and between the years 1936 and 1939 Arabs rose in revolt against the British and the Zionist settlers (Zionism emerged in the 19th century as the Jewish manifestation of nationalism; nationalist movements were emerging throughout Europe and some of the European colonies as a native, political reaction to Imperialism).

The Arabs were infuriated that Jewish colonialisation of what they considered to be their land was continuing unabated. By this time the British had decided that the solution to the growing problem in Palestine between the Palestinian Arabs and a growing Jewish population was that the area should be partitioned.

In order to do that, 250,000 Palestinian Arabs would face expulsion and relocation. So even before the official declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, the Palestinians faced the loss of their land to make way for the Zionist settlers.

Partition was something that they could never accept. It would be the same as if Bermuda was divided into two halves, a Bermudian area and a non-Bermudian area, with joint control of the city of Hamilton, with the newcomers claiming fully half of Bermuda having increased their numbers by immigration.

Of course, the Jewish people had a legitimate, long-time claim to the land of Palestine, stretching back to the so-called Biblical era when God promised them the territory.

But the land of Palestine has long been the focus of conflict and warfare. Long before the Arab/Israeli conflict or the wars between the Biblical Israelites and the Philistines who lived there, there were battles between the Hittites of Asia Minor and Egypt, the warfare between the ancient Israelites and the Canaanites.

But even in the wake of the victory of the ancient Israelites in Palestine, the land was later ruled by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persian, Greeks, Egyptians and Romans. The Holy City of Jerusalem ? revered by the world's three great Monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam ? was, in fact, a city built by the ancient Canaanites.

So while the Jews trace their roots to Abraham through Isaac, the Arabs claim theirs through Abraham's first born through Ishmael, son of Hagar the handmaid of Sarah, Abraham's wife. Abraham had been given a promise by God to be the father of many people.

So who does the land belong to? The descendants of Abraham and Isaac, the Jews who built Solomon's temple? Or does it belong to the children of Ishmael, the Moslems who follow the preachings of the prophet Mohammed?

All know the story, yet its modern version involves two peoples ? first cousins, in reality ? fighting over the same land, each with historical legitimacy on their side. Arafat was, in fact, the Palestinian Moses, who like Moses in the Bible story, was fated not to enter the Promised Land in the form of an Independent Palestinian state.

Yet without Arafat, the Palestinian people may have found themselves historical footnotes. Arafat and Arafat alone carried their struggle on his shoulders and forced the world not to forget them.

Time after time it seems that this struggle lived or died if Arafat lived or died, so much so, that a journalist remarked upon hearing about his death said it was hard to believe that Arafat had managed to die peacefully in bed in another man's country, not his own but peacefully nevertheless.

Arafat had escaped death many times at the hands of the Israelis, even at the hands of his fellow Arabs, in his quest to create a Palestinian state.

His detractors say he was a warlord not a peacemaker, one who could not bring himself to accept the Camp David peace treaty hammered out between the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority in the waning days of President Bill Clinton's administration.

I believe that history, in the long term, will be much kinder in judging the role Arafat played on the road to the creation of a Palestinian state. And it was a tortuous road that Arafat and the Palestinian people had to trudge before the issue of mass Palestinian expulsions from their homeland would find itself on the international agenda.

Even the first full-scale war between Israel and its Arab neighbours in 1948, which saw the creation of the Jewish state, entirely eclipsed the plight of the Arab natives of Palestine. The world saw the invasion of a very small Jewish state by its far larger Arab neighbours as an exercise in regional bullying.

After all, it had been only three years since the end of the Second World War when the Jewish people suffered disproportionately with the loss of between four and six million European Jews in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis.

So there was a great deal of sympathy and, it must be said, guilt on the part of the Western Allies, many of whom had anti-Jewish immigration policies in place in the years before the war ? dooming untold numbers of European Jews to the Nazi gas chambers. So the world focused in 1948 on the defeat of the Arab armies which had tried and failed to destroy the Jewish state and not the tragedy of the mass expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland.

And thereafter the remaining major wars fought between Israel and the Arab states ? in 1956, 1967 and 1973 ? were confrontations between regional powers, more interested in establishing military primacy in the Middle East than in dealing with the stateless Palestinians, millions of whom were now living in refugee camps outside their former homeland (in Lebanon Palestinians are treated particularly harshly, denied citizenship and generally treated as squatters rather than refugees).

This would have remained so if it were not for the coming of Arafat and his Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the 1960s.

But, unfortunately, in coming into being, it could also be said that Arafat was the father of international terrorism as we have come to know it. In pulling off some spectacular terrorism attacks, the Palestinian plight soon got the world's attention and that of the state of Israel, where most of those attacks were focused.

By the 1980s and 1990s there were a series of Palestinian/Israeli wars that could be called modern- day Indian wars given the one-sided nature of the conflicts.

All during that time Arafat was the greatest symbol of that conflict. Most of the world would come to know of this diminutive man with his trademark military uniform and his distinctive headdress, called awhich he said symbolised the jagged map of Palestine. Although he said that he was married to the state of Palestine, he would later take a wife, but it seemed that she was only his second wife to that of the unfulfilled desire of a Palestinian state.

His struggle would take the form of armed struggle as well as belated attempts at negotiation, even the recognition of the right of the state of Israel to exist. But always the ultimate price for the recognition of a Palestinian state would prove to be too high.

peace deal worked out by former President Clinton was rejected even though it appeared to give him a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, because it would have left millions of Palestinians outside of the new Palestinian state without a right of return. Arafat could not be a part of such a betrayal of the aspirations of his people and his unwillingness to compromise meant he could not lead his people to their final goal.

The man Yasser Arafat is gone. But the symbol remains. For as the state of Israel has found out, though it is loath to admit it, you cannot kill a symbol, and even in death ? with the denial of Yasser Arafat's wish to be buried in his beloved Jerusalem ? he still awaits the day his people will carry him there, carrying out the common edict known to both peoples: "Next year in Jerusalem . . ."