Yassir Arafat passed away tonight. I'm not going to pretend I can offer any kind of complex analysis -- I'm a college student, not a public policy analyst.
I do know that Yassir Arafat left the Palestinian people both in better shape and worse shape than they were when he became their leader.
Better shape, because now Palestinians have a (small) voice in the international community as a result of his leadership. No one today can claim that "there are no Palestinians," to quote Golda Meir.
Worse shape because while he gave them a voice, he left them without an infrastructure in a physical and political sense. He dominated the stage so utterly that no one knows who his sucessor will be.