For Yasser Arafat look-alike, impersonating him isn’t just a job

Blank stares and double takes follow him from the moment he enters the downtown Ramallah square, where thousands have gathered to celebrate the Palestinians’ statehood bid at the U.N.

That distinctively large nose. The green fatigues. A scruffy, gray beard. And of course the signature black-and-white kaffiyeh.

Wait … is that?

Waving a giant Palestinian flag, the Yasser Arafat impersonator bellows to the crowd: “National unity!”

He is instantly mobbed by laughing spectators, all wanting to pose for the spray of cellphones cameras.

Salem Smeirat lives for moments like this.

Sometimes he’s hired to impersonate the deceased PLO chairman, but many times he just shows up uninvited at celebrations and public events, soaking up the attention and adoration.

“This is God’s gift to me,” says the 58-year-old father of six.

The whole thing started as a fluke. The day Arafat died in 2004, Smeirat pulled out an old kaffiyeh his father had given him. Smeirat had often entertained family and friends with his spot-on voice impersonations of people like Arafat, Saddam Hussein and Ariel Sharon, but no one ever thought he looked much like the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman.

After donning the head scarf and doing the voice in his living room, his sons squealed, “Abu Ammar! Abu Ammar!” using Arafat’s nickname.

A ham was born.

Smeirat let his beard grow a little wild, found a uniform and made his public debut as Arafat a month later during a memorial service for the PLO leader. Smeirat was the hit of the event.

Since then he’s appeared at weddings, graduations and a couple of official Fatah party events, such as a 2005 anniversary celebration in which participants hoisted him on their shoulders as if he were the real thing.

“It was a little scary, actually,” he recalls. “I was practically suffocated.”

Much of the job is posing for pictures, something he says he never declines or charges for. Sometimes youths jokingly trail him, chanting the loyalty oath they sang to Arafat. During one appearance in the West Bank city of Nablus, he recalls, he led a parade in one of Arafat’s old cars, waving to thousands of onlookers.

“Everyone loves me when I do this,” he says.

He says he’s such a local celebrity now that he’s recognized even without the costume. Like a Hollywood star complaining about the paparazzi, he laments his fame. “It takes two hours just to go to the store,” he says with a sigh.

But being an Arafat impersonator isn’t steady work. He lost his job as a house painter in Israel a decade ago when Israeli authorities tightened controls on Palestinian workers entering from the West Bank as a security precaution.

He’s paid for appearances perhaps only once or twice a year, usually about $50. Once, at the invitation of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, he got $500. It supplements the small income he earns peddling vegetables from a street cart and selling Palestinian crafts from a Ramallah shop, where he sometimes dresses up as Arafat for customers.

“My dream is to play the role of Arafat in a TV show or a movie,” he said. “I’m hoping someone will discover me. I could use the money.”

Still, he won’t take just any gig, he insists. He says he’s turned down requests to appear in local plays or other jobs that he feared might “belittle” Arafat’s image.

He’s memorized many of Arafat’s most famous lines and mannerisms.

“Our children will raise a Palestinian flag over Jerusalem, and those who don’t like it can drink the seawater off Gaza,” he recites in Arafat’s booming voice, waving a finger in the air.

He’s even mimicked the little spring in Arafat’s gait and the quivering lips of his final days.

The popularity of the act is a testament to the Arafat’s enduring legacy here. Though widely unpopular in Israel and criticized in the U.S. for, among other things, rejecting the 2000 Camp David peace deal, Arafat is idolized by Palestinians.

“Arafat was the one who changed Palestinians from refugees into fighters,” says Smeirat, who never met the chairman. “He brought Palestinians to the world’s attention. When people look at Arafat, they see the symbol of Palestine.”

Arafat’s grave in Ramallah remains the West Bank’s most-visited site. Work on a museum is underway. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas still sometimes struggles to emerge from his mentor’s shadow.

That might explain why Abbas tends to keep his distance from Smeirat whenever the two find themselves at the same event. Although other Palestinian leaders enjoy mugging for the cameras with the fake Arafat, Abbas hasn’t joined in the fun, he says.

Israeli soldiers don’t see the humor either. Smeirat says he was detained for two hours once at a checkpoint when puzzled soldiers saw him dressed up as Arafat on the way to an event.

He says he beat out several would-be Arafat impersonators during an audition for a Syrian director, but the project never took off. A Lebanese television station flew him to Beirut for a mock show featuring dead Arab leaders, but there’ve been no offers since.

“No one could play Arafat like me,” he says. “Everyone tells me I look just like him.”

Perhaps not exactly, he adds. The PLO leader was somewhat famous for being, well, a little hard on the eyes. Here Smeirat finds a distinction.

“Personally, I don’t think he was ugly,” Smeirat says. “But when I meet people who knew him, they tell me I look much better.”

edmund.sanders@latimes.com