Read Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Volume 1 for Free Online

and the Palestinians, generally speaking, as the intellectual elite of the Arab world. I went on to say that what Jews and Palestinians could do together in peace and partnership was the stuff that real dreams are made of. I even dared to suggest that together in peace and partnership Jews and Palestinian Arabs could give new hope and inspiration to the world.
    The main purpose of the book in which I first expressed those thoughts was to put a great and exciting truth into the public domain. It was a truth I had discovered during my first period of privileged and unique access to Arafat when, at the start of 1980, I became the linkman in a secret exploratory dialogue between him and the one Israeli leader of the time who seemed to be serious about peace.
    My hope was that the truth represented in Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? would open some closed minds and make possible for the first time—in the Western world especially—a rational debate about the way to peace in the Middle East.
    Until the first publication of my book about Arafat and his struggle, Israel and its unquestioning and very influential supporters in the media, in America especially, had succeeded in getting the Western world to accept Zionism’s version of who and what the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) was. In this version Arafat was not merely a terrorist, he was the personification of all evil. The most dangerously deluded of Israel’s leaders—Menachem Begin, who had made the transition from terrorist leader to prime minister—had convinced himself and his followers, and proclaimed to the world, that Arafat was the reincarnation of Hitler. Such a man, said the Israel of Begin (and Shamir and Netanyahu and Sharon), was one the Jewish state never could or ever would do business with. And thanks to the efforts of Henry Kissinger while serving as President Nixon’s Secretary of State, Israel had seen to it that no American administration could do business with Arafat and his PLO so long as Israel said “No”.
    The truth represented in Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? was this: By the end of 1979—repeat 1979, nearly a quarter of century ago!—Arafat had done in principle everything that could be done on the Palestinian side at leadership level to prepare the ground for peace with Israel.
    It was a truth Begin’s Israel did not want to hear or be heard, but the facts supporting it were impressive, and were recognised as such by President Carter. He understood that Arafat really was serious about wanting to make peace on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.
    The facts in summary were these. Before 1979 was out, only months after Egypt’s separate (and actually disastrous) peace with Begin’s Israel, Arafat had persuaded the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament-in-exile and the highest decision-making authority on the Palestinian side, to be ready to make an historic compromise for peace with Israel. The compromise was unthinkable to all Palestinians, but given Israel’s military superiority in the region—an even more overwhelming fact of life after Egypt had been taken out of the military equation—it was, Arafat insisted, a compromise they had to make if they were to obtain an acceptable minimum of justice; “something concrete” as Arafat himself put it.
    The historic compromise required the Palestinians to recognise Israel inside more or less its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war and make peace with that Israel in exchange for the return of less than 23 percent of all the land that was rightfully theirs. Put another way, peace on that basis, to provide for Palestinian self-determination in a mini-state on the 23 percent of occupied land from which Israel would withdraw (the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip), required the Palestinians to renounce for all time their claim to the other 77 percent of their