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the PNC to be ready to make the historic compromise needed to bring the longest running and most dangerous conflict in all of human history to an end.
    What Arafat needed thereafter—to enable him to deliver the historic compromise—was a serious negotiating partner on the Israeli side; a leader who was prepared as a first step to do what all of Israel’s leaders had vowed they would never do: recognise and negotiate with the PLO for the purpose of making peace on terms that, following an end to Israeli occupation of Arab land seized in the 1967 war, would see the coming into being of a Palestinian state with Arab East Jerusalem as its capital. This, plus compensation for those refugees who would never be able to return to their homeland because of Israel’s existence, was the Palestinians’ irreducible minimum demand and need in the name of justice. A demand and a need that not even Arafat the miracle worker could compromise.
    On the face of it, because of the real leadership Arafat had demonstrated, a peaceful resolution of the Palestine problem was there for the taking by—it bears repeating—the end of 1979.
    That was President Carter’s judgment and he was right.
    Begin’s Israel responded with two initiatives.
    The first was a political one to block an attempt by President Carter to recognise the PLO and bring it into the negotiating process.
    The second was a military one—the invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut—to liquidate Arafat and his leadership colleagues and replace them with Israeli puppets. If Begin’s Israel had achieved all of its invasion objectives, the puppets would have been installed in Jordan when King Hussein had been overthrown.
    It was in between those two Israeli initiatives that I became by chance the linkman in a secret exploratory dialogue between Arafat and Shimon Peres. (The story of what my mission revealed about the agony of any rational Israeli leader who wants to be serious about peace has its place as appropriate in the pages to come).
    Peres was then the leader of Israel’s Labour Party, the main opposition in Israel’s fractious parliament, the Knesset, to Begin’s Likud- dominated government. Begin’s policy was to go on creating facts on the ground—more and more illegal Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land— to prevent any meaningful manifestation of Palestinian self-determination.
    At the start of my unofficial shuttle diplomacy the hope almost everywhere behind closed doors, especially in President Carter’s White House and the UN Security Council, was that Peres would succeed in denying Begin a second term in office by winning Israel’s next election. My role in the time remaining before that election was to try to develop enough understanding between Arafat and Peres so that when Peres became prime minister, he could engage in open dialogue with Arafat to get a real peace process going.
    The expectation everywhere, including in Israel itself, was that Peres would beat Begin at the polls. But in the event Israel’s amazing (many would say mad) system of proportional representation gave Begin the first crack at cobbling together a coalition government. He eventually succeeded and, confirmed as prime minister for a second term, he appointed General Ariel Sharon (the “bulldozer”) as his Defence Minister. From that moment the invasion of Lebanon all the way to Beirut was on.
    In the context of the whole story, only one conclusion is invited by Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. What he and all of Israel’s hardliners feared most was not Arafat the terrorist but Arafat the peacemaker. The one thing Zionism did not want was a Palestinian leader who was interested in compromise and who, given the opportunity, could deliver it. Negotiations with such a Palestinian leader would require Zionism to abandon its Greater Israel project (i.e. the retention of most Arab territories occupied in 1967).
    Arafat’s real crime is that he outwitted Zionism to