For nearly three years, Israel has been waging war against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank, with no end in sight. It is a war that has engulfed other parts of the Middle East, with repeated invasions and massive bombings of Lebanon — including the current one launched at the end of February as part of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

In interviews reported in Gaza and the West Bank: Dispatches from Catastrophe, some two dozen Palestinians in the occupied territories bear witness to “the effects of years of industrialized, live-broadcast massacres and colonization, particularly in Gaza, where more than 10% of the population is estimated to have been killed or injured” in the war Israel launched in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack. Palestinians from the West Bank describe how they have increasingly faced land grabs, home demolitions, and growing dispossession.

As far as the state of the Palestinian national movement is concerned, an analysis Rashid Khalidi offered almost 18 months ago seems even more accurate today.

Khalidi, described in an article in The Guardian as “America’s foremost scholar of Palestine,” retired in 2024 from his position as the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York City. He is the author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine and other books.

Khalidi was born in 1948, the year Israel drove hundreds of thousands of Palestinians off their land and into exile — now known as the Nakba (catastrophe, in Arabic). “I don’t know that I can even make the comparison historically, but I would say [today is] certainly the darkest day for Palestine and the Palestinians since then — no question of that,” he explained in an October 2024 interview with Jacobin.

“On the political level, the Palestinians are facing the same dilemma that they were on October 5 or 6 last year [2023],” Khalidi told Jacobin. “They’re still divided, and they’re still, in my view, leaderless.

“There is a powerful trend or faction that advocates an unrestricted form of violence,” he continued. “In my view, this trend does not have a strategic vision. It has achieved tactical victories and some catastrophic strategic defeats, and it has caused enormous suffering to Palestinians and also to Israelis. But there is no unified leadership or collective strategic vision…

“There’s no sense of how Palestinians want to live in the future and relate to the Israelis in Palestine in the future,” Khalidi pointed out. “Nor is there a sense of how they intend to get there. Those are strategic questions that are not being asked or answered by the people who currently claim to lead the Palestinian national movement, whether in Hamas or in what is laughably called the Palestinian Authority — an institution with no sovereignty, no authority, and no legitimacy among its own people.”

Looking ahead, Khalidi said, “I see the future as being very grim for the Palestinians into the foreseeable future, until they develop a consensus around a strategy and a leadership. Hopefully that will come soon, but there’s no way of telling when it will come.”

Of course, Israel’s never-ending brutality — including the consequences of its genocidal war on Gaza and the intensified settler violence and accelerated dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank — make it extremely difficult for the Palestinian national movement to regroup and reassess its prospects.

In a subsequent interview in November 2024 with the Israeli daily Haaretz, Khalidi was asked about the possibility of Jewish-Palestinian alliances.

“That’s a tough question,” he responded. “Among many Palestinians, especially young Palestinians, there is a resistance to what they call ‘normalization.’ And that, to some extent, blinds some people to the need to find allies on the other side. In the end, you’re not going to win without that happening.

“It’s harder than any other liberation struggle, because it’s not a colonial project in which people can go home. There is no home,” Khalidi said. “They [the Jews] have been in Israel for three or four generations. They’re not going anywhere. It’s not like you appeal to the French and they bring their colons home. It’s more like Ireland and South Africa, where you have to come to terms with what you see as a separate population, but which has now become enraciné, rooted, and which has developed a collective identity.”

Palestinian leaders of Standing Together have also addressed this question. Standing Together is one of the most prominent organizations in Israel — made up of Jews, Palestinians, and others — that have campaigned against Israel’s war in Gaza and for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

“Ending Israeli control over Palestinians and forging a society in which everyone is free and equal between the river and the sea is in the interest of both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis,” reads a January 30, 2024, statement by the Palestinian members of Standing Together’s national leadership. “Our long-term goal is to create a new majority in Israeli society, composed of both Palestinian and Jewish citizens, who are united in the fight to end the occupation and advance equality and justice, and ultimately, liberation — a sustainable and just peace.”

The strategic perspective implicit in these statements — fighting for a binational, democratic, secular state in which Palestinians and Jews would have equal rights — was most clearly expressed in the last quarter century by Edward Said.

Said (1935 – 2003) was a Palestinian and American academic, literary critic, and political leader. Born in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine, in 1935, Said was a U.S. citizen by way of his father, who had served in the U.S. Army during World War I. Following the 1948 Nakba, Said’s father relocated the family to Egypt, where they had previously lived, and then to the United States.

After graduating from Princeton and receiving a doctorate from Harvard in English literature, Said joined Columbia University in 1963 as a member of the English and Comparative Literature faculties, where he taught and worked until 2003. He lectured at more than 200 other universities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East.

Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council supporting a two-state solution that incorporated the right of exiled Palestinians to return, before resigning in 1993 due to his criticism of the Oslo Accords.^[1] As many other Palestinian leaders at the time, he advocated the establishment of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. However, in a January 10, 1999, article in the New York Times Magazine, he outlined a change in his view, explaining that sustainable peace was only possible with one Israeli/Palestinian state with equal rights for all.

Much has changed since Said offered that assessment. In 1999, Israel was occupying Gaza and Zionist settlements dotted the territory. In 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew its military forces and its approximately 8,000 settlers from Gaza. It subsequently imposed a land, sea, and air blockade that turned Gaza into an open-air prison. And in the years prior to October 7, 2023, Israel repeatedly carried out military attacks on Gaza, causing many deaths and terrible destruction.

In addition, in 1999 Hamas was not as large a factor as it is today, and Said does not even refer to it. Said wrote his article before the second intifada,^[2] during which Hamas emerged as a major force.

Given all that history, one may well ask why republish Said’s essay now? It seems to us that if Said believed the two-state solution was already a dead end in 1999, his arguments are even more compelling today. At a minimum they deserve re-examination and discussion.

For this reason, we publish Said’s 1999 article below for the information of our readers. The headline and text that follow are from the original. Breakers, notes, and photos are by World-Outlook.

— World-Outlook editors

*

The One-State Solution

By Edward Said

January 10, 1999

Given the collapse of the Netanyahu Government over the Wye peace agreement,^[3] it is time to question whether the entire process begun in Oslo in 1993 is the right instrument for bringing peace between Palestinians and Israelis. It is my view that the peace process has in fact put off the real reconciliation that must occur if the hundred-year war between Zionism and the Palestinian people is to end. Oslo set the stage for separation, but real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.

This is not easy to imagine. The Zionist-Israeli official narrative and the Palestinian one are irreconcilable. Israelis say they waged a war of liberation and so achieved independence; Palestinians say their society was destroyed, most of the population evicted. And, in fact, this irreconcilability was already quite obvious to several generations of early Zionist leaders and thinkers, as of course it was to all Palestinians.

“Zionism was not blind to the presence of Arabs in Palestine,” writes the distinguished Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell in his recent book, The Founding Myths of Israel. “Even Zionist figures who had never visited the country knew that it was not devoid of inhabitants. At the same time, neither the Zionist movement abroad nor the pioneers who were beginning to settle the country could frame a policy toward the Palestinian national movement. The real reason for this was not a lack of understanding of the problem but a clear recognition of the insurmountable contradiction between the basic objectives of the two sides. If Zionist intellectuals and leaders ignored the Arab dilemma, it was chiefly because they knew that this problem had no solution within the Zionist way of thinking.”

David Ben-Gurion,^[4] for instance, was always clear. “There is no example in history,” he said in 1944, “of a people saying we agree to renounce our country, let another people come and settle here and outnumber us.” Another Zionist leader, Berl Katznelson, likewise had no illusions that the opposition between Zionist and Palestinian aims could be surmounted. And binationalists like Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and Hannah Arendt were fully aware of what the clash would be like, if it came to fruition, as of course it did.

Vastly outnumbering the Jews, Palestinian Arabs during the period after the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate^[5] always refused anything that would compromise their dominance. It’s unfair to berate the Palestinians retrospectively for not accepting partition in 1947. Until 1948, Jews held only about 7 percent of the land. Why, the Arabs said when the partition resolution was proposed, should we concede 55 percent of Palestine to the Jews, who were a minority in Palestine? Neither the Balfour Declaration nor the mandate ever specifically conceded that Palestinians had political, as opposed to civil and religious, rights in Palestine. The idea of inequality between Jews and Arabs was therefore built into British, and subsequently Israeli and United States, policy from the start.

The conflict appears intractable because it is a contest over the same land by two peoples who always believed they had valid title to it and who hoped that the other side would in time give up or go away. One side won the war, the other lost, but the contest is as alive as ever. We Palestinians ask why a Jew born in Warsaw or New York has the right to settle here (according to Israel’s Law of Return), whereas we, the people who lived here for centuries, cannot. After 1967,^[6] the conflict between us was exacerbated. Years of military occupation have created in the weaker party anger, humiliation and hostility.

Impact of Oslo accords

To its discredit, Oslo did little to change the situation. Arafat^[7] and his dwindling number of supporters were turned into enforcers of Israeli security, while Palestinians were made to endure the humiliation of dreadful and noncontiguous “homelands” that make up about 10 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of Gaza. Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.

Israel’s raison d’etre as a state has always been that there should be a separate country, a refuge, exclusively for Jews. Oslo itself was based on the principle of separation between Jews and others, as Yitzhak Rabin^[8] tirelessly repeated. Yet over the past 50 years, especially since Israeli settlements were first implanted on the occupied territories in 1967, the lives of Jews have become more and more enmeshed with those of non-Jews.

The effort to separate has occurred simultaneously and paradoxically with the effort to take more and more land, which has in turn meant that Israel has acquired more and more Palestinians. In Israel proper, Palestinians number about one million, almost 20 percent of the population. Among Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which is where settlements are the thickest, there are almost 2.5 million Palestinians. [As of 2023, Palestinians still accounted for slightly over 20% of the population in Israel. The number of Palestinians in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank, however, had grown to about 5.5 million. W-O]

Israel has built an entire system of “bypassing” roads, designed to go around Palestinian towns and villages, connecting settlements and avoiding Arabs. But so tiny is the land area of historical Palestine, so closely intertwined are Israelis and Palestinians, despite their inequality and antipathy, that clean separation simply won’t, can’t really, occur or work. It is estimated that by 2010 there will be demographic parity. What then?

Clearly, a system of privileging Israeli Jews will satisfy neither those who want an entirely homogenous Jewish state nor those who live there but are not Jewish. For the former, Palestinians are an obstacle to be disposed of somehow; for the latter, being Palestinian in a Jewish polity means forever chafing at inferior status. But Israeli Palestinians don’t want to move; they say they are already in their country and refuse any talk of joining a separate Palestinian state, should one come into being.

Meanwhile, the impoverishing conditions imposed on Arafat are making it difficult for him to subdue the highly politicized inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank. These Palestinians have aspirations for self-determination that, contrary to Israeli calculations, show no sign of withering away. It is also evident that as an Arab people — and, given the despondently cold peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan, this fact is important —  Palestinians want at all costs to preserve their Arab identity as part of the surrounding Arab and Islamic world.

For all this, the problem is that Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable, just as unworkable as the principle of separation between a demographically mixed, irreversibly connected Arab population without sovereignty and a Jewish population with it. The question, I believe, is not how to devise means for persisting in trying to separate them but to see whether it is possible for them to live together as fairly and peacefully as possible.

A disheartening, bloody impasse

What exists now is a disheartening, not to say, bloody, impasse. Zionists in and outside Israel will not give up on their wish for a separate Jewish state; Palestinians want the same thing for themselves, despite having accepted much less from Oslo. Yet in both instances, the idea of a state for “ourselves” simply flies in the face of the facts: short of ethnic cleansing or “mass transfer,” as in 1948, there is no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away. Neither side has a viable military option against the other, which, I am sorry to say, is why both opted for a peace that so patently tries to accomplish what war couldn’t.

The more that current patterns of Israeli settlement and Palestinian confinement and resistance persist, the less likely it is that there will be real security for either side. It was always patently absurd for Netanyahu’s obsession with security to be couched only in terms of Palestinian compliance with his demands. On the one hand, he and Ariel Sharon^[9] crowded Palestinians more and more with their shrill urgings to the settlers to grab what they could. On the other hand, Netanyahu expected such methods to bludgeon Palestinians into accepting everything Israel did, with no reciprocal Israeli measures.

Arafat, backed by Washington, is daily more repressive. Improbably citing the 1936 British Emergency Defense Regulations against Palestinians, he has recently decreed, for example, that it is a crime not only to incite violence, racial and religious strife but also to criticize the peace process. There is no Palestinian constitution or basic law: Arafat simply refuses to accept limitations on his power in light of American and Israeli support for him. Who actually thinks all this can bring Israel security and permanent Palestinian submission?

Violence, hatred and intolerance are bred out of injustice, poverty and a thwarted sense of political fulfillment. Last fall, hundreds of acres of Palestinian land were expropriated by the Israeli Army from the village of Umm al-Fahm, which isn’t in the West Bank but inside Israel. This drove home the fact that, even as Israeli citizens, Palestinians are treated as inferior, as basically a sort of underclass existing in a condition of apartheid.

At the same time, because Israel does not have a constitution either, and because the ultra-Orthodox parties are acquiring more and more political power, there are Israeli Jewish groups and individuals who have begun to organize around the notion of a full secular democracy for all Israeli citizens. The charismatic Azmi Bishara, an Arab member of the Knesset, has also been speaking about enlarging the concept of citizenship as a way to get beyond ethnic and religious criteria that now make Israel in effect an undemocratic state for 20 percent of its population.

In the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza, the situation is deeply unstable and exploitative. Protected by the army, Israeli settlers (almost 350,000 of them) live as extraterritorial, privileged people with rights that resident Palestinians do not have. (For example, West Bank Palestinians cannot go to Jerusalem and in 70 percent of the territory are still subject to Israeli military law, with their land available for confiscation.) Israel controls Palestinian water resources and security, as well as exits and entrances. Even the new Gaza airport is under Israeli security control. You don’t need to be an expert to see that this is a prescription for extending, not limiting, conflict. Here the truth must be faced, not avoided or denied.

Need to share the land, in a democratic way, with equal rights

There are Israeli Jews today who speak candidly about “post-Zionism,” insofar as after 50 years of Israeli history, classic Zionism has neither provided a solution to the Palestinian presence nor an exclusively Jewish presence. I see no other way than to begin now to speak about sharing the land that has thrust us together, sharing it in a truly democratic way, with equal rights for each citizen. There can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.

This does not mean a diminishing of Jewish life as Jewish life or a surrendering of Palestinian Arab aspirations and political existence. On the contrary, it means self-determination for both peoples. But it does mean being willing to soften, lessen and finally give up special status for one people at the expense of the other. The Law of Return for Jews and the right of return for Palestinian refugees have to be considered and trimmed together. Both the notions of Greater Israel as the land of the Jewish people given to them by God and of Palestine as an Arab land that cannot be alienated from the Arab homeland need to be reduced in scale and exclusivity.

Interestingly, the millennia-long history of Palestine provides at least two precedents for thinking in such secular and modest terms. First, Palestine is and has always been a land of many histories; it is a radical simplification to think of it as principally or exclusively Jewish or Arab. While the Jewish presence is longstanding, it is by no means the main one. Other tenants have included Canaanites, Moabites, Jebusites and Philistines in ancient times, and Romans, Ottomans, Byzantines and Crusaders in the modern ages. Palestine is multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious. There is as little historical justification for homogeneity as there is for notions of national or ethnic and religious purity today.

Second, during the interwar period, a small but important group of Jewish thinkers (Judah Magnes, Buber, Arendt and others) argued and agitated for a binational state. The logic of Zionism naturally overwhelmed their efforts, but the idea is alive today here and there among Jewish and Arab individuals frustrated with the evident insufficiencies and depredations of the present. The essence of their vision is coexistence and sharing in ways that require an innovative, daring and theoretical willingness to get beyond the arid stalemate of assertion and rejection. Once the initial acknowledgment of the other as an equal is made, I believe the way forward becomes not only possible but also attractive.

The initial step, however, is a very difficult one to take. Israeli Jews are insulated from the Palestinian reality; most of them say that it does not really concern them. I remember the first time I drove from Ramallah into Israel, thinking it was like going straight from Bangladesh into Southern California. Yet reality is never that neat.

Palestinians have borne disproportionate share of pain, loss

My generation of Palestinians, still reeling from the shock of losing everything in 1948, find it nearly impossible to accept that their homes and farms were taken over by another people. I see no way of evading the fact that in 1948 one people displaced another, thereby committing a grave injustice. Reading Palestinian and Jewish history together not only gives the tragedies of the Holocaust and of what subsequently happened to the Palestinians their full force but also reveals how in the course of interrelated Israeli and Palestinian life since 1948, one people, the Palestinians, has borne a disproportional share of the pain and loss.

Religious and right-wing Israelis and their supporters have no problem with such a formulation. Yes, they say, we won, but that’s how it should be. This land is the land of Israel, not of anyone else. I heard those words from an Israeli soldier guarding a bulldozer that was destroying a West Bank Palestinian’s field (its owner helplessly watching) to expand a bypass road.

But they are not the only Israelis. For others, who want peace as a result of reconciliation, there is dissatisfaction with the religious parties’ increasing hold on Israeli life and Oslo’s unfairness and frustrations. Many such Israelis demonstrate against their Government’s Palestinian land expropriations and house demolitions. So you sense a healthy willingness to look elsewhere for peace than in land-grabbing and suicide bombs.

For some Palestinians, because they are the weaker party, the losers, giving up on a full restoration of Arab Palestine is giving up on their own history. Most others, however, especially my children’s generation, are skeptical of their elders and look more unconventionally toward the future, beyond conflict and unending loss. Obviously, the establishments in both communities are too tied to present “pragmatic” currents of thought and political formations to venture anything more risky, but a few others (Palestinian and Israeli) have begun to formulate radical alternatives to the status quo. They refuse to accept the limitations of Oslo, what one Israeli scholar has called “peace without Palestinians,” while others tell me that the real struggle is over equal rights for Arabs and Jews, not a separate, necessarily dependent and weak Palestinian entity.

The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence. In a modern state, all its members are citizens by virtue of their presence and the sharing of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship therefore entitles an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab to the same privileges and resources.

A constitution and a bill of rights thus become necessary for getting beyond Square 1 of the conflict because each group would have the same right to self-determination; that is, the right to practice communal life in its own (Jewish or Palestinian) way, perhaps in federated cantons, with a joint capital in Jerusalem, equal access to land and inalienable secular and juridical rights. Neither side should be held hostage to religious extremists.

A way out based on peace and equality, as in South Africa after apartheid

Yet feelings of persecution, suffering and victimhood are so ingrained that it is nearly impossible to undertake political initiatives that hold Jews and Arabs to the same general principles of civil equality while avoiding the pitfall of us-versus-them. Palestinian intellectuals need to express their case directly to Israelis, in public forums, universities and the media. The challenge is both to and within civil society, which has long been subordinate to a nationalism that has developed into an obstacle to reconciliation. Moreover, the degradation of discourse — symbolized by Arafat and Netanyahu trading charges while Palestinian rights are compromised by exaggerated “security” concerns — impedes any wider, more generous perspective from emerging.

The alternatives are unpleasantly simple: either the war continues (along with the onerous cost of the current peace process) or a way out, based on peace and equality (as in South Africa after apartheid) is actively sought, despite the many obstacles. Once we grant that Palestinians and Israelis are there to stay, then the decent conclusion has to be the need for peaceful coexistence and genuine reconciliation. Real self-determination. Unfortunately, injustice and belligerence don’t diminish by themselves: they have to be attacked by all concerned.

NOTES

[1] The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) led the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination beginning in the late 1960s. After Yasser Arafat and the organization he led, Fatah, won the PLO leadership, the PLO advocated Israel’s replacement with a democratic, secular Palestine where, it said explicitly, Jews and Arabs could live together with equal rights on the same lands. This perspective won wide support among Palestinians, the Arab masses, and worldwide. Subsequent events dealt setbacks to the Palestinian struggle. Under these circumstances, and faced with Israeli intransigence, the PLO shifted its position, recognizing Israel and accepting the compromise of a “two-state” solution. This was registered in the Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 between the PLO and Israel. But the accords themselves and ensuing events registered further blows to the quest for Palestinian statehood.

In his November 2024 interview with Haaretz, Rashid Khalidi had this to say about the Oslo accords: “In Washington [1991-1994], we said to the Americans that we were negotiating about a pie while the Israelis are eating the pie through ongoing settlement. ‘You promised that the status quo would be maintained, and they are stealing.’ And the Americans did nothing. At that point it should have been clear that if we didn’t take a stand, colonization would continue, Israeli security control and occupation would continue in a different form. That’s what Oslo did.

“Part of the problem is that the Palestinians took the awful things that were offered to us in Washington. They gave 60 percent of the West Bank to Israel in the form of Area C. Those were concessions by the PLO, it’s not Israel’s fault. No Palestinian leadership should have accepted any such agreements.”

[2] On December 8, 1987, an Israeli army truck in Gaza struck two vehicles carrying Palestinian workers, killing four. Protest demonstrations and strikes began the next day and quickly spread from Gaza to the West Bank, and then to the rest of Israeli-held Palestine. That was the beginning of the first intifada — a mainly nonviolent and unarmed popular uprising involving hundreds of thousands of Palestinian youth and working people demanding democratic rights and self-determination. It involved mass protests during which Palestinians confronted savage attacks by the Israeli military simply by throwing stones. “The intifada was a spontaneous, bottom-up campaign of resistance, born of an accumulation of frustration and initially with no connection to the formal Palestinian political leadership,” said Khalidi about that magnificent revolt, which lasted for eight years plus, in his book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. “The First Intifada was an outstanding example of popular resistance and can be considered the first unmitigated victory for the Palestinians in the long colonial war that began in 1917.”

The second intifada erupted in September 2000 as the situation of Palestinians in the occupied territories worsened post-Oslo and a rivalry between the PLO and Hamas, which had been founded in Gaza in 1987, intensified. During this uprising Hamas, primarily, but also other Palestinian groups, used suicide bombings, often targeting civilians, on a large scale. “In stark contrast to the first, the Second Intifada constituted a major setback for the Palestinian national movement,” Khalidi said in his book cited above. During the second intifada Hamas emerged as a major political force among Palestinians.

[3] The Wye peace agreement, or Wye River Memorandum, was an accord negotiated in October 1998 between Israel and the Palestinian Authority to resume the implementation of the Oslo Accords. It was mediated by the U.S. government at a summit in Wye River, Maryland.

[4] David Ben-Gurion was Israel’s first prime minister.

[5] The Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917 by the British cabinet. It committed Britain to the creation of a national Jewish homeland, but never mentioned the Palestinians, the great majority of Palestine’s population at the time, even as it set the course of British imperialism and its allies in Palestine for the subsequent century.

The British Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948) was a League of Nations administration granted to the United Kingdom following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It established British control over a territory that encompasses modern-day Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and Jordan.

[6] The 1967 Arab Israeli war, also known as the Six-Day War, began with the Israeli invasion of Egypt on June 5, 1967. Israel emerged victorious from the war. It captured large areas, including Gaza, the West Bank, and two-thirds of the Golan Heights — territories it continues to occupy decades later. For more information on that important event and its aftermath see The Jewish Tragedy Finds in Israel a Dismal Sequel.

[7] Yasser Arafat was the central leader of Fatah and the PLO until his death on November 11, 2004.

[8] Yitzhak Rabin was an Israeli general who became the country’s prime minister, occupying the post from 1974 to 1977 and again from 1992 until his assassination in 1995.

[9] Ariel Sharon was an Israeli general and politician. As Minister of Defense, he directed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and took personal responsibility for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian refugees, for which he became known as the “Butcher of Beirut” among Arabs. He was subsequently Israel’s prime minister from 2001 to 2006.

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