Arafat: terrorist or peacemaker

Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was born in Cairo. At ten he was marching and drilling the children of his neighbourhood. At seventeen he was smuggling weapons from Egypt to Palestine. At nineteen he vas fighting in Palestine. When Palestine became Israel, and when more than hree-quarters of the Palestinian people became refugees outside of their homeland, Arafat was in total despair. He says: If you want to know a secret, I made an application for a visa to go to America."

Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? is a book of revelations by Arafat and about Arafat by those who know him best - his senior colleagues, including his critics, in the leadership of Fatah and the PLO. The book is based on more than 200 hours of taped conversations with them and with Arafat.

It is the inside story of the private man and his secret past, from his unhappy childhood to the present. Once engaged to be married, Arafat denied himself a wife and children for the sake of the cause. He says: 'I am a normal man but I did not think it was fair that any woman should be asked to share the troubles I knew I would be facing in my long struggle."

It is the inside story of how the Palestine liberation movement was born, and how Arafat struggled to keep it alive as first the Arab regimes, then Israel, and then both together tried to idate it, often in collusion with the big powers who required the Palestinians to be expendable. It is the inside story of Arafat's leadership, how he has repeatedly risked his credibility and his life (he has survived some fifty attempts on his life) to persuade his colleagues to accept unthinkable concessions for the sake of peace with Israel.

It is the inside story of the PLO's secret diplomacy and Arafat's many peace moves and how they have been sabotaged. It is a classic story of right against might. For the future Arafat sees only two possible scenarios: peace with Israel or catastrophe for the region and probably

the world. He speaks frankly about both options. How was it that an English writer was allowed to get so close to Yasser Arafat? In 1979, and because of his personal friendship with leaders on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Alan Hart was asked to undertake an informal but highest-level Middle East peace initiative. His mission was to establish and maintain a secret channel of communication between Arafat and certain Israeli leaders. As a consequence of what the author describes as 'our conspiracy of peace', he won enough of Arafat's trust to write, and now revise, this exclusive and timely book.