A helicopter cut swiftly through the predawn gloom along the East River to the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan. At 4:00 A.M. on November 13, 1974, the helicopter touched down, and anxious security men rushed PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat to a secure suite inside the UN building. Arriving without warning in the dark of night, Arafat was spared the indignity of driving through the thousands of demonstrators who gathered later that morning at the UN Plaza to protest his appearance, carrying banners proclaiming the “PLO is Murder International” and the “UN Becomes a Forum of Terrorism.” He was also protected from assassins. Arafat’s visit to the United Nations was the culmination of a remarkable year for Palestinian politics. The Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc states, the countries of the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Arab world had combined forces to secure an invitation for the PLO chief to open the UN debate on “The Question of Palestine.” It was his opportunity to present Palestinian aspirations to the community of nations. The UN appearance also marked Arafat?s transition from guerrilla leader to statesman?a role for which he had little preparation. ?Why don?t you go?? he had asked Khalid al-Hasan, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Palestine National Council (PNC), the Palestinian parliament in exile. Hasan dismissed the suggestion out of hand, insisting that only Arafat could speak on behalf of Palestinian aspirations. ?You?re our Chairman. You?re our symbol. You?re Mr. Palestine. It?s you or there?s no show.?²⁴ The show had changed dramatically in the course of 1974. In the aftermath of the October War, the guerrilla chief had made a strategic decision to turn away from the armed struggle, and the terror tactics this involved, to negotiate a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For two and a half decades the Palestinian national movement had been more or less unanimous in seeking the liberation of the whole of historic Palestine and the destruction of the state of Israel. After the October War, Arafat recognized that the Jewish state, then twenty-five years old, was the military superpower of the region, enjoying the full support of the United States and the recognition of nearly all the international community. Israel was here to stay. In the postwar diplomacy, Arafat rightly predicted, the neighboring Arab states would eventually accept this reality and negotiate peace treaties with Israel under U.S. and Soviet sponsorship, based on Resolution 242. The Palestinians would be pushed to the side. “What does 242 offer the Palestinians?” Arafat asked a British journalist in the 1980s. “Some compensation for the refugees and perhaps, I say only perhaps, the return of some few refugees to their homes in Palestine. But what else? Nothing. We would have been finished. The chance for us Palestinians to be a nation again, even on some small part of our homeland, would have passed. Finished. No more a Palestinian people. End of story.”²⁵ Arafat’s solution was to settle for a ministate based in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. There were, however, a number of barriers that Arafat would have to overcome before he could hope to achieve even ministatehood for the Palestinians. The first obstacle was Palestinian public opinion. Arafat recognized that he needed to persuade the Palestinian people to relinquish their claims to the 78 percent of Palestine lost in 1948. “When a people is claiming the return of 100 percent of its land,” Arafat explained, “it’s not so easy for leadership to say, ‘No, you can take only thirty per cent.’”²⁶ Nor was Arafat’s claim to even 30 percent of Palestine universally recognized. The Gaza Strip had been under Egyptian administration from 1948 until occupied by Israel in the June 1967 War, and the West Bank had been formally annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1950. Though the Egyptians had no interest in absorbing the Gaza Strip, King Hussein of Jordan was determined to recover the West Bank and the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem, Islam?s third-holiest city, for Jordanian rule. Arafat needed to wrest the West Bank from King Hussein?s grasp. The hard-line factions within the PLO were unwilling to concede recognition to Israel, which meant Arafat would have to overcome their opposition to a two-state solution. The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front, whose notorious hijackings had precipitated the Black September war in Jordan in 1970, remained committed to the armed struggle for the liberation of all of Palestine. Had Arafat openly acknowledged the compromise he was willing to make to achieve limited statehood for the Palestinians, the more militant Palestinian factions would have demanded his head. Finally, Arafat had to overcome international abhorrence to the PLO as an organization, and to his leadership of the PLO. Gone were the days of “humane” terrorism, in which airplanes were destroyed and hostages released unharmed. By 1974 the PLO was associated with a string of heinous crimes against civilians in Europe and Israel: an attack on El-Al offices in Athens in November 1969 that left one child dead and thirty-one people wounded; a mid-air bomb that destroyed a Swissair jet in February 1970, killing all forty-seven aboard; and the notorious attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics that led to the death of eleven Israeli athletes. Israel and its Western supporters saw the PLO as a terror organization and refused to meet with its leaders; Arafat needed to persuade Western policymakers that the PLO would forego violence for diplomacy to achieve Palestinian self-determination. Arafat had set himself high goals for 1974: securing Palestinian public support for a two-state solution, containing the hard-liners within the PLO, trumping King Hussein’s claim to the West Bank, and gaining international recognition within a single year would not be easy. Given the constraints, Arafat had to proceed slowly and secure a constituency for the change in policy. He could not come out openly with the idea of a two-state solution, as this would entail ending the armed struggle, which enjoyed widespread Palestinian support. Negotiating for a two-state solution would have meant conferring some degree of recognition to Israel, which most Palestinians would have rejected. Instead, Arafat couched the new policy, first issued in a working paper in February 1974, in terms of establishing a “national authority” to be established “on any lands that can be wrested from Zionist occupation.” Next, he had to gain the support of the Palestinian National Council, the parliament in exile, for his new policy. When the PNC met in Cairo in June 1974, Arafat tabled a ten-point platform that committed the PLO to the “national authority” framework. However, to get past the hard-liners in the PLO, the platform reaffirmed the role of the armed struggle and the right of national self-determination, and it ruled out any recognition of Israel. The PNC adopted Arafat’s platform, but Palestinians knew that change was afoot. However, to the rest of the world the PLO still looked like a guerrilla organization committed to the armed struggle.

The PLO clearly needed to present a new face to the international community if the organization were to gain recognition as a government in exile. In 1973 Arafat named Said Hammami as the PLO’s representative to London. A native of the coastal city of Jaffa, Hammami had been driven out of Palestine with his family in 1948 and grew up in Syria, earning a degree in English literature at Damascus University. Hammami was both a committed Palestinian nationalist and a political moderate who quickly established good relations with journalists and policymakers in London. In November 1973, Hammami published an article in the Times of London calling for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. “Many Palestinians,” he wrote, “believe that a Palestinian state on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank . . . is a necessary part of any peace package.” He was the first PLO representative ever to make such a proposal. “It is no small thing for a people who have been wronged as we have to take the first step towards reconciliation for the sake of a just peace that should satisfy all parties”—which, by implication, included Israel. The editor of the paper added a note to the article stressing that Hammami was “known to be very close to the PLO chairman, Mr. Yasser Arafat,” and that Hammami’s decision to state such views publicly was thus “of considerable significance.”²⁷ Through his London representative, Arafat had succeeded in opening a channel not only to the West but also to Israel itself. An Israeli journalist and peace activist named Uri Avnery was electrified by what he had read in Hammami’s article. Avnery had immigrated to Palestine during the mandate and joined the Irgun in the late 1930s, when still just a teenager. He would later silence those who criticized him for speaking with Palestinian “terrorists,” saying, “You can’t talk to me about terrorism, I was a terrorist.” Avnery was wounded in the 1948 war and went on to serve three terms in the Knesset as an independent. Though a committed Zionist, Avnery had always advocated a two-state solution, long before anyone in the Arab world would support the idea. Menachem Begin used to deride him in Knesset debates, asking, “Where are the Arab Avnerys?”²⁸ In reading Hammami’s articles, Uri Avnery immediately recognized he had found his Palestinian counterpart. In December 1973, Hammami penned a second column for the Times, this time calling for mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinians. “The Israeli Jews and the Palestinian Arabs should recognize one another as peoples, with all the rights to which a people is entitled. This recognition should be followed by the realization of . . . a Palestinian state, an independent, fully-fledged member state of the United Nations.”²⁹ With this second article, Avnery recognized that Hammami’s views must have reflected a conscious change of policy within the PLO. A diplomat might make one indiscretion and keep his job, but a repeat offender would certainly get the sack. Hammami could only suggest such things as mutual recognition between Israelis and Palestinians with the support of Yasser Arafat. Avnery was determined to make contact with Said Hammami. While attending the Geneva peace conference in December 1973, Avnery met a journalist with the Times and asked him to arrange a meeting with the PLO representative. The meeting carried great risks for both men. In the climate of terrorist violence of the early 1970s, both the hard-line Palestinian factions and the Israeli secret service, the Mossad, were actively assassinating their enemies. Hammami and Avnery were willing to take the risk of meeting, for both men were convinced that a two-state solution held the only prospect for a peaceful resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They had their first meeting in Avnery’s London hotel room on January 27, 1974, during which Hammami set out his views. Avnery summarized them as follows:The two peoples, the Palestinian and the Israeli, exist. He did not like the way the new Israeli nation in Palestine came into being. He rejected Zionism. But he accepted the fact that the Israeli nation does exist. Since the Israeli nation exists it has the right to national self-determination, much as the Palestinians have this right. At present, the only realistic solution is to allow each of the two peoples to have a state of its own. He did not like Itzhak Rabin and understood that the Israelis did not have to like Yassir Arafat. Each people must accept the leaders chosen by the other side. We must make peace without the intervention of either of the superpowers. Peace must come from the peoples in the region itself.³⁰