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Chapter One

I am an Israeli, but also a Palestinian. I was born in February 1942 in British-
ruled Palestine on a fledgling kibbutz: a cluster of wood-and-tarpaper huts amid
a few orange groves and vegetable fields and chicken coops. It was just across
the road from an Arab village named Wadi Khawaret, which disappeared, with
the establishment of the State of Israel, when I was six years old.

As Prime Minister half-a-century later, during my stubborn yet ultimately
fruitless drive to secure a final peace treaty with Yasir Arafat, there were media
suggestions that my childhood years gave me a personal understanding of the
pasts of both our peoples, Jews and Arabs, in the land which each of us saw as
our own. But that is in some ways misleading. Yes, I did know first-hand that
we were not alone in our ancestral homeland. At no point in my childhood was I
ever taught to hate the Arabs. I never did, even when, in my years defending the
security of Israel, I had to fight, and defeat, them. But my conviction that they,
too, needed the opportunity to establish a state came only later, after my many
years in uniform, and especially when, as deputy chief-of-staff under Yitzhak
Rabin, we were faced with the explosion of violence in the West Bank and Gaza
that became known as the first intifada. And while my determination as Prime
Minister to find a negotiated resolution to our conflict was in part based on a
recognition of the Palestinian Arabs' national aspirations, the main impulse was
my belief that such a compromise was profoundly in the interest of Israel: the
Jewish state whose birth I witnessed, whose existence I had spent decades
defending on the battlefield and which I was ultimately elected to lead.

Zionism, the political platform for the establishment of a Jewish state,
emerged in the late 1800s in response to a brutal reality. And that, too, was a
part of my own family's story. Most of the world's Jews, who lived in the
Russian empire and Poland, were trapped at the time in a vise of poverty,
powerlessness and anti-Semitic violence. Even in the democracies of Western
Europe, Jews were not necessarily secure. Theodor Herzl, a thoroughly
assimilated Jew in Vienna, published the foundation text of Zionism in 1896. It
was called Der Judenstaat. "Jews have sincerely tried everywhere to merge
with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the
faith of our fathers," he wrote. "In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes super-
loyal. In vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow
citizens... In our native lands where we have lived for centuries, we are still
decried as aliens." Zionism's answer was the establishment of a state of our

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