I am an Israeli, but also a Palestinian. I was born in February 1942 in British

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 15 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027863