It is more surprising that Abu Daoud's memoir received an ambiguous welcome from commentators in the Arab world. Although excerpts were published in prominent Arab newspapers, including Al-Hayat and Beirut's An-Nahar, and though Abu Daoud made the rounds of the region's television stations, there was palpable restraint toward his account of the Palestinian-Israeli contest, which was, hitherto, the daily political preoccupation in the Arab world.

This reserve was the result, primarily, of three things: The memoir has only just been translated into Arabic, which means it is too early to evaluate accurately its impact. There is also something inherently incomplete in the first of a two-volume work: The reader is not allowed to determine how Abu Daoud's actions affected the ultimate destiny of the Palestinian nationalist movement--acceptance of statehood in the territories occupied in 1967. That will be the substance of the second volume, though now one is compelled to read a narrative with no ending.

The third problem is that Abu Daoud may be paying the price for the subtle and perilous transformation of the Palestinians into the pariahs of the Arab world. By the mid-eighties, the Palestinians were on their own. One difficulty was relevance. Banished from Lebanon after the 1982 Israeli invasion, the PLO watched as the Syrian leader, Hafez al-Assad--unwilling to be drawn into another costly war with Israel--engineered a rift in Palestinian ranks. In late 1983 Arafat, having been ejected from Damascus, attempted to regain a foothold in northern Lebanon, if only to remain close to Israel. Assad put a stern end to the adventure, however, when he had the PLO leader turned out of the port city of Tripoli and packed off to distant Tunis.

The intifada arrived in time to save the PLO. Though the organization's expatriated leadership commandeered the revolt, it was mostly the youths of the West Bank and Gaza who served as cannon fodder. These were the years in which the Palestinians living under occupation began developing a combative identity of their own, a development Arafat and his comrades would learn, uneasily, to contend with. By the time the PLO reached the nadir of its fortunes--when Arafat, in a drive toward self-immolation, sided with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War--the organization had already sensed that the only political lifeline available was negotiations with Israel.

It was an exotic feature of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that only when the PLO lost its élan did it become an attractive interlocutor for the Israelis. The Israelis took their time but eventually grasped that the intifada, though it had abated by 1990, represented an irreversible phase in the Palestinians' struggle for their national rights. Henceforth, the fight--regardless of the weaponry used--would be carried to the occupied territories, even to Israel proper, an objective that the PLO commanders, among them Abu Daoud, had pointedly failed to achieve in the seventies from their exile in what was known in the jargon of those years as the "confrontation states."

It was to Arafat's credit that he successfully transformed the lessons of the intifada into something he could bring to the negotiating table. Abu Daoud's memoirs are most useful, however, in measuring the time it took for the PLO to focus its attentions on the single issue that always mattered: liberation of Palestinian territory. Until virtually the eve of the Madrid conference in October 1991, Arafat and his acolytes were ensnared in senseless sideshows: in Jordan, then in Lebanon and, finally, on the wrong end of the Gulf War.

Much of Abu Daoud's book is taken up with the Jordanian interlude. After having joined the PLO in the mid-sixties, the former schoolteacher moved to Amman, where he came to lead the Palestinian militias, an auxiliary force of several thousand men that protected the refugee camps. Abu Daoud takes us through a blow-by-blow account of the growing animosity between the Palestinian organizations and the Jordanian regime. This culminated in full-scale warfare in September 1970. Though the Palestinian organizations were severely weakened, King Hussein had to wait until October 1971 to complete their eviction from the kingdom.

Abu Daoud's revelations about the conflict with Jordan are predictably partial. They will also become indispensable reading for anyone interested in the PLO's decision-making during the ascending crisis with the Hashemite regime. Though Arafat is depicted as a Neville Chamberlain-like figure, capitulating at the drop of a hat to Jordanian provocations, he comes across as far more sensible than Abu Daoud. Arafat understood that a war with Jordan would alarm most Arab states and isolate the PLO regionally.

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