Quotes of the Day

On a Friday summer night of 2001, around a year after the start of the Al Aqsa intifadeh, several friends and I were joined for dinner by a foreign journalist. He had been living here — while writing about Israel — for more than a few years, covering the Oslo Accord years as well as the intifadeh. As we interpreted the current political situation, he listened carefully to the discussion.

Our host's opinion was that the intifadeh had started because the Palestinians, namely Yasser Arafat, thought that a violent attack would break the Israelis and win a much better settlement than the one offered to him by Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the Camp David 2000 summit.

My friends were really furious with the Palestinians. Like the vast majority of Israelis, they believed that Barak handed Arafat the most generous deal the Palestinians had ever been offered. Most of those around that dinner table agreed: By rejecting Baraks'offer and then initiating a vicious terror campaign, Arafat proved that the Palestinians would never be willing to compromise. It meant, my friends concluded, that as long as Israel did not allow the Palestinian refugees the right of return (which would change Israel's demography and ensure it ceased to exist as a Jewish state) the Palestinians would do whatever was in their power to destroy it.

The foreign correspondent said that, according to his experience, things were a bit different. He'd been covering the West Bank when the intifadeh had just begun, he said. And he remembered very well not only how spontaneous it was — a burst of violent frustration following Ariel Sharon's (then head of the Opposition) cocky visit to Temple Mount — but also how a great deal of the outburst was directed towards Arafat himself. Arafat, he said, managed to turn this hatred, frustration and violence towards the Israelis, he explained.

My friends laughed at the guest. They said he was naive and pro-Palestinian. They reminded him how even peace-seeking Barak admitted that in Camp David he pulled the mask off Arafat's face to discover the Palestinian plot to eliminate Israel.

My friends were not right-wing extremists. In fact, the view they held, that there is no partner for political solution among the Palestinians, has remained the consensus among Israeli decision makers, the media and the general public, for the past three and a half years.

But last week, the Haaretz newspaper (considered here a left-wing publication) came up with research that made headlines even in the most conservative sections of the Israeli media. Haaretz correspondent Akiva Eldar — one of the few journalists who questioned the "no partner" myth at that time — revealed that Israeli military intelligence had never actually found any evidence of Arafat's intentions to destroy Israel. Eldar revealed that Major General Amos Gilad, head of the Military Intelligence's research division when violence erupted in October 2000, persuaded the cabinet to accept an erroneous view of the cause of the violence.

"…The research division did not produce so much as a single document expressing the assessment that Gilad claims to have presented to the [then] prime minister [Ehud Barak]," Eldar quotes Major General Malka, who was Gilad's commander at the time. Only on the eve of the 2001 election, Malka accuses, did Gilad begin "to retroactively rewrite MI's assessments."

The Israeli leadership clearly preferred to listen to Gilad, the intelligence officer who interpreted Arafat's behavior the way my friends did. Apparently, cabinet ministers never bothered to read the intelligence documentation and written evaluations that suggested a different view.

The picture, it turns out, is not as simplistic as we'd like to think. Clearly, nothing will absolve the Palestinians of the responsibility for the terror campaign they have waged for almost four years. It has been immoral and abhorrent and has also done nothing for the Palestinian cause: they have only lost the Israelis' trust and thus, absurdly enough, fortified the Israeli certainty that we have "no partner". But we, the Israelis, should also rethink this concept and wonder if by sticking to it so resolutely we did not in turn persuade the Palestinians that they have no Israeli peace partner, thus adding our own contribution to the bloody escalation of the conflict.

• Israelis and Palestinians view events though blood-spattered glasses. can they ever see things as they really are?