Chronicles the life of controversial Palestinian political leader Yasir Arafat, describing his early years in Egypt and his decades in the Palestinian Liberation Organization, assessing whether his work for his people has done them more harm than good.

Yasir Arafat stands as one of the most resilient, recognizable and controversial political figures of modern times. The object of unrelenting suspicion, steady admiration and endless speculation, Arafat has occupied the center stage of Middle East politics for almost four decades. Yasir Arafat is the most comprehensive political biography of this remarkable man. Forged in a tumultuous era of competing traditionalism, radicalism, Arab nationalism, and Islamist forces, the Palestinian movement was almost entirely Arafat's creation, and he became its leader at an early age. Arafat took it through a dizzying series of crises and defeats, often of his own making, yet also ensured that it survived, grew, and gained influence. Disavowing terrorism repeatedly, he also practiced it constantly. Arafat's elusive behavior ensured that radical regimes saw in him a comrade in arms, while moderates backed him as a potential partner in peace. After years of devotion to armed struggle, Arafat made a dramatic agreement with Israel that let him return to his claimed homeland and transformed him into a legitimized ruler. Yet at the moment of decision at the Camp David summit and afterward, when he could have achieved peace and a Palestinian state, he sacrificed the prize he had supposedly sought for the struggle he could not live without. Richly populated with the main events and dominant leaders of the Middle East, this detailed and analytical account by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin follows Arafat as he moves to Kuwait, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, and finally to Palestinian-ruled soil. It shows him as he rewrites his origins, experiments with guerrilla war, develops a doctrine of terrorism, fights endless diplomatic battles, and builds a movement, constantly juggling states, factions, and world leaders. Whole generations and a half-dozen U.S. presidents have come and gone over the long course of Arafat's career. But Arafat has outlasted them all, spanning entire eras, with three constants always present: he has always survived, he has constantly seemed imperiled, and he has never achieved his goals. While there has been no substitute for Arafat, the authors conclude, Arafat has been no substitute for a leader who could make peace.

A biography of the Palestinian leader

A former Palestinian sniper discusses his subsequent life in America, the religious experience which resulted in his conversion to Christianity, and his founding of a humanitarian organization which works toward a reconciliation between Palestinans and Jews.

It's over thirty years since Yasser Arafat swept onto the world stage as leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, a machine gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other. In that time he has become many things to many people: terrorist, a Nobel Peace Prize-winner and to the Bush Whitehouse, a Pariah once more. Based on hundreds of frank and revealing interviews with senior Israeli and Palestine officials, including Arafat himself, Arafat: The Biography documents his transition from terrorist to statesman then marginalisation following the tragic collapse of the Oslo Peace Accords. Examining the charge that the bitter personal blood-fued between Arafat and Isreal's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is a major obstacle to peace in the Middle-East, this book separates Arafat the man from Arafat the myth. A penetrating, balanced insight into the international and intelligence links, and the internal machinery, of the Palestinian regime.

A dual biography of the two leading figures in Palestinian politics, looking at what they gained and what they lost.

A revelatory portrait of Israel's first prime minister, written by its current president, includes coverage of his support of the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan for Palestine, his granting of first exemptions to Orthodox military servicepeople and his peaceful overtures toward post-Holocaust Germany.

A New York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice A teacher, a scholar, a philosopher, and an eyewitness to history, Sari Nusseibeh is one of our most urgent and articulate authorities on the conflict in the Middle East. From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at the Hebrew University through his appointment by Yasir Arafat to administer the Arab Jerusalem, he has held fast to the principles of freedom and equality for all, and his story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism as few other books have done. This autobiography brings rare depth and compassion to the story of his country.

Reviled as an imperialist power, an exporter of destructive capitalism, an arrogant crusader against Islam, and a rapacious over-consumer casually destroying the planet, it seems that the United States of America has rarely been less esteemed in the eyes of the world. In such an environment, one can easily overlook the fact that people from other countries have, in fact, been hating America for centuries. Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin here draw on sources from a wide range of countries to track the entire trajectory of anti-Americanism. With this powerful work, the Rubins trace the paradox that is America, a country that is both the most reviled and most envied land on earth. In the end, they demonstrate, anti-Americanism has often been a visceral response to the very idea--as well as both the ideals and policies--of America itself, its aggressive innovation, its self-confidence, and the challenge it poses to alternative ideologies.