jdi INTRODUCTION from the time of our Independence War until now, that we have been fighting against the civilian {Arab] population which inhabited the villages and towns, and every time that we do it, the same question gets asked: should we or should we not strike at civilians? [Al-Hamishmar, May 10, 1978] Thus one thing about “ terrorism ” is the imbalance in its perception, and the imbalance in its perpetration. O ne could mention, for exam ple, that in every instance when Israeli hostages were used to try to gain the release o f Palestinians held in Israeli jails, it was always the Israeli forces who offered fire first, knowingly causing a bloodbath. But even to cite figures and m ake explanations is not enough— for the record of hostility between Jew and A ra b , between Palestinians and Zionist Jews, betw een Palestinians and the rest of mankind (or so it would seem ), between Jews and the W est, is a chilling one. A s a Palestinian, I resent and deplore the ways in which the whole grisly matter is stripped o f all its resonances and its often morally confusing detail, and compressed simply, com ­ fortably, inevitably under the rubric o f “ Palestinian terror." Y e t as som eone who has been touched by the issue in all sorts o f ways, I must also say that— speaking now only as one Palestinian— I have been horrified at the hijacking o f planes, the suicidal missions, the assassinations, the bombing of schools and hotels; horrified both at the terror visited upon its victims, and horrified by the terror in Palestinian men and women who w ere driven to do such things. Since I do not pretend to write as a detached observer, I have believed that rather than trying to deal frontally with the terror itself, I would do better if I attempted to convey to my readers some sense o f the larger Palestinian story from which all these things came. A n d if in the end the story does not— as it cannot— mitigate the tragedies o f waste and unhappiness, it would at least present what has long been missing before such a reader, the reality o f a collective national trauma contained for every Palestinian in the question o f Palestine. O ne o f the features o f a small non-European people is that it is not wealthy in documents, nor in histories, autobiographies,