In the aftermath of the 1967 war, Palestinians were divided between those under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, and those in exile in Jordan or Lebanon. I described this anomalous situation in 1972 in The Face of Defeat. The majority of Palestinians, I found, had had quite enough of war and understood that they would enjoy peace only when Israel did too. But Yasser Arafat had taken over the PLO. Like other Arab autocrats, he turned to the Soviets for funds and arms. On a hillside at Ajlun in Jordan, I heard Arafat address his guerrillas in the doctrinaire style of a rally of the Red Brigade or the Baader-Meinhof gang. An activist and propagandist undoubtedly skilled in the black arts, he did more than the Soviet Union, more than anyone, to persuade the world that Israel is a successful nation-state thanks to its oppression of the Palestinians and not on account of its virtues. The promise of revolution, the liberation of Palestine and the elimination of Israel, moulded the Two Minutes' Hate into a fashionable cause, an ideology. Palestinians pay the price for this: their mobilisation and militarisation on these lines has stranded their national identity in illusion and victimhood.

The impulse to write The Closed Circle, my next book with a Middle Eastern theme, had begun during the 1967 war when I arrived at Aqabat Jaber, a huge refugee camp on the West Bank, at the moment the inhabitants were fleeing in their thousands. No Israeli soldiers were anywhere near. These people were abandoning everything, homes, possessions, their sheep, hens and dogs, even family members too old to walk far. They would have nowhere to spend the night, their future could only be desperate. Explanations for this mass flight were not very satisfactory. Had the Arabs won the war, they would have massacred the Israelis, and perhaps these people were only assuming that what they would have done to others, others would do to them. "In the grip of a collective response," I was to write, "they were obeying codes of their own." What might these codes be? Arab societies are one and all absolute. Rulers hold power through strong-arm methods and further justify power-holding as a matter of honour. Those running away from Aqabat Jaber were displaying the grip the cultural code has on all Arabs and Muslims, obliging them at all costs to avoid the shame of failure. 

Honour demands that the shame of defeat be erased by victory, which is why Arab and Muslim violence is so repetitive and each time so self-harming in the identical way. It's no use telling those who feel shame that there is no reason for it. Emotions of this kind cannot be rationalised away. Israel was always going to find that its cultural values were hard to reconcile with those of Arab and Muslim societies. When in 1973, the Egypt of Anwar Sadat and the Syria of Hafez Assad launched another war, once again I was a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Honour was recovered in a measure enough for Sadat to make peace, but not enough for Syria, which instead has chosen to ally itself with Iran. Iran's Islamist rhetoric may sound novel, but at bottom it too is all about the honour of victory and the shame of defeat. 

The rise of the Islamic Republic of Iran happened to coincide with the end of the Cold War and the inability of the PLO to represent real Palestinian interests. Filling the vacuum left by these developments, Iran sees itself not as a nation but as a cause whose fulfilment is Islamic supremacy. The ayatollahs are provoking a civilisational clash they expect to win. They cultivate a complete Ignorance-is-Strength fantasy that the elimination of Israel is the preliminary to overcoming the US, perceived as the power obstructing their ambitions for Islam. In a genuine Hitlerite style, the ayatollahs and their officials first deny that the Holocaust took place and then promise to conduct one of their own. To all appearances, the regime is intent on wiping Israel off the map, developing a nuclear programme but refusing to allow inspection that would clarify whether its purpose is civilian as proclaimed, or military; financing and arming its proxies of Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza in order to wage war on diverse fronts at the moment of choice; encouraging the entire Muslim world to see itself as the enemy of the West and everything the West stands for. Mainstream Israeli commentators have taken it for granted that the ayatollahs will one day finalise their plans and the worst is therefore to be anticipated.