Kevin Myers: A most curious thing. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former Communist head of Romanian intelligence, recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Yasser Arafat was a creation of the KGB.
And far from Arafat being a Palestinian, General Pacepa alleges that he was in born of an Egyptian middle-class family, and had been turned into a devoted Marxist by the KGB at its Balashikha special-ops school east of Moscow. The KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, replacing them with fictitious documents saying he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.
"Before I defected to America from Romania. . .I was responsible for giving Arafat about $200,000 in laundered cash every month throughout the 1970s. I also sent two cargo planes to Beirut a week, stuffed with uniforms and supplies. Other Soviet bloc states did much the same."
Gen Pacepa continued: "In 1972, the Kremlin put Arafat and his terror networks high on all Soviet bloc intelligence services' priority list, including mine. Bucharest's role was to ingratiate him with the White House. We were the bloc experts at this. We'd already had great success in making Washington - as well as most of the fashionable left-leaning American academics of the day - believe that Nicolae Ceausescu was. . .an 'independent' Communist with a 'moderate' streak.
"KGB chairman Yuri Andropov in February 1972 laughed to me about the Yankee gullibility for celebrities. . .those crazy Americans were still naïve enough to revere national leaders. We would make Arafat into just such a figurehead and gradually move the PLO closer to power and statehood. Andropov thought that Vietnam-weary Americans would snatch at the smallest sign of conciliation to promote Arafat from terrorist to statesman in their hopes for peace."
The Romanians were directed to help Arafat improve his extraordinary talent for deceiving, Pacepa wrote, adding that the KGB chief of foreign intelligence, General Aleksandr Sakharovsky, declared: "Arafat is a brilliant stage manager, and we should put him to good use". Pacepa says that in March 1978 he secretly brought Arafat to Bucharest for final instructions on how to behave in Washington. "You simply have to keep on pretending that you'll break with terrorism and that you'll recognise Israel - over, and over, and over," Ceaucescu told Arafat.
This all seems quite preposterous; but what if it were true? For whatever else drives Arafat, it is certainly not practical concern for the Palestinian people. Under his psychopathic leadership, they have been ushered right into the welcoming arms of unmitigated catastrophe. The Oslo accords which were meant to provide a basis for peace are in ruins; so too the road-map; and now we have the utter absurdity of the 225-mile long Great Wall of Israel, without which the Israelis know that the indiscriminate slaughter of the innocent would be certain.
The founding fathers of Zionism must be plucking their hair out in despair at such a descent into ludicrous, murderous farce. For now we have Arab teenagers queuing up to die in an intifada which has claimed 1,100 lives in three years; hundreds of thousands of homeless still subsisting in refugee camps 50 years after they were formed; tens of thousands of Palestinian-owned olive and fruit trees being uprooted by a state which was once determined to make the desert bloom; and 300,000 Jewish settlers illegally living on the West Bank and in Gaza.
This tragic parody of the Zionist dream is in part only possible because the iron law of consequence has been turned into rust as the conflict has been sustained by subventions to the participants by the US, the EU and the Arab world.
Sooner or later, all long wars end by exhaustion. Women will not let their sons go and fight; economies are unable to sustain the demands of war-production and of taxation; natural resources run short; feelers are extended; secret talks begin, and leaders who won't make peace are overthrown.
But this dynamic for peace works only within essentially closed systems of conflict which are not endlessly re-primed from outside. And the Middle East is not a closed system. Essentially, the US and Saudi Arabia (which means the US petrol consumer at one remove) have helped to prolong the conflict by endlessly subsidising the participants.
To make it all even more ludicrous, the Israelis have been paying the Palestinian Authority revenues collected in taxes and duty; and according to the IMF, Yasser Arafat has redirected $600 million of that money into secret funds which he has almost certainly used to pay for terrorist operations.
Thus the descent to lunacy, with Israelis subsidising Palestinian terrorism, with Palestinians being forbidden to enter Jerusalem while strangers from Minsk have complete right of access, with a higgledy-piggledy wall wandering all over the place like some insane project dreamt up by Caligula, and with school buses being blown up by suicide bombers.
But the Palestinians' greatest tragedy is the vast and venal Palestinian Authority. It employs 120,000 people, owns casinos, cement companies and Algerian telephones; and furthermore, trains young Palestinians to murder Jews.
And at the heart of it all - according to Gen Pacepa - is this KGB invention, the Egyptian Yasser Arafat. If Pacepa is correct, the evil little fraud must have derived much mordant pleasure from all those foolish human shields gathering at his feet to protect him (though of course, no outsider ever sat on school buses to protect Jewish children).
It is the maddest, saddest story in the world; and while Arafat controls the Palestinian Authority, it is one without end.