No one knows more about modern terrorism - its impetus, its technology, its secrets, its inevitable tragedy - than Bassam Abu-Sharif, a former Palestinian guerrilla, and Uzi Mahnaimi, a former Israeli spymaster. These two men, whose personal histories epitomize the struggle over Israel, were supreme practitioners of the vicious tactics characterizing the Arab-Israeli conflict. Now in a riveting double memoir, Abu-Sharif and Mahnaimi reveal life on opposing sides of the world's most bitter feud, and how they ultimately turned a cycle of violence into a search for peace. Bassam Abu-Sharif and Uzi Mahnaimi finally met in a London restaurant in 1988, many years after they both - for very different reasons - turned away from violence. In this strange meeting lies the heart of Best of Enemies. Their stories, and those of their fathers and grandfathers, encapsulate one hundred years of war between Arab and Jew. Unlike their predecessors, however, Abu-Sharif and Mahnaimi have joined forces in a new and more testing struggle: the fight for peace. Their quiet collaboration has steadily helped move the peace negotiations forward and set the stage for the Arafat-Rabin handshake of 1993.

Abu Sharif was one of the world's most notorious and dangerous terrorists in the 60's and 70's, acting as "minister of propaganda" for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and as a recruiter for terrorists like Carlos the Jackal. In 1972, a bomb was placed in a book and sent to him, leaving him half-blind, deaf in one ear, and almost fingerless. Finally abandoning the use of violence as a means to achieve his Palestinian nationalist aspirations, he aligned himself with Yasser Arafat, eventually becoming one of his closest advisors.

In this book, Abu Sharif, often alongside Arafat, takes us behind the scenes of all the major events in the Middle East during the last 30 years, from the secret caves in the West Bank where Arafat hid on his way to Jerusalem in 1967 to the peace negotiations in Oslo in 1993. "Arafat and the Dream of Palestine" combines a deeply personal account, informed by Abu Sharif's close relationship with Arafat, with a gripping, profoundly human history of Palestine.