As a correspondent covering the Six-Day War of 1967 and its aftermath, I had observed Yasser Arafat mobilizing the Palestine Liberation Organization for a guerrilla campaign on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. According to Chairman Mao, then still much admired by left-wing intellectuals, power was supposed to come from the barrel of a gun. The Face of Defeat (1972) is the book in which I expressed the view that nothing could come from this course of armed action except endless and probably irrevocable harm to the Palestinians. Determined to keep with the trend, the Times Literary Supplement made sure to give it a disparaging review. Out of the blue, the mail then delivered the offprint of an article by J. B. Kelly in a learned journal with the apt title “‘TLS’ in the Desert.” The opening sentence had a reference to this book of mine. John Kelly had come to my defense, with a critique of the selective quotations and omissions that had misrepresented what I was saying. For the next 30 and more years, John was to be a generous friend and guide to the complexities of the Middle East.
At the time, John was a professor of imperial history at the University of Wisconsin. On a par with India and Ireland, Palestine was one of the British Empire’s failures, and the rights and wrongs of that particular issue are so clear cut that he rarely commented on them. Arabia and the Persian Gulf were his area of special study, and he knew more about it than anyone else alive. Everything there was unsettled. Borders and treaties meant different things to different people. The tribe overrode the state; the strong overrode the weak. History itself was often a matter of hearsay through which only a scholar as careful as John could find a way.
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