If we Israelis had had a leader like the Palestinian Authority's Yasser Arafat, the state of Israel would never have come into being. Why? Because the test of a leader does not lie in his being swept up in his people's dreams; it lies in his pragmatic ability to accept what can be achieved. It is better to realize part of the dream than nothing. And that can be accomplished only by a leader of great stature, with the strength to lead his people into the realms of reality and not succumb to the unrealistic wishes of the majority.

There were some among us who dreamed of a Greater Israel stretching from the Euphrates to the Nile, while others aspired to an Israel that would be a client state of the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the country's leader was David Ben-Gurion. Far from being receptive to the ideas of the extremists, he fought them tooth and nail: "I do what the nation needs, not what the nation wants."

Ben-Gurion did not yield to the moods of the street; he accepted what was achievable, without the West Bank, without the Gaza Strip, without the Old City of Jerusalem, without the Western Wall or Hebron or Rachel's Tomb. In his place, Arafat would have put his foot down, and to this day Israel would have been languishing under his leadership as a frustrated nation with world sympathy but without a state.