The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) is a complex movement, stumbling from setback to setback. The PLO was riven by factionalism; he pursued revolution and diplomacy as if there were no contradiction between the terms. Then, as he gained recognition from Israel, he seemed on the verge of losing his most precious asset: the support of the Palestinian people, whom he sought to serve. Barry Rubin has written a history of the PLO in which he investigates and interprets its political circumstances, strategies, and doctrines from their birth in the late 1950s to the events of 1993 culminating in the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn. His book aims to offer a general account of the organization's history and politics. The task of illustrating the incompetence and corruption of the PLO and its leaders is not difficult, and Rubin appears to have pursued this task with enthusiasm. Throughout the book, Rubin outlines the development of the PLO starting from its founding in 1964 and then until the October 1993 signing of the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles. Twenty-nine years is a long time to cover in about 200 pages of text, but Rubin sharpens his focus by dedicating the majority of the book to the trials of the 1980s and 1990s. In the chapters on the 1980s and 1990s, his analysis succeeds in demonstrating the indecisiveness of the PLO's decision-making process. It shows the organisation's serious internal divisions, its failures and the pressures that led it to the current peace process (first in Madrid and then in Oslo). The book's opening chapters describe the founding of the PLO. In 1964, a meeting in East Jerusalem was attended by 400 delegates. This encounter was… half the paper… full of detail, causing some of the structure and sequence to be lost. The points he raises are valid, but the reader may lose track of them due to poor organization by category or priority within the chapters. Before reading this, I had little knowledge of the PLO. This book informed me about them and past events that I was unaware of. While I found the book informative, it also helped me understand that I can't read just one book on a topic and have all the information. Some parts of it made me feel like I was missing something. It also showed me how biased a writer can be and how useful it is to have different points of view. I believe this book is a good example of how an organization can be seen as terrorist by some and not by others, reiterating the point that there is no fixed definition of terrorism, which all people can agree on.