Among Alan's photographic souvenirs from his television reporting days for ITN and the BBC's Panorama programme, one picture is particularly dear to him. It is that of Golda Meir with an inscription in her own hand. It says, "To a good friend, Alan Hart."

The English gentile thinks he was the only correspondent to have enjoyed access to, and friendship with, Yasser Arafat, "Father Palestine", and Golda Meir, "Mother Israel". He describes them as "the two greatest opposites in all of human history."

Because of his special relationships with leaders on both sides of the Middle East conflict, it was suggested to him by people on the top on the UN, at the end of 1979, to try to become a middleman between Shimon Peres and Arafat for a secret, exploratory dialogue. But behind the scenes he lost faith in the two-state solution.

Peres was then the leader of Israel's main opposition Labour Party and was hoping ("as was President Carter", Alan says) to win Israel's next election against the Likud's Menachem Begin.

On the Arab side, Arafat had got his cabinet to accept Resolution 242 - peace with Israel inside its 1967 borders. The news, which reached the UN headquarters in the form of a secret letter, triggered some hope in the Carter White House that a "breakthrough" might be possible if Peres became prime minister, and if the ground was prepared in advance.

But Carter's attempt to use Arafat's offer to design peace was soon disrupted when he failed to secure a second term in the White House.

Alan's unofficial mission (which he tells in full in Volume Two of his latest book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews) did make progress, but was doomed when, against all expectations, Peres lost Israel's next election and Begin won a second term as prime minister.

Today, Alan believes that the two-state solution is "dead if not yet formally buried, killed by Israel's still on-going colonisation of the occupied West Bank". His assessment is reinforced by what Peres told him in their first one-to-one conversation before he, Alan, went to Beirut to persuade Arafat to participate in the "conspiracy for peace". Although he welcomed Alan's proposal, Peres said he thought it was already "too late" for peace on any terms the PLO Chairman could accept. Alan asked Peres what he meant, and the following was his reply:

"Every day that passes sees new bricks on new settlements. Begin knows exactly what he's doing. He's creating the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli leader is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot Jews out of the West Bank... I'm not."

Today Alan asks: "If it was already too late in 1980 when there were only about 70,000 illegal Jewish settlers, how much more too late is it today when they number about half a million, with that number rising on a daily basis?"

Alan Hart is a pragmatist. He still believes in a possibility to design peace in the region, but that would require rethinking the peace process.

Alan agrees with Professor Ilan Pappe, Israel's leading revisionist historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that there are now only two options on the table - one state for all or catastrophe for all.

The one state would be secular and democratic, with its Jewish and Arab citizens enjoying absolutely equal rights. "Yes," says Alan, "it would mean the de-Zionisation of Palestine, the end of Zionism's colonial enterprise. But it would not mean the end of the Jews now in Palestine that became Israel. In the one state, those Jews who wanted to stay would have real peace and security."

Because many Jews who actually oppose Israel's policy are frightened to speak out for fear of promoting anti-Semitism, thus of digging their own graves, Alan believes that the key is clearing nations to the fact that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are by no means synonyms.

"Like Christianity and Islam," Alan explains, "Judaism has at its core a set of moral values and ethical principles. To the extent that they look to Jerusalem as the centre of their religion, all religious Jews could (and most do) regard themselves as spiritual Zionists. But political Zionism is something else. It is a sectarian, colonialist ideology which created a state for some Jews in the Arab heartland mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing. By so doing, it made a mockery of Judaism's moral values and ethical principles."

Knowing this difference explains two things, Alan believes: "One is why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist (opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise) without being anti-Semitic. The other is why it is wrong to blame all Jews for the crimes of the relative few - hardest core political Zionists in Israel, which is a Zionist not a Jewish state."

Alan, who is an outspoken anti-Zionist, thinks he possesses the best proof that he is no anti-Semitic. He uses Golda's photograph as a shield to defend himself on public platforms against the false and malicious charge of anti-Semitism. "Sometimes I hold up the picture," he says, "read out Golda's inscription, and say to my accusers, 'Do you think that old lady was so stupid that she could not have seen through me if I was anti-Jew!'"

Alan would like to share this carefully worded view in the gentile world, because, if not told in context, anti-Zionism might well promote another turning against Jews. And that would mean another catastrophe.