Beginning with Arafat's murky background, which the man himself has surrounded in pretense, and moving to his assumption of the leadership of Fatah and subsequently the PLO in the 1960s, Aburish exposes the unsound foundations of Arafat's primacy and shows that the PLO has never been a revolutionary movement; rather Arafat and the PLO have always represented the Palestinian elite and the conservative Arab regimes.

Moreover, Aburish discovered from hitherto silent but impeccable sources that since 1973, when Arafat first established contact with the CIA in Beirut, the PLO has conducted a secret dialogue with the US, amounting to a betrayal of its people - in effect an agreement to reach a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict without deferring to the Palestinian people.