Uri Avnery on Israel's self-fulfilling prophecy: The High Priest of the "We Have No Partner" creed is General (res.) Amos Gilad, who at the crucial time was chief of the research section (and as such the No. 2) of the Army Intelligence Department...The army intelligence man reports directly to the Prime Minister and takes part in cabinet meetings. No minister would dare to question his assessments, which are the guiding star of the entire state. The research chief of the intelligence department is supposed to submit a professional summary of the huge amount of data amassed by the intelligence community. Most ministers are forbidden to read the written report, and even the few others are allowed only to glance at it. Therefore, the oral summary presented by the chief of research to the Prime Minister and the cabinet is of paramount importance. Amos Gilad went even further: he appeared almost daily in the media, commenting on almost every political and security event. He was not only the "national assessor", but also the "national explainer", as he was commonly called in the media. ...The last two weeks, Israel witnessed a stormy debate that should have shaken the very foundations of the state. The former chief of Army Intelligence, General (res.) Amos Malka, who was the direct superior of Gilad, broke his silence of many years and published a thunderous accusation: that Amos Gilad arrived at his "kontseptsia" without any intelligence basis whatsoever. On the contrary, the huge amount of information collected by the intelligence department indicated the very opposite. That is to say, Gilad freely invented his intelligence reports, based on his political views and/or on the desire to please his political bosses, Barak and Sharon. This grave accusation raised a storm in professional circles. Intelligence operatives of undoubted integrity emerged from their anonymity in order to support Malka publicly. They were headed by the man who, at the relevant time, was in charge of the Army Intelligence section for Palestinian affairs, Colonel Ephraim Lavie, who was then responsible for the collection of all intelligence material about the Palestinian leadership...This means, in simple words: there was no intelligence material at all backing the assertion that Arafat is working for the destruction of the State of Israel, that Arafat had broken off the peace process in order to start a terror campaign, that Arafat is not ready for a reasonable compromise...When the debate heated up, the Orientalist Matti Steinberg, a former advisor on Palestinian affairs to the chief of the Shabak, joined the fray. Steinberg not only confirmed that Gilad's "kontseptsia" was completely false and contradicted the intelligence material assembled by his own people, but he also asserted that Gilad's conception "fulfilled its own prophecy".