The one time I met Yasser Arafat was in the spring of 1983, when I was in Amman, Jordan, editing for the Wall Street Journal a series of articles that the intrepid Karen Elliott House was writing on how King Hussein was dealing with President Reagan’s peace plan. Shortly before midnight, Karen called my hotel room to report she’d just received a phone call and that we needed to be in front of the hotel in five minutes. No sooner had we stepped onto the sidewalk than three or four Mercedes sedans swept into the hotel driveway, escorts appeared behind us, and we were off.

The terrorist leader was receiving at a state guest house, in the lobby of which were dozens of machine-gun toting security agents. We were escorted upstairs and into an office where Mr. Arafat was just putting a kifiyeh onto his astonishingly bald head. He was cheerful, intense, and businesslike over the course of a lengthy interview, surrounded by a group of aides and advisers who evinced great intelligence but, by my lights, lacked for wisdom. This is the interview in which, impatient with the Palestinian’s palavering about details of the Reagan plan, I asked how he would feel about the Palestinians moving to America.

How, I asked, would Mr. Arafat react to a major American initiative to offer refuge in America to 250,0000 Palestinians a year for a decade? Mr. Arafat, as I later wrote in the Journal, seemed startled at the question. “At least me,” he said, “I would not accept.” I conceded that it wasn’t a live policy initiative in Washington and explained I was asking about the principle. Then he went into a huddle with advisers and emerged to exclaim: “We’d have pressure in the election of the [U.S.] president.” Then he went back into a huddle and emerged to observe that he himself wanted a visa to Jerusalem and that his interlocutors had “great imagination.”

My own thinking had to do with the notion that it might be a win-win situation for the Palestinian Arabs, who were kept by United Nations administrators in squalid camps, and for Israel, which was harassed by terror from the camps. I also had in mind the fact that nearly all the emerging republics in the past century or so – Italy’s, say, or Ireland’s or Germany’s, not to mention Israel – were nursed at least in part from the free soil of America, where countless expatriates from countless countries had found a place where they could work on their dreams and even raise capital. I wouldn’t want to take that argument too far, but I wouldn’t want to gainsay it, either.

As I traveled around the region that spring, I soon learned that almost no one saw logic in the idea. A minister in the government of Lebanon told me he didn’t care where the Palestinians went so long as they didn’t stay in Lebanon. Ariel Sharon did suggest, over lunch at his farm, that he didn’t see why those Palestinian Arab refugees in land controlled by Israel couldn’t stay if they were prepared to live in peace. Back in America, I ended up at a lunch that Karen House hosted for Lawrence Eagleburger.

Mr. Eagleburger, who would later become secretary of state, was still an undersecretary. When we asked him about the possibility of giving green cards to the Palestinian Arabs registered with the United Nations as refugees, he casually remarked that there’s been no announcement on that yet. Karen and I looked at him in amazement. Some sources were later to suggest that at the behest of Secretary of State Shultz himself (one of the wisest persons ever to hold the post), the State Department had been quietly exploring an American response to the suffering of the Palestinian Arabs in the most endangered refugee camps in Lebanon.

Sabra and Chatilla had already been attacked by the Lebanese Phalange, which committed a horrible massacre there, in which as many as 1,000 Palestinians, maybe more, were slain. Later, as the internecine struggle among the Arabs escalated, some of the camps in Lebanon were being shelled by the Syrians. Still curious on the point, I called Secretary Eagleburger last night and asked him what he recalled about the idea of trying back then to provide refuge in America to some Palestinians. He said a large plan was never seen as politically possible. But he remarked that had a small plan, such as the one that was looked at, been tried, “it would have sent a signal” and “could have made a difference beyond the numbers.”

The idea never went anywhere, though. It was greeted with a torrent of outraged letters to the editor when I wrote in support of it in the Wall Street Journal. And given the spread of Islamic extremism within the Palestinian Arab community and the war that radical Islam has levied against America, it is an idea that makes sense only in theory. As for Mr. Arafat, I never met him again, having long since concluded that he was neither a man of peace nor a man who thought imaginatively – or compassionately – about the problem of his people. What a contrast to the lively Zionist inspiriters who set in motion the movement that led to the creation of the Jewish State.