King Hussein had recently unveiled his plan for a "Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan," which included turning the West Bank--which had been occupied by the Israelis since the 1967 war--into a semi-autonomous state with its capital in Jerusalem ..." The Israelis, obviously, had not been thrilled, but neither had the militant Pan-Arabs. Mr. Sharaf, as befits a diplomat, discusses this and other questions calmly but with some eloquence: "... in the United States, as well as in Europe and in the West generally, there is a basic misconception with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict which stems from some emotional associations--a sense of guilt with regard to what happened to the Jews in the West and a wrong identification of that question with the Israeli question in the Middle East, where the situation is actually reversed. There, Israel has actually occupied territory not belonging to it and has set up the origin of the problem--a state that has been expanding, basically at the expense of the owners of that land, the Palestinian people."