At the age of 18 he joined the Palmach, the newly created Jewish paramilitary defense organization, as Palestine was becoming threatened by Rommel's rapid advance across North Africa.

As the military commander of the Jerusalem region following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Peled participated in a project to resettle Palestinian refugees, in which a small group of villagers were allowed to cross the Green Line from the Jordanian-held West Bank back into Israel[citation needed]; this act was a marked exception to the government's policy of outright rejecting the return of Palestinian refugees.

Though lasting only briefly, it was a crucial turning point in his life, as he was to recount on numerous later occasions; he found himself the "lord and master" over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

[3] During the severe political crisis of May 1967, in the lead-up to the Six-Day War, Peled—then at the rank of Aluf (Major General) and in charge of the IDF Supply Division—was considered a hawk.

Therefore, Peled asserted, he was duty-bound to tell the government that the country could not afford a long mobilization and that it had to strike "a sharp decisive blow," after which the reserves could be discharged—which is what Israel proceeded to do in the June 1967 Six-Day War.

Peled had already studied Arabic literature during his military service, and soon after being discharged he completed and submitted to UCLA his Ph.D. thesis on the Egyptian Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

Subsequently, Peled was one of the founders of the Arabic Literature Department at Tel Aviv University, which he headed for several years, and soon gained a reputation as a serious and innovative scholar in his chosen field.

At the same time, he started regularly publishing articles in the weekend edition of Maariv, in which the clear leftward change in his political stance was evident.

Peled later reversed this position, becoming a leading member in several such left-wing parties in succession, and on numerous occasions expressing sharp criticism of Labor.

In 1975 Peled was one of the founders of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP), together with Uri Avnery, Yaakov Arnon, Yossi Amitai, Amos Keinan, Aryeh Eliav and others.

[4] Arnon, for example, was a noted economist, who had headed the Zionist Federation of the Netherlands until 1948, when he came to Israel and became the director-general of its newly founded Ministry of Finance; later on he was chairman of the board of the Israeli Electricity Company.

The ICIPP sought to promote private and unofficial dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians in as many ways as possible, but also to try to bring about official negotiations between the Government of Israel and the leadership of the PLO.

The first meeting in Paris in 1976 brought Peled and several other Israelis together with PLO senior official Issam Sartawi, who acted with the full authorisation of Yasser Arafat—though Arafat personally would become involved in such dialogue only during the siege of Beirut in the First Lebanon War in 1982.

Also assassinated was Henri Curiel, an Egyptian Jewish communist living in exile in Paris, who had played a key role in facilitating the opening of Israeli-Palestinian contacts.

One faction, headed by Ran Cohen—later a Knesset Member and cabinet minister for the Meretz party—held that Israeli peaceniks talking to the Palestinians should strive to extract concessions from them, such as an official recognition of Israel.

Peled outspokenly supported the reserve soldiers who refused to take part in the war, organised by the newly founded Yesh Gvul movement—some 200 of whom served terms in the military prisons.

Avnery, Peled's partner, arrived in Beirut in quite different circumstances—crossing the lines to conduct a first-ever meeting with PLO leader Yasser Arafat, at his besieged and bombarded headquarters.

Their Arab partners were headed by Mohammed Miari, a veteran radical political activist and human rights lawyer specializing in land confiscation cases, and Rev.

Peled published numerous political articles in Israeli and international media and translated several pieces of Arabic literature to Hebrew.

In 1993, he took part in forming Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc—a grassroots peace movement in whose ranks Peled alternately expressed a sharp criticism of his old friend Rabin for severe human rights violations in the occupied territories; warmly commended and congratulated him for his dramatic rapprochement with the PLO and the handshake with Arafat on the White House lawn; and finally expressed a growing worry and anxiety at the slow pace of the peace process and the continuing occupation, oppression and settlement activity—which gave ample opportunity, as Peled wrote in several admonitory articles, to extremists on both sides to create a renewed dynamic of escalation.

In 1994, seventy years of robust health were broken when Peled felt sharp pains that turned out to be the sign of an incurable liver cancer.