The government’s policy on the Palestinian question as enunciated by the Cabinet statement Sunday was challenged today by four urgent motions for the agenda in the Knes- set. All of them were comfortably voted to committee despite a small number of Labor abstentions and one defection.
Among the proposers of motions for the agenda was Knesseter Moshe Dayan who stated his own ideas on the West Bank and Palestinian issues–but he agreed in the end that his motion be voted to committee rather than be debated by the plenum and thus avoided a parliamentary confrontation between himself and the government and party colleagues.
Replying to all the motions–from Shmuel Tamir of Likud, Yitzhak Raphael of the National Religious Party, and Nissim Eliad of the Independent Liberal Party–Foreign Minister Yigal Allon said that the Cabinet’s statement Sunday had not been new, but had rather “clarified” policy. It showed, he said, that the government recognized the problem and sought a solution to it based on the expression of the Palestinian national identity within the framework of one Arab state east of Israel.
Allon stated further that Israel could no longer be accused by its critics of ignoring the Palestinian problem and the Cabinet statement would facilitate new initiatives and new responses by the government in the progress towards a settlement. Tamir and Raphael accused the government of being prepared to redivide historic Eretz Israel and to countenance a hostile Arab rule on the West Bank. Eliad sought greater readiness to negotiate with any Palestinian group that would recognize Israel’s right to exist, in line with similar proposals made at the Cabinet session by Tourism Minister Moshe Kol and Health Minister Victor Shemtov which were rejected.
FOUR ‘PRINCIPLES’ OUTLINED
Dayan, without taking issue directly with the Cabinet statement, laid down four “principles” which he said ought to guide Israel’s policy on the West Bank issue.
The “principles” were: any peace agreement must provide for the right of Jews to live in and settle any area of the West Bank; any agreement must provide for the presence of Israeli military installations wherever they were required (“be it on the river or on the hilltops”) for the protection of Israel’s security; any agreement, interim or permanent, need not provide for Israeli rule over the West Bank people; and any agreement need not provide for Israeli dispossession of West Bankers or settlement in Arab-inhabited areas.
ISRAEL MUST BE AWARE OF REALITY
Dayan said he did not think that Jordan would be ready to accept these terms. Nevertheless, he thought Israel must stick to them–and be prepared to fight for them. He said he took full account, and hoped all Knesseters took the same full account in their policies on the West Bank, of the Arabs’ military might and of the fact that all the Arab states were united in their determination to restore the situation to pre-1967.
Allon said his own ideas, like Dayan’s, were unlikely to find acceptance in Jordan. He hinted that he had not relinquished the “Allon Plan” for a permanent Israeli military presence along the Jordan River. While he would not take up. Likud challenges that he agree explicitly with Dayan’s views on settlement in the West Bank, Allon said he was proud to have had a part in the creation of every settlement that had arisen there since the Six-Day War. At the same time, he said he was proud to have been a partner in shaping government policy which forbade settlement in certain areas of the West Bank.
In the voting, ex-Rafi Knesseter Mordechai Ben-Porat voted with the NRP and Likud opposition, while Dayan, Transport Minister Gad Yaacobi, Mrs. Matilda Ghez–all of ex-Rafi–as well as Laborite Moshe Shahal and ex-Achdut Avoda’s Mrs. Shoshana Arbeli all abstained. The motions were nevertheless passed to committee by comfortable majorities of six or seven each time. Motions by Rakah and Moked calling for the establishment of a separate Palestinian state were struck off the agenda, with some Mapam members, however, breaking discipline and voting with the extreme left-wingers.
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