Dayan: Peace Negotiations with Arabs Must Be Fair, Never One-sided

Israel’s former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told an audience here that peace negotiations with the Arab states must be fair and never one-sided. “If there is deadlock, we will have to live with deadlock,” he declared delivering the keynote address at the 33rd South African Zionist Conference in a packed Johannesburg City Hall.

Dayan stressed Israel’s continuing need for Western immigration and maximum diaspora support. Observing that “the Arabs are growing stronger in every way while Jewish life in the golah is weakening,” he said that Zionists must reinvigorate Jewish life in the golah and stimulate maximum support for Israel. “We in Israel can take care of Israel and you in the golah must take care of the Jewish people,” Dayan declared.

He noted that unlike previous wars that Israel has fought, the Yom Kippur war opened the way to negotiations — which Israel has always wanted — and which it hoped would continue at Geneva. “We want to negotiate very much,” he said, “but we will never accept the formula often used by the Americans that the Arabs will never agree to this or that. Negotiating cannot be one-sided. They must take account of what Israel will never agree to no less than the Arabs,” he said. Regarding the Judea and Samaria regions on the West Bank, Dayan said it was unthinkable that Jews should ever be prevented from settling in any part of their historic homeland.

JEWISH PEOPLE WILL DECIDE ISRAEL’S FUTURE

Israel’s Ambassador to South Africa, Itzhak Unna, said in his address at the opening session of the Conference that Israel’s future will not be settled by Moscow or Washington or the United Nations but by the Jewish people. Bringing greetings from the Israel Government to the Conference, he declared that Israel and the diaspora were one and would continue their united struggle whatever trials may lie ahead.

Messages were read from Premier Yitzhak Rabin and Pinhas Sapir, chairman of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization Executives. Tributes were paid to the former chairman, the late Louis Pincus who was born in South Africa. The Conference adopted resolutions condemning Soviet hostility toward Israel and supporting the efforts of various governments and public opinion to achieve free emigration to Israel by Soviet Jews.

Mayor Frank Dennis of Johannesburg hailed Dayan as a personification of the spirit that made the Jewish people great and which was found not only in Israel but in every nation where Jewish citizens contributed to the public welfare far beyond their numbers, as in South Africa. Julius Weinstein, the outgoing chairman of the South African Zionist Federation who presided at the Conference, expressed the conviction that Dayan, though no longer in the government, would play a vital role in helping Israel achieve its goals.