Gen. Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defense minister, plans to start a political battle within his Labor Party aiming at inclusion of a detailed plan for the future of the occupied areas and their Arab populations in the platform of the Labor Party for elections scheduled for 1973, observers said here today.
Gen. Dayan is father of an “open bridges” approach of maximum contact between Arabs of the occupied areas and Israelis in his “oral doctrine” on future borders and settlements in those areas. The first signs of Dayan’s plans were indicated at a meeting of the Labor Party’s “brain trust” at Beth Berl, the party’s ideological center. Gen. Dayan attended a session of the “brain trust” and after listening to the proposed agenda, for the party’s “think team,” he asked for permission to comment.
He thereupon criticized both his party and the government, of which he is a member, for not discussing the future of the Arabs in the occupied areas. He said he was “disappointed” that the issue was “not included in the agenda of this meeting.” He argued that the government and the Labor Party should prepare a “clear policy” toward the Arabs under Israeli rule. He stressed that clarification was particularly important on issues on which there were differences of opinion, including questions of use of Arab labor.
He declared that any political, social or economic discussion which overlooked the fact that 1,300,000 Arabs now lived under Israeli rule would take place in a vacuum, isolated from reality. Sources said Gen. Dayan advocates maximum cooperation between Arabs and Israelis and that the Arabs should be granted rights equal to those of Israelis, as well as Israeli efforts to raise the standards of living of Arabs in the occupied areas.
Gad Yaacobi, Deputy Communications Minister, replied that the Labor Party forum was not the place to discuss political affairs which involve foreign relations, security and occupied territorial policies. He made the reply at the request of Prime Minister Golda Meir. He added that such issues were matters for the political committee of the Labor Party.
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