Defense Minister Moshe Dayan said here last night that the Arabs wanted withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territories without peace, but that Israel must insist on peace even if the prospects now were said to be unrealistic.
Speaking at the convention of former Premier David Ben-Gurion’s dissident Israel Workers Party (Rafi), Gen. Dayan added that peace with the Arab countries may not be any closer now than it was before the June war. He declared that, viewed from the Arab side of the cease-fire lines, Israel must seem to be an “expansionist” state and a “threat” to the Arabs. But he insisted that Israel had no desire to dominate the Arabs or to impose a Jewish way of life on Arabs in the occupied territories.
Remarking that every aim of Zionism had been unrealistic when first formulated. Gen. Dayan said that peace, when it comes, must give expression to the Jewish people’s connection with such historic places as Hebron and Jericho, which are both in the occupied West Bank. The yearning for Zion which, he said, was the basis for Israel, included “these stones and territories.”
Gen. Dayan emphasized that Israel had not interfered with Arab life in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, declaring that all Arab mayors were carrying on their duties. Out of 4,600 employees in the educational system of the West Bank, he reported, only nine were Jews, and similar percentages obtained in health and agriculture services.
He asserted that there had not been any change in the basic goal of the Arab countries who want to wipe out Israel, and that the only change which had occurred was one in tactics to gain time. He said the main problem facing Israel until the gap of Israeli and Arab viewpoints narrowed was that of the relations of Israelis with more than a million Arabs in occupied territories.
He proposed for consideration by the convention as resolutions the goal of maintaining the Jewish character of Israel, the securing of its borders, the expression of the yearning of the Jewish people for its historic origins, solution of the Arab refugee problem, and Israel’s international rights to peace treaties with its Arab neighbors.
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