cians of the old parties have advocated a policy to "help and encourage" Arabs to emigrate from Palestine.
Annexation means turning Israel into a Hebrew empire, with a colonial regime controlling the Arab inhabitants. No one can believe that within such an empire, plagued with an ever-growing problem of inner security and armed resistance, democracy could be preserved even for Hebrew citizens-emergency laws and arbitrary rule have a way of expanding, once applied on a large scale. One way or another, annexation would be the end of Israel as we know it, the end of any hope for peaceful integration in the Region, the final turning of Israel into an armed Crusader state.
This is not only true about outright, official annexation. The status quo may generate another kind of annexation -a creeping, unannounced, factual annexation, brought about by hundreds of little acts and omissions. Here a Hebrew settlement is set up, temporarily, to support the army of occupation, there an abandoned Arab village is razed to the ground for "security and sanitary reasons" (as Moshe Dayan said the other day in the Knesset, in answer to my question). If such acts accumulate, a point of no return may be reached, which will have the same results as an official annexation. Practical annexation might become the continuation of old-time "practical" Zionism.
The third alternative is to encourage the setting up of an Arab republic of Palestine. My friends and I have advocated this plan for Israel's integration into the Semitic Region since 1948, long before the Six-Day War and the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
In the present circumstances, it would mean that the government of Israel would offer the Palestinian Arabs assistance in setting up a national republic of their own, this offer being conditional upon a federal agreement between such a Palestine and Israel. The Palestinian Repub-