it impossible for Israel to integrate the 300,000 Arabs living in it before the 1967 war. Far more operative, though seldom mentioned, was the instinctive conviction of old-time Zionists that Arabs could never really be a part of a state which was Jewish. For anyone entertaining this conviction, the idea of repatriating Arab refugees and increasing the Arab minority was positively obnoxious.
Prior to the 1967 war, Ben-Gurion's closest adherents started an outcry against the possibility that the Arab minority-then less than twelve per cent-would eventually become a majority in Israel by natural increase, a process which would have taken them several generations, even on the unlikely assumption that their present high birthrate would continue interminably. But it is not only the fear of an Arab majority which set Zionists against any idea of refugee repatriation, but the deeply felt, if quite often unconscious, conviction that Jews should be alone in their state, that Israel should remain homogeneously Jewish, that the Arab minority, if inevitable, should at least be kept as small as possible.
Before June 1967, the Arab minority, while constituting nearly twelve per cent of the population, held only two per cent of the posts in the government administration, with not one single Arab among the top-ranking officials, judges or cabinet ministers. Among the 120 members of the Knesset, only seven are Arabs, not one of whom occupies an important position in the House. (My first move after election, on the very first day of the 1967 Knesset, was to propose that the Speaker, or at least one of his eight deputies, should be an Arab. This was indignantly rejected.)
It is, in truth, while exploring the wider problem of Israeli-Arab relations that the gap between the Zionist philosophy and a normal healthy Hebrew nationalism becomes apparent.
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Nothing frightens the Arabs more than the idea of the