situation has changed again. Except for some hundreds of thousands of former and new refugees, all Arab Palestinians live in the territories occupied by the Israeli Army during this war, and these territories include all the area of Palestine as it existed under the British Mandate until 1948.
The question of what to do with these territories is, therefore, bound up with the question whether to recognize the Palestinian-Arab nation and deal with it or disregard its existence.
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Today the Israeli government insists that the present situation-the precarious cease-fire-can be changed only if the Arab governments start direct and open negotiations with Israel. Moreover, the Israeli government refuses to state, or even to hint, what its condition for peace may be. It says that only during the official, direct negotiations with the Arab governments will it state these conditions.
This very comfortable and expedient stand relieves the Israeli government of the necessity to decide upon peaceconditions, a task quite beyond the present Great Coalition, some of whose members could not agree to anything but full and outright annexation, while some of its other members could not tolerate annexation. Premier Eshkol who, like President Johnson, wants to be the personification of a great consensus, would like to keep this coalition intact until the elections of 1969, thereby postponing a move in any direction.
For the Arab states, direct negotiations as a first step are impossible. Such a repudiation of all the slogans which dominated the Arab world for fifty years cannot be the beginning of the road to peace, but rather the end of it. Many things-the solution of the Palestinian refugee problem, the neutralization of many other factors which poison the region-must come first.
Moreover, the Arab governments suspect that the call