the Arab-Palestinian nation." I proposed that two states embodying the two nations-Israel and the Republic of Palestine-should form a federation.
Only one other member voted for this resolution. But after the vote, twelve members, ranging from the rightwing Herut to the left-wing Mapam, and including a cabinet minister, approached me privately in the lobby, expressing their private support, adding wistfully: "I wish I could have voted for this resolution." By Israeli standards of party discipline, this was, of course, impossible, as all the great parties support the government policy of waiting for direct negotiations with the Arab states.
In a famous remark, Moshe Dayan has said that he is "waiting for the Arab leaders to ring his telephone." This is now official Israeli policy. The point is that this policy is aimed only at negotiations with existing Arab governments-and thus excludes automatically the one Arab people which has as yet no government, but who is the most directly concerned-the Palestinian people, with whom a solution can be worked out and implemented at once.
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In fact, three alternatives face Israel today, after the 1967 war.
The first is to give the occupied territories back to the neighboring Arab states. Very few Israelis think that that is either practical or desirable. At worst, it would mean that hostile Arab armies would appear again sooner or later in their old positions, ten miles from the seashore of Nethanya, fifteen miles from the heart of Tel Aviv, with future wars virtually inevitable. At best, if the Arab states do agree to some kind of peaceful settlement, it would mean that Israel would still be surrounded by the dispossessed Palestinian Arabs, longing for their own national identity, a cause for further trouble. The question