last three generations, since the appearance of the first Zionist settlers in Palestine, it has been our side which has held the initiative, the Arabs reacting to our actions. It is up to us to change, by deliberate steps, the climate of hatred and suspicion in the Middle East.
We can start this by helping the Palestinian Arabs to set up their state and by settling the refugees. We can assume a completely new stance in the Region by supporting Arab nationalist aims in spirit and action, with a hundred small gestures, each insignificant by itself but contributing, in sum, to a gradual change in the atmosphere. By truly integrating the Israeli Arabs into the framework of our state and turning it into a pluralistic society, we can show the Arab world a new face-Israeli Arabs representing Israel, side by side with Hebrew Israelis, in all fields of endeavor, from the General Assembly of the United Nations to the playground of international soccer.
Nothing will change overnight. Each of our acts will be suspect in the beginning. Each will be denounced as a new Zionist plot. But slowly, by concerted action, suspicion will be dispelled and confidence gained, providing the psychological framework for new Arab policies.
* * *
Yet time is important.
An uneasy cease-fire prevails along the frozen fronts of the recent war, a cease-fire fraught with dangers, broken by intermittent shots.
The armies confronting each other across the cease-fire lines are arming quickly. A new war is asumed by all of them as a virtual certainty, with only the exact timing still in doubt. But the next war, or the one after it, will be quite different from the recent one, so different, in fact, that the blitzkrieg of June 1967, will look, in comparison, like a humanitarian exercise.
Nuclear weapons, missiles of all types, are nearing the Semitic scene. Their advent is inevitable. If the vicious