Maryville Daily Forum · 7 October 1972

CP-1972-028

Palestinian Political Aspirations Debated

By Francis Ofner / The Christian Science Monitor News Service

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Transcribed from the clipping

TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — A vigorous debate is under way here about how to deal in the long term with the political aspirations of Palestinian Arabs.

Three basic trends of Israeli thought are discernible: —One calls for creation of some state -like entity to fulfill Palestinian nationalist longings. —A second opposes any Palestinian political configuration in the region. —A third refuses to address itself to the problem at all, assuming that extensive involvement in such approaches will only distract Israel from what should be its foremost consideration, its own security.

The debate has been given a fresh twist by Egyptian President Sadat's proposal for a Palestinian government-in-exile. For, while the proposal is shrugged off here as wholly unrealistic and liable only to deepen the rifts between rival Palestinian groups, it lends a new topicality to the subject.

Proponents of a Palestinian entity have been buoyed by the current efforts of Arye Eliav, the past secretary-general of the governing Labor Party. In a series of appearances before party chapters around the country, Mr. Eliav is propounding his view that the occupied territories should be kept free of Jewish settlement. This restraint, argues Mr.

Eliav, would embolden those Palestinians who favor self-determination alongside a formal peace with Israel. A recent book by Mr. Eliav, based largely on this thesis, has become a best seller in Israel. It serves as a platform for his declared campaign to win a Cabinet seat in the next government.

A political leader with similar inclinations is Mordechai Bentov, who served under former Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkoi in the war Cabinets of 1948, 1956, and 1967. An Arabic translation of his book, “Israel, the Palestinians, and the Left,” has been receiving favorable response from a number of Palestinians on the west bank of the Jordan River.

The camp that opposes a Palestinian state includes three of Israel's most powerful leaders: Prime Minister Golda Meir, Foreign Minister Abba Eban, and Minister without Portfolio Israel Galili. All three have stated flatly that “there is no place for a third state in the region between the Iraqi border and the Mediterranean.”

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The same copy, in 1 other paper

• Fate of Palestinian Arabs Being Debated in Tel AvivThe Shreveport Times7 October 1972CP-1972-029

Their text and this one are nearly identical. Found by comparing transcriptions, not by reading them side by side, so this establishes that the text overlaps and not that these papers ran the same dispatch. How this was done.