Summary
A Mapai leader and MK whose speech in the Knesset foreign-policy debate of 17 December 1959 is quoted in Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace as a franker Mapai analysis of the refugee problem than the Foreign Minister’s official position (Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.469-470).
Details
- Hacohen: “The Sudeten Germans were not a majority in Czechoslovakia. They were a minority. Our country was a special case to which the Arabs were very sensitive, it was the refugees who were the majority and not the minority [!]. The nation that suddenly turned into refugees had been here for many generations and hundreds of years, with a feeling that it was not living on a volcano” (Knesset Records 23/124, 17/12/59, quoted at Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace, PDF p.469).
- He held the problem would be fought “with the constructive enterprise of our State and the ingathering of the exiles, and with excellent possibilities for the absorption of the Arabs in Arab states”, while insisting: “Historical forces that are at work here must be recognized, and we should seek means and schemes to overcome them and not to pretend that they do not exist” — greeted by a General Zionist heckler’s “The wise are careful what they say!” (PDF p.470). The book comments: “These words, together with the catcalls from the General Zionist benches, clarify the nature of the problem more than all the books that have been written about the subject.”