 by her enemies.
Mr. Ambassador, in its... ten years as a nation, Israel has been involved in repeated violence: major border incidents, two open wars with the Arabs, the first in forty-eight the last in fifty-six. What do you foresee for the next ten years? Do you foresee continuing violence?
EBAN: Well, Mr. Wallace, the last ten years have not only been years of violence. They have been incomparable years of joyous creation, of sovereignty restored, of the people gathered in, of a land revived, of democracy established, but there has also been violence imposed by the hostility of our neighbors. For our second decade, we devoutly hope for a period of peaceful consolidation.
We hope that there will be no recurrence of the violent conflicts which marked our first decade, but that we and our kindred neighboring people will devote all our efforts to the development of our respective countries and of our common region.
WALLACE: You say that you "Hope" for peace. Back in September '56, you called Egypt's President Nasser, Israel's most perilous adversary. Now today Colonel Nasser would seem to be even stronger; he is the head of the merged Egyptian and Syrian nations, he is apparently regaining the friendship of Saudi Arabia; the populations, if not the leadership, of Jordan and Iraq look to him for inspiration. How does this all affect Israel?
EBAN: Well, at present, Nasser's policy is one of acquiescence towards us, and there has been a relative tranquility on our frontier with him. Perhaps the memories of the Sinai expedition have had a salutory effect in causing him to avoid his previous belligerent provocations, but basically we have not changed our views on Nasser and Nasserism.
WALLACE: All over the Middle East too, though, will you not find that the huge majority of the Arab people are interested in the extermination of Israel?
EBAN: We find that the governments of Arab countries still articulate the aim of our extermination, but er... I think it is beyond their powers to achieve it and, of course, in any international system which respects law and morality, there must be resistance to any such policy.
WALLACE: Do you think that we are currently going through a lull before the storm? Our former secretary of the Air Force Thomas Finletter told Zionist leaders in America, just a month ago that the present Middle East situation is a lull before a possible storm and he added that we have good reason, he said, to be apprehensive over the ultimate direction of the Arab mergers.
EBAN: I think a great degree of vigilance is called for, so long as Arab policy continues to be devoted, if only verbally, to the vision of Israel's destruction. On the other hand, if this lull, as you call it, this tranquility can be preserved, if passions are calmed, if Israel gives an ever increasing demonstration of her permanence and stability, I don't exclude the possibility that the present lull might merge into a climate more conducive to peace.
WALLACE: Well... a lull... will emerge into a climate more conducive to peace if perhaps some of the issues behind the Arab-Israeli hostility can be settled. Let's take a look at them. First, the refugee problem: An estimated seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs were left homeless during the Arab-Israeli war of '48.
Israel refuses to readmit them; they live in bitterness and such men as historian Arnold Toynbee has said this, "The evil deeds committed by the Zionist Jews against the Arabs are comparable to crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis." How do you feel about that?
EBAN: Well, about Professor Toynbee's statement I can only repeat what I've written, that it is a monstrous blasphemy. Here he takes the massacre of millions of our men, women and children, and he compares it to the plight of Arab refugees alive, on their kindred soil, suffering certain anguish, but of course possessed of the supreme gift of life. This equation between massacre and temporary suffering which can easily be alleviated is, I think, a distortion of any historic perspective.
EBAN: But the refugee problem, Mr. Wallace, isn't the cause of tension. The refugee problem is the result of an Arab policy. An Arab policy which created the problem by the invasion of Israel, which perpetuates it by refusing to accommodate them into their expanding labor market, and which refuses to solve the problem which they have the full capacity to solve.
There is, I think, a basic immorality in this attitude of Arab governments to their own kinsmen whose plight they could relieve immediately, once the will to relieve it existed. All world opinion admits that the problem can only be solved on a regional basis by opening the vast resources of the Arab world to this Arab refugee population, and if there were such an effort on their part to approach a regional settlement, Israel would make its due and just contribution.
WALLACE: Of course, the problem of the refugees is allied with the problem of territorial expansion on the part of Israel. A major Arab spokesman here in the United States Dr. Faid Sai says this: He says, "The area of the territories held by Israel today exceeds by about 40 percent the area of the territories given Israel by the United Nations. Most of this added area, "he says" was taken by force and should therefore be relinquished by Israel."
EBAN: Well, I think this gentleman need not to lose any sleep at night worrying about whether the State of Israel is too big. Really there is nothing more grotesque or eccentric in the international life of our times, than the doctrine that little Israel, eight thousand square miles in area, should become even smaller in order that the vast Arab Empire should still further expand.
WALLACE: That involves what... what territory Israel took as result of the forty-eight war.
WALLACE: Under the terms of an armistice pending final settlement.
EBAN: Yes... yes, but in that final settlement, as it is written in the agreements, no changes can be accepted without the consent of both parties. So we are within our rights and they are within their rights in accepting or refusing any change, so there is nothing whatever illegal about any aspect of the present territorial question; but the moral issue is the most important here.
WALLACE: Well now, that's the point that I would like to talk to you, if I may. The fact remains, when we talk about morality... the fact remains that Israel benefited territorially from a war, from armed violence.
EBAN: Yes, I'm glad to say that I hope that whenever countries wage a war of aggression, as the Arab States did, that they should be the losers by waging that war of aggression.
WALLACE: Well, as a member of the Judaic Faith, which cherishes social justice and morality, do you believe that any country should profit territorially from violence?
EBAN: Mr. Wallace, I am not going into the history of other countries, and I am not going to analyze how the frontiers of countries which I have seen or in which I have served were achieved; but we have certainly achieved our territorial settlement as a result of agreements, not as a result of violence. It was they who decreed the method by which the present frontiers were achieved. They rejected the 1947 recommendation.
We said, "Let us have boundaries by international agreement"; they said, "Let us fix our boundaries by war," and they made the war. But following the war, we reached agreements and these agreements define our boundaries, and we... and they have agreed that they may not be changed except by mutual consent.
I will admit it isn't sponsored by any serious government but one does hear it -- the doctrine that this vast, sated, fat, huge, lavish Arab Empire should expand at the expense of tiny Israel. Nobody in the world need lie awake at night worrying about whether Israel is too big.
WALLACE: When you talk about the huge, sated, fat, Arab States, the eleven sovereign states, it is barely possible that you are guilty of some overstatement, there is also in that area tremendous poverty, tremendous desolation.
EBAN: Yes, I am speaking, Mr. Wallace, purely in territorial terms. They really have no reason to envy us our eight thousand square miles.
WALLACE: Mr. Ambassador, do you.... do you foresee further territorial expansion by Israel?
EBAN: Well I don't like the word "further" Mr. Wallace, because, as I have said, our present boundaries rest upon agreements beyond which we have not encroached, but we certainly do not desire to expand our frontiers. I doubt the reality of this issue. We are prepared to accept a guaranteed settlement with the Arab States on the present frontiers.
Are they so prepared? I wonder whether the issue isn't one of Arab expansion. Here sit I, the accredited representative of Israel, and I declare that Israel will sign a peace treaty with the Arab States on the present frontier. Now you get an Arab Ambassador sitting here to say that he will have a settlement with Israel on the present frontier, and you will really have a story.
WALLACE: Of course, there is one political party and a fairly substantial political party within Israel, the Herrad Party, with fifteen seats in your Parliament to the Ben Gurion Party's forty seats. One of the Herrad's major spokesmen, Dr. Joseph Sheckman, wrote this recently, he said, "Zionism is more than Israel, for Zionism Israel's present territory and population are but a partial accomplishment, and the Herrad party is