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If you feel they are indefensible.
It is seldom my practice to take a stand on principle, and this is not one of those rare occassions. Here, as is often the case in conflicts, expediency and principle find confluence in a common course, that is in the long view the most ruthless that can be adopted. It is most desireable for the state of Israel to do well by its Arab citizens, and gain and hold their loyalty and affection; their potential as "Fifth Columnists" is far too great to be ignored, and it is always an easier and more palatable business to win loyalty and affection than to instill fear, and it has much less potential for a damaging recoil.
Title to the greatest portion of land in Israel is held by a trust that originated in the earliest days of the Zionist project, when land in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine was being purchased by funds raised among the world's Jews. It was, of course, intended that such lands purchased be used for settlement and economic support of Jews emmigrating to Palestine.This organization has continued to function through the period of statehood, as have many organizations that originated in the Zionist movement: this one persisted in part because Israel was initially organized on Socialist lines, and it was desired that land be treated as a collective possession of the Jewish people in a Jewish state. Such a thing, of course, becomes in many ways a government bureau, but remains in other ways a Party organization, as it was origionally. Its origional charter, to secure land for the settlement and economic support of Jews, remains in force. Since the establishment of Israel as a state in 1948, a good deal of land over and above that purchased in the Mandate has come under this organization's control, with state lands of the Mandatory authority, and lands whose owners fled in '48 that was condemned as unoccupied by the state, being leading sources of acreage.
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