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Israel realizes that absorption of more than 1,000,000 Arabs into Israeli life could be dangerous. "All the Jews will be getting Ph.D.s," frets Premier Meir, "and the Arabs will be doing the dirty work." Defense Minister Moshe Dayan explains that "we do not want to exploit them or colonialize them or turn them into Jews. We just want the right to be there and to let them run their own lives, with full rights—but not to depend on their agreement, because we will not get it. There is no point in trying to get agreement with them, but there is a point to try and say: All right, we know what you think and you know what we are doing. As things are like that anyway, how about trying to drill for water or have a mutual bus company taking tourists around?"
Even in such enlightened talk, Israelis inevitably refer to the Arabs as "they"—signifying an Israeli sense of difference and superiority. Not a few Israelis, mainly intellectuals, worry about the ultimate effect of the occupier's role on the national character. There has always been a small but gnawing guilt feeling that Israel acquired some of its richest lands because the earlier Palestinian owners were, in one way or another, forced out. Throughout their history, the Jews have lived too often as aliens in someone else's land, at someone else's mercy, to be entirely at ease in their new role as occupiers. However necessary and fair-minded the Israeli administration of the occupied territories may be, there are Israelis to whom the idea of Jews ruling anyone against his will is repugnant.