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Whatever happens in the immediate future, Begin has plenty of trouble on his hands. His citizenry is dispirited, his country's inflation rate is running at about 100%, and the popularity of the opposition Labor Party is once more on the rise. The lesson of Elon Moreh is that the aspirations of a few thousand nationalist fanatics do not necessarily coincide with the needs of the Israeli people. But it is a lesson that Menachem Begin does not appear ready or willing to accept.
Further evidence of the Israeli government's sensitivity on the Palestinian question came to light last week when it became known that a ministerial censorship committee had prevented former Premier Yitzhak Rabin from including in his memoirs a first-person account of the expulsion of 50,000 Palestinian civilians from their homes near Tel Aviv during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Some of Rabin's former colleagues disputed his account; the censors' action was presumably based on the argument that any discussion of the subject by former officials tends to damage Israel's reputation overseas and to bolster Arab claims to territory that has long since become part of Israel.