Issues and Answers – Barbara Walters

For the first time in history, the Arabs in Judea and Samaria would enjoy such a situation. They didn't have it under Jordanian or Egyptian rule in Judea, Samaria or in the Gaza Strip. We took the initiative to suggest autonomy. It's a novel human idea. And it was accepted, but it cannot be widened into a Palestinian state because we excluded it in advance. We never misled anybody. We said an independent Palestinian state would be a mortal danger to Israel and a Soviet base and a peril to the whole world in the heart of the Middle East from which you can go to the north, to east, to the south. In our situation, with the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan, with Ethiopia being under Soviet control, with southern Yemen, with the Russians and the Cubans there, with Angola and Mozambique being ruled by pro-Soviet governments, does the free world really need such a Soviet base in the middle, in the center of the Middle East? I think it would be the greatest folly of the free world. It would weaken, it would endanger the existence of the state of Israel. It would be another Munich if the rest would agree to it and we would never accept it, of course, but we said to openly at Camp David. Hence the idea of autonomy. Not a state. Autonomy.