Theoretical stance
His anti-Zionism was based on two main reproaches: pretending to impose on all people of Judaic descent all over the world an identity and a nationalist ideology, and judaizing territories at the cost of expulsion and domination of the Palestinians. Hence, in his book Israël and the Arabs in 1968, he considered the Palestinians as the single national fact in the Palestinian territories:
The Arabs of Palestine used to have the same rights over Palestinian territory as the French exercise in France and the English in England. These rights have been violated without any provocation on their part. There is no evading this simple fact.
Elsewhere, he emphasized that my uncompromising condemnation of the errors and crimes committed under the aegis of the Zionist movement, in contradistinction to the apologies for these things by my opponents, has given me the right to criticize more or less analogous ideas and practices among the Arabs, who understandably are not interested in obviously biased discourses. For my part, I have been able to try to explain to Arab audiences, to Arab public opinion, that the behaviour of the Zionists, although surely meriting criticism, does belong to the gamut of human conduct. I have said and reiterated, for example before three commissions convoked by the Egyptian Popular Assembly in late 1969, that ... I deplored the historical error of the creation of the state of Israel on Arab land, but that a new nationality or ethnic group with a culture of its own now exists there, and not a religious community that could as well adopt the Arabic language and Arab culture, nor a heterogeneous collection of gangs of occupiers who could be sent back where they came from with the greatest of ease."
His approach to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict included a call for peaceful negotiations between Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Israel could not be regarded only as a colonial-settler state but a national fact too. Israeli Jews had collective rights that the Palestinians had to honour:
If there are two or more ethnic groups in the same country, and if the danger of the domination of one by the other is to be avoided, then both these groups must be represented as distinct communities at the political level, and each must be accorded the right to defend its interests and aspirations.
That is the reason why he disagreed with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), warning them against the illusion based on the Algerian FLN guerilla warfare which had driven out French "colons". At the same time, he urged the Israelis to stop pretending to be part of Europe and accept being a part of the Middle East, then, Israelis have to learn to live with their neighbours, by reckoning the injustices made against the Palestinians and adopting a language of conciliation and compromise.