% INTRODUCTION we have begun, I think, to construct a political identity and will o f our ow n; we have developed a rem arkable resilience and an even more remarkable national resurgence; we have gained the support o f all the peoples o f the Third W orld; above all, despite the fact that we are geographically dispersed and fragm ented, despite the fact that we are without a territory of our ow n, we have been united as a people largely because the Palestinian idea (which we have articulated out o f our own experience o f dispossession and exlusionary oppression) has a coherence to which we have all responded with positive enthusiasm. It is the full spectrum o f Palestinian failure and subsequent return in their lived details that I have tried to describe in this book. Y e t I suppose that to many o f my readers the Palestinian problem imm ediately calls forth the idea o f ‘’terrorism ,” and it is partly because o f this invidious association that I do not spend much time on terrorism in this book. T o have done so would have been to argue defensively, either by saying that such as it has been our “ terrorism ” is justified, or by taking the position that there is no such thing as Palestinian terrorism as such. The facts are considerably more com plex, how ever, and some of them at least bear some rehearsal here. In sheer numerical terms, in brute numbers o f bodies and property destroyed, there is absolutely nothing to com pare between what Zionism has done to Palestinians and what, in retaliation. Palestinians have done to Zionists, T he almost constant Israeli assault on Palestinian civilian refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan for the last twenty years is only one index o f these com pletely asymmetrical records o f destruction. W hat is much worse, in my opinion, is the hypocrisy o f Western (and certainly liberal Zionist) journalism and intellectual discourse, which have barely had anything to say about Zionist terror. 1 Could anything be less honest than the rhetoric o f outrage used in reporting “ A ra b ” terror against “ Israeli civilians" or "tow n s" and "villages” or "schoolchildren,” and the rhetoric of neutrality em ployed to describe “ Israeli” attacks against “ Palestinian positions,” by which no one could know that Palestinian refugee camps in South Lebanon are being named?