ZIONISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS 97 purposes— so too did Zionism dress the Jewish colonists in the system o f Jewish labor and Jewish land, whose uniform required that only Jews were acceptable. The power of the Zionist army did not reside in its leaders, nor in the arms it collected for its conquests and defense, but rather in the functioning o f a whole system, a series o f positions taken and held, as Weizmann says, in agriculture, culture, com m erce, and industry. In short, Zionism ’s ‘ ’com pany’’ was the transla­ tion o f a theory and a vision into a set of instruments for holding and developing a Jewish colonial territory right in the middle o f an indifferently surveyed and developed Arab territory. T he fascinating history o f the Zionist colonial apparatus, its “ com pany," cannot long detain us here, but at least some things about its workings need to be noted. The Second Zionist Congress meeting in Basel, Switzerland (August 1898) created the Jewish Colonial Trust Lim ited, a subsidiary of which was founded in Jaffa in 1903 and called the Anglo-Palestine C om pany. Thus began an agency whose role in the transform a­ tion o f Palestine was extraordinarily crucial. O ut o f the Colonial Trust in 1901 came the Jewish National Fund (JNF), em powered to buy land and hold it in trust for “ the Jewish people” ; the wording o f the original proposal was that the JNF would be “ a trust for the Jewish people, which . . . can be used exclusively for the purchase o f land in Palestine and Syria.” The JN F was always under the control o f the World Zionist Organization, and in 1905 the first land purchases were made. From its inception as a functioning body the JN F existed either to develop, buy, or lease land— only for Jews. A s W alter Lehn convincingly shows (in a major piece o f research on the JN F, on which I have relied for the details I mention h ere),'0 the Zionist goal was to acquire land in order to put settlers on it; thus in 1920, after the Palestinian Land D evelopm ent Com pany had been founded as an agency o f the JN F, a Palestine Foundation Fund was created to organize immigra­ tion and colonization. A t the same time, emphasis was placed institutionally on acquiring and holding lands for “ the Jewish