INTRODUCTION xttr chronicles, and the like. This is true o f the Palestinians, and it accounts for the lack o f a m ajor authoritative text on Palestin­ ian history. I have not tried to supply this lack here, for plainly evident reasons. W hat I have tried to do is to show that the Palestinian experience is an important and concretc part of history, a part that has largely been ignored both by the Zionists who wished it had never been there, and by the Europeans and Am ericans who have not really known what to do with it. I have tried to show that the Muslim and Christian Palestinians who lived in Palestine for hundreds o f years until they were driven out in 1948, were unhappy victims o f the same movement whose whole aim had been to end the victimization o f Jews by Christian Europe. Y e t it is precisely because Zionism was so admirably successful in bringing Jews to Palestine and constructing a nation for them, that the world has not been concerned with what the enterprise meant in loss, dispersion, and catastrophe for the Palestinian natives. Som e­ thing like an ironic double vision is therefore necessary now in order to see both the very well-known success and the far less known disaster which Hannah A rendt has portrayed as fol­ lows: After the [Second World] war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved— namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory— but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.2 A s I say throughout the book, whereas Israel and its history have been celebrated without interruption, the actuality o f Palestinians, with lives being led, small histories endured, aspirations felt, has only recently been conceded an existence. Y et all o f a sudden, the Palestinian question now seeks an answer; W orld opinion has dem anded that this hitherto