4 THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE struggles for independence. From being a place “ out there,” the Orient became a place o f extraordinarily urgent, and precise detail, a place o f numerous subdivisions. O ne o f these, the Middle East, survives today as a region of the Orient connoting infinite com plexities, problem s, conflicts. A t its center stands what I shall be calling the question o f Palestine. When we refer to a subject, place, or person in the phrase “ the question o f,” we imply a number o f different things. For exam ple, one concludes a survey o f current affairs by saying, “ A nd now I come to the question o f X ." T he point here is that X is a m atter apart from all the others, and must be dealt with apart. Secondly, “ the question o f ’ is used to refer to some long-standing, particularly intractable and insistent problem: the question o f rights, the Eastern question, the question of free speech. Thirdly, and most uncommonly, “ the question o f ’ can be used in such a way as to suggest that the status of the thing referred to in the phrase is uncertain, questionable, unstable: the question o f the existence o f a Loch Ness monster, for exam ple. The use o f “ the question o f ’ in connection with Palestine implies all three types o f meaning. Like the Orient of which it is a part, Palestine exists in another world from the habitual Atlantic one. Palestine is also in some way what the most thorny international problem o f postwar life is all about: the struggle over, for, and in Palestine, which has absorbed the energies o f more people than any other for a comparable period o f time. Finally— and this is a main reason for this book— Palestine itself is a much debated, even contested, notion. The very mention o f the name on the one hand constitutes for the Palestinian and his partisans an act of important and positive political assertion, and on the other, for the Palestinian’s enemies it is an act o f equally assertive but much more negative and threatening denial. W e need only recall here that demonstrations on the streets o f major Am erican cosmopolitan centers during the late sixties and much o f the seventies were led by factions saying either "Palestine is" or “ There is no Palestine." In Israel today it is the custom officially to refer to the Palestinians as “ so-called Palestinians,” which is a somewhat gentler phrase than Golda