THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE 5 Meir’s flat assertion in 1969 that the Palestinians did not exist. T he fact o f the matter is that today Palestine does not exist, except as a memory or, more importantly, as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act o f sustained popular will. M y subject in this essay will be all those things about Palestine, although I will not for a moment pretend that Palestine, for anyone now living and writing in the W est, is not “ the question o f .” Y e t even to admit that is already to venture into a relatively unfamiliar field. For too many people who read the press, who watch television and listen to the radio, who pretend to more than a smattering o f political know ledge, who confess to expert opinions on international controversy, the Middle East is essentially the Arab-Israeli conflict (dispute, problem , struggle, etc.) and little more. There is a consider­ able reductiveness in this view, o f course, but what is really wrong with it is that most o f the time it literally blocks Palestine from having anything to do with the Middle East of today, which since Septem ber 1978 seems entirely sym bolized by Menachem Begin, A nw ar al-Sadat, and Jimmy Carter locked up together at Cam p D avid. A considerable m ajority of the literature on the Middle East, at least until 1968, gives one the impression that the essence o f what goes on in the M iddle East is a series o f unending wars between a group o f A rab countries and Israel. That there had been such an entity as Palestine until 1948, or that Israel’s existence— its “ indepen­ dence,” as the phrase goes— was the result o f the eradication o f Palestine: o f these truths beyond dispute most people who follow events in the M iddle East are more or less ignorant, or unaw are.2 But what is most important is the continuing avoidance or ignorance o f the existence today o f about four million Muslim and Christian A rabs who are known to themselves and to others as Palestinians. T hey make up the question o f Palestine, and if there is 110 country called Palestine it is not becausc there are no Palestinians. There are, and this essay is an attempt to put their reality before the reader. M uch recent history involves the Palestinians, and like their present actuality, it is a history dispersed in likely and unlikely places. N o foreign affairs symposium, scholarly b ook, or moral