10 THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE o f the Crusades, as well as a place whose very name (and the endless historical naming and renaming o f the place) has been an issue o f doctrinal importance. A s 1 said above, to call the place Palestine and not, say, Israel or Zion is already an act of political will. This in part explains the insistence in much pro-Zionist writing on the dubious assertion that Palestine was used only as an administrative designation in the Roman Em pire, and never since— except o f course during the British M andate period after 1922. The point there has been to show that Palestine too is also an interpretation, one with much less continuity and prestige than Israel, But here wc see another instance o f the same mechanism em ployed by Lamartine: using a future or past dream to obliterate the realities lying between past and future. The truth is, o f course, that if one were to read geographers, historians, philosophers, and poets who wrote in A rabic from the eighth century on , one would find references to Palestine; to say nothing o f innumerable references to Palestine in European literature from the Middle A ges to the present. The point may be a small on e, but it serves to show how epistem ologically the name of, and o f course the very presence o f bodies, in Palestine are— because Palestine carries so heavy an imaginative and doctrinal freight— transmuted from a reality into a nonreality, from a presence into an absence. My more important point is that so far as the A rab Palestinian is concerned, the Zionist project for, and conquest of, Palestine was simply the most successful and to date the most protracted o f many such European projects since the M iddle A ges. I say this as a relatively simple historical statem ent, without at this stage wishing to say anything about the com parative intrinsic merit o f Zionism against that of earlier projects. Palestine becam e a predom inantly A rab and Islamic country by the end o f the seventh century. A lm ost immediately thereafter its boundaries and its characteristics— including its name in A rab ic, Filastin— became known to the entire Islamic w orld, as much for its fertility and beauty as for its religious significance. In the late tenth century, for exam ple, we find this passage in Arabic: