20 THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE for the Paris Pcace C onference, Sylvain L6vi (a distinguished French Orientalist— the profession is important for the argu­ ment o f this book) spoke on behalf o f the Zionist delegation; he argued “ that, though the work o f the Zionists was o f great significance from the moral point o f view, Palestine was a small and poor land with a population o f 600,000 A rabs, and the [incoming] Jews, having a higher standard o f living, would tend to dispossess th e m ."’" A ccording to Weizmann, this embar­ rassed the Zionists since, as he was later to say, “ the world would judge the Jewish state [and presumably the Zionist movement] by what it shall do with the A ra b s,” 19 For indeed it was the world that made the success o f Zionism possible, and it was Zionism ’s sense o f the world as supporter and audience that played a considerable practical role in the struggle for Palestine. Not all the world had Balfour’s callous disregard o f natives, although it is also true that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries even anti-imperialists like John Hobson believed in the existence o f “ subject races” whose opinions did not count very high on a list o f priorities. Nevertheless the Zionists and even the British knew that somehow the natives would appear— and by appear I mean something little more than that the natives would become physically perceptible, if nothing else, to observers—-and by appearing would make their resistance known to the world. It was not lost on the British and the Zionists that according to the finest A rab study o f the struggle for independence ( The Arab Awakening by G eorge Antonius), the A rab renaissance would make Arabs aware o f the impossible contradiction between their plans for themselves and for their territory (including Palestine, of course) and the plans advanced by Balfour, the Zionists, and the French. M oreover, most of the Jews of the w orld, then as now, were not in Palestine but in “ the w orld," defined as the European/American world. The task then became to convert Palestine into a Jewish state, without at the same time making it possible for the world to take seriously (or even later to know about) the natives' protest. T he systematic denial o f a substan­ tial native A rab presence in Palestine was accom panied, as I