THE QUESTION O f PALESTINE 21 said above, by its destruction, blocking, and confinement in Palestine, and its blocking and confinement in the councils of the world; in addition, the Zionists were able to diffuse their views and their reality over the views and reality of the Palestinian Arabs, A negative project— denial and blocking— entailed an equal and opposite positive project— diffusion, I am not speaking here about mere propaganda, which, were it to have depended principally upon lies about Palestine, would never have brought Zionism to its realization in Israel. What concerns me a great deal more is the strength of the process o f diffusion whose main focus was the Zionist coloniza­ tion o f Palestine, its successes, its feats, its remarkable institutions; just as today the strength o f Israeli information is its admiring self-regard and the celebration o f its “ pioneering" spirit, which Am ericans in particular have found it very easy to identify with. An intrinsic aspect o f diffusive strength has been a systematic repression o f the A rab reality in Palestine, Most accounts o f the kibbutz, for exam ple, leave out the facts that even before the state o f Israel came into being (and o f course after), Arabs were never admitted as mem bers, that chcap (A rab or Oriental Jewish) hired labor is essential to kibbutz functioning, that “ socialist” kibbutzim were and are estab­ lished on land confiscated from A ra b s.30 Rather than attempt in advance to answer the charges that might be made about Zionist policy toward the A rab natives in Palestine, Zionist spokesmen simply said nothing about them. In the case of the kibbutz, therefore, the institution appeared to grow and prosper more or less spontaneously in an uninhabited land, where enterprising Jewish immigrants hit upon the otherwise quite remarkable social unit which was the kibbutz. And so it went in Palestine with such instruments as Avoda Ivrit (Jewish Labor), whose purpose, according to A m os Elon, was aimed arthe establishment of a completely separate economic sector for the ncwcomers [the Jewish arrivals in Palestine as part of the Zionist project]. Native labor must not be “ exploited” in the reconstruction of the country by the Jews.