THE g LEST ION OK PALESTINE extent this comm unity depends heavily on a remarkable tradition in the West of enmity toward Islam in particular and the Orient in general. I have documented this tradition in detail elsewhere, and I refer my reader to my study o f what I have called Orientalism for details and for an account o f a long, consistent history which culminates today in the fact, for exam ple, that practically the only ethnic group about whom in the West racial slurs are tolerated, even encouraged, is the A rabs.” The Arabs and Islam represent viciousness, veniality, degenerate vice, lechery, and stupidity in popular and scholar­ ly discourse. On this collective representation of the Arabs and Islam, Zionism , like its Western ideological parents, drew. How it drew and where it stood when it drew deserve attention here, because it is a perfect instance of how propaganda, politicized scholarship, and ideological information have pow er, imple­ ment policy, and, at the same time, can appear to be “ objective truth.” First o f all. the Zionists took it upon themselves as a partially “ Eastern" people who had em ancipated themselves from the worst Eastern excesses, to explain the Oriental Arabs to the W est, to assume responsibility for expressing what the Arabs were really like and about, never to let the Arabs appear equally with them as existing in Palestine. This method allowed Zionism always to seem both involved in and superior to the native realities o f Middle Eastern existence. A s an instance, consider this extraordinarily revealing letter o f May 30, 1918, from Weizmann to Balfour: It is with a great sense of responsibility that I am attempting to write to you about the situation here and about the problems which confront the Zionist Commission. . , . The Arabs, who are superficially clever and quick witted. worship one thing, and one thing only— power and success. Hence while it would be wrong to say that British prestige has suffered through the military stalemate it certainly has not increased, . . . The British Authorities , . , knowing as they do the treacherous nature of the Arab, they have to watch carefully and constantly that nothing should happen which might give the Arabs the slightest grievance or ground of