ZIONISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS 81 O r Stanley C o o k ’s view of the country: . , . rapid deterioration, which {it would seem) was only temporarily stopped by the energetic Crusaders. Modern travellers have often noticed the inherent weakness of the characters of the inhabitants and, like Robinson, have realized that, for the return of prosperity, "nothing is wanted but the hand of the man to till the ground.” O r, finally, R. A . S. Macalister: It is no exaggeration to say that throughout these long centuries the native inhabitants of Palestine do not appear to have made a single contribution of any kind whatsoever to material civilization. It was perhaps the most unprogressive country on the face of the earth. Its entire culture was derivative . . . 10 These, then, are some of the main points that must be made about the background of Zionism in European imperialist or colonialist attitudes. For whatever it may have done for Jews, Zionism essentially saw Palestine as the European imperialist did, as an empty territory paradoxically “ filled” with ignoble or perhaps even dispensable natives; it allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann quite clearly said after W orld War I, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a new Jewish state in Palestine, and it did not think except in negative terms o f “ the natives,” who were passively supposed to accept the plans made for their land; as even Zionist historians like Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel have em pirically shown, the ideas o f Jewish colonizers in Palestine (well before World War I) always met with unmistakable native resistance, not because the natives thought that Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners;11 m oreover, in form ulating the concept o f a Jewish nation “ reclaiming” its own territory, Zionism not only accepted the generic racial concepts o f European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually pcopied not by an advanced but by a backward people, over which it ought