KJ THE y l LSIION OK PALESTINE The "in ven tory" o f Palestinian experience that I am trying to take here is based on the simple truth that the exultant or (later) the terrorized Jews who arrived in Palestine were seen essentially as foreigners whose proclaimed destiny was to create a state for Jews. What o f the Arabs who were there? was the question we must feel ourselves asking now. What we will discover is that everything positive from the Zionist standpoint looked absolutely negative from the perspective of the native A rab Palestinians. For they could never be fit into the grand vision. Not that "vision " was m erely a theoretical matter; it was that and, as it was later to determine the character and even the details of Israeli government policy toward the native Arah Palestinians, “ vision" was also the way Zionist leaders looked at the Arabs in order later (and certainly at that moment) to deal with them. Thus, as I said earlier, I have in mind the whole dialectic between theory and actual day-to-day effectiveness. My prem­ ise is that Israel developed as a social polity out of the Zionist thesis that Palestine’s colonization was to be accomplished simultaneously for and by Jews and by the displacement of the Palestinians; m oreover, that in its conscious and declared ideas about Palestine, Zionism attempted first to minimize, then to elim inate, and then, all else failing, finally to subjugate the natives as a way o f guaranteeing that Israel would not be simply the state o f its citizens (which included Arabs, of course) but the state o f “ the whole Jewish peop le," having a kind of sovereignty over land and peoples that no other state possessed or possesses, (t is this anom aly that the Arab Palestinians have since been trying both to resist and provide an alternative for. One can learn a great deal from pronouncements made by strategically important Zionist leaders whose job it was, after Herzl, to translate the design into action. Chaim Weizmann comes to mind at once, as much for his extraordinary person­ ality as for his brilliant successes in bringing Zionism up from an idea to a conquering political institution. His thesis about the land o f Palestine is revealing in the extent to which it repeats Herzl: