I (IF. yi'KSTION OP PALESTINE something constructed for us for no other reason than either to keep Arabs out or to subjugate them. The internal solidity and cohesion o f Israel, o f Israelis as a people and as a society, have for the most part, therefore, eluded the understanding of Arabs generally. Thus to the walls constructed by Zionism have been added walls constructed by a dogm atic, almost theological brand of Arabism . Israel has seemed essentially to be a rhetorical tool provided by the West to harass the Arabs. What this perception entailed in the A rab states has been a policy o f repression and a kind o f thought control. For years il was forbidden ever to refer to Israel in print; this sort of censorship led quite naturally to the consolidation o f police states, the absence o f freedom o f expression, and a whole set o f human rights abuses, all supposedly justified in the name of “ fighting Zionist aggression,” which meant that any form of oppression at home was acceptable because it served the “ sacred cause” of “ national security.” For Israel and Zionists everyw here, the results o f Zionist apartheid have been equally disastrous. The Arabs were seen as synonymous with everything degraded, fearsom e, irrational, and brutal. Institutions whose humanistic and social (even socialist) inspiration were manifest for Jews— the kibbutz, the Law o f Return, various facilities for the acculturation of immigrants— were precisely, determ inedly inhuman for the A rabs. In his body and being, and in the putative emotions and psychology assigned to him, the A rab expressed whatever by definition stood outside, beyond Zionism. T he denial o f Israel by the Arabs was, 1 think, a far less sophisticated and com plex thing than the denial, and later the minimization, of the A rabs by Israel. Zionism was not only a reproduction of nineteenth-century European colonialism , for all the community of ideas it shared with that colonialism. Zionism aimed to create a society that could never be anything but “ native” (with minimal ties to a metropolitan center) at the same time that it determined not to come to terms with the very natives it was replacing with new (but essentially Europe­ an) “ natives.” Such a substitution was to be absolutely econom ical; no slippage from A rab Palestinian to Israeli