w I ! IK gl'ESTION OF PALESTINE word. . . . Except in very rare instances it is a regrettable fact that this defect is enlarged rather than diminished by contact with European civilization. The second is lack of mental initiative. . . . Unless impelled from the outside the native seldom branches out from a recognized groove and this mental lethargy is characteristic of his mind.37 This is C , L, T em p le’s Native Races and Their Rulers ( 1918); its author was an assistant to Frederick Lugard in governing Nigeria and, like W eizm ann, he was less a proto-Nazi racist than a liberal Fabian in his outlook. For Tem ple as for W eizm ann. the realities were that natives belonged to a stationary, stagnant culture. Incapable therefore o f appreciating the land they lived on, they had to be prodded, perhaps even dislocated by the initiatives o f an advanced European culture. N ow certainly Weizmann had the additional rationalizations behind him of reconstituting a Jewish state, saving Jews from anti-Semitism, and so on. But so far as the natives were concerned, it could not have mattered initially whether the Europeans they faced in the colony were English­ men or European Jews. Then too, as far as the Zionist in Palestine or the Britisher in A frica was concerned, he was realistic, he saw facts and dealt with them, he knew the value o f truth. Notwithstanding the “ fact” o f long residence on a native territory, the non-European was always in retreat from truth. European vision meant the capacity for seeing not only what was there, but what could be there: hence the Weizmann-Ruppin exchange about Jaffa and Tel A viv. The specific temptation before the Zionist in Palestine was to believe— and plan for— the possibility that the A rab natives would not really be there, which was doubtless a proven eventuality (a) when the natives would not acknowledge Jewish sovereignty over Palestine and (b) when after 1948 they became legal outsiders on their land. But the success o f Zionism did not derive exclusively from its bold outlining o f a future state, or from its ability to see the natives for the negligible quantities they were or might becom e. Rather, I think, Zionism 's effectiveness in making its