9H T H E O lE S T IO N OK PALES! INK people.” This designation made it certain that a Zionist state would be unlike any other in that it was not to be the state of its citizens, but rather the state of a whole people most of whieh was in Diaspora. Aside from making the non-Jewish people of the state into second-class citizens, it made the Zionist organizations, and later the state, retain a large extraterritorial power in addition to the vital territorial possessions over which the state was to have sovereignty. Even the land acquired by the JNF was— as John Hope Simpson said in 1930— “ extraterritorialized. It ceases to be land from which the Arab can gain any advantage either now or at any time in the future," There was no corresponding Arab effort to institution­ alize Arab landholding in Palestine, no thought that it might be necessary to create an organization for holding lands “ in perpetuity" for the “ A ra b people,” above all, no information­ al, money-raising, lobbying work done— as the Zionists did in Europe and the United States— to expand “ Jewish" territory and, paradoxically, give it a Jewish presence and an interna­ tional, almost metaphysical status as well. The Arabs mistak­ enly thought that owning the land and being on it were enough. Even with all this sophisticated and farsighted effort, the JNF acquired only 936,000 dunams* of land in the almost half-century of its existence before Israel appeared as a state; the total land area of mandate Palestine was 26.323,000 dunams. Together with the small amount of land held hy private Jewish owners, Zionist landholding in Palestine at the end of 1947 was 1,734,000 dunams, that is, 6.59 percent of the total area. After 1940, when the mandatory authority restrict­ ed Jewish land ownership to specific zones inside Palestine, there continued to be illegal buying (and selling) within the 65 percent of the total area restricted to Arabs. Thus when the partition plan was announced in [947 it included land held illegally by Jews, which was incorporated as a fait accompli inside the borders of the Jewish state. An d after Israel announced its statehood, an impressive series of laws legally assimilated huge tracts of Arab land (whose proprietors had become refugees, and were pronounced “ absentee landlords” * A dunam is r o u g h l y a q u a r t e r o f a n acre.