ZIONISM tHOM THE STANDPOINT OfrLITS VICTIMS 103 struction of houses and villages. After several decades of treating the Arabs as if they were not there at all, Zionism came fully into its own by actively destroying as many Arab traces as it could. From a nonentity in theory to a nonentity in legal fact, the Palestinian Arab lived through the terrible modulation from one sorry condition to the other, fully able to witness, but not effectively to communicate, his or her own civil extinction in Palestine. First he was an inconsequential native; then he became an absent one; then inside Israel after 1948 he acquired the juridical status of a less real person than any individual person belonging to the "Jewish people," whether that person was present in Israel or not. The ones who left the country in terror became “ refugees," an abstraction faithfully taken account of in annual United Nations resolutions calling upon Israel— as Israel had promised— to take them back, or compensate them for their losses. The list of human indignities and, by any impartial standard, the record of immoral subjugation prac­ ticed by Israel against the Palestinian A ra b remnant is blood­ curdling, particularly if counterpointed with that record one hears the chorus of praise to Israeli democracy. A s if to pay that wretched 120,000 (now about 650,000) for its temerity in staying where it did not belong, Israel took over the E m er­ gency Defense Regulations, used by the British to handle Jews and Arabs during the mandate period from 1922 to 1948. The regulations had been a justifiably favorite target of Zionist political agitation, but after 1948 they were used, unchanged, by Israel against the Arabs, For example, in those parts of Israel that still retain an Arab majority, an anachronistic but no less effective and detailed policy of “ Judaization” goes on apace. Thus just as Ruppin and Weizmann in the early days foresaw a Tel Aviv to "outstrip” A ra b Jaffa, the Israeli government of today creates a new Jewish Nazareth to outstrip the old Arab town. Here is the project described by an Israeli in 1975: Upper Nazareth, which was created some fifteen years ago, “ in order to create a counterweight to the Arab Nazareth,"

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