_____________ ONE_____________ THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE i Palestine and the Palestinians Until roughly the last thirty years o f the nineteenth century, everything to the east o f an imaginary line drawn somewhere between G reece and Turkey was called the O rient. A s a designation made in Europe, “ the O rient” for many centuries represented a special m entality, as in the phrase “ the O riental m ind," and also a set o f special cultural, political, and even racial characteristics (in such notions as the Oriental despot, Oriental sensuality, splendor, inscrutability). But mainly the Orient represented a kind o f indiscriminate generality for Europe, associated not only with difference and otherness, but with the vast spaces, the undifferentiated masses o f mostly colored people, and the rom ance, exotic locales, and mystery o f “ the marvels o f the E ast.” A nyone familiar with the political history of the late Victorian period, how ever, will know that the vexing, mostly political “ Eastern Q uestion,” as it was called, tended then to replace “ the O rien t" as a subject of concern. B y 1918 it is estimated that European powers were in colonial occupation o f about 85 percent o f the globe, o f which a large segment belonged to the regions form erly known simply as O riental.' The romance o f the O rient was thus succeeded by the problems o f dealing with the O rient, first in competition with other European powers maneuvering there and second with the colonial people themselves in their