THE QlESTtON OK PALESTINE 1 presence? No matter how backward, uncivilized, and silent they were, the Palestinian Arabs were on the land. Read through any eighteenth- or nineteenth-century account of travels in the Orient— Chateaubriand, M ark Tw ain, Lam ar­ tine, Nerval, Disraeli— and you will find chronicled there accounts o f A rab inhabitants on the land o f Palestine. A ccord ­ ing to Israeli sources, in 1822 there were no more than 24,000 Jews in Palestine, less than to percent o f the w'hole, over­ whelmingly A rab population. For the most part, it is true, these Arabs w'ere usually described as uninteresting and undeveloped, but at least they were there. Yet almost always, because the land was Palestine and therefore controlled, in the Western mind, not by its present realities and inhabitants but by its glorious, portentous past and the seem ingly limitless potential o f its (possibly) just as glorious future, Palestine was seen as a place to be possessed anew and reconstructed. Alphonse de Lamartine is a perfect case in point. He visited in 1833 and produced a several-hundred-page narrative o f his travels. Voyage en Orient. When he published the w ork, he affixed to it a Resume politique in the form of a series o f sug­ gestions to the French government. Although in the Voyage pro­ per he had detailed numerous encounters with A rab peasants and town dwellers in the Holy Land, the Resume announced that the territory was not really a country (presumably its inhabi­ tants not ''re a l" citizens), and therefore a marvelous place for an imperial or colonial project to be undertaken by France.4 What Lamartine does is to cancel and transcend an actual reality— a group o f resident Arabs— by means of a future wish— that the land be empty for developm ent by a more deserving power. It is precisely this kind o f thinking, almost to the letter, that informed the Zionist slogan formulated by Israel Zangw'ill for Palestine toward the end o f the century: a land without people, for a people without land. For Palestine has always played a special role in the imagination and in the political will of the W est, which is where hy common agreement modern Zionism also originated. Palestine is a place o f causes and pilgrimages. It was the prize