THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE 15 claims to have “ liberated” ) is i .7 million; o f them half a million are part o f prc-1967 Israel. The transformation o f Palestine which resulted in Israel has been an extraordinarily expensive project-—especially for the A rab Palestinians. II Palestine and the L ib er a l West A ll the transformative projects for Palestine, including Zionism , have rationalized the denial o f present reality in Palestine with some argument about a “ higher" (or better, more worthy, more modern, more fitting; the com paratives are almost infinite) interest, cause, or mission. These “ higher” things entitle their proponents not only to claim that the natives of Palestine, such as they are, are not worth consider­ ing and therefore nonexistent; they also feel entitled to claim that the natives of Palestine, and Palestine itself, have been superseded definitively, transformed com pletely and beyond recall, and this even while those same natives have been demonstrating exactly the opposite. Here again the Arab Palestinian has been pitted against an undeniably superior antagonist whose consciousness o f him self and of the Palesti­ nian is exactly, positionally, superior. A m ong the many examples o f this expressed and dem onstrated superiority there is naturally the Balfour D eclaration, made in N ovem ber 1917 by the British Governm ent in the form o f a letter to Lord Rothschild (who represented Zionist interests for the occa­ sion), in which the government undertook to “ view with favour the establishment in Palestine o f a national home for the Jewish people.” W hat is important about the declaration is, first, that it has long formed the juridical basis o f Zionist claims to Palestine and, second, and more crucial for our purposes here, that it was a statement whose positional force can only be appreciated when the dem ographic or human realities of Palestine are kept clearly in mind. That is, the declaration was made (a) by a European power, (b) about a non-European territory, (c) in a flat disregard o f both the presence and the