IS THE Ql'ESTION OF PALESTINE average o f 9.0 percent annually, helped by the British policy of forcing a Jewish majority on the country. In the year 1927 alone the increase reached the figure o f 28.7 percent, and in [934 it reached 25.9 percen t.15 The only way in which these brute, politically manipulated disproportions between natives and nonnatives could be made acccptable was by the rationale Balfour used. A superior idea to that o f sheer number and presence ought to rule in Palestine, and that idea— -Zionism— was the one given legitimacy right up until 1948, and after. For their part, the Zionists clearly saw themselves as the beneficiaries o f this view. Far from the Arab multitudes signifying an already inhabited land, to the early Zionist colonists these people were to be ignored. Different reasons were given, most o f them built on an assumption essentially identical with B alfour’s. A recent book about the Israelis, written by an Israeli, has described the blindness of the early- and mid-twentieth-century settlers in Palestine, without making the connection back to Balfour and the moral epistem ology o f im perialism ."' This blindness was as true of left-wing ideologues and movements like Ber Borochov and H a’poel H a’tzair as it was o f so-called romantic right-wingers like Vladim ir Jabotinsky and his Revisionists (Menachem Begin’s political ancestors). A t bottom , as A m os Elon has quite accurately shown, the Zionists considered the A rab problem as som ething either to be avoided com pletely, or denied (and hence attacked) com pletely. T here is no separat­ ing Balfour’s ideology from that o f Zionism , even though Zionist Jews perforce had a different feeling for, a different history and historical experience o f, ideas about Palestine. For all their differences (and they were numerous), both the British imperialist and the Zionist vision are united in playing down and even canccling out the Arabs in Palestine as somehow secondary and negligible. Both raise the moral importance of the visions very far above the mere presence o f natives on a piece o f immensely significant territory. A nd both visions (as we shall sec in Chapter Tw o) belong fundamentally to the ethos o f a European mission civilisatrice— nineteenth-century, colonialist, racist even— built on notions about the inequality