THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE 2J had to be waged, and fuelled, and supplied, in the great capitals of the West, On the one hand, the native resistance to the Zionists was either played down or ignored in the W est; on the other, the Zionists made it their claim that Britain was blocking their greater and greater penetration o f Palestine, Betw een 1922 and 1947 the great issue witnessed by the world in Palestine was not, as a Palestinian would like to imagine, the struggle between natives and new colonists, but a struggle presented as being between Britain and the Zionists, T he full irony o f this remarkable e piste mo logical achievem ent— and I use the philosophical term because there is no other one adequate to expressing the sheer blotting out from knowledge o f almost a million natives— is enhanced when we rem em ber that in [948, at the moment that Israel declared itself a state, it legally owned a little more than 6 percent of the land of Palestine and its population o f Jews consisted of a fraction of the total Palestinian population. T he consistency o f this attitude and A v o d a Ivrit is almost total: Address the world as the aggrieved, with Britain (a colonial power) as your enemy; ignore the natives, and have nothing said about them, so long, objectively, as you cannot be seen directly to be exploiting them. T he diffusion o f Zionism in the W est, its subsequent replenishment by the W est, was spearheaded obviously enough by the Jewish communities in the W est. The essence of the Zionist campaign on behalf o f the conquest of Palestine was, and remains to this day, an appeal so specific, yet so full of general justification, as to make alt opposition to it both impossibly general and generally inadmissible. This had the effect o f bringing most o f the liberal and enlightened W est to its side. Let me give a few exam ples o f what I mean. A s Herzl first conceived o f it in the nineties, Zionism was a movement to free Jews and solve the problem of anti-Semitism in the W est; later elaborations o f this idea took Palestine as the place where the conception was to be m aterially fulfilled (after locations in South A m erica and East A frica had been considered and dropped). In addition to being the place where there existed a spiritual bond in the form o f a covenant between G od and the