36 THE QUESTION l » ' PALESTINE ed elsew here, but the most maddening dishonesty is found in W ilson's use o f the word “ exclusiveness” to speak about Zionist treatment o f the Arabs who did not leave until [948. During the time that he was in Israel, the laws applied to Arabs were the Em ergency Defense Regulations originally devised and impiemented in Palestine by the British to be used against the Jews and Arabs. These laws were openly racist in that they were never used in Israel against Jews. When Israel retained them after 1948 for use in controiling the A rab minority, they forbade A rabs the right o f m ovem ent, the right o f purchase of land, the right o f settlem ent, and so forth. Under the mandate the regulations were regularly denounced by the Jews as colonial and racist. Y et as soon as Israel became a state, those same laws were used against the A rabs. Wilson has nothing whatever to say about this. A gain there is little excuse for the omission since, as one can ascertain easily from Sabri Jiryis’ book The Arabs in Israel,19 there was a great deal o f post-1948 Zionist writing against the abuses o f the form er colonial rules as they were administered by Israelis to suppress and manipu­ late the A rabs. O ver and above everything explicit in W ilson's writing is the implicit verity (so it seems) that anyone, especially an enlight­ ened humanistic liberal, can write, have an expert opinion on, discourse about the situation in the Middle East. This is a very important thing, I think. For if during the nineteenth century the expert scholar-Orientalist was looked to for knowledge about the O rient, the situation changed drastically in the twentieth century. For now a W esterner turns for his evidence of and knowledge about the Orient (and Orientals) to the Zionist. W hat Wilson sees— and for that matter what the W esterner generally secs— in the Middle East is seen from the Zionist perspective. Israel is the norm, Israelis are the pres­ ence, their ideas and institutions the authentically native ones; Arabs are a nuisance, Palestinians a quasi-mythical reality (mainly, the argument goes, a propaganda reality), and so on. Israeli origins are forgotten: Israel simply is a Western democracy now quite gratuitously set upon by anti-Semitic A rabs. The reversal in actuality is com plete. This is the