52 T1IK (JLKSTIO N O l HAt.KSTINK on, all in the context o f a general discussion o f future peace, and all too in the intellectual context of a Zionist acceptance of the fact that Jewish national liberation (as it is sometimes called) took place upon the ruins o f another national existence, not in the abstract. It is finally to recognize that the question of Palestine is not simply a hcrmetic debate between Zionists as to how Zionism and Israel are to comport themselves in theory on the land o f what once was Palestine, but a vital political matter involving Arabs and Jews, residents in a commonly significant territory. !n all this discussion, how'ever, one must remember that the issues are perceived and formulated not strictly as local issues between people in the Middle East but, as I have tried to show, as issues involving two communities who consider themselves in exile, communities whose quarrel has engaged the world internationally. The parties are Zionism , the Jewish covenant and Jewish history, the survivors of the most tragic destiny meted out to any people, and, on the other hand, an anti-imperialist and anticolonialist Third W orld people whose basis for action includes their own dispossession as a people as well as their opposition to racial discrimination, territorial expropriation, and military occupation. These universal mat­ ters lock the whole world into some aspect o f the struggle, and even though there is always a danger that small quarrels magnified becom e intractable, it is true that magnification gives one some sense o f the whole set of problems and ideas animating a dispute; But there must be a scaling down o f this perhaps too imponderable contest. My belief is that both Palestinians and Jews in Palestine have much to gain— and obviously something to lose— from a human rights view o f their common situation, as opposed to a strictly national perspective on it. It is too often forgotten that the modern Middle East has almost unquestion­ ingly inherited a terribly divisive political legacy from nineteenth-ccntury colonialism. The Ottom an Em pire, as well as those portions o f it that came under Western suzerainty, w-as ruled in principle by minorities whose local interest allied them with the colonial power. Today there are minority govern­