58 THE Ul/ESTtON OK PALESTINE gin's honored position camc about literally at the expense of Palestinian A rab silence in the Western “ marketplace of ideas," that the entire historical duration of a Jewish state in Palestine prior to 1948 was a sixty-year period two millennia ago, that the dispersion o f the Palestinians was not a fact of nature but a result o f specific force and strategies. The concealment by Zionism of its own history has by now therefore becom e institutionalized, and not only in Israel. T o bring out its history as in a sense it was exacted from Palestine and the Palestinians, these victims on whose suppression Zionism and Israel have depended, is thus a specific intellect­ ual/political task in the present context o f discussion about “ a com prehensive peace" in the Middle East. The special, one might even call it the privileged, place in this discussion of the United States is impressive, for all sorts of reasons. In no other country, except Israel, is Zionism enshrined as an unquestioned good, and in no other country is there so strong a conjuncture o f powerful institutions and interests— -the press, the liberal intelligentsia, the militaryindustrial com plex, the academic com m unity, labor unions— for whom, as I said in Chapter O n e, uncritical support of Israel and Zionism enhances their domestic as well as international standing. A lthough there has recently been some modulation in this remarkable consensus— due to the influence of A rab oil, the em ergence o f countervailing conservative states allied to the U nited States {Saudi A rabia, E gypt), the redoubtable political and military visibility o f the Palestinian people and their representatives the P LO — the prevailing pro-Israeli bias persists. For not only does it have deep cultural roots in the W est generally and the United States in particular, but its negative, interdictory character vis-a-vis the whole historical reality is systematic. Y et there is no getting around the formidable historical reality that in trying to deal with what Zionism has suppressed about the Palestinian people, one also abuts the entire disastrous problem o f anti-Semitism on the one hand, and on the other, the complex interrelationship between the Palestini­ ans and the A rab states. Anyone who watched the spring 1978