ZIONISM FROM r u t STANDPOINT OK ITS VICTIMS 65 Interestingly, Eliot cannot sustain her admiration o f Zionism except by seeing it as a method for transforming the East into the W est. This is not to say that she does not have sympathy for Zionism and for the Jews themselves: she obviously does. But there is a w hole area of Jewish experience, lying somewhere between longing for a homeland (which everyone, including the G en tile, feels) and actually getting it, that she is dim about. Otherwise she is quite capable o f seeing that Zionism can easily be accommodated to several varieties o f Western (as opposed to Eastern) thought, principal among them the idea that the East is degraded, that it needs reconstruction accord­ ing to enlightened Western notions about politics, that any reconstructed portion of the East can with small reservations become as “ English as England’ ’ to its new inhabitants. Underlying all this, however, is the total absence o f any thought about the actual inhabitants o f the East, Palestine in particular. T h ey are irrelevant both to the Zionists in Daniel Deronda and to the English characters.'Brightness, freedom , and redemption— key matters for Eliot— are to be restricted to Europeans and the Jews, who are themselves European prototypes so far as colonizing the East is concerned. There is a remarkable failure when it comes to taking anything nonEuropean into consideration although curiously all o f Eliot’s descriptions o f Jews stress their exotic, "E astern ” aspects. Humanity and sympathy, it seems, are not endowments of anything but an Occidental mentality; to look for them in the despotic East, much less find them, is to waste one’s time. T w o points need to be made immediately. One is that Eliot is no different from other European apostles o f sympathy, humanity, and understanding for whom noble sentiments were either left behind in Europe, or made programmatically inapplicable outside Europe. There are the chastening exam ­ ples o f John Stuart Mill and Karl M arx (both o f whom I have discussed in Orientalism)*, two thinkers known doctrinally to be opponents o f injustice and oppression. Y e t both of them seemed to have believed that such ideas as liberty, representa­ tive governm ent, and individual happiness must not be applied in the Orient for reasons that today we would call racist. The