ZIONISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS 71 removal o f the poor must be carried out discreetly and circum spectly." This was to be done by “ spiriting] the penniless population across the border by procuring em ploy­ ment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country." With uncannily accurate cynicism, Herzl predicted that the small class o f large landown­ ers could be "had for a price”— as indeed they were. The whole scheme for displacing the native population o f Palestine far outstripped any o f the then current plans for taking over vast reaches o f A frica. A s Desmond Stewart aptly says: Herzl seems to have foreseen that in going further than any colonialist had so far gone in Africa, he would, temporarily, alienate civilised opinion. “ At first, incidentally,” he writes on the pages describing “ involuntary expropriation,” ‘‘people will avoid us. We are in bad odor. By the time the reshaping of world opinion in our favor has been completed, we shall be firmly established in our country, no longer fearing the influx of foreigners, and receiving our visitors with aristocratic benevolence and proud amiability.” This was not a prospect to charm a peon in Argentina or a fellah in Palestine. But Herzl did not intend his Diary for immediate publication.1” One need not wholly accept the conspiratorial tone o f these comments (whether Herzl's or Stewart's) to grant that world opinion has not been, until during the sixties and seventies when the Palestinians forced their presence on world politics, very much concerned with the expropriation o f Palestine, I said ear­ lier that in this regard the major Zionist achievement was get­ ting international legitimization for its own accomplishments, thereby making the Palestinian cost o f these accomplishments seem to be irrelevant. But it is clear from Herzl's thinking that that could not have been done unless there was a prior European inclination to view the natives as irrelevant to begin with. That is, those natives already fit a more or less acceptable classificatory grid, which made them sui generis inferior to Western or while men— and it is this grid that Zionists like Herzl appropriated, domesticating it from the general culture