ZIONISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS 73 the effects o f Zionism on its victims, and these effects can only be studied genealogically in the framework provided by imperialism, even during the nineteenth century when Zionism was still an idea and not a state called Israel. For the Palestinian now who writes critically to see what his or her history has m eant, and who tries— as I am now' trying— to see what Zionism has been for the Palestinians, A n ton io G ram sci’s observation is relevant, that "the consciousness o f what one really is . . . is ‘knowing thyself as a product o f the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” The job o f producing an inventory is a first necessity, Gramsci continued, and so it must be now, when the "inven tory” of what Zionism 's victims (not its beneficiaries) endured is rarely exposed to public view '." If we have becom e accustomcd to making fastidious distinc­ tions between ideology (or theory) and practice, we shall be more accurate historically if we do not do so glibly in the case o f the European imperialism that actually annexed most o f the world during the nineteenth century. Imperialism was and still is a political philosophy whose aim and purpose for being is territorial expansion and its legitimization. A serious underes­ timation o f imperialism, how ever, would be to consider territory in too literal a way. Gaining and holding an imperium means gaining and holding a domain, which includes a variety o f operations, am ong them constituting an area, accumulating its inhabitants, having power over its ideas, people, and of course, its land, converting people, land, and ideas to the purposes and for the use o f a hegem onic imperial design; all this as a result o f being able to treat reality a p p r o p ria te ly . Thus the distinction between an idea that onc feels to be one’s own and a piece of land that one claims by right to be one's own {despite the presence on the land o f its working native inhabitants) is really nonexistent, at least in the world of nineteenth-century culture out o f which imperialism devel­ oped. Laying claim to an idea and laying claim to a territory— given the extraordinarily current idea that the non-European world was there to be claim ed, occupied, and ruled by Europe— were considered to be different sides o f the same.