THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE 37 greatest success of what 1 referred to earlier as the Zionist practice o f diffusing ‘'truth.” In other words, W ilson's remarks about the A rabs are not inaccurate; they are very accurate as a more or less verbatim copy o f what Israelis (as Western colonialists living in a backward area) think about A rabs, their “ nomadic” habits, and so forth. But the elision is so complete that one forgets that the relationship between Israelis and Arabs is not a fact of nature but the result o f a specific, continuing process o f dispossession, displacem ent, and coloni­ al de facto apartheid. M oreover, one tends to forget that Zionists were arrivals in Palestine from Europe, III The Issue o f Representation The point I have been trying to make is that such writing as Wilson’s can be taken as the perfect symbol o f a political reality in what I have been calling the common discourse of enlightened Am erican liberal dem ocracy. It is the complete hegemonic coalescence between the liberal Western view of things and the Zionist-Israeli view. I use the word “ hegem on­ ic” advisedly, with all its resonances in A ntonio G ram sci, the great Italian Marxist who analyzed the importance o f culture and o f intellectuals to politics. For in elaborating one of its meanings, Gramsci assigned the notion o f consent to hegemo­ ny; in other words, there is hegem ony not by mere domination but by consent, acquiescence. By the middle o f the twentieth century, as the examples o f Niebuhr and Wilson show, there was a willing identification between Western liberal discourse and Zionism. The reasons for this identification are complex (perhaps there is even an acceptable justification for it), but for the A rab Palestinian the concrete meaning o f this hegemonic relationship was disastrous. There are no two ways about it. The identification o f Zionism and liberalism in the W'est meant that insofar as he had been displaced and dispossessed in Palestine, the A rab had become a nonperson as much because the Zionist had himself becom e the only person in Palestine as because the A rab 's negative personality (O riental, decadent.