THE QILSTION OF PALESTINE 29 conflict between the West and the Orient, whose main surrogate was Islam. This was not only a colonial matter, but a civilizational one as well. It was perfectly apparent to Western supporters o f Zionism like Balfour that the colonization of Palestine was to be made a goal for the Western powers from the very beginning o f Zionist planning: Herzl used the idea, Weizmann used it, every leading Israeli since has used it. Israel was a device for holding Islam— and later the Soviet Union, or communism-—-at bay. Zionism and Israel were associated with liberalism, with freedom and dem ocracy, with knowledge and light, with what “ w e” understand and fight for. B y contrast, Zionism ’s enemies were simply a twentieth-century version of the alien spirit o f Oriental despotism, sensuality, ignorance, and similar forms o f backwardness. If “ they” didn't under­ stand the glorious enterprise that was Zionism , it was because "th e y" were hopelessly out o f touch with “ our" values. It did not seem to matter that the backward Muslim had his own forms of life, to which he was entitled as a human being, or that his attachment to the land on which he lived was as great as and perhaps even greater, by virtue o f its investment in centuries of actual habitation, than that o f the Jew who yearned for Zion in his exile. A ll that really mattered were ethnocentric ideals, appropriated by Zionism , valorizing the white man's superiori­ ty and his right over territory believed to be consonant with those ideals. How much these notions have becom e accepted ideas in the common discourse o f enlightened Am erican liberal dem ocracy needs to be documented immediately and decisively. Each of the instances I will cite makes its point about Zionism and Israel in two related ways. O ne is that Zionism on its own merits is a marvelous, admirable thing which is accountable to no one and nothing mainly hecause it corresponds so com plete­ ly with Western ideas about society and man. T he other is that the obstacles to Zionism and/or Israel are nefarious, stupid, or morally indecent and— this is crucial— they are not to be heard from directly. Only Zionism can speak for them. Take Reinhold Niebuhr as a first case. So far as I know , he had little to do with the A rab world or Islam to begin with, except as he