THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE 33 when he wrote about the British in India— is that there was a national right being violated even by a “ technical and dynamic civilization” when it made colonial incursions upon “ the miserable masses.” In addition, and from the viewpoint of a famous Christian theologian, one would have expected (and in later years, expected fruitlessly) some appreciation o f the fact that for every Jewish immigrant com ing into Palestine there was likely to be an A rab or Arabs displaced, and human rights accordingly suppressed. Finally, we would have expected Niebuhr to have made some effort to hear “ the miserable masses” and their wishes, or at least to have assumed that among their more or less natural wishes would have been the desire not to be displaced or so violently “ benefited” by a superior civilization. Had Niebuhr been speaking about the South African situation or about the Am erican South, no such condescension and racial implications would have been tolerated, which is a situation the more to be appreciated when we realized,- as I said above, that Niebuhr believes him self to be expressing an advanced, or progressive, liberal view. W ell then, we ask, is it possible that Niebuhr did not know what was happening in Palestine, or (as I believe the case to be) that he truly thought that Zionism was culturally superior to A rab “ decadence"? This brings me to my second exam ple, which will illustrate the extent to which support for Zionism , in all its positive and affirmative aspects, entailed not just a grudging acceptance of some A rab reality in Palestine but an affirmative and positive feeling that Zionism had done well in destroying A rab Palestine. No less a spokesman and cultural status figure than N iebuhr, Edmund Wilson was also a rem arkably brilliant and catholic critic— o f literature, society, history, and morals. Much more than Niebuhr, he exemplified a lifelong project to discriminate between those elem ents in W estern (and world) culture that were (the phrase is a bit mushy, but I use it sincerely) life-enhancing and those that were life-retarding. W hatever else he may have been, Wilson never identified with the State, or with anything the slightest bit chauvinistic, or even institutional. A n y one o f his readers— and he was the