ZIONISM FROM I HE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS 95 way against A rab Palestinian resistance lay in ils being a policy o f detail, not simpiy a general colonial vision. Thus Palestine was not only the Promised Land, a concept as elusive and as abstract as any that one could encounter. It was a specific territory with specific characteristics, that was surveyed down to the last millimeter, settled on, planned for, built on, and so forth, in detail. From the beginning o f the Zionist colonization this was something the A rabs had no answer to, no equally detailed counterproposal. They assumed, perhaps rightly, that since they lived on the land and legally owned it, it was therefore theirs. They did not understand that what they were encountering was a discipline o f detail— indeed a very culture of discipline by detail— by which a hitherto imaginary realm could be constructed on Palestine, inch by inch and step by step, "another acre, another go at,” so Weizmann once said. T he Palestinian Arabs always opposed a general policy on general principles: Zionism , they said, was foreign colonialism (which strictly speaking it was, as the early Zionists admitted), it was unfair to the natives (as some early Zionists, like Ahad Ha'am , also admitted), and it was doomed to die o f its various theoretical weaknesses. Even to this day the Palestinian political position generally clusters around these negatives, and still does not sufficiently try to meet the detail of Zionist enterprise; today there are, for exam ple, seventy-seven “ ille­ gal'' Zionist colonies on the West Bank and Israel has confiscated about 27 percent o f the W est B ank’s Arab-owned land, yet the Palestinians seem virtually powerless physically to stop the growth or "thickening" o f this new Israeli coloniza­ tion. T he Palestinians have not understood that Zionism has been much more than an unfair colonialist master against whom one could appeal to all sorts o f higher courts, without any avail. They have not understood the Zionist challenge as a policy of detail, o f institutions, of organization, by which people (to this day) enter territory illegally, build houses on it, settle there, and call the land their own— with the whole world condemning them. The force o f that drive to settle, in a sense to produce, a Jewish land can be glimpsed in a document that Weizmann