ZIONISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF ITS VICTIMS 99 in order to expropriate their lands and prevent their return under any circumstances) to the JNF. The process of land alienation (from the A ra b standpoint) had been completed. The ideological, profoundly political meaning of the “ com­ pany's” territorial achievements illuminates the post-1967 controversy over the fate of A ra b land occupied by Israel. A large segment of the Israeli population seems to believe that Arab land can be converted into Jewish land (a) because the land had once been Jewish two millennia ago (a part of Eretz Israel) and (b) because there exists in the JNF a method for legally metamorphosing "neglected” land into the property of the Jewish people.41 Once Jewish settlements are built and peopled, and once they are hooked into the state network, they become properly extraterritorial, emphatically Jew’ish, and non-Arab. T o this new land is added as well a strategic rationale, that it is necessary' for Israeli security. But were these things simply a matter of internal Israeli conccrn, and were (hey sophistic arguments intended only to appeal to an Israeli constituency, they might be analyzed dispassionately as being no more than curious. The fact is, however, that they impinge— as they always have— on the A ra b residents of the territories, and then they have a distinct cutting edge to them. Both in theory and in practice their effectiveness lies in how they Judaize territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it. There is privileged evidence of this fact, I think, in what Joseph Weitz had to say. From 1932 on, Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund; in 1965 his diaries and papers, My Diary, and Letters to the Children, were published in Israel. On December 19, 1940, he wrote: . . . after the [Second World| war the question of the land of Israel and the question of the Jews would be raised beyond the framework of “ development"; amongst ourselves. !t must be clear that there is no room for hoth peoples in this country. No ‘‘development" will bring us closer io our aim. 10 he an independent people in this small country. If ihc Arabs leave the country, it will be hroad and wide-open for us. And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable.