71) T H E t j l K M [O S OK 1>\[.KM 1SK [wo camps crcated thereby." A s a result, it has been impossible for Jews to understand the human tragedy caused the Arab Palestinians hy Zionism; and il has been impossible for Arab Palestinians to see in Zionism anything except an ideology and a practice keeping them, and Israeli Jews, imprisoned. But in order to break down the iron circle o f inhumanity, we must see how it was forged, and there it is ideas and culture themselves that play the major role. Consider Herzl. If it was the Dreyfus Affair that first brought him to Jewish consciousness, it was the idea of overseas colonial settlement for the Jews that came to him at roughly the same time as an antidote for anti-Semitism. T he idea itself was current at the end of the nineteenth century, even as an idea for Jews. H erd 's first significant contact was Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a wealthy philanthropist who had for some time been behind the Jewish Colonization Association for helping Eastern Jews to emigrate to Argentina and Brazil. Later, Herzl thought generally about South Am erica, then about A frica as places for establishing a Jewish colony. Both areas were widely acceptable as places for European colonial­ ism, and that Herzl's mind followed along the orthodox imperialist track of his period is perhaps understandable. The impressive thing, however, is the degree to which Herzl had absorbed and internalized the imperialist perspective on “ natives" and their “ territory.” ’ There could have been no doubt whatever in Herzl's mind that Palestine in the late nineteenth century was peopled. True, it was under Ottom an administration (and therefore already a colony), but it had been the subject o f numerous travel accounts, most of them famous, by Lam artine, Chateau­ briand, Flaubert, and others. Y et even if he had not read these authors, Herzl as a journalist must surely have looked at a Baedeker to ascertain that Palestine was indeed inhabited by (in the i88os) 650,000 mostly A rab people. This did not stop him from regarding their presence as manageable in ways that, in his diary, he spelled out with a rather chilling prescience for what later took place. The mass o f poor natives were to be expropriated and, he added, "both the expropriation and the