7: thk y L H s n o N os- Pa l e s t in e o f their time to the unique needs of a developing Jewish nationalism. O ne needs to repeat that what in Zionism served the no doubt justified ends o f Jewish tradition, saving the Jews as a people from homclessness and anti-Semitism and restoring them to nationhood, also collaborated with those aspects o f the dominant Western culture (in which Zionism institutionally lived) making it possible for Europeans to view non-Europeans as inferior, marginal, and irrelevant. For the Palestinian A rab, therefore, it is the collaboration that has counted, not by any means the good done to Jews. The A rab has been on the receiving end not of benign Zionism— which has been restrict­ ed to Jews— but o f an essentially discriminatory and powerful culture, o f which, in Palestine, Zionism has been the agent. Here I must digress to say that the great difficulty today of writing about what has happened to the A rab Palestinian as a resuit o f Zionism , is that Zionism has had a large number of successes. There is no doubt in my mind, for exam ple, that most Jews do regard Zionism and Israel as urgently important facts for Jewish life, particularly because of what happened to the Jews in this century. Then too, Israel has some remarkable political and cultural achievements to its credit, quite apart from its spectacular military successes until recently. Most important, Israel is a subject about which, on the whole, one can feel positive with less reservations than the ones experi­ enced in thinking about the A rabs, who are outlandish, strange, hostile Orientals after all; surely that is an obvious fact to anyone living in the W est. T ogether these successes of Zionism have produced a prevailing view o f the question of Palestine that almost totally favors the victor, and lakes hardly any account o f the victim. Y et what did the victim feel as he watched the Zionists arriving in Palestine? What does he think as he watches Zionism described today? Where does he look in Zionism 's history to locate its roots, and the origins o f its practices toward him? These are the questions that are never asked— and they arc precisely the ones that I am trying to raise, as well as answer, here in this examination o f the links between Zionism and European imperialism. M y interest is in trying to record