I THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE European decision was made to resettle, reconstitute, recap­ ture the land for Jews who were to be brought there from elsewhere. So far as anyone has been able to determ ine, there has been no example given o f any significant Palestinian gesture made to accept this modern reconquest or to accept that Zionism has permanently removed Palestinians from Palestine. Such as it is, the Palestinian actuality is today, was yesterday, and most likely tom orrow will be built upon an act o f resistance to this new foreign colonialism. But it is more likely that there will remain the inverse resistance which has characterized Zionism and Israel since the beginning: the refusal to admit, and the consequent denial o f, the existence of Palestinian A rabs who are there not simply as an inconvenient nuisance, but as a population with an indissoluble bond with the land. The question o f Palestine is therefore the contest between an affirmation and a denial, and it is this prior contest, dating back over a hundred years, which animates and makes sense of the current impasse between the A rab states and Israel, The contest has been almost comically uneven from the beginning. Certainly so far as the West is concerned, Palestine has been a place where a relatively advanced (because European) incom­ ing population o f Jews has perform ed miracles o f construction and civilizing and has fought brilliantly successful technical wars against what was always portrayed as a dumb, essentially repellent population o f uncivilized A rab natives. There is no doubt that the contest in Palestine has been between an advanced (and advancing) culture and a relatively backward, more or less traditional one. But we need to try to understand what the instruments o f this contest w ere, and how they shaped subsequent history so that this history now appears to confirm the validity o f the Zionist claims to Palestine, thereby denigrat­ ing the Palestinian claims. In other words, we must understand the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism as a struggle between a presence and an interpretation, the form er constantly appearing to be overpow ered and eradicated by the latter. W hat was this