There is a considerable reductiveness in this view, of course, but what is really wrong with it is that most of the time it literally blocks Palestine from having anything to do with the Middle East of today,

The fact of the matter is that today Palestine does not exist, except as a memory or, more importantly, as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular will.

In Israel today it is the custom officially to refer to the Palestinians as “so-called Palestinians,” which is a somewhat gentler phrase than Golda Meir’s flat assertion in 1969 that the Palestinians did not exist.

By 1918 it is estimated that European powers were in colonial occupation of about 85 percent of the globe, of which a large segment belonged to the regions formerly known simply as Oriental.

associated not only with difference and otherness, but with the vast spaces, the undifferentiated masses of mostly colored people, and the romance, exotic locales, and mystery of “the marvels of the East.”

By what moral or political standard are we expected to lay aside our claims to our national existence, our land, our human rights?

merely to mention the Palestinians or Palestine in Israel, or to a convinced Zionist, is to name the unnameable, so powerfully does our bare existence serve to accuse Israel of what it did to us.

to efface the Palestinian in words and actions because the Jewish state in many (but not all) ways is built on negation of Palestine and the Palestinians.

I have called my book a political essay because it tries to put our matter before the Western reader, not as something watertight and finished, but as something to be thought through, tried out, engaged with—in short, as a subject to be dealt with politically. For too long we have been outside history, and certainly outside discussion; in its own