that in every instance when Israeli hostages were used to try to gain the release of Palestinians held in Israeli jails, it was always the Israeli forces who offered fire first, knowingly causing a bloodbath.

By some standards we are perhaps an unexceptional people; our national history testifies to a failing contest with a basically European and ambitious ideology (as well as practice); we have been unable to interest the West very much in the justice of our cause. Nevertheless we have begun, I think, to construct a political identity and will of our

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.

Yet it is precisely because Zionism was so admirably successful in bringing Jews to Palestine and constructing a nation for them, that the world has not been concerned with what the enterprise meant in loss, dispersion, and catastrophe for the Palestinian natives. Something like an ironic double vision is therefore necessary now in order to see

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

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.”

One of the features of a small non-European people is that it is not wealthy in documents, nor in histories, autobiographies, chronicles, and the like.

After the [Second World] war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problem of minorities nor the stateless.

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.