From the beginning of the colonization of Palestine, the architects of the Zionist “dream” excluded from consideration its potential consequences for the Palestinians. The reality of Zionism as translated on the ground was rarely perceived as diverging from the dream, which was (and still is) regarded as pristine; any divergence between the reality and the dream was only a momentary aberration from the dream. Thus the ineluctable link between Zionist action and Palestinian reaction was banished from Zionist consciousness. Since 1948, with the exception of a small Israeli peace movement, the Israelis have succumbed to an emotional and intellectual condition (to which an oppressor is prone) that complements the Palestinians’ obsession with the past. This condition is characterized by an acute aversion to a scrutiny, with all its moral implications, of Zionism’s historical record in Palestine since the 1880s. So great has their aversion been (and so compelling the apparent psychological need for it) that, which the help of historical revisionism and rationalization, the Israelis have convinced themselves and their supporters either that the Palestinians did not exist at all before 1948, or – if they did – that the Palestinians were the initiators of the conflict and the tormentors of Zion. The Israelis’ final refinement of this line of reasoning has been to categorize their Palestinian victims under much rubrics as “fanatics” and “terrorists,” that the sources of whose behavior must be sought in specious, atavistic fountainheads. Thus have the motives behind Palestinian existence to Zionism and Israel been traced comfortably away from the context of the conflict itself, and equally from those of Israeli introspection and moral responsibility.

If 1948 had marked the end of the impingement of Zionism and Israel on Palestinian rights, time would still have had a formidable task to heal the wounds already inflicted on the Palestinians.

In fact, throughout the two decades between 1948 and 1967 Israel adamantly refrained from any alleviating gesture of redress or reconciliation, whether in the form of repatriation, reparation, or territorial adjustment. It proceeded, instead, to “legalize” its expropriation of the abandoned movable and immovable properties of the Palestinian refugees and to transfer these properties to Jewish ownership. It imposed military rule on the terrorized Palestinian minority left in its midst. It carried out, in the name of retaliation for the slightest border violations, grossly disproportionate military operations against Palestinian border villages on the Jordanian-controlled West Bank and in the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, villages whose best farmland it had already seized in 1948. It annexed the demilitarized zones and no man’s land on the West Bank. It unilaterally diverted the waters of the Jordan River for its own purposes. It repeatedly flaunted its might by holding military parades in West Jerusalem. During the same two decades, the Palestinian problem evolved into the conflict between Israel and the neighboring Arab countries. And in the 1960s Palestinian despair found expression in the concept of armed struggle under the aegis of the Palestine Liberation Organization.