320 DESTINY DISRUPTED
The most problematic single territory for the competing claims of na-
tionalism versus nation-statism was Palestine, soon to be known as Israel. Be-
fore and during World War II, the Nazis' genocidal attempt to exterminate
the Jews of Europe confirmed the worst fears of Zionists and gave their ar-
gument for a sovereign Jewish homeland overwhelming moral weight, espe-
cially since the Nazis were not the only anti-Semites in Europe, only the most
extreme. The fascists of Italy visited horrors upon Italian Jews, the French
puppet government set up by the Germans hunted down French Jews for
their Nazi masters, the Poles and other Eastern Europeans collaborated en-
thusiastically in operating death camps, Great Britain had its share of anti-
Semites, Spain, Belgium-no part of Europe could honestly claim innocence
of the crime committed against the Jews in this period. Millions of Jews were
trapped in Europe and perished there. All who could get away escaped in
whatever direction lay open. Boatloads of Jewish refugees ended up drifting
over the world's seas, looking for places to land. A few were able to make their
way to the United States and resettle there, but even the United States im-
posed strict quotas on Jewish immigration, presumably because a single
country could absorb only so many immigrants of any one group; but just
perhaps some anti-Semitism was mixed into that policy as well.
The one place where the refugees could land was Palestine. There, ear-
lier immigrants had bought land, planted settlements, and developed some
infrastructure of support. Toward that slender hope of safety, therefore, the
refugees headed, overcoming heroic hardships to begin building a new na-
tion in an ancient land inhabited by their ancestors. Such was the shape of
the story from the Jewish side.
From the Arab side, the story looked different. The Arabs had long been
living under two layers of domination by outsiders, the first layer being the
Turks, the next the Turks' European bosses. Then, in the wake of World
War I, amidst all the rhetoric about "self-rule" and all the hope aroused by
Wilson's Fourteen Points, their land was flooded by new settlers from Europe,
whose slogan was said to be "a land without a people for a people without a
land"^3 -an alarming slogan for people living in the "land without a people."
The new European immigrants didn't seize land by force; they bought
the land they settled; but they bought it mostly from absentee landlords,
so they ended up living among landless peasants who felt doubly dispos-
sessed by the aliens crowding in among them. What happened just before