aries who resided in Palestine and in Constantinople, the Ottoman capital, some new ideas were timidly aired. The feasibility of a pact with the Arabs in their light against the Turkish monster was dimly realized by a few. Yet their opinions, recorded in letters and reports of the period, carried little weight within the Zionist leadership, residing as it did in Europe and looking upon affairs in the "Orient" from a superior vantage point of world politics. The Palestinian segment of Zionism was as yet small and secondary. The base of the movement, the masses of its followers, the seat of its institutions, were all still in Europe, seeing these affairs through European eyes. (In passing, one cannot help but wonder why the leadership of the movement was not transferred immediately to Palestine, the land which was the sole object of all Zionism's aims and endeavors. The reason was, of course, that the colonization effort was still viewed as only a secondary aspect of the movement. The main objective was to acquire the international charter for the establishment of a national home in Palestine. What's more, the majority of Zionist leaders, then as now, did not really relish the prospect of transferring themselves to an environment vastly inferior to the one in which they were living.)

The official doctrine was enunciated time and again by Max Nordau, the famous German-Jewish writer who became the most outstanding personality of the movement upon the death of Herzl in 1904. Martin Buber recounts, in one of his books, how Nordau, upon hearing for the first time that there were Arabs living in Palestine, ran to Herzl, deeply shocked, exclaiming, "I didn't know that! We are committing an injustice!" However, Nordau seems to have recovered from his shock handsomely. In his address to the Seventh Zionist Congress, which convened in Basel in 1905, he said,

The movement which has taken hold of a great part of the

Arab people may easily take a direction which may cause

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