[Below, Gilmour sympathizes with Said's attitude about the Palestinian issues discussed in The Politics of Dispossession.]

The most remarkable feature of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been not the great military and political success of the state of Israel or the hardship and misery imposed on the Palestinian people, but the West's heaping of praise and reward on the oppressors, and blame and penalty on the victims—a stark contrast to South Africa. Europe has for some time been more even-handed; not so the United States.

The struggle for Palestine is often thought to be one between two rights: both Arabs and Jews have a right to the land, But, initially at least, that was far from true. As late as 1917, Palestine was 90 per cent Arab. There had long been a small Jewish presence there, but by no stretch of imagination did the Jews have a secular right to Palestine. Hence, God had to be invoked.

The difficulty was that religious Jews did not believe in political Zionism—which means the turning of Arab land into Jewish, and the substitution of Jews for Arabs—and political Zionists did not believe in God. Virtually all leading Zionists had been non-believers. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was so little guided by the Old Testament that he would have been happy to settle for Uganda as the Jewish State.

As George Steiner put it: 'Zionism was created by Jewish nationalists who drew their inspiration from Bismarck and followed a Prussian model.' Yet somehow the idea got home that God had given Palestine to the Jews who, therefore, had a natural right to the land. So, as Edward Said writes in this impressive collection of finely textured essays, The Politics of Dispossession, 'a national movement whose provenance and ideas were European took a land away from a non-European people settled there for centuries'.

Unfortunately, that process was begun by the British. By the Balfour Declaration of 1917, wrote Arthur Koestler, 'one country solemnly promised to another the country of a third'. That promise was not only freakish, as Koestler said, it was politically frivolous. Having been Chief Secretary of Ireland, Balfour well knew the results of sectarian bitterness and land disputes, yet he recklessly foisted them on to Palestine with the disastrous consequences that we know. In 1948, by a strikingly thorough policy of ethnic and geographical cleansing, the Israelis drove out five sixths of the Palestinian population and so comprehensively destroyed 400 out of 500 Palestinian villages that no trace of them now remains.

Edward Said is chiefly concerned, however, with the last 25 years when the Palestinians have had to contend not with British frivolity but with American malevolence. He himself was born in Jerusalem, and when his family was 'dispossessed and displaced in 1948' he finished his education in the United States, where he is now Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. In 1967 he became actively involved in Palestinian affairs; since then in addition to writing a number of notable books he has been the most cogent and eloquent defender of the Palestinians and their right to self-determination.

That has been no easy task. There is no decent argument against Palestinian self-determination, as the American public evidently recognises. But the Palestinians are 'the victims of a victim' who in America is unusually powerful, and the views of the public count for little against the pro-Israeli lobby, to which the Senate is unfailingly obedient. Hence the Palestinian case has been customarily vilified or ignored, and American aid showered upon Israel. (That relatively well-off country gets nearly half the total American foreign aid budget. Per capita, Israel gets 700 times as much as sub-Sahara Africa.) With few exceptions American governing circles have been humiliatingly subservient to the Israelis.

The US media are little better. The owner of the once-liberal Atlantic Monthly and US News and World Report was only uncommonly candid in directing: 'I will not have a word of criticism of Israel in any of my publications.' Columnists such as A. M. Rosenthal and William Safire are mere Zionist propagandists. Others such as Anthony Lewis, William Pfaff and Stephen Rosenfeld are brave and fair, but they are a small minority.

Israel, therefore, can do much as it likes, and the unconsulted American tax-payer foots the bill. The internationally recognised frontiers of Israel leave the Palestinians just 23 per cent of Palestine—hardly an excessive proportion for the indigenous inhabitants. Yet, by building a mass of illegal settlements, Israel has stolen some 40 per cent of that remnant. In the Gaza strip 5,000 Israeli settlers and the Israeli army still occupy more than half as much land as 800,000 Palestinians.

The United States has underwritten such activities as well as the accompanying Israeli violence. It has effectively paid for the bullets which have enforced a brutal occupation—live ammunition has routinely been fired at children throwing stones, hundreds of whom had been killed and wounded. Torture has been prevalent, yet American hypocrisy is easily equal to treating the Palestinians as the offenders instead of as victims who deserve reparations.

As the settlements still grow apace, Said is gloomy about the future. He has no time for the Arab governments, little for Yasser Arafat. And he believes the incompetently negotiated Oslo Peace Accord to be 'an instrument of Palestinian surrender'. This fine book shows him to be an angry man; it also shows that he has much to be angry about.