Zionist “Colonialism”: Myth and Dilemma

Mr. President, the roots of the Palestinian question reach back into the closing years of the 19th century, to that period we call the era of colonialism. . . . This is precisely the period during which Zionism was born; its aim was the conquest of Palestinian land by European immigrants, just as settlers colonized and indeed raided most of Africa.

—Yasir Arafat, speech to the United Nations General Assembly, November 14, 1974

The Dreyfus affair was not uniquely the ordeal of Captain Dreyfus. Within a few years of his first trial, a collection of dissenting groups—liberals, socialists, and Zionists—had become his champions, primarily because they admired him for his enemies. The radicals who (often grudgingly) took up Dreyfus’s defense perceived that they were equally vulnerable to the powerful alliance that, at least for the time, was aimed against the unlikely Captain.

This apprehension was inten...