Some of us remember filling those old Jewish National Fund boxes with nickels and dimes (plus a few quarters) with which "we" helped reforest the land of Israel and also buy land from perfectly willing--indeed, very eager--Arab sellers. It is a luminous and true memory, and it also taught us our responsibility for others. In my mother's kitchen, the March of Dimes' slotted cardboard for ten cent pieces (to combat infantile paralysis) and the JNF pushka (a modern variant on the traditional tsedaka or charity box) stood with pride of place together waiting to be replenished as part of the Sabbath blessings. Now, I know that Theodor Herzl was the father of two nationalisms. First, of course, came Zionism. Then, but mostly as an act of panic and quite a bit later, came the imitative response of the Arabs to the restoration of the Jews to Palestine. But Palestine was the name of our desire. It was enshrined in a silly children's ditty:

If you like salami
join the Jewish army:
Fight, fight for Palestine.

And Palestine was also the name of our realities and institutions. The Palestine Post. The Palestine Philharmonic. The Palestine Broadcasting Corporation. The United Palestine Appeal. The Palestine Endowment Fund. Palestine Economic Corporation. Palestine Land Development Corporation. Palestine Zionist Executive. The journal Palestina. Palestine National Museum. Palestine Exploration Society. Palestine Express. Et cetera, et cetera. At the same time, the Arabs in Palestine didn't know who they were. Some thought of themselves as South Syrians. Some thought of themselves as tied to Egypt. Some to Trans-Jordan or to Jordan. Some thought of themselves just as Arabs, which is a vagary. Most had nothing big in their heads. They were members of very provincial entities like tribes, clans, families. When the idea of an Arab state in the largest part of Palestine had been put on the table by the United Nations General Assembly on November 29, 1947, no one so much as looked at it. "Palestine" as a vague concept of identification has been in the heads of the Arabs of Palestine now maybe for 40 years. But it is still a backward movement. Terrorist, yes. But without an idea of what the Palestinian nation is ... or what it promises. Or what it aspires to, save to get out from under the shadow of the Jews. Its wealthy diaspora has contributed little to the ambition for Palestine. Much unlike the way the Jews of the Diaspora, from rich to poor, gave of themselves and of their possessions to the idea of the return. "As of right," as Churchill put it, "not by sufferance." So what provoked my meditation about the JNF collections to plant trees early on in Palestine, then in Israel? I came across an ad for the British Left weekly, New Statesman. If you purchase a subscription you'll be planting "three new olive trees in Palestine," to "repair the enormous destruction years of war have inflicted on the olive groves of Palestine. ... Each tree represents a long-term source of income for Palestinian families, who have been harvesting olive oil, fruit and wood for generations." Hurry! The "offer ends 31 October 2006." There is something pathetic about raising funds to plant olive trees in Palestine, and misleading. New trees take years to be fruitful. In any case, this backward agricultural symbolism--oh, I know how beautiful olive trees are--is a sign of the impoverishment of the Palestinian vision for their own society. It's not as if there aren't plenty of Palestinians with advanced degrees and advanced ambitions for themselves and even for their own community. But the olive trees are a symptom of the hokey innocence of the Palestinian presentation of self to the world. It is an instance of what Edward Said might himself have called the orientalist falsification of Palestinianism had he himself not engaged in precisely such misrepresentations of prelapsarian innocence.