"We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put
under some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy."
But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that?
Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure of
sentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it? Would even the Turks say,
"The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms.
If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will
perhaps be in danger of massacres." I suspect that a Turk would see
the joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves.
If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely the
first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of.
And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they
are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic
or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin
and the crescent of cruel teeth. This may be a fairy-tale about
a fabulous animal; but it is one which all sorts of races believe,
and certainly one which these races believe.
But the case is yet more curious than that. These simple tribes
are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements
which Dr. Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got;
they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got.
They may be in error, at the first superficial glance,
in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark.
But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectable
professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect.
And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical
or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in
stating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews. They fear,
in exact terms, their knowledge and their experience and their money.
The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need.
Only the Arabs would call it a knowledge of financial trickery
and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given
by hoards of money not only of their own but of other peoples.
About Dr. Weizmann and the true Zionists this is self-evidently unjust;
but about Jewish influence of the more visible and vulgar kind
it has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the force
of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly
to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it.
But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us again
and again of their knowledge and their experience and their money.
That is what people dread like a pestilence or an earthquake;
their knowledge and their experience and their money.
It is needless for Dr. Weizmann to tell us that he does not desire
to enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forcibly
out of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker;
and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driven
their foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites.
But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economic
culture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkers
reassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy of
their Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers.
Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselves
in their cellars, when such virtues are abroad in the land.
In short the fear of the Jews in Palestine, reasonable or unreasonable,
is a thing that must be answered by reason. It is idle for the unpopular
thing to answer with boasts, especially boasts of the very quality
that makes it unpopular. But I think it could be answered by reason,
or at any rate tested by reason; and the tests by consideration.
The principle is still as stated above; that the tests must
not merely insist on the virtues the Jews do show, but rather
deal with the particular virtues which they are generally accused
of not showing. It is necessary to understand this more thoroughly
than it is generally understood, and especially better than it
is usually stated in the language of fashionable controversy.
For the question involves the whole success or failure of Zionism.
Many of the Zionists know it; but I rather doubt whether most of
the Anti-Zionists know that they know it. And some of the phrases
of the Zionists, such as those that I have noted, too often tend
to produce the impression that they ignore when they are not ignorant.
They are not ignorant; and they do not ignore in practice;
even when an intellectual habit makes them seem to ignore in theory.
Nobody who has seen a Jewish rural settlement, such as Rishon,
can doubt that some Jews are sincerely filled with the vision
of sitting under their own vine and fig-tree, and even with its
accompanying lesson that it is first necessary to grow the fig-tree
and the vine.
The true test of Zionism may seem a topsy-turvy test.
It will not succeed by the number of successes, but rather
by the number of failures, or what the world (and certainly
not least the Jewish world) has generally called failures.
It will be tested, not by whether Jews can climb to the top
of the ladder, but by whether Jews can remain at the bottom;
not by whether they have a hundred arts of becoming important,
but by whether they have any skill in the art of remaining insignificant.
It is often noted that the intelligent Israelite can rise to positions
of power and trust outside Israel, like Witte in Russia or Rufus Isaacs
in England. It is generally bad, I think, for their adopted country;
but in any case it is no good for the particular problem of their
own country. Palestine cannot have a population of Prime Ministers
and Chief Justices; and if those they rule and judge are not Jews,
then we have not established a commonwealth but only an oligarchy.
It is said again that the ancient Jews turned their enemies
into hewers of wood and drawers of water. The modern Jews have
to turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water.
If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves into citizens,
but only into a kind of alien bureaucrats, of all kinds
the most perilous and the most imperilled. Hence a Jewish
state will not be a success when the Jews in it are successful,
or even when the Jews in it are statesmen. It will be a success
when the Jews in it are scavengers, when the Jews in it are sweeps,
when they are dockers and ditchers and porters and hodmen.
When the Zionist can point proudly to a Jewish navvy who has _not_
risen in the world, an under-gardener who is not now taking his ease
as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village
idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village,
then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and lift
up the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turned
the captivity of Zion.
Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced,
and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have told
me that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a
beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land.
One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it "this
very un-Jewish characteristic." She was perfectly well aware both of
the need of it in the Jewish land, and the lack of it in the Jewish race.
In short she was well aware of the truth of that seemingly topsy-turvy
test I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges.
When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestly
expects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claim
is very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside.
I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under the
circumstances to set it altogether aside. It is our whole complaint
against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade;
it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, "Give me
a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it."
It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really love
any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be
deaf to him if he really says, "Give me a land and I will love it."
I would certainly give him a land or some instalment of the land,
(in what general sense I will try to suggest a little later) so long
as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principles
I have suggested. If he asks for the spade he must use the spade,
and not merely employ the spade, in the sense of hiring half a hundred
men to use spades. If he asks for the soil he must till the soil;
that is he must belong to the soil and not merely make the soil
belong to him. He must have the simplicity, and what many would
call the stupidity of the peasant. He must not only call a spade
a spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation.
By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be not
only on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trick
of inventing the word dirt for the dust to which we shall return.
He must be washed in mud, that he may be clean.
How far this can really happen it is very hard for anybody,
especially a casual visitor, to discover in the present crisis.
It is admitted that there is much Arab and Syrian labour employed;
and this in itself would leave all the danger of the Jew
as a mere capitalist. The Jews explain it, however, by saying
that the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this is
necessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists.
In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is none
the less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers.
It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves to
be peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itself
does not prove them to be peasants. So far as that is concerned,
it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be an
agricultural labourer, if he is a decently paid agricultural labourer.
On the other hand, the leaders of these local experiments,
if they have not yet shown the higher materialism of peasants,
most certainly do not show the lower materialism of capitalists.
There can be no doubt of the patriotic and even poetic spirit in which
many of them hope to make their ancient wilderness blossom like the rose.
They at least would still stand among the great prophets of Israel,
and none the less though they prophesied in vain.
I have tried to state fairly the case for Zionism, for the reason
already stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attempt
of the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejected
as one of their irregularities. But I do not disguise the enormous
difficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine.
In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it
has to take place in Zion. There are other difficulties, however,
which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are
very much the fault of Jews. The worst is the general impression
of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type
of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation.
When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiers
had complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were made
by the government to the peasantry, and even that the government
had yielded to them. If this were true it was a heavier reproach
to the government even than to the Jews. But the general truth
is that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solid
patriotism of a Palestinian Jewish nation practically impossible,
and forces us to consider some alternative or some compromise.
The most sensible statement of a compromise I heard among the Zionists
was suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highly
intelligent but ardent and sympathetic. And the phrase he used
gives the key to my own rough conception of a possible solution,
though he himself would probably, not accept that solution.
Dr. Weizmann suggested, if I understood him rightly, that he did
not think Palestine could be a single and simple national territory
quite in the sense of France; but he did not see why it should not
be a commonwealth of cantons after the manner of Switzerland.
Some of these could be Jewish cantons, others Arab cantons,
and so on according to the type of population. This is in itself
more reasonable than much that is suggested on the same side;
but the point of it for my own purpose is more particular.
This idea, whether it correctly represents Dr. Weizmann's meaning
or no, clearly involves the abandonment of the solidarity
of Palestine, and tolerates the idea of groups of Jews being
separated from each other by populations of a different type.
Now if once this notion be considered admissible, it seems to me
capable of considerable extension. It seems possible that there
might be not only Jewish cantons in Palestine but Jewish cantons
outside Palestine, Jewish colonies in suitable and selected
places in adjacent parts or in many other parts of the world.
They might be affiliated to some official centre in Palestine,
or even in Jerusalem, where there would naturally be at least some
great religious headquarters of the scattered race and religion.
The nature of that religious centre it must be for Jews to decide;
but I think if I were a Jew I would build the Temple without
bothering about the site of the Temple. That they should
have the old site, of course, is not to be thought of;
it would raise a Holy War from Morocco to the marches of China.
But seeing that some of the greatest of the deeds of Israel were done,
and some of the most glorious of the songs of Israel sung,
when their only temple was a box carried about in the desert,
I cannot think that the mere moving of the situation of the place
of sacrifice need even mean so much to that historic tradition
as it would to many others. That the Jews should have some high
place of dignity and ritual in Palestine, such as a great building
like the Mosque of Omar, is certainly right and reasonable;
for upon no theory can their historic connection be dismissed.
I think it is sophistry to say, as do some Anti-Semites,
that the Jews have no more right there than the Jebusites.
If there are Jebusites they are Jebusites without knowing it.
I think it sufficiently answered in the fine phrase of an English priest,
in many ways more Anti-Semitic than I: "The people that remembers
has a right." The very worst of the Jews, as well as the very best,
do in some sense remember. They are hated and persecuted and
frightened into false names and double lives; but they remember.
They lie, they swindle, they betray, they oppress; but they remember.
The more we happen to hate such elements among the Hebrews the more
we admire the manly and magnificent elements among the more vague
and vagrant tribes of Palestine, the more we must admit that paradox.
The unheroic have the heroic memory; and the heroic people
have no memory.
But whatever the Jewish nation might wish to do about a national shrine
or other supreme centre, the suggestion for the moment is that something
like a Jewish territorial scheme might really be attempted, if we permit
the Jews to be scattered no longer as individuals but as groups.
It seems possible that by some such extension of the definition of Zionism
we might ultimately overcome even the greatest difficulty of Zionism,
the difficulty of resettling a sufficient number of so large a race
on so small a land. For if the advantage of the ideal to the Jews
is to gain the promised land, the advantage to the Gentiles is to get
rid of the Jewish problem, and I do not see why we should obtain
all their advantage and none of our own. Therefore I would leave
as few Jews as possible in other established nations, and to these
I would give a special position best described as privilege;
some sort of self-governing enclave with special laws and exemptions;
for instance, I would certainly excuse them from conscription,
which I think a gross injustice in their case. [Footnote: Of course
the privileged exile would also lose the rights of a native.]
A Jew might be treated as respectfully as a foreign ambassador,
but a foreign ambassador is a foreigner. Finally, I would give
the same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternative
policy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named;
the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had not
so much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists.
There is one word to be added; it will be noted that inevitably
and even against some of my own desires, the argument has returned
to that recurrent conclusion, which was found in the Roman Empire
and the Crusades. The European can do justice to the Jew;
but it must be the European who does it. Such a possibility
as I have thrown out, and any other possibility that any one can
think of, becomes at once impossible without some idea of a general
suzerainty of Christendom over the lands of the Moslem and the Jew.
Personally, I think it would be better if it were a general
suzerainty of Christendom, rather than a particular supremacy
of England. And I feel this, not from a desire to restrain
the English power, but rather from a desire to defend it.
I think there is not a little danger to England in the diplomatic
situation involved; but that is a diplomatic question that it
is neither within my power or duty to discuss adequately.
But if I think it would be wiser for France and England together
to hold Syria and Palestine together rather than separately,
that only completes and clinches the conclusion that has haunted me,
with almost uncanny recurrence, since I first saw Jerusalem
sitting on the hill like a turreted town in England or in France;
and for one moment the dark dome of it was again the Templum Domini,
and the tower on it was the Tower of Tancred.
Anyhow with the failure of Zionism would fall the last
and best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew.
We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism has
ever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure.
Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence and
comfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorian
agnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a brief
medieval insanity. In this as in greater things, even if we lost
our faith we could not recover our agnosticism. We can never
recover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance.
We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that there
is a Jewish solution. If there is not, there is no other.
We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certain
theological theories, any more than we can believe again any other part
of the optimistic materialism whose temple is the Albert Memorial.
A scheme of guilds may be attempted and may be a failure;
but never again can we respect mere Capitalism for its success.
An attack may be made on political corruption, and it may be a failure;
but never again can we believe that our politics are not corrupt.
And so Zionism may be attempted and may be a failure;
but never again can we ourselves be at ease in Zion.
Or rather, I should say, if the Jew cannot be at ease in Zion we
can never again persuade ourselves that he is at ease out of Zion.
We can only salute as it passes that restless and mysterious figure,
knowing at last that there must be in him something mystical as well
as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ
or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.
CONCLUSION
To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London
might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff
like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather
that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some
identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God.
Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one
who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only
symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal
coloured like copper and brass. For on it was written in Greek
characters the word "Jerusalem," and though it may be less valuable
than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand.
All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze
and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold
and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled
down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger.
I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I
rubbed the ring perhaps all those towers would rise again.
And there was a sort of feeling of truth in the fancy after all.
We talk of the changeless East; but in one sense the impression
of it is really rather changing, with its wandering tribes and its
shifting sands, in which the genii of the East might well build
the palace or the paradise of a day. As I saw the low and solid
English cottages rising around me amid damp delightful thickets
under rainy skies, I felt that in a deeper sense it is rather
we who build for permanence or at least for a sort of peace.
It is something more than comfort; a relative and reasonable contentment.
And there came back on me like a boomerang a rather indescribable
thought which had circled round my head through most of my journey;
that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace
of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe
the form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that
very striking book _Form and Colour_, by Mr. March Philips.
When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmured
against such a description of the ideals of Buddha or Mrs. Besant.
To which I can only reply that I do know a little about the ideals,
and I think I prefer the idols. I have far more sympathy with
the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms
and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented
by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument
in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind.
I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun,
than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist.
Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one
thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it,
and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sort
of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made
the revolving Eastern mind, as the Franciscan said in Jerusalem,
do something at last.
Anyhow, although I carried none of the trappings of a pilgrim I felt
strongly disposed to take the privileges of one. I wanted to be
entertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner,
and to tell them interminable tales of my travels. I wanted to linger
in Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town. I nearly got
out of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secluded
cottages which might be brightened by a little news from the Holy Land.
For it seemed to me that all my fellow-countrymen must be my friends;
all these English places had come much closer together after travels
that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars.
The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my own
kitchen garden; and London itself to be really situated at London End.
London was perhaps the largest of the suburbs of Beaconsfield.
By the time I came to Beaconsfield itself, dusk was dropping
over the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemed
to grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the long
lanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer,
I heard the barking of a dog.