After the War the Turks in Anatolia may still be infatuated enough to banish their best friends, but in Armenia, when the Turk has gone, the Americans will find more than their former field; for, in one form or another, Armenia is certain to rise again. The Turks have not succeeded in exterminating the Armenian nation. Half of it lives in Russia, and its colonies are scattered over the world from California to Singapore. Even within the Ottoman frontiers the extermination is not complete, and the Arabian deserts will yield up their living as well as the memory of their dead. The relations of Armenia with the Russian democracy should not be more difficult to settle than those of Finland and Poland; her frontiers cannot be forecast, but they must include the Six Vilayets—so often promised reforms by the Concert of Europe and so often abandoned to the revenges of the Ottoman Government—as well as the Civilian highlands and some outlet to the sea. One thing is certain, that, whatever land is restored to them, the Armenians will turn its resources to good account, for, while their town-dwellers are the merchants and artisans of Western Asia, 80 per cent., of them are tillers of the soil.
What the Americans have done for Armenia has been done for Syria by the French[43]. There are half a million Maronite Catholics in Syria, and since the seventeenth century France has been the protectress of Catholicism in the Near East. In 1864, when there was trouble in Syria and the Maronites were being molested by the Ottoman Government, France landed an army corps and secured autonomy for the Lebanon under a Christian governor. But French influence is not limited to the Lebanon province. All over Syria there are French clerical, secular, and Judaic schools. Beirût and Damascus, Christian and Moslem—for there is more religious tolerance in Syria than in most Near Eastern countries—are equally under the spell of French civilisation; and France is the chief economic power in the land, for French enterprise has built the Syrian railways. The sufferings of Syria during the War have been described; the Young Turks have confiscated the railways and deprived the Lebanon of its autonomy; even Rohrbach deprecates the fact that "only a few of the higher officials in Syria are chosen from among the natives of the country, while almost all, from the Kaimakam upwards, are sent out from Constantinople," and he attributes to this policy "the feeling against the Turks, which is most acute in Damascus." This is Rohrbach's periphrasis for Arab Nationalism, which will be master in its own house when the Turk has been removed. The future status and boundaries of Syria can no more be forecast than those of Armenia at the present stage of the War; yet here, too, certain tendencies are clear. In some form or other Arab Syria will retain her connection with France, and her growing population will no longer be driven by misgovernment to emigration.
Syrians and Armenians have been emigrating for the last quarter of a century, and during the same period the Jews, whose birthright in Western Asia is as ancient as theirs, have been returning to their native land—not because Ottoman dominion bore less hardly upon them than upon other gifted races, but because nothing could well be worse than the conditions they left behind. For these Jewish immigrants came almost entirely from the Russian Pale, the hearth and hell of modern Jewry. The movement really began after the assassination of Alexander II. in 1881, which threw back reform in Russia for thirty-six years. The Jews were the scapegoats of the reaction. New laws deprived them of their last civil rights, pogroms of life itself; they came to Palestine as refugees, and between 1881 and 1914 their numbers there increased from 25,000 to 120,000 souls.
The most remarkable result of this movement has been the foundation of flourishing agricultural colonies. Their struggle for existence has been hard; the pioneers were students or trades-folk of the Ghetto, unused to outdoor life and ignorant of Near Eastern conditions; Baron Edmund de Rothschild financed them from 1884 to 1899 at a loss; then they were taken over by the "Palestine Colonisation Association," which discovered the secrets of success in self-government and scientific methods.
Each colony is now governed by an elective council of inhabitants, with committees for education, police, and the arbitration of disputes, and they have organised co-operative unions which make them independent of middlemen in the disposal of their produce. Their production has rapidly risen in quantity and value, through the industry and intelligence of the average Jewish settler, assisted latterly by an Agricultural Experiment Station at Atlit, near Haifa, which improves the varieties of indigenous crops and acclimatises others[44]. There is a "Palestine Land Development Company" which buys land in big estates and resells it in small lots to individual settlers, and an "Anglo-Palestine Bank" which makes advances to the new settlers when they take up their holdings. As a result of this enlightened policy the number of colonies has risen to about forty, with 15,000 inhabitants in all and 110,000 acres of land, and these figures do not do full justice to the importance of the colonising movement. The 15,000 Jewish agriculturists are only 12-1/2 per cent. of the Jewish population in Palestine, and 2 per cent., of the total population of the country; but they are the most active, intelligent element, and the only element which is rapidly increasing. Again, the land they own is only 2 per cent. of the total area of Palestine; but it is between 8 and 14 per cent. of the area under cultivation, and there are vast uncultivated tracts which the Jews can and will reclaim, as their numbers grow—both by further colonisation and by natural increase, for the first generation of colonists have already proved their ability to multiply in the Promised Land. Under this new Jewish husbandry Palestine has begun to recover its ancient prosperity. The Jews have sunk artesian wells, built dams for water storage, fought down malaria by drainage and eucalyptus planting, and laid out many miles of roads. In 1890 an acre of irrigable land at Petach-Tikweh, the earliest colony, was worth £3 12s., in 1914, £36, and the annual trade of Jaffa rose from £760,000 to £2,080,000 between 1904 and 1912. "The impetus to agriculture is benefiting the whole economic life of the country," wrote the German Vice-Counsul at Jaffa in his report for 1912, and there is no fear that, as immigration increases, the Arab element will be crowded to the wall. There are still only two Jewish colonies beyond Jordan, where the Hauran—under the Roman Empire a corn-land with a dozen cities—has been opened up by the railway and is waiting again for the plough.
But will immigration continue now that the Jew of the Pale has been turned at a stroke into the free citizen of a democratic country? Probably it will actually increase, for the Pale has been ravaged as well as liberated during the war, and the Jews of Germany have based an ingenious policy on this prospect, which is expounded thus by Dr. Davis-Trietsch of Berlin[45]:
"According to the most recent statistics about 12,900,000 out of the 14,300,000 Jews in the world speak German or Yiddish (jüdisch-deutsch) as their mother-tongue…. But its language, cultural orientation, and business relations the Jewish element from Eastern Europe" (the Pale) "is an asset to German influence…. In a certain sense the Jews are a Near Eastern element in Germany and a German element in Turkey."
Germany may not relish her kinship with these lost Teutonic tribes, but
Dr. Davis-Trietsch makes a satirical exposure of such scruples:
"It used to be a stock argument against the Jews that 'all nations' regarded them with equal hostility, but the War has brought upon the Germans such a superabundance of almost universal execration that the question which is the most despised of all nations—if one goes, not by justice and equity, but by the violence and extensiveness of the prejudice—might well now be altered to the Germans' disadvantage.
"In this unenviable competition for the prize of hate, Turkey, too, has a word to say, for the unspeakable Turk' is a rhetorical commonplace of English politics."