As I have said, some of the Zionist leaders woefully misunderstood the Balfour Declaration. The terms of the mandate now leave to them no room for misunderstanding. Other Zionist leaders, however, wilfully misrepresented it. They knew that it meant what it said, but they did not dare to tell their followers what it meant. They chose rather to let them think that it was only another phrasing of their original programme of the erection of a Zionistic national sovereign state, or that it would lead to it. These misleaders, being more vociferous than their more honest colleagues, have had the ear of the great mass of Jews throughout the world. This mass now believes that Zionism, as a national ideal, is presently attainable, if, indeed, it is not actually attained already. These Zionistic apostles are culpable, in that they have failed to undeceive the masses of this error. Instead, they have capitalized this credulous faith, and are collecting funds in America and in Europe, ostensibly to finance what they call the establishment of their dream, although really, as I believe, to finance further propaganda for their unattainable ideal.
Having disposed of the fallacious assumption that Zionism has been, or is about to be attained, let me now return to my main argument, namely, that it never can be attained, and that it ought not to be attained.
Let us examine the pretensions of Zionism from three essential angles: Is it an economic fallacy? Is it a political fantasy? Is it a spiritual will-o’-the wisp?
First, its economic aspect. I assert positively that it is impossible. Zionists have been working for thirty years with fanatical zeal, and backed by millions of money from philanthropic Jews of great wealth in France, England, Germany, and America; and the total result of their operations, at the outbreak of the World War, was the movement of ten thousand Jews from other lands to the soil of Palestine. In the same period, a million and a half Jews have migrated to America.
The truth is that Palestine cannot support a large population in prosperity. It has a lean and niggard soil. It is a land of rocky hills, upon which, for many centuries, a hardy people have survived only with difficulty by cultivating a few patches of soil here and there, with the olive, the fig, citrus fruits and the grape, or have barely sustained their flocks upon the sparse native vegetation. The streams are few and small, entirely insufficient for the great irrigation systems that would be necessary for the general cultivation of the land. The underground sources of water can be developed only at a prodigious capital expense. There are thirteen million Jews in the world: the Zionist organization itself claims for Palestine only a maximum possible population of five millions. Even this claim is on the face of it an extravagant over-estimate. After careful study on the spot in Palestine, I prophesy that it will not support more than one million additional inhabitants.
Palestine is in area about equal to the state of Massachusetts; and that New England state, blest (as Palestine is not) with plentiful water, ample water-powers, abundant forestation, and a good soil, supports only four million people. This bald comparison, however, does not begin to tell the story. Massachusetts is an integral part of a tremendously prosperous nation of one hundred million souls. Distributed among forty-eight states, between which there are no political boundaries to protect, no fences to be maintained, no tariff discrimination, or unfavourable exchanges to be considered, she enjoys all the advantages of a highly industrialized community, and of established commercial intercourse with the rest of the most progressive nations in the world. If Massachusetts were situated as Palestine is situated, remote from the great currents of modern economic life; without even one of those absolutely indispensable prerequisites to commercial success, namely natural ports; without its network of railways, bringing to it cheaply the raw materials for its manufactures, and carrying from it cheaply and quickly to rich markets its manufactured articles, Massachusetts would support a population far less than its present numbers.
This is the condition of Palestine: not only must agriculture be pursued under the greatest possible handicaps of soil and water, but it is subject to the direct competition of far more favoured lands in the very agricultural products for which it is distinctive. These are the citrus fruits, almonds, figs and dates, grapes and wine. How can little Palestine compete in these products with Italy, France, and Spain, and their north African colonies, whose richer soil lies in the direct line of the great march of commerce?
A great industrial Palestine is equally unthinkable. It lacks the raw materials of coal and iron; it lacks the skill in technical processes and the experience in the arts; and, above all, it is not in the path of modern trade currents. What hope is there for Palestine, as an industrial nation, in competition with America, Great Britain, and Germany, with their prodigious resources, their highly organized factories, their great mass-production, and their superb means of transportation? The notion is preposterous.
I claim that the foregoing analysis demolishes the economic foundation of Zionism.
What of its political foundations? Is Zionism a political fantasy? I assert most emphatically that it is. The present British mandate over Palestine is a recognition, by the great powers of the world, of the supreme political interest of Great Britain in that region. It was no mere accident that it was a British army which captured Jerusalem from the Turks in the late war. The life-and-death importance of the Suez Canal to the integrity of the British Empire has for more than half a century made the destiny of Palestine as well as of Egypt a vital concern of British statesmanship. So long as the Turk was in control, the British had no cause to fear what that impotent and backward neighbour might do to interrupt the life current that flows through this jugular vein connecting India with the British Isles. But now that the Turk is in process of being dispossessed of sovereignty, and the future disposition of his territories in doubt, British statesmen can hold but one opinion concerning either Egypt or Palestine, and this opinion is, that no matter what else may befall, British influence must be omnipotent on both sides of the Suez Canal. It may be politic for them for the moment to coddle the aspirations of a numerically negligible race like the Jews. But the notion that Great Britain would for one instant allow any form of government in Palestine, under any name whatever, that was not, in fact, an appanage of the British Crown, and subservient to the paramount interests of British world policy, is too fantastical for serious refutation.