I have just said that it may be politic for the British Government to coddle the aspirations of the Jews. There are, however, profound reasons why this coddling will not take the form of granting to them even the name and surface appearance of a sovereign government ruling Palestine. In the first place, Britain’s hold upon India is by no means so secure that the Imperial Government at London can afford to trifle with the fanatical sensibilities of the millions of Mohammedans in its Indian possessions. Remember that Palestine is as much the Holy Land of the Mohammedan as it is the Holy Land of the Jew, or the Holy Land of the Christian. His shrines cluster there as thickly. They are to him as sacredly endeared. In 1914 I visited the famous Caves of Machpelah, twenty miles from Jerusalem; and I shall never forget the mutterings of discontent that murmured in my ears, nor the threatening looks that confronted my eyes, from the lips and faces of the devout Mohammedans whom I there encountered. For these authentic tombs of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are as sacred to them, because they are saints of Islam, as they are to the most orthodox of my fellow Jews, whose direct ancestors they are, not only in the spiritual, but in the actual physical sense. To these Mohammedans, my presence at the tombs of my ancestors was as much a profanation of a Mohammedan Holy Place as if I had laid sacrilegious hands upon the sacred relics in the mosque at Mecca. To imagine that the British Government will sanction a scheme for a political control of Palestine which would place in the hands of the Jews the physical guardianship of these shrines of Islam, is to imagine something very foreign to the practical political sense of the most politically practical race on earth. They know too well how deeply they would offend their myriad Mohammedan subjects to the East.
Exactly the same political issue of religious fanaticism applies to the question of Christian sensibilities. Any one who has seen, as in 1914 I saw at Easter-tide, the tens of thousands of devout Roman Catholics from Poland, Italy, and Spain, and the other tens of thousands of devout Greek Catholics from Russia and the East, who yearly frequent the shrines of Christianity in Palestine, and who thus consummate a lifetime of devotion by a pilgrimage undertaken at, to them, staggering expense and physical privation; and who has observed, as I have observed, the suppressed hatred of them all for both the Jew and the Mussulman; and who has noted, further, the bitter jealousies between even Protestant and Catholic, between Greek Catholic and Roman—such an observer, I say, can entertain no illusions that the placing of these sacred shrines of Christian tradition in the hands of the Jews would be tolerated. The most enlightened Christians might endure it, but the great mass of Christian worshippers of Europe would not. They regard the Jew not merely as a member of a rival faith, but the man whose ancestors rejected their fellow Jew, the Christ, and crucified Him. Their fanaticism is a political fact of gigantic proportions. A Jewish State in Palestine would inevitably arouse their passion. Instead of such a State adding new dignity and consideration to the position of the Jew the world over (as the Zionists claim it would do), I am convinced that it would concentrate, multiply, and give new venom to the hatred which he already endures in Poland and Russia, the very lands in which most of the Jews now dwell, and where their oppressions are the worst.
The political pretensions of Zionism are fantastic. I think the foregoing paragraphs have demonstrated this.
Is Zionism a spiritual will-o’-the-wisp? I assert with all the vigour of my most profound convictions that it is. Its professed spiritual aim is the reassertion of the dignity and worth of the Jew. It is a mechanism designed to restore to him his self-respect, and to secure for him the respect of others. The means by which it proposes to accomplish this have been described above. How pitifully inadequate these means are has been demonstrated.
The effort of the Jews to attain their legitimate spiritual ambitions by means of a political mechanism needs hardly further to be controverted in the negative, or destructive, sense. I prefer to meet this issue on positive and constructive grounds. My answer to the spiritual pretensions of Zionism is the positive answer that the solution has already been discovered—the way out has been found. The courageous Jew, the intellectually honest Jew, the forward-looking Jew, the Jew who has been willing to fight for his rights on the spot where they were infringed, has won his battle, and has found all the glorious freedom which Zionism so impractically describes. The brave Jews of England did not surrender their cause. They did not seek a moral opiate in an Oriental pipe-dream of retreat to a cloud-land Zion pictured by fancy on the arid hills of Palestine. They stayed in England; they fought on English soil for their rights as men. Their courage enlisted the admiration of the nobler spirits among the English, and it allied to them such Britons as Macaulay and George Bentinck, whose splendid eloquence and political acumen assisted in the repeal of the Jewish Disabilities in 1858. This epochal legislation gave the Jews every right enjoyed in Britain by the Christians. It made possible the splendid political career of Beaconsfield (for many years Prime Minister of Great Britain), and the brilliant experience of Sir Rufus Isaacs (now Earl Reading) who has progressed through the highest political honours of the nation as Lord Chief Justice, Ambassador to America, and Viceroy of India.
Do not forget that in this victorious struggle the Jew made no compromise whatever with his conscience. He did not abandon his racial, religious, or cultural heritage.
The courageous and wise Jews of France and Italy have fought this same battle to this same victorious conclusion.
But this book will be read chiefly by Americans: such influence as it may wield will be particularly upon American minds. Need I elaborate the argument in its American setting? The facts lie upon the surface for the dullest eyes to see them. Nowhere in the world has so glorious an opportunity been offered to the Jew. Generous America has thrown wide the doors of opportunity to him. The Jew possesses no talents of the mind or spirit that cannot find here a free field for their most complete expression.
Does he seek political office? Jews in this country have been or are members of every legislature, including the Senate of the United States; ambassadors representing the person of the President at foreign courts; officers of the judiciary in every grade from justice of the peace to justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Does he seek freedom of conscience? He may freely choose his mode of worship, from the strictest of orthodox tabernacles to the most liberal of free synagogues.