V. Jabotinsky

THE JEWISH WAR FRONT

CHAPTER I.

This book, written in January 1940, is intended to press a claim for the inclusion, first, of the Jewish problem into the war-sime of the Allied nations, and secondly - into the scope of any all-round revisionist discussion that may follow the war.

Responsible people, I know, are getting impatient of laymen's insistence on extending the war aims of the Allies so as to include the redress of almost any grievance ever raised anywhere on earth. These responsible people firmly demand that a stop be put to this nonsense; they point out that the proper "aims" of a nation at war is to remove those factors which have caused that war, and hardly anything else; whereas other grievances, however justified, will have to be settled by some other method.

Those responsible people are perfectly right; nevertheless, and strictly in accordance with their argument just
outlined, the removal of the Jewish grievance is a claim most\nundeniably entitled to a prominent place among the genuine and\nurgent aims of the war - without prejudice to the place to
which it is entitled among the questions to be dealt with in

are, among the many questions of reconstruction raised in connection with the wer, these two quite distinct categories: "war aims" and "all-round revisioniem". Much confusion would be avoided if both were kept rigourously apart. A war aim is something which you actually and obviously fight for, and if you do not obtain it as an outcome of the war it will mean that you have been beaten. For instance, if a repetition of acts of violance such as Foland's invasion will not be rendered impossible the Allies will have lost the war; crushing the Maxi regime is, therefore, a war aim. But such purposes as, for instance, re-establishing free trade between the nations, excellent as it is, cannot be called a war aim. A peace treaty can be signed without mentioning it and still be considered most satisfactory.

The removal of unreasonable trade barriers belongs to quite a different category of world needs: It is one of those problems that await the great Revision. Revisionism is not by any means unconnected with the war: on the contrary, most of us feel that it would be a criminal waste of a tragic but great opportunity if such a cataclysm were allowed to pass without leading up to some effort of all-round, thorough apring-cleaning. Which does not mean that no peace can be made before it is effected.

War sime are sime for which nations are compelled to fight with steel and gunpowder. Revisionism embraces purposes which can be discussed pascefully and settled without violence (even if not always without the pressure of implied threats). It is to be hoped that, as progress marches on, more and more problems will be solved by peaceful revision instead of by war. For the present it is unfortunately indispensable to distinguish between the two aspects, war aims and revision.

The preceeding paragraph is not an academic essay:\nit has the very practical purpose of doing away with the convention that the Jewish problem, though ripe for "revision",\nis not to be considered a "war aim". This contention is
wrong. The Jewish problem belongs to both categories, and
above all to that of war-aims.

Responsible statesmen and press organs have been heard recently betraying some impatience with those voices out of the great public which attempt to bring up every overdue item of world-improvement as one of the sins qua non conditions for an acceptable peace. Those statesmen and newspapers are perfectly right: the circle of proper war-sine should not be extended beyond the really essential and indispensable items.

But the solution of the Jewish tragedy is exactly one of these essential and indispensable items. A peace treaty leaving the Jewish problem unsolved would not ensure anything like a durable peace. Jewish redress is a war aim.

The problem is vast and complicated; it can obviously not be settled in all its details at one single peace, conference. Those details will have to be left over for the "revision" period which will follow the end of the war. But complicated problems do not only consist of details: they also have roots. The root of the Jewish tragedy is a matter of terrible urgency; it is actually one of the main factors that brought about this war. This root must be extracted, and this is a war aim.

I wish to add also this to the distinction between

Far aims will be discussed and sattled at peace conferences, one or saveral conferences. Such conferences tend to be short and sharp.

The Revision period, which will follow the signature of the peace treaty or the various peace treaties, will probably take the for of a protracted session, by something like a European parliament or perhaps a world parliament. Its labours may last years, may last even a generation. It may be called a new League of Nations, or a continent's Federation, or any other name. One thing is certain: all humanity feels that it must come and that must carry out the great reconstruction.

It would doubtlessly have come without the pretext or the preface of this war, simply by the pressure of realities; this war is perhaps only a secondary incident. It is not the war that will reconstruct the universe: this will be accomplished by the Revision period. The war will only burn or sweep away a few rocks impeding the reconstruction; cut out a few malisment tumours preventing any recovery.

One of them is the cancer called the Jewish tragedy.

Even a beginning of universal reconstruction cannot be made unless this is cut out. A war aim is the fullsat spense of the term.

CHAPTER II.

The Jewish tragedy is not the microbe which has caused this war. The Jewish tragedy is "only" that favourable medium or feeding-ground in which the microbe grew to maturity.

The man in the etreet may not be constous of this intimate connection between the acute forms of antisemitism and war-danger. He may even think it a monstrous exaggeration

to suggest that Jew-baiting in Nati Germany, however objectionable, was in any way responsible for, say, Hitler's massegarding the Anglo-French warning which was the direct cause of the conflict. The man in the street can be expected to dismiss such suggestions as a case of megalomania: "Those Jewa imagine that everything, weather and climate and earthquake, depends on what is going to happen to him. Of course the Maxi programms and practice, beside the greed for world yower and the cult of violence, also includes persecution of Jews, but the latter is just a concomittant, an accompanying phenomenon, not the essence. Maxism could have been just as bad if there were no Jews on earth".

This is utterly wrong. For destructive movements of the Nazi type, antisemitism is infinitely more than a "concemittant"; and Nazism would probably never have accomplished such rapid and sweeping conquests if it had not been able to ride the anti-Jewish horse.

Everybody knows that, in propoganda, the appeal of lowe is slow and clumsy in comparison with the appeal of hate. Hate is that piquant sauce which speeds up both the swallowing and the digestion of ideas and schemes. Futhermore, that "sauce" can only be fully effective if the object of the hate is within reach, well-known to all, easy and non-dangerous to attack. Had the Maxi propoganda, from its beginnings, been confined to preaching rebellion against the Versailles peace

The world outside of Germany does not realise to .

what an all-prevading extent the Mazi movement has, through all

the years of its existence, been dependant on its

Jewish spice for vitality and driving power. Theoretically,

a complete gospel of German National Socialism could have been

composed without any reference to Jews at all: rearmament,

militarisation of the Rhine district, restoration of colonies,

Ansohluss of Austria, annexation of the Sudetenland, to say mothing of that childish scheme of social reforms devised in 1923 by an amateur crudite called Reder, and incorporated into the "immutable" programme of the party, and a little later abandoned:— all these could have been preached just as forcibly had their authors never thought of Israel and Judah. But those authors evidently felt, from the very beginning, that nothing of all this would "go down" properly with the masses unless seasoned with the all-powerful spice. The result was that not one spoonful of the dish was served without the spice; not one single ditch crossed but on the "Jawich" etilts.

It is foolish to explain this infatuation by using the term mania. With a few exceptions, the Mazi chiefs are as any other government or party leaders in any other country. Nor is it "sadism"; nor any other abnormal urgs rooted in the morbid subconcious of men almost each one of whom, when defeated and shorn of his war-paint and examined in the ordinary light of drab everyday reality, will probably be found to be just drab average. Some of them (if not most of them) have long, and quite credibly, been reported to confess how endlssely "fed up" they were with the necessity always to talk of Jews, Jews. One does not do such things for pleasure: one does it only because of necessity. They knew that their propagands would not win through fast enough and wide enough

without the sauce. It is only thanks to the sauce that it has won through so wide and so fast. The word only has just been italiaskoised with full responsability: not in the sense (let it be repeated) as though Jew-baiting belonged to the real essence of the Masi contraband - which it does not: but because Jew-baiting has proved a powerful lubricant without which the load would have drawled instead of sliding down as it did.

early as in the eighteenth eighties, after a pogrom in the Ukraine, a Russian Socialist party published a manifesto trying to comfort all friends of liberty by arguing that an antiJewish pogrom was, after all, not such a bad thing, being rather in the nature of a rehearsal: the peasants only begin by attacking the M Jawa, they will continue by massacring the police and will end by smashing autocracy. - Years later, also in Russia, it was a Jewish revolutionary who chimed in, with the often quoted formula, "Jewish blood is the best for oiling the wheels of progress".).

The success of the Nazi experiment has proved instructive. Now, in the light of the present conflagration, the wholl story of the last decade looks very much like a gradual shunting of several nations "falling in" into the one or the other of the two great camps about to clash. And it is really striking and curious to see that, whenever any of those nations thought of joining the enemy brank of the Festern block (be it even only a hesitating attempt, soon to be abandoned), it invariably begun by qualifying for admission in the same and only may - through a dose of the "Jewish" spice. That was the meaning of the Goga-intermezzo in Roumania: for a moment, in the autumn of 1936 that country's ruling circle oscillated close on the brink of an anti-western orientation - and the first visible symptom of it was the application of that same "lubricant", a violently anti-semitic cabinet and a broadside of anti-Jewish legislation.

A few weeks later the anti-western orientation was found undesirable - and Mr. Gogaldismissed and his legislation quashed.

This is not the moment to dwell on that short-lived incident longer than strictly necessary for pointing out its moral, but

Still less opportune would it be just now to emphasise the Italian analogy: yet it is one even more striking than Reumania's example. In Roumania there had always been antisemitte tendencies among the masses: so there was, at least, something (or even much) for a gambler to gamble upon. But Italy! It is not enough to say that its people, for half a century at least, had genuinely forgotten all about discriminating against a Jew: they had actually lost interest (all) in noticing who was a Jew and who wasn't. Yet, when the time came for swinging the country into a certain "crientation", in some mysterious way it was immediately felt that the new course

would not run sufficiently smoothly without a coat of the regulation grease. The lubricant here was applied half-hear-tedly, with evident repulsion, with countless apologies - as something one does admittedly contre-coour, and only because one must: because, for that kind of job, this kind of black mass is in-dis-pen-sable.

I am wither a historian nor a sociologist, and raise no claim to being fully able to explain why it is "indispensable? Many a time have I, too, asked myself this question: innumerable wars had been fought in the past, yet never was any such necessity to prepare for it by such capecial emphasis on the Jews. Why does it appear so necessary now?

One explanation is perhaps an almost comforting one: progress. The world has been moving on after all despite all our scepticism. Masses can no longer be sent to die simply by order: now they need some km kind of "religion" to die for. It may not have been a mere word when some observers of, for instance, the Spanish civil war affirmed that the programmatic differences, or the clash of real interests, between Burgos and Madrid were infinitessimally small - it was not a fight over tangible issues but a pure and simple guerre de religion.

And a formidable amount of training by rehearsal, by cheap and easy experimenting in corpore vili. The dormant brute in German souls seems to have been hibernating very near to the surface, but even so it had to be converted to beastliness and cruelty by gradual drill. Like Voltaire's God, if the Jews had not existed they would have had to be invented for the purpose.

It would be criminal blindness, on the part of western statemanship, to disregard the historical truth of this enquiry. When the Mazis across the frontiers, or their hirelings in Britain and France, yell or whisper that this is a "Jewish War" they are perfectly right: the microbe would have died had it not been allowed to feed and multiply on the Jewish tragedy.

CHAPTER III.

Folund's part in that "Jewish" pre-history of the
war is a chapter by itself. I shall have to speak of Poland\nin this book in other connections: here I only wish to point
out the curious and painful of her historical rôle
during these twenty years of her renewed existence. It was a
period during which the new world war was hatching; during
which her government did much to prevent it; but it so happened that, after Germany herself, Poland was, objectively, the
main ground where the war-microbes bred.

There is a story about the late Marshal Pilsudski's interview with an important French envoy, soon after the Earl conquest of the power in Berlin. The Frenchman was trying to persuade him to join France and England (plue, of sourse, Soviet Russia) against Germany. Pilsudski took his guest to a big wall map, showing Poland squeezed in between the U.S.S.R. and Germany, and said: "If these two clash some day, all their battles will be fought on our soil. Now you just imagine that this sail is not Foland but France, and tell me what would be your policy then".

From the moment Pilmudski took the power in 1926, perhaps even before that, the policy of the Polish Republic

was dictated by this paramount aim: no war on Polish soil.

In those days it was, in all winds, tantamount to "no war at ail". Of all intensely, inherently, ingrainedly peaceminded countries, Poland was probably the most genuinely anxious: not because of what is called pacifies but because of something such more effective than pacifies - obvious unwistakable interest.

And at the same time, all that East-Central zone of Europe - we call it "Europe, E.C." - stretching from Riga on the Beltic down to Constants on the Black Sea was uninterruptedly kind of kind of the seething with the most unhealthy/social fever: and its centre, and the main focus from which it radiated North and South, was Foland. It was, of course, the same evil again: the "Jewish"fever.

Its source was the stabistical fact that the Jews were ten per cents of Foland's total, and about one third of Foland's urban, population. This fact viciated and perverte every civic value. "Democracy" in this atmosphere meant that in the townhalls of Varsaw, Cracow, Lemberg, Lodz, of every important city, Poles would have to share mastery almost evenly with Jews: that was what it meant, or so people thought.
"Equality of rights" in this atmosphere meant that in every branch of economy that requires some learning, the long-urbanised Jew will overtake and beat his Polish competitor, son or grandeon of slow-witted peasantry: or so people thought ......

It does not matter how unfair and orded this rings: in Foland, that was the constant all-deafening din filling the very air of her public life. We shall see in another chapter how true it is that in some countries it is not "anti-semitism of men" but anti-semitism of Things" which decides: here we have a convincing illustration of that rule.

Yet this was Poland, by size and numbers and preetige the central rock of "Europe, S.C.". Had she been given, by God or fate, a chance of developing calmly and steadily, her influence would have steadied the whole of that some and would have made of it a real "Third Europe", a cohestve force capable of sobering its German neighbour despite all his numerical strength ("Europe, E.C." has itself a population not far from 100 million). As it was, Poland's unrelaxing feverishmens only acted as a constant encouragement for the nest where birds of previous batching.

The conclusion is clear: no restoration, in Central or East-Central Murope, will be any use to durable peace if the sarcome-root from which antisemitism flows is not cut out.

Among the factors whose interplay has produced this war, that "Jewish" root - "Jewish" the Jews - was at the root of all. The war will have been fought in vain, the victory worse than a lie if it is left stuck in the ground to poison the future.

naws", as they say in the B.B.C.:

It is useless to ask how much of it the reader has see in the general Allied press. Yet all these are not events of some remote earthquake, or antipode typhoon, "something which after all is no concern of ours" from the standpoint of, say, sacro egoismo: these are the direct results of the conquest of Poland for which the Allies solumnly assume responsability.

Under these conditions a conspiracy of silence is unforgivably insulting. But its main harm is in the inevitable suggestion that the Allies are ashamed of having Jews as fellow-sufferers. There is, both in England and France, a moral underworld ever trying to "get at" the non-defeatist camp by the taunt of a "Jewish war": which, as we have seen, is in a sense not quite entirely wrong. But polite society evidently shrinks from such "pornography". The result is that the Jewish fellow-sufferer is denied the even the last and most elementary priviledge of a sufferer: to have his losses registered in proper and fair perspective, so that he may at least hope, when the day comes for all-round redress, restoration and retribution, to present his claims on equal terms with others. The only explanation of the conspiracy - whether instinctive or planned - is that it is not desirable that the Jewish claim should ever be presented.

This is a foolish policy: if continued, it can only drive all world Jewry to bitter and dangerous conclusions.

CHAPTER V.

Some desultory attempts have, however, been made by best-class British statesmen to include the Jewish question into the scope of the Allied war-aims. The men I am going to quote are worthy of all respect, and their intentions unimpeatably sincere and benevolent. The more disappointing will be the conclusion any Jew will have to draw from their compared atterances.

Should any more pronouncements on the subject have appeared before this book goes into the printing machine, they will be mentioned in the concluding chapter; but there is little hope that they can appreciably change the picture. As it is, the picture is extremely arid. It boils down to "as you were". It is, of course, foreshadowed that Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland will once again become liberal Republics, and there will be a reinforced League of

Nations to look after the treatment of minerities. On the other hand, Jews are honestly warned by Sir Archibald Sinclair (who ought to be sincerely thanked for saying the only essential word in all this cant) that actual and permanent supervision of internal developments in a sovereign country by outside organs is inpracticable: in other words, the reality of any statute or treaty clauses about equal rights will ultimately depend, in Germany on the good will of the Germans, in Poland of the Poles. Roumania and Rungary, being as yet not at war, are not mentioned, but the obvious inference is that in these two countries outside supervision of the Jewish position is also out of question.

This disposes of some \$4,000,000 Jews still living in the zone which, for 20 years, has been the main theatre of scute Jewish distress. Apart from cant, what they are really promised is matrix atatus quo ante. This is presumably what is expected to keep the Jew enthusiastic for an Allied victory.

The general public, some Jews probably too, are very far from realising all the positive and hideous horror of the prospect this situation involves. It is worth analysing that prospect's details in the four chapters that follow.

There is, however, one aspect of optimism which even the most sanguin among the sober should discard utterly and pitilesely: this is the beleif that the anti-Jewish cancer can also be cured by such means as liberal constitutions and League of Nations supervision. No doubt, everything that is suitable to the subject will be duly inserted into those constitutions and into the League's new Covanant.ensuring the inviolability of equal rights for all. But the enforcement of those constitutions will have to be left for every country in the hands of local

governments will be as truly representative of the attitudes of the masses as only possible. It is therefore on the masses attitudes that the actual working of any equal-rights paragraph, so far as Jews' rights are intended, will depend. Not so in the case of other minorities: they mostly live in close territorial clusters, districts or at least cantons, and can more or less look after themselves if left alone. The Jews live scattered throughout predominantly Gentile towns and villages: on every step, in the street or in life, they are exposed to the good will or the ill will of the local majority. To pretend that under conditions such as these any essential results can be ensured by law is a childish idea. NON crede qui absurdum. Nor do I admit that any statesmen, even among those who profess to expect such magic effects from legislative incantations, are being really sincere about it.

Germany ( Jews) and Austria ( Jews).

The present situation in both is so universally known that it needs no futher elaboration: what does is the past of German antisemitism, for a myth is being created to the effect

Adolf Hitler and born in 1888, so that if he can be removed it will disappear. But the truth is that Hitler has just as much to do with it that evil as Eapoleon had with the invention of gunpowder. Napoleon did not invent it, he only made magnificent use of it; and when he went, others came and surpassed him.

into the Reichstag, in about 1893, the first bunch of deputees solemnly and quite democratically elected as Antisemitische

Partei: and in Vienna, two years later, Lueger triumphantly conquered the Vienna townhall on a platform whose main, or rather only, "plank" was Jew-hatred, and became burgomaster amid scenes of the wildest mass-enthusiasm, and kept his seat for decades.

All this had been happening for three quarters of a century long before a Mazi party was conceived.

there is that record of frank, sincere, full-throated, really totalitarian joy displayed by all classes of the Vienna crowd, in the first weeks after the Anachluss, when "Jewish ladies in fur coats" were ordered to scrup pavements and the mob flocked to watch and yell with delight, and mothers lifted babies over neighbours' heads to have a good look at the lovely sight.

"By order"? Of course there must be an order to unleash the impermost brute: but the main point is the presence of the brute underneath, and what a multitude of them!

Antisemitism is traditionally and organically endemic in Germany: not in Germany alone by any means, but in no other country more than in Germany. Here again, being neither a sociologist nor a student of psychology, I will not attempt to explain the phenomenon; but it would take a fool or a liar to deny the phenomenon.

The collapse of Maxism, however, can bring no essential remedy to this endemic poison. I am realist enough to allow for the so-called swing of the pendulum: when Hitler goes there may be some kind of popular scurry to atome for the antisemitic orgy, partly for p opportunist reasons but partly also, no doubt, out of genuine diaguest at the more makedly brutal forms the persecution had taken. Then, of course, there will have to be those equality-clauses in the peace treaty and the new constitution. Still more: there is not the slightest doubt that many Jews who were forced to leave Germany since 1935 will then be most ardently willing to return and forgive and forget: some

because of discouraging experiences while in exile, some out of genuine attachment to the German land and civilisation. But all superficial optimist should be warned that the result of all this backwash will be - almost immediately, perhaps only within a few weeks after that new édit de Nantes which will have opened the new era - a venomous recrudescence of the incurable tumor.

with the alternative "reconquer or starve", and in all cases morally entitled to an admitted grievance, something of an Enoch Arden cliam only much more poignant because originating in admitted injustice.

To make the prospect still clearer, it will perhaps be best to ask the reader - supposing he be a non-Jew - to forget that beggars cannot be choosers, and imagine that a similar prospect is offered not to us but to him and to other Englishmen:

the prospect of living at the mercy of a one-hundredto-one-majority trained for generations to abhor the English, under the sole protection of paper paragraphs and a supervision by Geneva, or a substitute for Geneva;
and to wax or keep enthusiastic about the Allied victory when all it promises you is just this prospect.

I am sure that that reader's reply would be: "I'll see you in hell first".

It is unfortunately true that some of those Polish governments, especially in the period preceding Pilsudski's coup d'état, had done much to aggravate the pressure; and that none of them, not even the best, can claim having done their duty, or half or one tenth of their duty, to "diminish or soften". Nothing would be easier than now to

denounce them with all the bitterness they deserve, now that they are all beaten and broken and swept away. A chapter of that kind might give a deal of belated satisfaction to pent-up and long outraged feeling. Bu the author frankly confesses that it would not give any satisfaction to him; profoundly regretful if he disappoints, he will stick to his line of enquiry which deals not with the guilt of men but with the tendencies of an elemental social process.

Those men, ministers and officials, writers and priests, were often unforgivably guilty; long trails of Jewish tears, often tinged by a substance even more salty than tears, lead to their doors. If there is justice beyond this life, they will pay for it; if history will be written by honest hands, they will stand condemned. But this book is written to force Jew and Gentile to realise that the fundamental curse of Jewish existence in that Zone is infinitely deeper than policies or ideologies or propagandas, whether anti or pro; and the author deliverately refuses to allow the attention of his readers to be sidetracked in the direction of easy and cheap emotions, from the stern concentration on the essential and irremediable doom.

The ghetto of East-Central Europe was doomed. No government, no regime, no angel or devil could have transformed it into snything even remotely approaching a normal homeland. It is now still more impossible to restore it as such unless numerical ethnical proportions undergo a drastic change.

legal equality alone is no cure for the disease which has poisoned their existence and will poison it again. It is unforgivably shortsighted now to withhold this experience from the notice of Allied statesmen, some of whom if not all way be genuinely ignorant of it and sincerely deluded into imagining that to restore the equal rights clauses in peace treaties, constitutions and covenants would be an efficient and sufficient solution. On the contrary: it would be a most harmful disservice to Jews and to Europe. The most urgent need of the day is to drive it home to all concerned that in East Central Europe the equality principle alone means no equality but the same old chaos all over again.

To make clear to outside observers, some bitter truths will have to be admitted and stated, however irksome that may seem to people of overdone susceptibility. Those awkward admissions centre around the one essential and dominating feature of East-European reality: there are some inevitable aspects in the normal social evolution of those countries (the words "inevitable" and "normal" should be especially noted) which prove inherently, objectively and organically fatal to the Jews' existence.

The subject will be repeatedly illustrated in the course of chapters that follow: here, as introduction into the subject, let us mention what is held to be the classical example of this incompatibility between a normal evolution

True, there may have existed in those Ukrainian districts a few Christian shopkeepers, and they of course also

have to surrender before the onslaught of cooperation. But when that happens, the "broken" Christian. trader, as often as not, gets absorbed in the movement's administrative machinery: being a valuable "specialist" among simple peasants, he will be employed by the cooperative. The Jew will not; it is so obvious to all that there can simply be no question of including the displaced Jewish trader into the executive staff of a farmers' cooperative that no Jew would ever dream of asking for such an "absurdity". Is this, too, to be called "antisemitism"? The managers of the cooperative movement, men of advanced views in the great majority, would indignantly deny such a charge. It is "simply" that one has to look after one's own people first, etc.

The same phenomenon, but in a much more solemn form, can be observed in one of the Baltic States (or perhaps in all). Violent antisemitism is not tolerated. What must actually goes on is a social process rather commendable in itself: the State, in one form or another, is gradually taking over the more or less direct administration of all the worth-while industrial or commercial concerns. The owners are paid fair value; at least more or less fair value. If the owners were Centiles, they mostly remain in charge. If Jews it is different: they are gradually replaced by non-Jews. This, as a rule.

is accomplished without any rude abruptness but nevertheless effectively. As one of the victims put it to
the author: "In Poland, when the government takes over
a Jewish-owned factory, all the Jews on the staff have to
go. Here there is no such indecent haste. 90% of my
former staff have been left in employment when it happened,
now three years ago. A year later only 70% were left, last
year 50%, and the end is in view.

govern if it kept them waiting while Jews went on running and manning what now would be state concerns (though created by Jewish entreprise with Jewish capital) - in that paculiar, all-pervading atmosphere of the Zone?

Gross injustice? Of course; but to disapprove of it it is useless. Its root isnot hatred of Jews - a feeling which could, if not pradicated, at least be combated - but something much more firm, elemental, primordial: sympathy with "one's own people", an instinct which cannot even be criticised because, after all, it is as natural as preferring one's own children to one's neighbour's child.

Antisemitism of Things, at bottom, is also due to a certain attitude of men and women. The line we draw between the two kinds of Judeophobia - that of Man and that of Things - is, however, not artificial. The first kind is active enmity, a constant urge to harm the hated race, to humiliate them, to see them aquirming and writhing beneath one's feet. Such an aggressive Sadistic mentality can obviously not be kept for ever on the same boiling level in every average souls of the community: it must have its ups and downs, periods of strain and periods of hibernation, and even at its strongest only a leading minority have it in its really and greedily scute stage - the remainder just follow suit and mildly enjoy the fun. Being thus of a somewhat elastic nature, "antisemitism of Men" can sometimes be fought against with a measure of success; the

Germans, for instance, a nation endowed with remarkable genius for collective obedience, may be expected to tone it down by order.

Other curious hypotheses have been suggested by observers of this morbid phenomenon. The most popular one has been re-launched, years ago, by Henri Bernstein in a

All this may or may not be a true guess; some day an investigator of coddective psychopathology might devote to this matter a volume which will be of considerable interest to science. To the Jews it will make no difference, as they are not likely to be flattered nor need they be downcast by the revelation of Dr. Goebbels' Rabbinical descent, nor

can the discovery in any way diminish or increase their trouble. The author's intention in allowing this digression is to underline the morbid, hectic, fluctuating character of what he calls antisemitism of Men - as against "antisemitism of Things" which is quiet, solit, and insutable, and therefore much more formidable.

CHAPTER VII.

the Jew. Thether or not these two countries, in the end, will also be invited to reconfirm their adherence to the principle of equal rights for all (it has never been absent from their constitutions) is immaterial: "Things" will decide, and only fools or hypocrites can doubt what the tenor of the decision will be.

The writer/was born in Russia, in a generation that knew what Jewish inequality tasted like, and his youth was apent in the atmosphere of constant struggle for equal rights. In 1906, at Helsinki, at a conference of Jewish nationalists who came from all corners of the Russian empire, he was co-editor of what is known as The Helsingfors Programme - a demand for perfect and absolute equality of civic rights: every Jew to be a citizen of Russia equal to all others. Russian Jewry as a whole to be recognised as a nationality equal to all others within the empire, its language equal to all languages, its religion equal to all other churches. To-day, he is prepared to sign that programme again. But he is not prepared to condone policies bound to make of that programme, or even of much less ambitious conceptions of equal rights for the Jew, a doomed matter of cant

I warn my fellow-Jews (if they still need the warning, which I doubt....) that equal rights are, at best, an extremely perishable piece of goods, infinitely touchy, to be handled and

There are two possible ways of envisaging a non-exodus solution of the Jewish problem, i.e. a solution founded on the assumption that equality can "work": the one called "assimilation", the other "Diaspora nationalism".

The first is an elastic idea, its adherents have been known to give it interpretations exgremely different from one another. Some favour assimilation in language and manners, but no religious apostasy and no mixed marriages: which, after all and despite all ractorics to the contrary, means the perpetuation of some kind of separate racial community held together by a collective ideology. Others, more radical, foresee or even desire mixed marriages so that both the race and the relition might gradually disappear; the comforting feature of this creed is the "proud" assurance that both will prove an excellent manure for enriching the physical and spiritual soil of humanity. -

"Diaspora nationalism" is based on the theory that all the essence of nationality is just language, literature, music, philosophy, religion and mak suchlike, and these can be preserved and cultivated without any territorial segregation. "Nationalities", according to this doctrine, are very much like churches, in that they can perfectly well carry on their separate worships though their adherents live intermingled not only in the same district but in the same street. What is needed to save them from the drabness of

mutual assimilation is not separate homelands ( ) a Comcalled "national-personal autonomy". All Jews who so un will be registered as members of thier own national community, will have their own schools, use their own language in public life and feel equal to anyone else.

This is not the place to debate the practical worth of any of these two solutions; for argument's cake let us assume that both are excellent. Let us go a step farther and agree in advance that, should a third or a fourth non-exodus solution of the Jewish problem be invented to-morrow, they will all be excellent. But their efficiency will always depend on one condition: the equality of individual civic rights (which they all presuppose as the fundamental condition of normal existence) must be real and keep real. Yet we just have seen that in Europe, E.C., it cannot be made real without a great exodus.

Assimilation is especially conditioned by execus.

Only when the bulk will be gone, the diminishing remainder may perhaps find a favourable atmosphere for trying to solve its problem by "merger": not illusory merging as in the past but this time, effective.

For the assimilation of Jews in the past has proved illusory throughout the whole of Europe, E.C. Real assimilation is not a solo: it is a duet, it takes two to complete it. It is not enough for the Jew to feel convinced that he

has become absolutely like his Gentile neighbour: what is more decisive is whether the Gentile meighbour also has the same impression. Joining a new community of nation or class or set is not only a question of genuine endeavour but above all of reception. Jewish assimilation in East-Central Europe, from this point of view, has obviously failed; hydrician by bringing Jew and Gentile nearer each other, bu making them rub shoulders in many walks of life where they never met before, it only axtended the area of possible friction. If assimilation as an escape from Jewish distress is at all worth trying again, the attempt will have to start afresh from the very beginning. But its enthusiasts themselves, if there still are any such in existence, must have by now realised that they stand no chance of success unless racial percentages in that part of Europe undergo staggering changes.

A "successful" assimilation may or may not be worth while, may or may not be objectively possible: but if it is, the preliminary condition is the execus of the bulk.

Mutatis mutandis the same judgment applies to
Diaspora-nationalisms whether practicable or not, the preliminary condition for its success is the exodus of the buak.

It is by far not the intention of this author to suggest giving up all hope of ever securing a decent and normal existence for the Jews in this part of the Diaspora. On the contrary, he still believes that this can be done. But the preliminary condition for any such hope is the exodus of the

mık.

The matter is so close to some intimate susceptibilities that the author must take leave for himself to add a few remarks speaking in the first person.

I warn my fellow-Jews (if they still need the warning, which I doubt) that equal rights are, at best, a very perishable piece of goods, infinitely touchy, to be handled and used with caution, moderation and tact. In

I asked him: is it fear? He denied it. "It is, my friend, a question of test. It is too conspicuous for good taste. I should equally disapprove it on the part of Protestants."

But of course it was fear; and of course it was by far not unfounded. The German economist Werner Sombett, who after all was neither a fool nor a sworn enemy of the Jews gave them this advice at the beginning of the century: "Our German laws and our ethical outlook admit Jewish equality - but if you Jews want to preserve it, do not take it too seriously. Always stick to the second place." It would be children to deny that 39% of Jews (and particularly the non-Zionist, "assimilationists Jews to whom equality is alpha and mann omega) think that a very wise maxim, and feel very sorry they did not follow it themselves, and would at least be very glad if their children would.

That their children will not follow the wise maxim,
for it is humanly impossible. Life is competition: equality
of rights has only one concrete meaning - equal chance in\nevery aspect of life's competition, the right to win if you
are better equipped. Twenty centuries of localded urbanism
have made the Jew, in the average though not on the summits
ordinary
where genius dwells, better equipped for most/competitions
of modern life; there is no pride in stating it, for the
advantage has long become a curse to us, a curse and a nuise
ance.

This is the fateful inner antinomy of civic equality for Jows: it can only be durable if not used to the full; yet it is impossible to prevent or avoid its being used to the full.

There is no remedy. True, various remedies have be tried, to keep the Jewish advance within "moderate" limits: attempts mostly in the form called numerus clausus. It consists in limiting the number of Jews which may be admitted into a certain profession (or school) or entreprise or institute) to a fixed percentage of the total personnel. In Czarist Russia, since 1888, it was the rule with regard to all universities and secondary schools: Jewish pupils were to be not more than 10% of the total in the western part of the empire (the "Fale of Settlement"), S or 3% in other provinces. The most modern experiment on the same lines is the Hungarian law limiting the number of Jews in certain professions to six per cent. - which is exactly the proportion of Jews to the total population of Hungary.

The idea seems to catch on even in some democratic milieux. Some years ago thre was a newspaper report, not denied so far as the author can trace, that in one of the famous North-American "colleges" a numerus clausus for Jews had been introduced without any legislation, simply by agreement between the learned governing body. Naked open affirmation of the recial criterium as such was, "of course", politely avoided, and the reply to any enquiry or complaint as to the reasons for the choice of A and the rejection of B was always to the effect that only intellectual or "social"

of proposing it. Yet all talk of eliminating the Jewish tragedy by "re-instating" civic equality in East-Central Europe can only imply this; unless it implies nothing but lip-service and twaddle.

To say that all the Allies aim to win for us is a guarantee of civic equality, would mean that to us the cause of the Allies is not worth fighting for. No greater service can be rendered the Allies than by insisting that their aim go much farther than that.

At this stage of our enquiry a question will probably arise in readers' minds: In how far can this sapect of the solution here proposed be regarded as a "war aim of the Allies"? The war is against Germany. Wherever the area for a Jewish State may be reserved, in Palestine or elsewhere, it certainly will not be on any soil now held by Germany. What has this whole matter to do with a peace conference where demands canbe presented only to Germany?

But the forecast contained in this last sentence is an error. The Versailles treaty (the author, by the way, refuses to join in the great choir of that document's detractors: it was, with all its defects, quite a fine piece of statesmanship for its time) - even the Versailles treaty covered much more than just settling accounts with the beaten foe: for instance, it established the League of Nations. What had that to do with that war? Everything to do. It was universally realised that some kind of permanent association between sovereign peoples might help to prevent further wars. It has failed: this time, therefore all the world is even more scutely aware that the only justification of the present conflict is to find some better safeguards against eruptions of the spirit of violence.

Everything which has value as such a safeguard is a proper war aim. Hardly anybody will maintain that the uprooting of antisemitism, at least of its acute form, in East-Central Europe would be an essential wafeguard against the further boom of cratolatric movements.

CHAPTER VIII.

In 1936 the writer, assisted by two friends, published in a Tarsaw daily a pronouncement to the effect that the only reasonable thing for the Polish Jews to do would be to evacuate all those economic positions which could evidently not be maintained. As it was even by then a matter of common conviction that no less than one third of Poland's 3.300.000 Jews had already lost their "positions" beyond any hope of Fecovery (while another million, paupers hereditary, never had possessed any before....), the solution was mass exodus.

The term "evacuation" hurt many susceptibilities, seemed offensive and humiliating. I cannot see what is wrong with it. In September and October 1939, both in England and France, children were "evacuated" from the areas of danger; apart from wax, when a dam threatens to burst or a house to fall in, the inhabitants are invited to "evacuate" the apot; the same happens when a plague breaks out in a set of premises. This was exactly what the Jawish situation was in 1936; crumbling walls, bursting dams, all forms of "plague" at every corner, not one single hand to defend the victims and no plan

for adequate self-defence even among the victims themselves. At a conservative estimate, two thirds of them at least ought to have been, if not evacuated, at least effectively marked down for evacuation before any sensible scheme of salvaging the balance could have been only conceived. But that was in 1936, halycon days compared with the present.

The great advantage of the words "evacuation" is its implied suggestion of organised orderliness. No other word conveys that important quality: "emigration" has always meant a haphazard tumble (except when stopped), "exodus" inevitably recalls the pursuing enemy host, and a risky fording entreprise where, but for a mirscle, not only the wrong 'uns but some of the right people too might get drowned. "Evacuation", in modern times and under decent governments, has always been associated with forethought, careful planning and decent accommodation at the end of the journey prepared beforehand.

Mass evacuation is the only remedy for the cancer of Jewish distress. However superhumanly difficult, however attroctously costly, - as it is the only way to save Europe from being soon poisoned into another catastrophe, obstacles and expense will have to be faced: whereupon it will, of course, be discovered that the operation, at its maximum, is infinitely easier and cheaper than a modern war, besides being a profitable investment which a war is not claimed to be.

"Evacuation", in modern times and under decent governments, has always been associated with forethought, careful planning and decent accommodation at the end of the journey prepared beforehand.

Mass evacuation is the only remedy for the cancer of Jewish distress. However superhumanly difficult, however attroclously costly, - as it is the only way to save Europe from being soon poisoned into another catastrophe, obstacles and expense will have to be faced: whereupon it will, of course, be discovered that the operation, at its maximum, is infinitely easier and cheaper than a modern war, besides being a profitable investment which a war is not claimed to be.

Twaddle again will it be, on the part of openent or critic, to raise an outcry that the suggested evacuation would have to be "compulsory". It will, on the contrary, be extremely difficult to enforce the proper order in the queues lining up for places on the waiting list, some of them forgetting even to ask what is the name of the "reception area"

SHOUTE TOT IN THE

Some critics of evacuation fear that it would have
to be "compaledry". This is hardly likely: it will, on the
contrary, prove extremely difficult to keep proper order in
the queues lining up for places on the waiting list. - Others,
more sophisticated, only demand that the mass-emigration of
Jews should be treated as something concerning the Jews alone,
no business of may government Polish or Roumanian or Hungarian
Not only should there be no hint of compulsory evacuation, but\neven not of mere pressure in any form; and if a country's
government openly cooperated in organising emigration that
would be practically tentamount to pressure. The correct
attitude for such a government would therefore be to pretend
to ignore the fact that Jewish emigration exists, especially
that it is necessary, etc. etc.

All this is foolish. There's no reason why citizenry government and parliament, in a state where emigration is a necessity, should feel bashful about it. On the contrary, it is the state's duty to help the emigrant by every means at its power. Italy before the Great war was an excellent example of such sound, sober and perfectly patrictic treatment of its emigration problem. Italy had no ethnical minorities to get rid of, all her emgirants were of pure Italian breed: but her government was always busy devising shipping facilities.

(Ch.X)

Welther success nor order can be ensured in the exodus unless it is an international entreprise assisted by every government concerned. The bashful Jewish politicians, just mentioned, probably know it themselves, for one cannot imagine them imagining that, for instance, arrangements about the

$(Ch_{\bullet}X)$

transfer of capital or liquidation of property can be made privately while ministers are requested not to look. The exodus will have to be a most solemnly official performance with banners flying; it will require not only administrative measures but also special legislation and, above all, great international treaties; all this cannot be helped and need not be shrunk from.

One understands, however, the reasons of that bashful shrinking. A and B have been room-mates for centuries; there have been quarrels; now it is finally agreed that peace should be restored, but B has decided to move to other quarters a voluntary decision, absolutely voluntary and all that, but there is nevertheless something in the very fact that it is B and not A who has decided to move away. Under these conditions B may prefer that A should leave him alone to do his house-hunting and packing; should A prove solicitous to help, it might look like asgerness for the good riddance...

The brittle delicacy of the dainty little drama is obvious, nor do we underrate its size if multiplied by the difference between two room-mates and two races; but it still remains too slender to count where issues of world-danger are involved. Yet the main thing about that awkward feeling of being too anxiously assisted to pack is that it only applies is if Mr. B. is moving to another set of hired rooms. Imagine for a moment (always in the framework of the little domestic drama) that Mr. B. has inherited a house, real freehold

)ch.x)

property, and one long-dreamed of: the whole psychological atmosphere would change, all complexes and swkwardness disappear ...

provided there is one set aside for them; and their esgerness will hardly be noticeably affected by the new constitutions promising civic equality.

is a parable that settles the foolish and idle question.
There was a town of 500 houses, and one day the sultan sent them fifty orphans and appealed to the citizens mercy is to give these unfortunates a home. So the town carefully selected fifty of the most affluent and virtuous families. and placed one orphan in each. A month later the whole town was aflame with irritation; mothers complained that the orphans were lousy, bad-mannered and generally horrid. Them the town councillors got together again and decided to raise a subscription from every one to build an orphanage; and the people subscribed twice the amount, and built a wonderful home for the orphane, and lived happily ever after.

Mass evacuation applied to the Jewish problem is not alternative to civic equality: it is conflary to equality, the indispensable condition and the only way to make of the latter something of a durable reality for those, no matter how few or how many, who will stay.

But this is a side-issue. The essential role and value of the evacuation principle is that it is the only cure for an evil which, if not removed, will go on perverting humanity to more outrages: a cure final, thorough and clean.

Also, a popular cure, an idea which the overwhelming majority of men of all creeds like and respect, an idea sanctified by the Bible and ennobled by the tradition of Zionism, an idea whose consumation would be greeted universally, by all countries inside the zone of distress and outside of it, and by all Jews those who want to go and those who want to stay.

What is lacking is the "reception area": to fix and reserve it, is the demand which the Allies will have to include in their war sime.

CHAPTER - IX

Europe's East-Central ghetto, will be short and deliberately inconclusive. I dislike Communism and do not beleive either in its value as a solution of the social problem, nor in its efficiency, nor in its durability; on the other hand, as all people outside the USSR, I have no exact information on what is happening there. Dislike plus lack of information are not a sufficient equipment for drawing conclusions. I should prefer to leave this chapter out altogether, but there is of course one aspect in the situation which has a direct bearing, and may yet have a decisive influence, on the Jews' final orientation with regard to the war scene.

ested in the outcome of this war: not to speak of Russia, not at all or as little as possible. Some probably prefer it so because they do not believe that the "giant" can be forced to give back what he has snatched; others may think that to a large portion of what he has anatched, for instance Volhynia and Folessia, the "giant" may possess a better title than the former owners; others again may, perhaps, harbour

the hope that the loot will be recaptured in due course, but it would be undiplomatic to declars it aloud just now. However that may be, the tacit agreement seems to cover these Jews of Eastern Poland, between 1.500.000 and 2.000.000, who have now become Soviet citizens. Their geographical future is very seldom discussed. It seems everybody takes it for granted that for them there is no way out of the Soviet father—land; some take it for granted that they have no need for any "way out", being quite happy where they are.

Such a thickness of fog surrounds the U.S.S.R. that nothing about its inner life is clear and certain: there are rumours, but it is safe to discount them, no matter whether favourable to the Soviet regime or not. That cannot and must not be "discounted" is when there is no rumours even to register for the last ten years we have heard no report whatever of any symptoms of antisemitism in any Soviet territory, and we assume this to mean that there are no such symptoms there. Ten years is too short a period for any final conclusions to be formed, the cancer may only be dormant. But no Jew can underestimate the fact that it is dormant in Russia while everywhere else, just during this last decade, the evil has been prominent in varying but always very notiveable degrees.

As these symptoms of a kind of permanent, above-the-average conflict between the Jews and the Soviet regime cannot be explained by the antisemitism of the Guépéon (J.G.P.U.) or the courts - of "men", in short - there is evidently something of incompatibility between the nature of "Things" and Soviet Russia and the nature of the Jews in Soviet Russia.

of their children have had all their school curriculum taught them in Hebrew. This nut will be much tougher/than the generation of 1918; one expects soon to hear of a new, and a heavier, offensive against Jewish "imperialism" ....

Yet all this is only a surmise, made en passant, and the reader has been warned at the beginning of this chapter that the author does not claim to speak of Russian conditions with any competence whatever. That is certain is that so far the Soviet regime has proved a very efficient preservative against all the conscious form of antisemitism. Jews under Soviet rule fear neither "ousting" nor pogroms. and the principle of equals rights and equal opportunity seems there to be applied without any trace of racial discrimination. At the same time, west of the Soviet frontier antisemitism rules supreme, and just know, and for God knows how long, in forms of mm exquisite bestiality.

This places every Jew on earth - every Jew without exception, Polish or British or Chilean - before a dificult moral problem: and the problem has a most unpleasant direct bearing on his "crientation" with regard to this war. To put it bluntly: Russian conquest means the actual end to concrete antisemitiem; where the Soviet rule is established, pagroms are impossible and all forms of Jew-baiting disappear. This is an undeniable empirical fact. In such cases of divided loyalty it is best to experiment with oneself: #

each one of those border towns I have friends to whom that Red Fiend's advance meant escape from torture.

The author has taken for as object for his observation himself, but this was only a manocuvre. Sixteen million Jews are watching, two thirds of them not as victims but as members of the Allied and neutral universe. Most of them, one or two generations ago, came from the Zone: everybody has a cousin in the eastern ghetto between the devil and the deep

done at once, A. or B. will turn pro-Moscow is an old device of political pressure; it is especially popular when A. and B. are Jews. It has been used so often that it no longer frightens anyone. Yet there is a fund of hitter and dangerous truth in it all the same; and wise men know that many a menace, even if it never materialises, turns to venom and misms. It is foolish to allow it to fester and mature in war time.

CHAPTER 25. X

The official Allied attitude to the Jewish evacuation problem (in so far as the official Allied view admits the existence of such athing, under the suphemist name of the "refugee" problem) is in contradiction with all our essential and vital interests.

The essential and vital interests of the Jewish masses in the Zone of distress, even considered apart from spiritual aspects such as the appeal of religion or Zionism, demand the recognition of two principles:

a) That there is no probability whatever that the need for mass emigration will cease after an Allied victory: that, on the contrary, the balance of probability points to an increased evacuation urgs after the war; and that all international policy plans with regard to the future of the "Jewish refugee" problem must, therefore, discard the cheap optimism justifying neglect and adopt the "greater need" forecast as their only base.

This "greater need" forecast has been dealt with in several of the predeeding chapters and need not be dwelt upon again.

b) The second principle is: territorial concentration of Jewish immigrants, and especially, no encouragement for their futher dispersion as minorities among other peoples.

but to look for "easy" ways out of a problem of such magnitude would be childish. When the plain man hears that intergovernment conferences are being called and committees set up to devise schemes for settling "refugees", mainly if not wholely Jews, he expects the statemen thus engaged to apply their efforts, first of all, in the direction not of scattered but of concentrated settlement.

The official Allied attitude, so far as can be ascertained, favours the scattering of the "refugees", and the view that after the Allied victory there will be no need even for that.

The Evian Conference (

1938), convened to

was the outcome of President Roosvelt's initiative. His original intention was a sweeping and far-reaching one: he wanted the civilized governments to provide an adequate solution for the plight of all refugges; by all he explicitly meant both those who geographically were already out of the trouble and those who might reasonably be expected to get

out of it in the immediate future. Also, he did not intend to limit the scope of help to German and Austrian refugees only: he meant that the claims of those who were being daily squeezed out of Poland should also be weighed. There are some indications that Mr. Roosvelt's initial plan went even further than that: relief should be provided not only for those actually expelled or fled but also for those left behind to their agony: in other words, not only refugee relief but also preventive evacuation. It is of course unlikely that Mr. Roosvelt expected a first conference to solve these problems in their immense entirety; what he intended was probably a full-sized beginning plus a complete and courageous outline of the tasks shead.

When his envoy, Mr. Taylor, bagah to go round the European capitals sounding their attitudes to the President's initiative, it became at once evident that he met heavy obstacles on his way - that there were powerful influences alarmed and displeased by the aweep of Roosvelt's plan and bent upon narrowing it to as little as possible. The main centre of that obstruction was official London.

The spring of 1938, when Mr. Taylor was travelling on his exporatory spade-work mission, was the time when Boreign Office and Colonial Office direles were busy looking for some way to reduce Great Britain's Zioniat obligations.

Thirdly, there was obviously no need to invite to the assembly countries, like Poland and Roumania, which could obviously offer no assistance by agracing to absorb refugees: the only contributions these countries were likely to make offer the conference would obviously be a demand of an outlet for their own prospective emigrants. Before Mr. Taylor finished his visiting round, the conference was already doomed to become a mockery and a failure.

Symbolically, the man chosen as chief British delegate to the conference was Lord Winterton, then Minister for

The topedoing of the Evan conference, morally, the ugliest action one can remember on the scene of international contacts for a generation at least. The full depth of its ethical level was only revealed quite recently,

So far as known, the same tactics were adopted at the second "refugee" conference - at Washington in October 1939. Here again Mr. Rocavelt was initiator, and Lord Winterton British delegate. Here again Mr. Rocavelt is

reported to have expressed the apprehension that after the war there will be many more refugees than before; according to some of the reports the American delegation went so far as to forecast a human flood amounting perhaps to twenty million homeless particle people of all races. Yet here again "some European delegatee" firmly disagreed, and assured the gathering that, on the contrary, no refugee problem would be left in Europe after the Allied victory. Another report states, besides, that it was decided to start a systematic enquiry into the absorbtive possibilities of a number of countries, but Palestine (at the demand of "some European delegates") was excluded from the scope of such enquiry.

All this is no small matter. This is a deliberate policy of scuttling the chances of Jewish salvation; of discouraging our well-wishers and paralysing their attempts to help us. I want to choose my words very carefully, but this is a line of action more than just unfriendly - this is an action of wreckers. Moreover, even a wrecker does not always act so wantonly as to rob a neighbour of a pound in order to save for himself a penny. Half a century of Jewish endeavour, since Theodore Herzl's day and before, had been devoted to the one supreme purpose: to make the civilised governments realise that the Jewish migration hunger is a world-problem and agree on an international effort to solve it in all its magnitude. At long last, a powerful initiative has begun to move in this direction, at a period

CHAPTER XI

Tanganyika - XEXX

Jeannette, Nine, Alice, Aline, Zelma, Bulie ~ Et i'en oublie

The numbers of refugees which can, according to these press reports, be accepted by each of these countries are another jumble. The figures vary from "100,000 and more" to " a few qualified specialists", both sometimes with reference to the same land, the larger figure looming on

It is not clear whether the Intergovernmental Committee is prepared to support this "territorialist" idea, but any public spirit there is behind such schemes as Alaska, British Guiana, especially Australia, is definitely "territorialist".

The one item that never varies is, of course, finance, Whenever that is mentioned, all reports frankly state that very big sums willbe necessary if more than the "infiltra-

through all the latitudes of the earth also run into astronomical totals in costs, but as to quantities of people to be saved, the results they promise are frankly microscopic.

The "infiltration" achemes need not be discussed: they are allabove board, in the sames that their fundamental rottenness is obvious to all and by no one disputed.

The following string of news-items has been leieurely gleamed from the London "Jewish Chronicle" files of 1938 and 1939:

According to a statement issued by the Government of Northern Rhodesia the elected members of the Legislative Council have unanimously opposed any immigration of Jewish refugees. The acting Governor, therefore, felt unable to advise the Secretary of State that the matter would be preceded with further at the present time. (August 19, 1938)

It is stated that mass immigration into the Fortuguese colonies is strictly forbidden. (August 19, 1938)

President Vargas of Brazil has issued a decree prohibiting the establishment of communities of one nationality, fixing the annual quota of immigration at two per cent of the total number of immigrants of the same nationality during the last fifty years and establishing an immigration counsil. (September 2, 1938)

A memorandum urging the prohibition of foreign immigrants intox Cyprus has been submitted to the Municipal Council by local professional corporations (September 16, 1938)

Refugees from European countries willnot be encouraged to emigrate to New Zealand, according to a statement made last week by Mr. Nash, the Minister of Finance (September 16, 1938)

It is understood that the Government of South Africa is unwilling to contemplate any modification in the stringent purkature provisions of the Aliens Act, which makes Jewish impigration virtually impossible. (Dec. 2, 1938)

It is reported that the Uruguay Boverment has instructed its consuls to refuse views to Jews who are emigrating for racial or political reasons (December 23, 1938)

The Foreign Office of Equador advised consuls and agents in foreign countries not to issue permanent visas to aliens (July 14, 1939)

Thenty more geographical names could be added to this list The Jewish refugee is not wanted. When he is admitted, it is by meroy, cajolary, or fraiskly friendly pressure: precarious visas all of them. Here again, the author means no reproach either to hospitable Governments or to humanitarian intermediarles: they deserve endless gratitude. Also, from the point of view of shipwrecked individuals anything is better than drowning. But as a considered intergovernmental policy infiltration, is this case, is an all-round waste of mission and opportunity, sowing inevitable harm for to-morrow, harm to the refugees, to the hospitable countries, to the world at large. Its only redeening feature is its narrow range — it cannot overspread as the peoples are ever more unwilling to grant hospitality which they willbe unable decently to sustain.

The only proper task for an Intergovernmental Committee of this kind, so far as the Jewish "refugee" phenomenon is concerned, would be to discard infiltration (delegating it

into the possibilities of the "territorial solution.

There are so far no indications whether the Committee is thinking in that direction. At Rvian, where it was formed, it certainly received no such commission; it may have got it from the Washington Conference whose resolutions have not been published, or were perhaps so insignificant as to get lost in the noise of the war; or the Committee may have set out along this high road, the only road, on its own initiative and responsibility. It is to be hoped it has. If not, it will have to; or some other body will be formed for the purpose, inevitably.

Nothing can be more deplorable than the strange passivity of Jewish public opinion in this regard. Since Leo Pinsker wrote "Auto-emancipation" 60 years ago, since Theodor Herzl founded political Zionsim, it has been all Jews' hope that some day the civilised world would realise the international character of the problem of our migrations, and an intergovernmental organ would be established to study and solveit. Here is that organ now before their eyes, seemingly wasting time, the most tragic time of all times, on stop-gar futilities. It is no secret that its leading workers are themselves convinced of the dammable uselessness of patchwork: their legitimate ambition is to produce something really adequate; it is only the uncorrect.

wilful shorteightedness of one bureaucracy that is supposed to hinder them. A few months of concerted counter-attack by public opinion, overwhelmingly backed by the tragedy going on before the world's eye in the East, would sweep away that obstruction and force the Intergovernmental Committee, to the Committee's own rejoicing and pride, to concentrate on the Jewish State question.

Committee will force its bounds and start on its high road, it willitself realise the inadequacy of its composition and demand to be enhanged. Perhaps even then it will only be a forerunner, not the final assembly to pronounce the final decision; nor does the author forget that the really "final" decision in a people's fate can only be pronounced, in deeds not in formulas, by the people itself. - But with all that the "Evian" Committee to-day is an important factor, a lever that can open many impasses: and it is deplorable that Jewish public opinion neglects the lever.

Such Jewish bodies as seem already to enjoy the Intergovernmental Committee's recognition prefer to follow the Evian lead and concentrate on palliatives. The biggest, at least the most conspicuous, departure on this path of smaller mercies which leads hardly anywhere has been, up to date, the solemn signature of a contract between the Dominican Government and an American Jewish corporation known as the Agro-Joint. The newspapers' report mentioned that the agreement was concluded "with the blessing of the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees". Very little is known about its contents at the moment of writing, but it certainly promises relief to several thousands German-Jewish refugees who will be selected for agricultural settlement, mainly, it appears,

on a vast area of land generously donated for this
purpose by Senor Trujillo, a former President of Santo
Domingo. It would be churlish not to acknowledge all
this with respect and gratitude, or to look for defects
where the chief thing is the achievement itself, doubt-\nlessly valuable and handsoms. The Dominican republic is
reported to have agreed to admit up to 100,000 Jewish
refugees, so that these 5 thousand settlers on Senor
Trujillo's land (another report speaks of 500 families)
are only a beginning; the Agro-Joint is a colonising body
of great efficiency, with a first rate record of similar
work done in Soviet Russia; both parties to the agreement
are to be sincerely congratulated, admired, and wished
the best of success.

But when that success willbe attained, and not only the first 500 or 5000 but all the 100,000 settled in Santo Domingo, the problem of the exodus of several million souls will stand before us just as big as if the whole Dominican episode werean illusion: as som ungracious sceptics think it is and will prove.

CHAPTER XII

The Advisory Committee on Political Refugees appointed by President Roosevelt dispatched a commission of experts to investigate British Guiana. They spent a few weeks in touring various sections of the country and produced a report. The British Colonial Office hastened to publish it as a White Paper in May 1939, obviously to offset or soften the blow to the Jews dealt by the other White Paper, the Palestine one, which appeared in the same month. One home-land is closed, but here is another on the horizon.

This should not be taken as criticism of British Guiana's fitness for close settlement. The Colonial Secretary said in September last year that some "voluntary organisations in Great Britain had been on the point of establishing a corporation to carry out the (British Guiana) shheme, but owing to the outbreak of the war action had been suspended for the time being". "Action", we assume.

he saw his neighbour's smoke; people will migrate overseas not because of hunger and persecution but just for the fun of space, which is perhaps as vital in all of us as the fun of speed. The all the waste places around the globe will be planted, including the Guianas, including even Biro-Bidjan. The only link with the huddled past will be the jealousy of nationality: men still will insist, then and for ever in eternity, that the next door fellow, no matter how far the next door, should be hisown kith and kin.

All this is said to prove that the author does not disparage either British Guiana or any other place any sensible people may suggest for mass-settlement by Jews. Some day all these places will be happily settled by some people or other. But mass-settlement by Jews is not a vision of the radiant future when water, soil and climate will obey man's order, and a magic ward weighing two ounces will replace not only spades and axes but even tractors. The Jewish exodus is a need of tomorrow, litteral tomorrow; it has its inherent conditions and limitations, due partly to the nature of the Jew such as he is to-day, partly to the nature of other peoples such as they are to-day, and partly on the technique of mass settlement such as it is to-day - atill an extremely hard up-hill entreprise.

"there are miles of good water in the Ord River above the tidal limit, and thousands of acres fertile and easy to irrigate".

All this would, of course, be taken fully into account if the scheme ever came to be finally entertained as officially practicable and accepted. There is no doubt that it would be found bristling with enormous difficulties and demanding as "astronomical" an outlay as any other similar project; but such obstacles cannot be helped as long as the suitable territory is being looked for outside of Palestine; and all such obstacles to colonisation, as said before, are sure to be conquered by some people some day in the future.

Australian acheme lies elsewhere. It was mentioned, without exception, in every favourable comment printed or spoken throughout Dr.Steinberg's campaign - not as an unsurmountable hindrance th but simply as a secondary reservation; and the Precland League's delegate, in his replies, also treated it as such - as an apprehension which can easily be removed. In this, it is to be feared, both sides were mistaken. The obstacle will most probably prove not secondary but of dominating and overwhelming importance; and of the only two means by which it can be

removed, Jews are not likely to accept the first and the Australian Commonwealth the second.

The nature of that obstacle had better be illustrated by a few quotations:

The "West Australian's" editorial asks "whether the Jewish zame colonists, once admitted, will be content to stay on the settlement; whether there would be a serious risk of their migrating South in large numbers and attacking Australian industrial standards from the sheer necessity of sarning a livelihood".

Mr. A. Thompson, member of the Legislative Council, an expert on the Kimberleys, and a sympathiser of the scheme:

"It may be argued that the Jews might tend to drift scuthwards after experiencing the hard work of development. I think that could be regulated easily by agreement and the issue of permits from the State or Commonwealth authorities".

Mr. Lathum, also a sympathleer, leader of the opposition in the State's Legislative EXEMIL Assembly, during the Address-in-Reply debate: "The Government must be careful, however, that those people did not come South and provide additional labour for a market which did not want them. Some agreement should be entered into with these people, by which - if they left the cettlement - they would have to go overseas".

And so on without one single exception.

Dr. Steinberg seems to have fully realised the paramount importance of this apprehension, and the necessity to allay it. Thether the solution he proposed was a happy one remains to be seen. In addressing those Labour Women at Perth, he "spoke of the suggested possibility that these new settlers might compete in the Southern areas for work... He said that, first of all, this settlement would not be a separate section but would be incorporated in the Australian Commonwealth; and guarantees would be given to the Government that they would remain there for at least five years.

that the settlement area will be "incorporated in the Common-wealth" can only intensify the fear: that can only make it easistor disappointed settlers to move to Ferth or Melbourne or Sydney. Dr. Steinberg's corrective is, if we put it plainly, to prohibit those settlers from travelling outside of their reservation, at least during the first five years. They would have to be issued special passports for the purpose; the reservation's boundary would have to be watched; and police in the Southern cities would have the right to track offenders and send them back to the reservation, or - as Mr. Latham suggested - make them "go overseas". There is nothing new in such an arrangement: essentially, it is the same as that applied toNegroes in the Union of South Africa, or -mutatis mutandis - to Jews in Czarist Russia where they had to stey in

the Pale of Settlement and were forbidden entering the central provinces of the empire.

There is no doubt that Dr. Steinberg and all his colleagues on the Freeland League's executive, when they realise all the implications of such a "guarantee", will themselves reject such a solution. Nor is any Australian government, in view of the country's fine Liberal traditions, likely to agree to an experiment of so shady's kind.

The only other solution would be to promote the settlement area from the start to the dignity of an independent state, properly out off from the Commonwealth by an international frontier with a proper visa control on both sides. In this way there would be for the settlers no stigma of civic inferiority: but the other drawbacks would be so serious that no dreamer could be so dreamy as to lay this solution before an Australian government.

This is no doubt the main reason why, last January, an official answer to an M.P.'s question was given in the Commonwealth Parliament to the effect that the Government rejected the Kimberley scheme.

Readers should not be surprised at so much attention given to this particular project. It deserves attention not only because of the honest great devotion behind it, but also

and especially on account of its lesson which ought to be read as referring not only to Australia but to all "territorialist" schemes outside of Palestine.

Chapter XIII

The Fate Morgana Land

The title is meant to cover all the projects, present and future, of finding a "suitable territory" - but not Pelestine - where a Jewish State or province could be established. This chapter willnot take us out of our way in dealing with war aims. At the end of the war the Jewish state must be established by international decision: the state itself, not a commission for geographical research. Research must precede the end of the war; one may add, with grim satisfaction, that there seems to be plenty of time for it ahead of us. The "Evian" Committee is tout indiqué to carry out such a preliminary geographical quest, and it could do worse than justify its existence by preparing the solution of the only "refugee" problem that historically matters.

The author, of course, does not believe in the reality of any "territoriast" projects outside of Palestine; in this sense he considers all search for other autable areas hopeless. But the quest should nevertheless be treated with fullest respect: even by the most zealous and jelous of uncompromising Zioniats. Logically, it is in their interest to encourage the closest scrutiny of all non-Palestinian schemes.

There is the well-known Anglo-Saxon prejudice against logic in politics, but that is an error. Life is always

(Ch. XIII)

infallibly logical. Logic, however, is a complicated concept, as tortuous as the concept "arithmetic". There is a story about the Russian peasant who once propounded this mathematical theory: "Four and four make eight, with this I can agree; some say that five and three also make eight - but that's a Jewish trick". He would be astounded to learn that 613 minus 1000 plus the aquare rout of 625 plus 64 minus 50 times nine also makes eight.

Still more involved are the methods of political logic. In this problem of a "suitable territory", in particular, one should be warned against lapses into simplified bucolic arithmetics. The chain of ideas with which life's logic is bound in this case to operate is composed of thre main links:

a) Inevitability of exodus
b) No exodus possible except to a Jewish State
c) No suitable site for the Jewish State but one.

In this chain every link is of equal importance; should one of them break, it is the end of the chain. This is why it would not be wise to imagine that point "c" can be smothered in silence; it will have to be threshed out very thoroughly. Even Herzl and Nordsu, founders of madern Zionism, had to pass inwardly through the phase of looking for the Fata Morgane Land before they realised the objective inevitability of the one and only "site". To-day many Christian minds are going through

As to the outcome of the search, provided it be conducted in good faith, there is no need to fret: the outcome is preordained.

Has it ever occurred to the reader, now that he hears has so many territories are being mentioned as suitable, why is it

that no single government ever thought of proposing one of them through all the years since the Great war?

Jaws as country-builders were most prominently "in the market" throughout the period; and not a bad "proposition" either. All the governments, and all the newspaper readers in their countries, could not help being aware at least of two facts about Palestine: first - that Jewish colonisation was bringing that country an unheard-of rain of gold, every year in and out of season; second - that all the time these very Jews were having there trouble with the Arabs and friction with the British administration. In homely parlance, it was a case of a bride with quite an appetising dot who, judging by all one heard, could safely be assumed to feel disappointed in her fiancé. This is a situation which invariably stirs up attention in the "market" and produces other tentative offers. Why has nothing of the kind over accounted in our case?

The first fact - the golden rain - was widely known throughout the world, especially to governments. Between 1922 and 1936, especially since 1925, consuls, bankers, reporters, travellers emphasised and exeggerated it in every language of the printing press. The second fact - trouble - was even better known the world throughout, having been everywhere lavishly headlined, with sensational embellishments, in 1920, 1921, 1929 and almost daily since April 1936. Why was there never a competing offer: here is another gerritory, every bit as good or better (certainly not worse) - change over and bring your gold and have no trouble?

The only explanation, purely deductive but difficult to evade, is that there are no such "suitable" territories in the market: no territory combining in itself all those characteristics which are necessary to make it "suitable". This brings us to the question: what are those characteristics?

ጽ

A territory (outside of Palestine) suitable for the establishment of the Jewish State must satisfy, at least from the Gentil's point of view, three essential requirements. From the point of view of the Jew there may be more; but here, in this chapter, the problem is examined in pragmatic sobriety, under strictest elimination of sentimental idiosyncrasics. The three requirements, short and sharp, are these:

a) the territory must be empty:
b) it must be good
c) it must be of no value to its present owners.

In first condition must not be taken literally - no land is absolutely "empty": but the population on the spot must be less than insignificant, otherwise there would be no change. Where there is a noticeable established population, the same trouble is bound to arise as with the Arabs in Paleatine. It would not matter who those natives might beseven if they were Haussas or Herreros, trouble would come all the same. If they were themselves unable to write in newspapers, they would find white-skinned protectors (English, most probably) who would take up the cudgels on their behalf and quite justly - poss to the government a difficult ethical

question: "If it is unfair to give the Jews a country underpopulated by Arabs, why is it right to give them a country underpopulated by Negroes?".

of powerty and discontent, says Prof. Briffith Taylor in Mr. Isaiah Bowmen's report on "Limits of Land Settlement", published by the American Council on Foreign Relations). The quitters are, of course, in Brisbans, Newcestle, Adelaide if not in Sydney and Melbourne. So long, however, as they were Anglo-Saxons it was not terribly serious. Having their towns flooded by Jews would be quite a different prospect; for Asutralians and for any other nation (for the Jews, too, if Tel Aviv were similarly threatened by an Aryan wave).

With the best will in the world, no friendly government is likely to grant the Jews a territory unless it can be cut off from that nation's mainland - cut off so sharply and clearly that the boundary should be actually impenetrable except with a special passport, in special cases, and for a limited period. As the Russian method is evidently out of question, there remains only the other way, cession of sovereignty. The Jewish territory must become, at least formally, a separate independent state from the outset of the colonisation. Not an "autonomous" province, not a "canton" in a federated commonwealth: for between the provinces of the same state, between the cantons of the same federation, the free intermigration of citizens cannot be prohibited without establishing a parish class, introducing internal passports, and poisoning

(Ch. KIII)

and degrading the whole civic atmosphere. Entry can be forbidden, in a decent modern community, only to "aliens", paople who come from "abroad". The Jewish territory must be full-pledgedly "abroad".

There is nothing impossible in such a cutting-off operation - provided the territory has no value in the eyes of the nation that owns it. But that would be very strange in the case of a piece of land fulfilling the first two requirements. "Uninhabited" plus "habitable" is a value, and rather an enviable one. To look for a land combining such three mutually incompatible attributes as "uninhabited", "habitable", and "valueless" is not a hopeful quest. In the author's opinion there is only one answer to it, the Fata Morgans Land.

xxx

"But does Palestine answer any of those three criteria?", is what one expects to hear asked at this stage. "Why should Palestine be preferred?"

matter of perceptian which does not even pretend to compete with any other cauntry's possible attractions, or ease of access, or cheapness of conquest. The author fully shares his generation's dislike of totalitarian papriotism, but there are desperate situations where no "choice" is left and the only attitude for a decent man to take is, right greater or wrong - any country. With much great justification, a

Incidentally, it will prove not so costly, not so hard and even not so bad.

$\mathbf{x}$ $\mathbf{x}$ $\mathbf{x}$

Chapter XIV

The White Paper Policy

It would be empty hypocrisy to pretend that there is a truce in the debate on the proper interpretation of the Palestine mandate. There ought to be one till the common danger is over; there ought to be a firm attitude of respect for the legal statue quo, bad as it is, without attempts to steal a march on one another; there ought to but there is not.

(Ch. XIV)

the mean time, the less her sphesmen say the clearer her soldiers speak up for her. In September we were quire ready to plunge into war work and switch off the political battering machine: assuming, of course, that the battering would also be switched off on the other side, and that our war work was wanted.

In both these assumptions we were mistaken. The

Jews' war effort is not wanted, there is no desire to treat

them as an Allied nation, or just a nation, or as any kind

of entity at all: and the lattering at the status quo in

Falestine from the opposite side goes on crescendo. For,
\neven if there is quibbling over what a "status quo" does or

does not include under cirumstances complicated by three years'

rioting, one thing is beyond doubt: legal status quo ante in

Palestine cannot include active encroachments by a White

Paper which has never been ratified, never even discussed

by the Council of the League of Nations.

This primary condition of truce has been suthoritatively discarded from the very outset. The writer and his
friends, as early as one week after the outbreak of the war,
put the question to highest authority and received a clear
answer.

The question, dated September the 10th, 1939, was addressed to the War Cabinet. This was its substance:

This Fresidency* have the honour of calling the attention of H.M. Government to the fact that, the September session of the League of Nations Council having been postponed gine die, no legal validity can now even provisionally be attached to last May's White Paper on Palestine.

This view has already been submitted to the Colonial Secretary; but this matter, especially under war time conditions, obviously transcends the competence of one single department and should be brought to the notice of the Government as a whole.

unanimous in recognising that that policy was not in accordance with the interpretation of the Palestine Mandate hitherto adopted by the Council of the League of Nations. Even that minority of three, who felt that the Council might perhaps not refuse, at its impending session, to change its former view and adopt the White Paper's interpretation, also agreed that that would mean a change.

x) Of the New Zhonist Organisation

Ch. XIV

It is obvious, now that the Council's meeting has been postponed, that the Mandatory Government has no authority whatever to make changes of such a sweep in the interpretation of a Mandate whose only authoritative interpreter (and the British Government admits ir) is the Council.

Paper as in English law one would treat a bill approved by Ministers but not yet granted assent by King in Parliament; and, in the mean time, it is obviously the former interpretation which should form the basis of legality.

The Whitehall view on this question came in a communation dated September 21st and written on behalf of the Prime Minister, to the effect

"that the policy of the White Faper still holds the field".

This brief correspondence is wonth the reader's attention quite epart from the Palestine issue: such a strange little dissonance in the great solemn oratorio about all the mighty ones' duty to respect the Covenant and the supreme authority of the League, always to await Geneva's verdict and never to use the fait accompli trick by mainer unilateral action, least of all against the weak...

events excepting the small corner where the weak dwell. Yet it is like one of those tiny squeaks which prove that something is wrong somewhere in the big machinery.

It is no secret that great efforts are being made to translate this policy, which "holds the field", though it has no passport even to enter "the field", into decisive legislative acts. It has taken a serious intervention of opposition leaders with the Prime Minister to avert the issue of a Palectine ordinance prohibiting the sale of land to Jews in certain districts. For how long this breach of the Mandate has been averted no one can foretell. Strong influences are at work in Palestine, and in London at the Eolonial Office, to create the fait accompli, the legal precedent proving that the White Paper is valid and has superseded the original Mandate.

In administrative practice there are many disquieting signs that the Felestine bureaucracy already feels inspired, even without waiting for the legal precedent, to treat the Thite Paper as its only guide book. This trand is especially prominent in two directions. The first is that of immigration. In all negotiations about the numbers to be admitted or refused, officials in Jerusalem and London openly quote the White Paper as their authority: the White

(Ch. XIV )

with unpanelled iron walls inside sweating cold moisture until the moisture froze. Two babies were born on that tanker ...

A significant feature is the action of some ladies of the Bucarest British colony, headed by Miss Boyd (head-mistress of the English high school), Miss Gadge and Mrs. Wallie: they collected donations from among members of the colony and sent 100 bads for the babies and the old-people, beside warm clothing and 75,000 lei. A stream of donations came from Balkanic Jewish communities, from Jews of America and Paris and South Africa. At the time of writing this chapter, early in February, the marooned refugees have been enabled to leave: by how many steamers, of what tonnage how many heads per ton, at what cost - all these details, probably as Dantesque in their way as the Danubian stage of their adventure, will only be told when it is over.

The closed door policy which is the cause of all this wisery has no justification either in moral conscience or in law.

From the moral point of view, Palestine should be the last country to reject war fugitives. So far she has been spared by the war, in comparison not only with the countries from which those refugees fled but even with many a neutral pland. She would only "do her bit" if she served as a refugee camp; apart from all National Home quibble, it

(ch. XIV)

would be a great service to the Allies and to Europe.

Lithuania, with not one tenth of the financial resources

Palætine can summon for the purpose from all the world over,

Opens her gates almost daily to runaways crowding at her so
called "green bounday" near Vilna. Thy is Palestine exempted?

From the view point of law - if the Mandate is the law that Mandate prescribes that immigration of Jews be encouraged
"under suitable conditions". What conditions can ever be more
"suitable" that these: people driven by disaster, all humanity
sympathising with their agony, half the world's governments
on the search for Lands where refugees could be absorbed, half
a million Jews in 300 settlements promising tolock after the
newcomers, all the funds of Jewish charity ready to help? But the Mandate has been superseded - by an illegal document.

•

The other direction in which the new trend seems to point is even more distarbing: it is the tendency to suppress the Jewish self-defence organisation. There is unfortunately no other explanation for two recent events: 42 Jews were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for armed drilling in November, 38 more in January. There is no precedent for this action in the history of Palestine under British rule since 1920. In that year, twenty one Jews were sentenced to penal servitude by a military court on a charge of preparing for armed self-defence; but the proceedings of that court were subsequently

(CH. XIV )

and mercilessly quashed by the Army Council. Since then never an attempt was made, either by civil or by military authorities in Palestine, to hamper the development of the force. Its existence was known to the authorities; during the anti-Jewish riots of 1921 and 1929 British police and military actually collaborated with what Tommies called "Jewish patrols"; during the 1936-1939 trouble this Jewish militia rendered invaluable service to the government and the troops, both by providing trained men for the official auxiliary police and by autonomous action. Cases can be market quoted when Jewish leaders were cordially thanked for it by British military chiefs. What happened since to cause a hunt after "Jewish illegal drilling"?

The only new thing that happened since the cutbreak of the war ought to have produced quite the opposite result, an increase of mutual confidence between the government and the Jewish self-defence. One section of the latter, the "Irgu (its full title is "the National Military Organisation"), had been responsible for active mass reprisals against the Arab terror in 1937-1939; it was the only part of the Jewish self-defence forces which could really be called "clandestine", not just unofficial as the remainder; and it possessed a secret broadcasting station in the country which was used for warnings, announcements and propaganda. A few days after the

outbreak of the war, the "Irgun" broadcasted a declaration of loyalty to the Allies, of willingness to
cooperate with the government for the defence of Palestime and on any other front, and of resolve to "cease
fire" and call a truce with the Arabs. In official
circles this change of heart was acknowledged, one might\neven say that in some respects it was handsomely acknowledged. What happened since that, a few weaks later, it
should be rewarded by what looks like a minor crusade?

The thing is without precedent even in a wider sense. The only other country where Jewish self-defence has ever functioned as a permanent institution, beside Falestine, was Czarist Russia. In 1905, in Odessa, the author was present when the Oxford-blue unfiformed gendarmerie, the Czar's equivalent of the present Ogpu, invaded a Jewish family's flat at night in search of revolutionary literature. Of that they found none, but they found a parcel of freshly-printed manifesto, bearing the name of a Jewish self-defence organisation - a perfectly illegal body - and urging the Jews to arm and drill and resist pogroms. "This is none of my businese", said the officer in charge waving the parcel away. "this has nothing to do with subversive political activity".

This seemed to be the rule throughout the period, till the fall of the Romanoffs. One does not recollect one single instance of serious police attack on Jewish self-defence bodies or their modest arms stores. There was some queer strain of brigands fair play in the psychological make up of that police systems they neve stopped a pogrom, they were often suspected of staging pogroms, but at least they felt the Jews ought to be given a chance to fight pogroms.

After the Czar'd downfall, Odesea - the largest Jewish community in the Ukraine - for two years of the civil war (1918-19) was garrisoned by a wolunteer body called the Jewish Fighting Company. It was uniformed, barrakced, and rather well armed. It was of course entirely allegal; but the thirteen governments that followed one another in occupying the city (the French, the Greeks, the White Russians, the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians, et j'en oublie) all respected the illegal Jewish self-defence. - Its organiser, S.Y. Jacobi, then a boy of twenty, settled subsequently in England dreaming, some day, to repeat the experience on a much larger scale, under the British aegis; but he died last November, and the British aegis does not seem to be available for the purpose anyhow.

Neither the author nor anyone else suggest that the regimes can be compared. But the fact remains that in Palestine anti-Jewish terror had been allowed to drag on for years; there is no doubt that the government genuinely wanted to stop it, some may even admit that they "did all they could" to stop it, - but apparently what they "could" was not enough. Why, then, should a decent administration fail to observe an unwritten law which even Czariam, even chaos, respected?

The question was recently put, in formal writing, to the proper authority in London. The official reply, dated November 29th, was that the Colonial Secretary

"is unable to admit that any justification exists for the illegal arming and military training of Jews in Palestine".

"No justification"; written pertyrialist in the winter of 1939, so soon after three years' experience of how little official protection can actually be given to Jewish settlements even in peace time; a fortion now, perhaps on the threshold of unforeseeable complications. Protection More than ever, preparadness for self-pertention should be "justified" now. There is no logic, no justice, no elementary care for the safety of an exposed minority in this attitude; but there is method - it is the White Paper policy, resentful of all that smacks of the Jewish

Statehood dream, that tries to "hold the field".

It would be ridiculous Bon Quixotry for the Jew, leaser partner to the truce, had there been a truce, to play the silly game of nobless oblige where it just obviously does not. War or no war, the major partner has decided that the debate on Palestine's future shall go on, and we follow suit.

CHAPTER XV

complimentary formula, but this is the impression shared bu all observers in Palestine watching the inroads of the White Paper policy on the dwindling status que. Yet the most alarming aspect of this system of encroachment is its inevitable futility, futility even from the point of view of its authors and abettors. They produced the 1939 White Paper to placate the Palestinian Arabs; they are showing such hasty eagerness to "implement" it without dven a show of legitimacy for the same purpose - that the Arab nationalist party may feel satisfied, those authors and abettors of the anti-Mandate policy try to silence the complaints by the same argument - that this method is sure to calm the Arabs and keep them from insisting on further concessions.

The optimistic outlook is an illusion. The Jews have been deeply hurt and injured by the White Paper of May 1939, but that is not enough to say that the Arabs have been "bought" by its charm and promise. Not one single Arab nationalist in Palestine, no matter whether a Husseini man or a Mashashibi man, has ever for a moment been decleved into regarding the White Paper as in any way satisfactory. except as a blow to the Zionists - never as containing one

single item of real positive calue to Arab aspirations never anything but a stepping stone for to-morrow's
renewed offensive. And in this negative appreciation,
moreover, these Arabs from their point of view are perfectly
right: a blow to Jewish hopes - it is an equally masty
blow to Arab aspirations.

It may be useful here to reproduce a short analysis of this White Paper as seen through the eyes of a group of intelligent Palestinian Arabs. It has been conveyed to the writer, immediately after the publication of that document, by reliable friends in close touch with those circles; but its main reliability is the inner evidence of its very sound logic which cannot but commend itself to the reader.

From the Arab point of view, the only good thing in the White Paper is that it explicitely rejects the Jewish State idea and promises to stop further immigration (or to make it dependent on the Araba, consent, which amounts to the same) after 75,000 more Jews have been admitted in five years. Also the decision to prohibit land sales to Jews, outlisde of districts which already are predominantly Jewish, is a good thing - although in this respect any law can easily be evaded. No immigrations is

a much more solid thing: it is actually the main point, even more essential than the rejection of the Jewish State principle. Taking all the three items together, this aspect of the White Book is excellent - provided it proves durable.

(CH. XV)

last in what seems to be a world of chifting papers.

For such it seems to be. Take the Legislative
Council issue. The 1922 White Paper "established" in
Pelestine a Legislative Council with an Arab majority; but
another White Paper, published also in 1922, cancelled it.
In 1930 the Passfield White Paper "established" it again,
A Legislative Council with an Arab majority: and it never
came into existence. in 1935, the Wauchope White Paper
promised it finally and definitely - mm a L.C. with an Arab
majority; and again nothing came of it; and then the Royal
Commission's Report stated that the scheme was impracticable;
and now even this new White Paper contains no elective
legislature. Three White Papers wested:

Or take Jewish immigration. The 1922 White Paper promised to tone it down: at that time there were less than 100,000 Jews in Palestine. A few years later the number was doubled. Then, in 1930, the Simpson Report showed that no further immigration was economically permissable, and the Passfield White Paper was published and we hoped that the glood would stop. At that time there were already 200,000 Jews. A few years later the number was again doubled: 400,000 in 1936, and nearly half a million now. One must really not be surprised if the Arabs sometimes think that White Paper and waste paper are synonyms. In any case, a white Paper gives no doubt a precise and genuine indication

of what a government wanted when it was published; but that is no indication of what the government may want a year later.

So, grateful as the Arabe were for all these good intentions, they would appreciate them much more if there was in the White Paper a real guarantee that those intentions would not be dropped at the next turning of the road. What constitutues a real guarantee? There is only one answer: an Arab government, and immediately. Before the road has had time to turn.

Still worse, from the Arab point of view, is the picture of that independence itself, if they ever live to see, as defined in the White Paper. Great Britain "will require to be satisfied that adequate pax provision has been made" for the following matters:

the Holy Places, and the protection of the interests and property of the various religious bodies. Every Palestinian knows that it means: administration of the Valled City of Jerusalem and parts of Nazareth, Bethlehem and Hebron; control of the railways leading to these places; control of all arrangements regulating the relations between the various churches including Moslema and Jews. In particular, the Vailing Wall business will remain outside of Arabs' jurisdiction.
ties in Palestine in accordance with the obligations of H. M. Government to both Arabs and Jows and for the special position of the Jewish National Home". This means all the legislative and administrative activity regarding education, representation on municipalities, justice in all cases where both peoples are affected, the rights of the two languages in public life, treasure grants to hospitals and innumerable other items covering practically the whole field of public life in a country like this.
c) "Such requirements to meet the strategic eltuation as may be regarded as necessary ...". In other words, military garrisons.
d) "The interests of certain foreign countries ...". In other words, finger in Polestine's "independent" Foreign Office.

(Ch. XV)

would seem unfattered autocracy.

The truth about the 1939 White Paper, from the Arab point of view, is this: it is an attempt virtually to annex Palestine to the British Empire for ever and ever, using the Jewish National Home as a justification. As it can always be claimed that the Jews are afraid of the Arabs (the Jews will chaim it with pleasure, as long as they are in a minority), Great Britain's supervision shall never cease. Whatever glorified name may be given that relationship - alliance, for instance - Palestine is to remain a British colony. This is the sense of the White Paper. Palestine shallnever be able to join an Arab Federated into the British Empire.

It is obvious, from the Arab point of view, that this situation is entirely unacceptable. There has never even been a question of accepting it. Its only value which the Arabs recognise is its formal repudiation of the Jewish State idea. As to the rest of the White Paper, the next step will be a concerted Arab effort to wipe out every line of it.

The writer's interest is diametrically opposed to that of the Palestine Arab nationalists, and it is not his business to make out a case for them; moreover, as against the Jews he thinks they have no case at all, not against a government firmly set on carrying out the Jewish National Home policy up to the end. But against a policy aiming to bribe the Arabs by harming the Jews, the Arab case just quoted is unasswerable: the bribe is not even illusory - it simply does not exist. The White Paper has not, and could not have, satisfied the Palestinian Arabs.

So the controversy has been left open on the Arab side, too, and there has never been any indication that the Palestinian Arabs are prepared to call a truce on the subject. On the Mandatory Government's side, as we have seen, there is a delibereate active policy in a direction which is the opposite of a political truce.

It remains for the Jews, then, to take up their side of the uninterrupted controversy. The future of Palestine is on the war day's agenda, by the will of factors over which we have no control, and no time should be lost in gressing for the claim that Palestine, on both sides of the Jordan, is the only "suitable" site for that Jewish State which, being the only remedy against Europe's cancer, is the world's urgent need.

Chapter XXI MENDINGALI FLAN THE MAX NORDALI FLAN

The late Max Nordau, Herzl's collaborator in founding political Lionism, was probably the most revolutionary thinker of the finds siècle generation. In 1919 he was old and ailing, far on the sunset way of what had once been a bitterly contested yet world-wide literary fame, but sill a great intellectual force equipped by a rare wealth of erudition. That was the honeymoon period of the Balfour Declaration, and Max Nordau offered a plan how to make the best use of it once and for all. It was the immediate and simultaneous transportation to Falestine of the first half million immigrants from the East European ghettees.

The leading Jewish circles of the period did not respond, and the plan was forgotten. Now the time has arrived to revive it as the only practical and reasonable way to cope with a situation incomparably more urgent than that of 1919. Wax Fordau's projects were concerned with Palestine only; so are, in timex true intention, the suggestions of the present writer; but for the sake of formal plausibility, the following outline can be expressed in terms applicable to any "auitable area", provided the area is to become the Jewish State and to absorb the great exodus.

$\mathbf{x} \mathbf{x} \mathbf{x}$

Adapted to present conditions, the Max Nordau Plan can be summarised as follows:

1. All the exodus to take about 10 years.
1. The first willdien settlers to be transferred within the first year or less.
1. All planning to be done during the war, so that work can start on the merrow of the peace conference.
  Expressed in a form less abrupt, it would mean:
1. The transfer to the Settlement Country of all the Jews of East Central Europe who may voluntarily register for the purpose, shallbe effected within a period not surpassing ten years.
1. The first million settlers, roughtly selected as to simultaneously age and health, shallbe transferred/at the very start of the migration within the minimum time indispensible for the technical operation of transport not surpassing one year.
1. All preliminary planning as to the methods of settlement, financial arrangements and any other relevant matters, should be accomplished as far as possible during the war, by the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees reinforced by the addition of Jewish representatives, or by another suitable body to be established for the purpose.

The actual transportation of the First Million to the Country of Settlement shall begin within the shortest possible interval after the close of hostilities, as soon as the necessary international loan has been raised and a rough selection of settlers completed.

It is not the author's intention here to attempt a systematic presentation of the Max Norday Plan. A good comprehensive outline, with almost most figures than text, was published by Dr. S. Klinger - "The Ten Year Plan for Palestine", New Zionist Press, London 1938. In the following paragraphs only some of the less specialised aspects of the scheme will be pointed out. They are:

the tempo;

manufacture, not agriculture, as the bas of mas-immigration economy; the method of planning; the financial scheme,

* * *

x x x

based on the assumption that mass colonisation "must" be a very slow process. This assumption was then considered a "scientific" truth admitting no exception. It is hradly so considered now, after a number of experiences in quick displacement of human masses since the Great War. The Greek exodus of 700,000, so often quoted, was not the only example: between 1919 and 1924, 2.450.000 people (\$\phi\$ 1.600.000 Greeks, 758.000 Moslems, and others) changed places between the Balkans and Asia Minor, with results which even neutral observers hold to be much more satisfactory than the position obtained before the migration Those masses not only travelled fast - they proved also very fast in getting absorbed in the new countries' economy.

Yet, should we even accept the alleged "rule" that the economic absorption of immigrants is a slow process, their actual transfer to the Country of Settlement can obviously be accelerated at will: and this is the essence of the Max Nordau Plan.

Its advantages, outside of the Settlement Country.

will be many and far-reaching. The tension in East

Central Europe will immediately be reduced. Roughly, 300.00°

Jews will be at once assisted to emigrate from Germany

and Austria, 500,000 from Poland, 100,000 each from Hungowa

and Roumania. Still more efficient will be the assurance,

inherent in the very essence of a Jewish State, that the process will continue: an assurance which will go a long way to paralysing racial strife. Weighed against this, all the hardships of an overcommeded Newland are a trifling matter, especially to people who, just recently, have seen worse.

wosphere in the Zone must be further strengthened and perpetuated by the rule that the best age for the First Million pioneers is the age of intense child-bearing fertility.

Among Jews in Eastern Europe it is, approximately, from 25 to 40 for men, from 23 to 37 for women. The Zionist prejudice in favour of sweet seventeen will have to be discarded: at least two thirds of the First Million will have to be young maturity rather than early youth. People of young maturity are quite adaptrable for pioneer tasks in a not too exotic climate; and, as they are chiefly responsible for the nation's birth rate, it is most important that they should not be left behind to refill the gap but should do their best in the new country.

In dealing with mass-migration of this character, one traditional premise of political economy must be dispersaded: it is the axiom that the bas of society is agriculture. That may be so, but has no bearing on our mission. Here a different amion dominates: the sinews of mass-migratic economy, in our day, is industry. It is obvious that in a colonising entreprise of such magnitude, especially when speed is imperative, agriculture as an absorber of large immigrant masses is less than secondary. For numbers, mass immigration emonomy leans, above all, on manufactures and house building; far behind these, on trade and transport; ver far behind these, on farming.

This has nothing to do with the future of the colony: even if it is desired that the Settlement Country should in the end become a predominantly bucolic community, precedence in the beginning will have tobe given to industry, letting agriculture come last and grow slowly until it conquers - if it can.

This rule is of dominating importance to every aspect of our colonisation.

It overrides the traditional attitude to soil and water. A florishing industrial city, feeding thousands of people, can be built on stony soil where no farmer could thrive. Water of the poorest quality, unfit for the irrigation of fields, can be used in boilers to drive steam engines. In agriculture it may not pay to carry the water in pipelines over a long distance or to sink reservoirs for

rain-water deep enough to reduce evaporation: but what is too expensive for the slow conservative profits of corn growing, might prove worth while if it helps to produce footgear and earthenware.

Geographical planning - i.e. mapping out the sites where the future dwelling centres shall be established - also becomes much easier. It need no longer, in a country with few perennial rivers, be subordinated to the results of slew and uncertain borings for underground water: the suitable sites can be chosen for reasons immediately visible because near to the sea shore, or because convenient as a marketing centre for a number of existing villages, or because it is a cross-reads, or because there is a quarry nearby. State-planning, when approached under this angle, becomes almost akin to town-planning: future cities can be rationally marked all over the empty map of the State-area in the same way as future green squares over the empty map of a projected town, and highroads be traced with the same logical forethought as main streets.

T T T

Basing our calculations on the supremacy of industry has also another advantage: modern society spends incomparably more on the consumption of manufactured goods than on the consumption of agricultural produce. Immigrants concentrating on industry can supply a much larger proportion of the new Settlement's needs than if they devoted themselves chiefly to agriculture.

The calculations, expressed schematically, is very simple. One million people will need a very large mass of non-agricultural and non-pastoral goods. A certain part of that mass will have to be imported, because the Settlement Country cannot supply them, (e.g. raw materials or the heavier kinds of machinery). But the balance can be provided locally, and the largest possible part of that must be provided by the First Settlement forces themselves. In other words, the sakene willbe to let the First Killion feed and clothe and house the First Killion in the maximum measure of possibility.

economy will always largely retain the nature of an abstract makes as schematic framework, and will have to be readjusted to realities. Nevertheless, the framework will prove most useful in helping solve the fundamental question of all new communities - "how will they manage to live by taking each other's washing".

All humanity lives by taking each other's washing, without any outside financial help as there is no other planet able to supply it. The Jewish settlement will have the advantage of considerable outside assistance, represented by the International Loan and, subsequently, by the purky yearly income of national funds raised among the Western communities. But the basis of its initial economy must be an attempt to approach a provisional "autarky" as much as possible.

This indicates the character of the entreprises which should be started at once. In a land of large agricultural possibilities, the main effort should of course be directed to agriculture. In a land where land and water are, for the moment, scarce, the chief lines of activity will have to be house building, road building, transportation, and all kinds of light industry to provide elementary consumers' goods - rough clothing, rough furniture, rough corckery and every other primary need that can be satisfied "roughly" by local effort.

A short period will in practice elapse between the conclusion of the peace concerence and actual start of the transportation: probably not less than a year. This period could be utilised to give the First Settlement candidates opportunities for rough training in the rudiments of those branches of labour (mainly industrial and building) which they are likely to join after arrival on the spot. Their output will be very poor at first, and therefore uneconomical: which, weighed in the propert balance, does not

buildings for any of the planned industries are ready, machinery and raw materials will be imported, workers engaged and the production willbegin.

* * *

The international loan will have to finance the following operations:

a) Liquidiation and export of the emigrants' property.

In assuming that any of that property be left at the

end of the war, East Central Europe willbe so impoverished that its removal can only be envisaged as a gradual process, so slow as not to disarrange local economy. Special organs willhave to be established, probably banks, for granting the emigrant advances against any kind of property he way leave in their hands for liquidation.

b) Transportation. The only reasonable way to cope with the transportation of such masses will be for the Jews to found one or several big shipping companies of their ewn. The Settlement Country will need a commercial fixidata maphagement and asker the rush; and a new field of employment mauning the ships will be opened before thousands of young Jews.
c) The actual sattlement: house building for the initial camping and the new sites; highboad, aqueducts, rainwater storages; all public works in general.
d) Establishment of factories not provided for by private capital (but probably unless Western Europe and America are also ruined) the bulk of that development will be financed by private capital alone).
- e) Health, schools, public security.
- f) Administrative expenditure.

The repayment of this international loan, principal and interest, will probably be regarded even by the hard-boiledest of business men as reasonably safe. The shares will, of course, be borne entirely by Jews, mainly by the new Settlement itself. Various collaboral securities can be foreacen: the one most obviously apt to guarantee the regular service of this Public Debt will be the Custom House income of the Settlement Country (or the increase of that income due to the new immigration, so as not to encreach upon the interests of the pre-Norday Plan population).

Another source may be discovered if the energy countries, under the future peace treaty, will have to pay indemnities. The indemnity clauses of Versailles have left a bad taste, and there is at present a strong prejudice against the usual catchword "Let the enemy pay". But this attitude mustnot necessarily be pushed too far. Mr.

Norman Angell has no doubt most convincingly proved that making the enemy pay for his belligerent conquerors' damages is a transaction ruinous to those conquerors themselves. But damage done to private citizens in Poland, as well as in Germany and Austria itself, is quite a different question. It will hardly be found unfair that the perpetrator of that damage should, at least, have to accept a share of the Public Debt made to save his victims.

The technique of building a new country under such conditions is, of course, not a subject matter for a guessing layman's page. It will ik take many months of planning by specialists: but all the framework of the plan ought to be completed, so far as possible, during the war. Only the finishing touches of the technical scheme, the actual launching of the loan, and the appointment of the people in charge of the work, should be left over till after the peace conference.

what can be foretold about the technical plan is an ebvious thing: it will probably deal with the First Million enly (subsequent repatriations, being slower, will be more like ordinary migration, needing perhaps no special planning at all); and there will be three stages to consider - the initial emping of the newcomers; the constituction of the new centres - mostly industrial centres - on the appointed spots; and the start of good special production.

The first stage would be a formidable by the rough and ready method of billeting. In our case, however, billeting willprobably be an exception: as the flow of new-camers is to be a permanent feature, it will be worth while to build. They willbe a fluctuating population, batch after batch going off to other places; during the First willion's repatriation, probably over one third of that number will need some kind of hutment accommodation. This gives as an outline of the first item of the scheme: to

leficulty in a

outher where

olovico that

outh of outers

outh towns,

outh of outers

out 300 towns

laces lace and

outh and scottered

and and scottered

and outhers

berrack-reoms for some 300 to 400 thousand pioneers.

The third stage willbe the actual start of the goods production, their delivery, their storage and sale, and the myriads of individual gestures which all this entails and which tegether constitutes a mation's economy: in other words, the birth of the mation.

All this is how a layman imagines a performance which experts will know how to formulate much better: but in the end it will amount to the same, a splendid reality.

x x x

Now the pseudonym can be dropped, and we came back to Palestine as the only "area" where that performance is destined to be emacted.

Palestine is a country enjoying a bearable climate and presenting a not by any means exceptional mixture of great natural advantages and still greater natural drawbacks. The absorptive capacity of such a country depends above all, not on those natural features but on the kind of men that inhabit or desire to inhabit it; on their intelligence, skill, endurance, will power, ressourcefulness, financial means, and world-connections making for assistance and trade.

One does not wish to sound disrespectful to Dectors of Colonisation, but it is a fact that the many experts who have in recent years made pronouncements on the settlement prospects of Palestine have all contradicated each other. The pronounce ments somehow lack solidity, do not sound "scientific", do not look to be final. Sir John Hope Simpson, in 1930, found ~ in

western Palestine was the land actually then weaker under cultivation - 8 million dunam out of a total area of 36 million. The Royal Commission's Report (1937) minute dismissed that verdict by admitting frankly that nebody really knew anything as to whether the wasted area be cultivable or not, and that the first thing to start with sught to be a geophysical and hydrographical survey, which should also extend to Transjordan. As to Transjordan, the 1935 Report of the Mandatory to the Mandates Commission estimated that only about 5% of its area could be considered cultivable. 5% of Transjordan's area is 1,150,000 acres, or 4,500,000 "dunams". But two years later, in August 1937, Mr. Ormsby Gore -

x) Schechtmann, "Transjordanien", Vienna, 1937, p.171

T. 187

The chief question ("chief" only from the point of view of agriculture, which is by no means the chief avenue for mass colonisation) is water for irrigation. The Woodhead Commission's Report devotes a painstaking chapter to this matter, only to show that nothing is really known on the subject, and next to nothing has been done to learn anything about it. The report cays that

x) Woodhead ("The Palectine Partition Commission's") Report 1938, p. 29: "The average for taxable crop land, 140 dumans".

that of the whole of Palestine, and quotes Sir John Hope Simpson to the effect that "given the possibility of irrigation, there is practically an inexhaustible supply of cultivable land in the Beersheba area". Yet, to investigate so vital a matter, sixteen borings for water all told have been made in that area, at the cost of £60,000. The results have been "mostly disappointing". Perhaps: but that was no survey to speak of. A government really bent on constructive issues, especially when for years its treasury accounts show comfortable amplies surplusees of revenue over expenditure, should spend a million pounds and make hundreds of borings is an area so vast and so important for settlement.

The question of Falestine's agricultural possibilities awaits a really serious survey: so far there has not been a single step made in that direction solid enough to justify any conclusion.

But it is a naive error to treat agriculture as the main basis of immigration economy. For a century and more, when countries grow it is no longer an account of their agriculture. Countries with the greatest density of population have the smallest percentage of people living by the plough and the pasture. Germany (density 360 per square mile), has 24%; Holland (618 per sq.m.) 20%; Belgium (702 per sq. m.) 16%; England and Wales (703 per sq.m.) 8%.

The Max Mordan Plan applied to Palestina.
\nincludes inevitably Transperdan: Let us dispose of a

curious widespread misconception: most people seem to think
that in Arab eyes that part of Palestine is infinitely more
sacred than the Western strip. People seem to think: I

Falestine on both sides of the Jordan has an area of about 40,000 agains miles. Its total population to-day, West and East of the river, is 1,600,000, Jews and Arabs together. It the density of France it could hold over 8 million inhabitants: and France's density is one of the lowest among the industrialised countries of Europe.

X X X

But even high densities only produce big numbers if the land is big enough. To absorb the Jewish execus Palestine must inevitably include the colonisation of Transfordan. Western Palestine centains only 10.000 equare miles, Transfordan 30.000. Population west of the Jordan, 1.300.000; population east of the river, only 300.000.

We are discussing business in this book, eminently grave business, business of Europe's and all the world's health and manity: thus, and in no other way, will the question of Palestine be discussed at the peace conference, too. The area wanted to save Europe's stepchildron must be barge enough to house them. This is not a question of a spiritual centre, of a slightly enlarged and glorified varsity years quadrangle where the Jews could parado their cultural excellence: this is a grim matter of numbers, of hunger and need, of square inches to stand upon and cubic feet of air to breathe. A reception area covering

can be reasonably considered for the quick reception of several millions: but not an area a quarter that size, and with 130 inhabitants per square mile already on the spot.

All this isvery palpably abvious, and all reticence can only lead to mutual decict. Nor is there really any need for reticence. A curious atmosphere of tabes has been created around the name "Transjerdan": a sort of myth or superstition, to the effect that just Transjordan, in Arab eyes, is an especially sacred portion of Palestine's soil, infinitely more valuable and more intengible than the Western strip; that if those Arabs as stubbarnly begrudge us the acres of Sharon and Galilee.

2.21

It is most important to disabuse public opinion.

Jewish and Christian, of this delusion as to the comparative degree of our neighbours' and cousins' jealousy with regard to the two parts of Palestine. This delusation has always affected our energy in pressing for the opening

up of Transjordan: many a Zionist who already claims the sole comership of Dan and Beersheba shrinks even from stating his case about Rabbat-Ammon as though fearing lest he tread on too delicate ground. But the ground is much less delicate here than in the first instance. Arab opposition to Jewish claims on Transjordan - once we really start pressing that claim - will be incomparably weaker than what we have apx experienced in the long-drawn battle for Western Palestine.

analysis of legal facts may show that the obstacles are much less formidable than people imagine. The essential legal facts about Transjordan are these:

The Palestine Mandate was formally adopted by the League of Nations on July 24th, 1929; the term "Palestine" in its was text embraced also Transjorden. Art.25 of the Mandate provided that "in the territories lying between the Jordan and the Eastern boundary of Palestine as ultimately determined, the Mandatory shall be entitled, with the consent of the Council of the League of Nationa, to postpone or withhold application of such provisions of this Mandate as he may consider inapplicable to the existing local conditions".

Two months later, on September 23rd, the Council of the League 'in pursuance of the provisions of this Article", passed a "resolution" stating that certain portions of the Falestine Mandate (allthe portions referring to Zionista interesta) 'are not applicable to the territory

This effect of the acodus on the population statistics of the Lone This final and radical character of the exactus mount be if he further strengthened by the above of rule that the "optimen in" age of for

the contingency that the measure could some day be recalled. The very title "resolution", in comparison with the title "Mandate", clearly emphasizes a lesser degree of durability. In other words, it is perfectly reasonable and lawful to assume that the intent of the resolution was just to "postpone" the application of the Mandate's Zioniat clauses to Transjordan in view of "existing local conditions"; what has been postponed can now be enacted without any breach of the Mandate. X)

x x x

The real difficulty, of course, is not the "resolution" but the existence of a certain dynastic fact. One would feel rather awkward in the widdle of this 20th century having to dicuss dynastic facts of such abviously articial origin as if they were decisive factors in a situation involving the fate of peoples. It is perhaps more practical to leave it undiscussed; as, for different reasons, we have left aside the question of how a Max Nordau Plan could be fitted into the framework of an existing Mandate. Where there is good will, everything can be fitted into everything. That is perfectly clear in the ail concerned is that where serious world's business is to be done, titles cannot stand of in the way.

x) Schechtmann, "Transjordanien", Vienne 1937, p.259

Chapter XVII

The transformation of Falestine can be carried out to the full without dislodging the Palestinian Arabs. All current affirmations to the contrary are utterly wrong.

Anterritory of over 100.000 square kilometers, settled at the average density of France (87 inhabitants per sq. k.)

would hold over 8 million inhabitants; at the density of Switzerland (104), over 10 million; at the density of Germany or Italy (140), about 14 million. It now holds, counting Araba and Jews and Transjordanians and all, just over one million and a half. There is margin enough left for Palestine to absorb in addition, the better part of East Central Europe's ghetto - the better part of five million souls - without coming anywhere near even the moderate density of France. Unless the Arabs choose to go away themselves, there is no need for them to emigrate.

Another fallacy is the assertion that for the Arabs to be a minority in a state predominantly Jewish would mean to be persecuted and oppressed. The last people to repeat this fallacy ought to be the authors of the 1939 White Paper. Since they assure that the Jews, condemned to remain a one-to-two minority in Palestine, would not only be oppressed but can even enjoy the delights of a Jewish National Home, what ground have they to suggest that it would be a disaster for the Arabs if the positions became reversed? It would be much

more logical for the authors of the White Paper to offer the Arab minority the same safeguards they consider sufficient for the happiness of a Jewish minority.

minority can live in reasonable contentment. The world has no right to assume that Jewish statesman-ship is unable to create as decent a regime as that orested by Canadian or Swiss statesmanship. After all, it is from Jewish sources that the world has learned the visdom about the proper treatment of the "stranger within the gates".

Thereis only one case where to be a minority is a tragedy and a curse: it is the case of a nation which is only a minority, everywhere a minority scattered among strange races, with no corner of the earth to call her own and no home to go to. — But the Araba have all Arabia, Irak and Syria on the East side of the Suez Canal; West of Suez, there is Rgypt, Libya, Tunis, Algiers ad Morocco. Some of these countries are already independent, others not yet; but in each one of them there is no question of any but Arabian majority, each one of them is an Arab national homeland.

It would be an idle pastime, at this stage, seriously to offer drafts of future constitutions. But some people may be genuinely worried about what would heppen to the rights of the Palestinian Arabs if the country became a Jewish State. The author can at least give them an idea of what Jews themselves intend to do

Armenian, Mosaic). It will be impossible hereto display all that erudition: only a few sections are worth quoting, dealing with civic equality, Languages, so-called "cultural autonomy", the Holy Flaces, and land laws. Only the broad issues, no details. It will perhaps be sufficient to bear cut the statement made by this writer before the Palestine Royal Commission: that the Jawa are ready to guarantee to the Arabs in a Jewish Palestine the maximum of the rights they claimed, but mover got for themselves in other countries.

In reading this draft it should be remembered that according to the principle which is the alpha and omega of Revisioniam. Falestine can be promoted to independent statehood only after the formation of the Jawish majority.

I. Civic Equality

Jew from repatriating to Palestine and, by doing so, sutomatically becoming a Palestinian citizen, - the principle of equal rights for all citizens of any race, creed, language, or class shall be exacted without limitation throughout all sectors of the country's public life.

In every Cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, vice-premierable shall be offered to an Arab, and vice-versa. Proportional sharing by Jews and Arabs both in the charges and in the benefits of the State shall be the rule with regard to Parliament elections, civil and military service, and budgetary endowments.

The same rule shall apply to mixed municipalities or county councils.

2. Languages

1. The Hebrew and the Arabic languages shall enjoy equal rights and equal legal validity.
1. No State law, proclamation, or ordinance; no coin, banknote, or stamp of the State: no publication or inscription produced at the State's expense shall be valid unless executed identically in both Hebrew and Arabic.
1. Both Hebrew and Arabic shall be used with equal legal effect in Parliament, in the Courts, or before any other office or organ of the State.
1. All offices of the State shall answer any applicant, orally and in writing, in the language of his application, whether Hebrew or Arabic.

3. Cultural Autonomy

The Jewish and the Arab ethno-communities hall be recognised as autonomous public bodies of much status before the law.

x) The word used in original is the Hebrew equivalent of "nationality". As in English the term denotes state allegiance rather than ethnical allegiance, this trans-lation had to be invented.

(Ch. XVII)

Should the Christian Arabs, or any other group of citizens reasonably justified in claiming autonomy, also demand a measure of independent recognition,

Parliament shall be entitled to grant the request.

1. The following matters shall be delegated by the State to each ethno-community with regard to its members:
  - a) religion and personal status;
  - education in all its branches and grades,
    especially in the compulsory elementary
    etages.
  - c) charity including all forms of social assistance.
  - d) settlement of minor law cases arising out of the above mentioned matters.
1. Each ethno-community shall elect its national Diet with the right to issue ordinances and levy taxes within the limits of the autonomy and to appoint a national Executive responsible before the Diet.
1. A permanent Mirister of cabinet rank, independent of all parties, shall represent each ethno-community in the country's Government.

IV. The Holy Places

1. The relevant areas within the Old City of Jerusalem, to be delimited under the authority of the League of Nationa, shall enjoy the same measure of exterritoriality as that universally recognised in the case of Embassica.
1. Each of these areas shall constitute a municipality under a Council appointed by agreement between the ecclesiastic authorities concerned.
1. A similar regime shall apply, mantather mutatias mutandia, to other Holy sites within the country.
1. Except in war, pilgrim permits of sufficient duration shallbe freely granted to nationals of any State: subject only to genuine requirements of hygiene, traffic, and public safety, and provided any paupers among the pilgrims shall be maintained and repatriated at the expense of the respective ecclesiastic authority.
1. A delegate of the League of Nations, with the status of Ambaesador, shall be appointed to represent the interests concerned.

V. Land

A Falestine Land Court shall be formed including among other members, also judges and agricultural experts belonging to both ethno-communities.

1. All the waste lands, as well as all lands inadequately cultivated in the Court's opinion, shallbe requisitioned (under fair compensation in the case of the latter) to form the State's Land Reserve.
1. After improvementmat the expense of the State, reclaimed areas of the Land Reserve divided into allotments shall be granted, at fair prices and easy terms of credit, to individual applicants and groups.
1. Allotments shal be distributed under the Land Court's supervision to Jewish and Aran applicants and groups indiscriminately.
1. Each applicant shall have to satisfy the Land Court:
  - a) that he owns no other land
  - b) that he possesses a reasonable minimum of capital or equipment for working the land, no matter whether his own or supplied by supporters;
  - c) that he will work it personally

(Ch. XVII)

theoretically, the idea of redistributing minorities en masse is getting ever more popular among what is called the best people, and there is no longer any taboo about it.

One thing seems certain: any Arab country which would find the courage and the acresse for such an operation would reap fabulous material advantages. It would probably have unlimited sums and the world's best experts at its disposal for the most ambitious schemes of land reclamation and irrigation. The Arab trekkers, on the other hand, would probably also trek with donkey-loads of pelf. All the problems connected with the evacuation of the European "Zone" would become incomparably easier. Who knows?

But this is an aside, nothing to do with war aims. Palestine astride the Jordan has room enough for that million Arabs, for another million of the eventual progeny, for several million Jews, and for peace; for so much peace that it will then be peace also in Europe.

Chapter XIX

Senatus Populusque Israel

In cold justice, the first of all Jewish war demands ought to be addressed to the Jews themselves: a united front. They ought to have formed it, or at least have set about forming it, long ago; but now, since the war, the eleventh hour has really struck.

A united from means, above all, one agreed single formula of demands to be presented to the future peace conference: this is even more essential than one single national authority. In theory it might even be more impressive if a dozen different Jewish delegations, appearing one after another before the peace conference, would repeat exactly the same demands; or again it might prove, on the contrary, much less impressive, only irritant.

That does not really matter as the theory is unreal; an agreed programme, provided the people be not quite insane, would mean a united representation before the peace conference.

Yet even this - a single Jewish delegation before the conference table - is by far not what we need. The historical hour demands a Jewish delegation at the table of the peace conference. In the next chapter, the last of this book, this need willbe emphasized as the crucial point of all the Jewish war aims. Our-claim is for the full status of an Allied nation, with a recognised nations

(Ch. XIX,

headquarters (if the word "government" be premature) and a seat among those who will have to decide on our damands. But that cannot even be suggested unless there is, or will be formed in time for action, a single organ whose title as beadquarters no one could reasonably dispute.

Not consulted as partners; and as the petitioners are many we risk a replica of what happened at Evian. Having learned that there were some eighteen Jewish delegations at Geneva waiting to be heard, the Evian Conference entrusted one of its committees to invite all the eighteen. Each one of those delegations claimed, some probably with right, a "world" wide range of influence, beside the main claim to attention which was a point of view quite unlike that of the next embassy. Each one was impartially given five minutes to state that point of view. This is the dangerous precedent which may have to be repeated at the peace conference, unless which would surprise no one - the conference simply refuses to hear any of the competitors.

Another thing may happen, perhaps the worst at all:

(yet there is a danger that some important Jewish bodies

will themselves try and make influence in that harmful

direction). That would be if the peace conference chose to

hear only a few more authoritative, or at least more sub
stantial looking bodes; in that case the choice would be

Committee (the biggest of our relief associations), the Joint Foreign Committee (a London body with a long and not unworthy record of political interventions), the Aliiance Israelite Universelle, the Jewish Colonisation Association; perhaps also the Jewish Agency. This would be, frankly, the weret thing that can happen to us. A mix-up of eighteen points if view is at least harmless in that it cannot prejudice anything. But the selection of a few privileged admissibles would be in itself a prejudgment, an indication that the peace conference has already before listening to the Jews, made up its mind as to what it wants to hear.

Zionism. Even if a Jewish Agency were invited or allowed to present its view in this selected company, that would place it into the position of a competitor - with rather inferior chances. If a peace conference after a war like this decides to grant the floor to several Jewish bodies so selected as to represent several well defined attitudes reliance on "equal rights", relief by charity, relief by scattered infiltration, group settlement in places outside of Palestine, and also Zionism among others - it means that the mot d'ordre is to be relief by patchwork and Palestins

(Ch.XIX)

is to be examined simply as one of the many possible and partial palliatives.

This means bidding for sure failure. 50,000 a year (even to those who believe in the "progratic reality of this figure) is, under the present circumstances, a candid admission that Zioniam raises no claim to solve the tragedy. Arithmetically, it would take 20 years at this rate to save from hell even one single million; actually, there would be hardly any evacuation at all for under the "selective"

are green youths, so that just the age classes of maximum fertility (approximately, in the "Zong", 23 to 39) are left behind to replace the losses. Before a peace conference concerned a if at all + only with what can be done to evacuate the ruined Zone, it is an attitude calculated to make of Palestine just one of the partial and inadequate remedies that may be proposed.

"group settlement" - in the sense of a settlement certified to become an all-Jewish territory if it succeeds at all - this programme is obviously inadequate. British Guians or the Kimberleys are a mirage, but at least there the first five thousand settlers, if they managed to stay, would make a purely Jewish province with no neighbours to cause trouble. But it would take a longish generation to transform even Western Palestine alone into a country with a Jewish majority at the rate of 50 thousand immigrants a year; and in the meantime - every member of the p peace conference will know what would have to be faced in the meantime. Taken as a patchwork remedy, admittedly one of the several on the market, Palestine is really not an attractive business proposition.

Palestine as one of many palliatives has no chance at all to be not only preferred but even seriously noticed at the future peace conference. Of all possible palliative propositions Palestine is, politically the most ardnous. hampered by obstables which can only be surmounted at the

(Ch. XIX)

cost of considerable daring. Of course it is not impossible to overcome the Arab obstruction and Great Britain's reluctances, but to do so a decisive effort willbe required. Efforts are only made when it is worth while to make them: when the price is great and unique, not a pittance to which can much easier be obtained elsewhere.

Falestine as a war aims problem has no locus standi unless it can be presented as the full solution of the Jewish problem, the only practicable theatre for a Max Norday plan, the only complete medicine for Europe's cancer. Only then can the Falestine claim be defended before the councils of a world such as it will be on the morrow of a great cataclysm, facing the necessity of immesme solutions, with no time nor patience for trifles and trimmings: only if put forward as a scheme unique in its material humanitarian range, exclusive and intolerant of all competition, and indeed dwarfing all competitors and making their offer valueless in comparison.

The Jewish demand at the future peace conference should be an amalgam of the two dominating ideas of our people's modern history: the Jewish State for those who want it, and real equallity for those whom Eastern Europe will not release. The amalgam is indissoluble, for

(Ch. XIX)

without the Jewish State the second demand is unreal, it is, in fact, not an amalgam but a bi-atomal oneness. Our people's only chance of alavation our of this war depends on these two conditions: that oneness of the Jewish war demands must be recognised by all the collective authority of world Jewry, - and it must be presented at the world's settlement board by a single Jewish embassy in the name of a single world-Jewish leadership.

defence. The author is rather far from that conception, but it would be waste of time to argue. What is needed is the recognition of a paramount common interest and a single headquarters to defend it: 'Senatus Populusque Israel'.

X. Assistant

leadership out of the voluntary submission of central committees.

on the globe.

This short paragraph is inadequate for a subject so wast. The problem will probably have to be solved by long and heated internal debate, but it is an internal problem and does not properly belong in a book which attempts to state the Jewish claim vis-a-vis the Gentile universe. We shall leave it at that, only remembering that there will be no chance even of voicing a claim unless a single WorldJewish "government" be there to voice it.

Chapter XX

The Jewish war demands are:

a) A Jewish army on all the Allied fronts
b) Recognition of a world-Jewish civil headquarters with a seat on any international organ dealing with migration or reconstruction problems and on the future peace conference
- c) The Jewish State as a war aim of the Allies
- d) A Covenant on civic equality, as a war aim of the Allico

B) The Army

The Jewish Regiment was formed by the War Office in August 1917. It was at first officially known as the 38th to 41st Royal Fusiliers, but was afterwards granted the name of "Endaeans" and a special badge (the seven-branched candlestich described under canvass familiarly as the toasting fork). Its full strength on the register at Hounslow was probably over 10,000, but only half of that number could be trained in time to reach Palestine. Of these, about 1600 came from the United Kingdom, 100 from that Southern part of Palestine which Allemby had liberated a year before the final conquest, about 2500 from the United States, the balance from Canada, the Argentine, and from among the Jewish prisoners of war at Alexandria, Egypt, who volunteered for that services

Be section of Jewish graves. They are not many: the Jewish battalions had not been given a real battle chance, perhaps simply because there happened to be no serious engagement where they happened to be stationed. What they were told to do they did well. There was no reason why the precedent should not have been followed when the present war broke mut. and there still is null.

both in scope and in character. It must be, formally, a Jewish army, not a regiment within the British army; it must be given a chance to grow to 100,000 men at least; and it must fight on all the Allied fronts to prove just what some people would prefer to forget - that this is a Jews' war as much as Brittin's and France's, Poland's and Finland's.

The writer need not be lectured on the 1001 excellent reasons why it is both unusual and "impossible" to have a Jewish army so long as there is no Jewish state, nor a Jewish treasury to maintain it. All the reasons are value—less. Unusual, yes, "impossible", nonsense. The only question is whether an additional 100,000 men. probably many more, will be useful in the field or not, and what will be the best way, the "optimum", to get the maximum number of recruits, and out of them the maximum eagerness of effort. This also settles the treasury question. If

Outside of the Allied countries, and the countries held or paralysed by the enemy (U.S.S.R. included), there are more than six million Jaws to-day whose dominating pre-occupation, without any fear of overstatement, can be described as looking for some way to help in destroying the common enemy. About 1.200.000 of them are males between the ages of 18 and 35. - An expecially interesting corner of

the picture is Palestine, whose male Jewish population of army age can alone provide 100,000 man, with a large proportion of them not only trained but fairly experienced in that old-fashioned kind of warfare which in the Middle East may still be not quite of fashion. - All these are potentials which it would not be wisdom to neglect, simply as numbers, even apart from their value as a factor likely to affect the other "potential" of the war, the moral one,

lCh. XX

These are doubtless very gruel thoughts, but they
fit human nature and are proably shared, by now, in most
of the relevant circles high and low. But even while the
need for monotony lasts, its bromide effects on the nonbelligerent nations' morale could be considerably countersouls
balanced if six million/living in their midst had a
concrete tangible stake in the arens, and not just in
the passive sense as victime.

embroidering, but may become still clearer with the help of another illustration by analogy (once again, only a very superficial analogy): "propaganda". Anti-Nazi propaganda by the Allies would be resented even in pro-Allied countries, anti-Nazi propaganda by Jews is regarded natural. An appeal to Jews to play a part in the conflict is bound to produce a magnetic beam of great power: it would be resented if its source were British or French, but coming from a purely Jewish source it would be weighed in a different balance. The tragedy of dispersion is, after all, not without some redeeming features, inadequate on the whole, but sometimes effective.

But the earnest argument in favour of a Jewish army as preferable to Jewish units under other flags is the question of numbers and the question of elan. Any child realises that there is a great scarcity of Jewish generals, staff-officers, even field officers, and especially MCO's: at the outset the Jewish army will be really Jewish only as to rank and file. But this isome of these cases when a name is more essential than material substance. The author, now for over 25 years, has been obstinately engaged in fostering what some fools were pleased to describe as Jewish militarism, and in close contact with the type of Jewish youth whose mentality responds to the appeal of the bugle (to-day this covers practically the mass whole young manhood of the race):

(Ch. XX)

he can affirm, with the fullest assurance, that while a call to g join Jewish regiments under an Allied flag would attract thousands, whole streets will be emptied in the rush for a Jewish army.

b) The "Civil" Hesaquarters"

violence de facto is non-existent in law, it would vitiate the very air we breath. A statehood recognised by the comity of civilized nations cannot cease, it stands.

Yo analogy need be perfect in all details. Fortunately for the Polish nation, or for the Czech nation by the same token, their lot is immendedly better than that of the Jews: they inhabit the territory for whose freedom they fight, while the Jews are in dispersion. But the root of the analogy is sound: it is the principle that a destroyed nation is still a nation.

whether the Jews of East-Central Europe are a nation would be futile. For the last 20 years no responsible statesman, east or west or in-between, ever even thought of that section of Jews in any other terms. Whenever events forced them and their porblems upon his attention, he knew that therewas one official solution - they were some day to form a nation in a sort of area called a National Home; he may be sceptical himself as to wisdom of that solution, or as to chances of its success, but the official view was that they were, so to speak, stuff earmarked to form a nation when israixas (or "if and when") restored. It would be useless to argue with those who deny that this was, roughly, the common

approach to the problem. Those who admit the truth cannot help admitting that, the moment a list of destroyed nations waiting for restoration has been officially drawn up, the homeles section of the Jewish people has a fair claim to a place on that list.

(CH, XX) *

an "executive", a "presidency" entitled to negotiate and to cooperate, not as petitioners but as partners.

(Ch. XX)

c) The State

The whole book has been devoted to this subject; here it will be enough simply to recapitulate the main points of the argument.

The Jewish State is a true and proper war aim. Without it, the ulcer that breeds Europe's trouble cannot be curedifur without it there can be no adequate emigration of the millions whose old homes are irretrievably condemned by the force of reality; and without that, no equality; and without this, no neace.

There must be an organ of international authority devoting itself, from now on, to the study of this problem, and the preparation of the scheme, or the schemes, to be laid before the future peace conference. If that organ is the Intergovernmental Cammittee on Refugees, it must be rebuilt and reinforced in agreement with Jewish authorities, and instructed to drop the matchwork business and concentrate on the Jewish State problem.

Therecan be no preliminary limitation as to the various projects that body shall have to examine before it makes its choice. It shall be instructed to investigate any plan presenting, prime facie, the essential features of earnestness: if necessary, all the corners of what we call the Fata Morgana land. But the first item on its agenda must be to investigate the Palestine plan. This is a fair proposal, excluding nothing except any attempt to steal a march either way.

It will be for the Jewish factor, in debate or in realit to prove what is, after all, not difficult to prove: that the Palestine plan, with allits drawbacks, is the only oneapart from all other considerations - that is practicable.

(CH_XX)

d) The Covenant of Equality

Should the Jewish porblem by some miracle, entirely disappear from Europe's surface, it will still probably require a couple of generations to establish real equality of rights between members of different ethnical groups sharing the same territories. There was a time when people believed that such equality can be efficiently "guaranteed" by a mention in a document. There still are statemen who pretend to believe in it. There is no same adult mind left on earth that really believes in such atter nonsense. Any paragraph in any constitution or international treaty, imposing on a majority the obligation to abstain from harming a minority, willnot be worth the price of the printer's ink spent on its reproduction if it can be disregarded with impunity: as it can everywhere, under the international regime prevailing to-day.

being harmed everywhere. On the contrary, he has made it very clear that he considers the condition of some minorities (the Scotch in England, the French Canadians in Ontario, etc) an entirely satisfactory condition; and that he is sure the Jose in a Jewish Palestine willbs able to create as satisfactory a condition for the Arab minority if the Arabs choose to stay. To treat a minority decently is an achievement in

which some nations in some countries succeed while other nations in other countries sail. History, sociology, psychology or perhaps psychology willsome day discover why there should be such a difference; it is smough for our to-day's purpose to remember that it exists, and that East-Central Europe, even without Jews, is not among the areas where the miracle can work uncless it can be enforced by some ever-present and tangible threat of supreme compulsion.

should be enforced to the end, so that everything in Greece should be everybody's business in Fortugal and vice-versa. But the division of matters, from the point of view of mutual safety, into external and internal is a schoolboy's concept. If your neighbour's drains are bad it is your concern, and you must have the right to call in the police.

led to the establishment of some absolutely practical, efficient, and automatic machinery for knocking out enyone who starts laying a powder trail before he has had time to carry it much farther.

And the writer thinks that among those "internal" matters that have a direct and tangible bearing on war danger, treatment of athmical or religious minorities is in the first rank. A hundred dars of Europeas history have proved it.

There can be no claim of sovereignty to cover a breach of the covenant of equality: any step in that direction is the same as starting the powder trail; the machinery must be set in motion and the culprit knocked out.

To have such great power, the covenant of equality must fulfil two conditions among others: it must be terribly solemn, and it must be fully and carefully reasonable.

"clauses" or "paragraphs" inserted into treaties dealing with seventy seven other matters. None of those other matters can have one tenth of the monstress poison force of the minorities matter; no chapter dealing with the forker, one tenth of the colossal prophylactic impotence of provisions affecting the latter. Nor is there, among all problems of international or "internal" statecraft, any so complicated.

any that requires such attention to detail and such penetration of foresight as this. There must be a special session of the peace conference entirely devoted to this problem; and a separate Covenant of Equality.

(CH. XX)

Liguists. On the strict basis of equal opportunity and the best man wins reagrdless of facial angles, it is invariably the longhest candidates who takes the honours. The result, after 25 years of that regime, is that 75 per cent of the best jobs in government or townhalls amploy has been captured by longheads; practically the same in trade and the professions. The broadheads asks is that fair? Should people whom God has refused the gift of tengues be penalized? Should there not be some kind of proportionality in the enjoyment of equal rights?

A xexementice reasonable Covenant will take this into account. "Equal opportunity and the best man wine" does not cover the whole problem of equal rights; it has perhaps even very little to do eith the real essence of that problem, whose extremely complicated nature is exactly the chief reason why it is absurd - even on paper - to try and solve it by inserting a few paragraphs into an instrument dealing with something else. Jockeys, to be really equal to one another in a race, are weighed and weighed; golfers get varying handwark handicaps. A convenant of equality must see to it that, while the twenty longheads get their full twenty loaves, not nineteen, the broadheads get their eighty rations and not seventy nine.

Whether such a Covenant, however perfect, can work the trick and produce a condition satisfactory enough to prevent friction, is a query which only the future answer. Some

people doubt it, and believe that the only reel solution of the minorities problem is a redistribution of the races over the surface of the earth, i.e. the mass evacuation of all scattered winorities. This may be an exeggeration. There are minorities which, though cut off from their ethnical mainland, still form mono-ethnical "islands", enclaves, at least villages of their own, so that it is, so to speak, only on the market-day that they have to rub shoulders with the hajority people. Or there may be cases where both races are somehow more or less congenial, good mixers mutually, so that by leaving them alone and giving the time they might be helped to intermarry, or simply to forget allabout it. The coverant must foresee all that can be foreseen, and time will show.

But the Covenant must be reusonable, and its authors cannot expect the impossible to happen: in particular, they cannot expect Jewish equality in East-Central Europe to be anything but a lie unless their colleagues, the other statesmen at the other bession of the peace conference, establish the Jewish State.