THE WAR AND THE JEW

THIS book will compel the attention of the war-ridden world. Its analysis of the Jewish problem tears down the shams and ignorance which have been built up around it. The solution of the Jewish problem is vital not only to the Jewish people but to the health of the world. Jabotinsky's proposals for the new world after the war are not only the demands of a Jewish patriot—they are the essence of bold statesmanship, and constitute a challenge to which the civilized world must reply.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, one of the bestknown figures in the Jewish world, fought for the rights of the Jewish people for nearly forty years. In World War I he struggled against enormous odds for the creation of the Jewish Legion which ultimately participated in Allenby's Palestine campaign. A brilliant orator, soldier, poet and writer, he devoted his life to the re-

THE WAR

_ву VI.ADIMIR JABOTINSKY

WITH

A Foreword by Pierre van Paassen

AND

Conclusion by Con. John Henry Patterson, D.

NEW YORK
THE DIAL PRESS

COPYRIGHT 1942 BY JEANNE JABOTINSKY

All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

Part III THE STATE EXODUS

Part IV THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

conclusion by Col. John Henry Patterson, D.S.O. 251

AS I REMEMBER HIM

By Pierre van Paassen

Ecce Homo!
Ja, ich weiss woher ich stamme!
Ungesättigt gleich der Flamme
Glühe und verzeh' ich mich.
Licht wird alles, was ich fasse,
Kohle alles was ich lasse:
Flamme bin ich sicherlich!

Nietzsche

Let WAS saying that even as the Roman Empire ceased to exist not, to be sure, in the fifth century of the Common Era, as the date-loaded school history books would have it, but right in the first year of the first century, even so France, Germany and Britain must dès maintenant be considered as very far advanced on the road to disintegration. . . . It is sometimes pathetic, he went on, to hear politicians, statesmen and editorialists warn the nations that a great danger has come to threaten them all since Germany broke from her moorings and started on the rampage once more, as if the danger were but a thing of yesterday, coincidental in genesis for instance with Hitler's rise to power or with the shackling of the Reich in the chains of Versailles. I do by no means wish to minimize the threat of Nazism, he said, looking up,

but I also believe that the hour of decision for our civilization struck long ago.

With the rise of Hitler the crisis in human affairs grew infinitely more acute. It was really the agony that set in. But you must go back nearly a century to find the more or less exact moment when the process of dissolution itself began. The first alarming symptom perhaps was the Franco-Prussian War. What followed thereafter: the financial panics, the ever-recurrent business depressions, the wars, the revolutionary upheavals, all that was consecutive: incluctable and logical sequence in the operation of the law of cause and effect. . . .

With the immediate, rapidly changing scene before our eyes and the ground whereon we stand trembling under our feet, he resumed after a short silence, our attention is riveted on the petty affairs of the day, on our personal, group or national interests and we are apt to lose sight of the fact that civilizations, like all living things, are born and die, sometimes never even reach their maturity. It is a cycle everlastingly being developed and consummated. Like living organisms, civilizations eliminate their wornout and dead particles by degrees, and assimilate others derived from their surroundings which renew their flesh and blood until the day when their powers of adaptation relax and finally stop altogether. Then comes death because they no longer nourish life. But the dying process, the agony may be quite long. It may take as long as the life-span of one or even more generations. . . .

And then, suddenly, dropping his chin on his breast

and speaking in a voice of plaintive sadness in which there crept a note both of disillusion and bitterness, Jabotinsky sighed: "It is the tragedy of the men of my generation to have lived in a dying era. To me personally this knowledge has the last few years deepened my ever-present sense of exile."

It was in New York, on the evening of one of those sultry, sweltering days in midsummer of 1940 that we walked for the last time and sat on the green in Central Park till the city grew hushed with the coming of dawn.

He looked pale and worn, the Rosh Betar, after weeks and weeks on end of writing and conferences and discussions with journalists and politicians and disciples, always planning, always thinking of some new venture, some new approach to the old problem of Jewish national emancipation. I had to tear him away, literally, from the clutches of some devoted chassidim who were gathered in the humble apartment which he occupied during the last few months of his life near the Park.

Once outside, however, in the open air, his cares and worries seemed to leave him. He was as cheerful as I had seldom seen him. His step was brisk and light and he laughed heartily at the pranks of some colored children who were playing with a dog on the greensward.

That night after dinner he talked uninterruptedly, not in a vainglorious display of his almost encyclopedic knowledge and quiet wisdom or because he was of a garrulous nature. He merely felt released from his most pressing cares for the moment. The breadth of his spirit took a wider sway in the freedom of the trees and meadows.

revolutions to degenerate into étatism and tyranny; then of course of the need to raise a Jewish army forthwith, not only for the defence of Palestine but as an instrument to speed up the redemption of Eretz Israel and the founding of a Jewish State in the present cataclysmic circumstances when history does not move with the measured tread of a grandfather's clock, but advances with the seven league boots of a giant and with revolutionary shocks. . . .

For that: Eretz Israel and the Jewish State in Palestine, that was his cause, his all in all, the sacred passion which entirely possessed and visibly consumed him. In Jabotinsky the love of Zion was both an unquenchable, ecstatic fire and also the still and steady flame of grace which the sages called Hitlahabut and of which the Baalshem once said that it sanctifies every action in life with a holy significance.

The healing of Israel through a normalization of its national and international status as a people, with a history, traditions, a way of life and a religion of its own, and therefore its need to live and work within walls of its own, that is: in its own land, master of its own destiny, not forced and twisted into the moulds of this or that alien civilization, but applying its genius for justice to working out its own solution of man's relationship with his brother as in the past it found for all mankind the way of man's relationship with God, and so as an independent factor, in a personal-national sense, and in accord with its own character and talents and ethos a contributor to the sum total of civilization: that was Jabotinsky's

vision of Israel's place and rôle and function in the new humanity.

In order to bring this vision to reality by translating it into new covenants and into a new structure of international relationships, to lead Israel at least part of the way along the long and weary road to the ideal, he poured out his whole heart, all his strength and his whole life. Jabotinsky lived Zionism. And it was the cause, too, that made of his life one of wondrous unity and singleness of purpose.

Vladimir Jabotinsky came from that intellectual milieu in Russian Jewry which had fully absorbed Russian civilization. When he first began to write his feuilletons and poetry in the Russian language, he was hailed by the critics of Petersburg and Moscow. Maxim Gorki devoted an essay to the realism and style of the young Jewish author. The great Tolstoy himself welcomed in Jabotinsky "a new writer of promise at last." The road to glory seemed open to the budding poet.

Then, without a word of warning, Jabotinsky stopped writing. His name disappeared from the columns of the literary journals and the journals of opinion to which he had but recently become a contributor.

What had happened, what had brought about this sudden change of direction? It was the wave of pogroms that swept through his native land following Russia's defeat in the war with Japan in 1905, which had thrown the young writer completely off his track.

Not unlike Theodor Herzl, scarcely a decade earlier, Jabotinsky had suddenly beheld for himself and had measured, as in some dread apocalyptic revelation, the full magnitude of the Jewish tragedy. He had become convinced of the permanent insecurity of the Jews in the Galut because he had seen the frustration and the futility of all their striving and that all their contortions and wrenching in all sorts of humiliating attitudes, physical and mental, in order to conform to another's way of life not only gravely damaged their own spirit and destroyed their human dignity, but that in the end the process would lead to the extinction of Jewish national culture and of Jewish life itself to the grievous detriment of civilization itself which would be the sufferer by the loss of the Judaic contribution.

He saw the homelessness of the Jewish people as the mortal disease to which Israel must ultimately succumb, for his people's condition without land and without a state was not unlike that of a human being who has all his limbs and organs intact but whose bone structure is devoid of marrow and who is therefore, though his outward appearance may be normal, as flabby, hollow and unreal as a putty doll.

This was the realization that had dawned on the young writer, causing him to be struck with an immense lassitude and with a sense of betrayal of his own people if he should continue his devotion to Russian letters.

He was to sum up the anguish of his soul and of the soul of Israel later in life, before the Royal Commission sitting in the House of Lords in February 1937 with the words: "Three generations of Jewish thinkers and Zionists amongst whom there were many great minds... have given much thought to analysing the Jewish position and have come to the conclusion that the cause of Jewish suffering is the very fact of the Diaspora, the bedrock fact that the Jews are everywhere in the minority....

"It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all, the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia of the body social or the body economic under which the Jews suffer. Of course there are ups and downs; but there are also moments, there are whole periods in history when 'this xenophobia of Life itself' takes on dimensions which no people can stand, and that is what we are facing now."...

Yet Jabotinsky did not become a Jewish nationalist merely because he had gained an insight at an early age into the overwhelming tragedy of the Jewish people in the Galut. He was a nationalist because he was an artist, a man of the world, a thinker of practical understanding and high critical judgment in international political affairs, a man of the European spirit and of a world outlook and in the love of his Fatherland and people: a man of action. His nationalism was a protest and in diametric opposition to the depersonalization which is the goal and object of internationalism. He knew that only by and in asserting one's own particular and peculiar nature, talents and character one can best serve the general interest and that this applies to nations as well as to individuals.

Nothing Jewish was alien to him except the cringing spirit of Schultzjudentum, the abject defence mechanism of assimilationism, and the eternal apologetics for the existence of the Jewish people. To those whom Zangwill once called the grand dukes of Judaism, the self-appointed leaders and stadlonim, his name was anathema. The professional compromise makers in Jewish life, who lock up their ideals in the cupboard under a layer of mothballs when there is a challenge or the prospect of battle, dreaded him as King Ahab dreaded Elisha, the adversary.

Nor did the movement which he led know him as a light taskmaster, as a dreamer who contented himself with visionary speculations and Zukunftmusik or as one who, like Eli, did not even look askance at the misdeeds of commission and omission of his sons. Jabotinsky's word could sear like a whiplash. He was a leader who imposed an iron discipline, who did not hesitate to ask for great sacrifices, the supreme sacrifice not excluded. But if Jabotinsky asked a great deal it was because he himself gave even more.

Like the true prophet he castigated because he loved. Because he wanted to see his people great and free, he denounced its faults. He tolerated no betrayal of values, national or spiritual. He always came back to the central truth: You Jews, you are a nation, a nation are you!—for the renewal of Jewish life is only possible when proceeding from this central thought. It is the positivism of Prophetism which seeks the restoration of the central thought. And therefore all creative

reforms proceed from prophetic action which never advances the slogan of a return to the past, but always seeks a break-through to the central truth in the future.

Jabotinsky's prophetism was social in character. What mattered personal salvation? His own life was but a flame that burned and consumed in order that the nation might be saved and led into new paths of life.

Although frequently impatient in debate and in negotiations with his own, when opponents by tortuous argument sought to divert attention or concentration from the one essential, Jabotinsky never wearied in his advocacy of Jewish rights with the Mandatory Power and the governments who had subscribed to the sentiments and ideas of the Balfour Declaration. "I have appealed," he told me once, "to their honor and to their sensibility, to their self-interests and to their own national cause, even to their innermost anti-Semitism wherever that existed. I have left nothing untried and I am ready to begin all over again tomorrow. For they must hear me. They must take heed. They must allow us to live."...

If it is objected, as it frequently was, that Jabotinsky was one-sided and repetitious, I would say that it is of spiritual and moral profit to us to have certain ideals put before us with intensity and one-sidedness. All-roundness and comprehensiveness cannot be expressed with equal intensity. And balance prevents enthusiasm.

In the course of my long years of wandering to and fro on the earth, his path crossed mine again and again: in Antwerp, in Warsaw, in London, Berlin, New York, Paris and Vilna—never, alas, in his own Jewish Fatherland whence a nervous British bureaucracy, instinctively fearing "the Spirit that maketh alive," kept him permanently barred. But whenever and wherever, on his speaking and organizing tours, the chance presented itself, he would snatch an hour or so to sit still and discuss the plans and thoughts and dreams that always occupied his restless mind.

In such moments his words, cast in a wondrous clarity and precision of speech, were revelationary of coming things and events. It was as if a light suddenly went up over the dying and decaying phenomena of the present. But he never played with flighty impressions, nor was he just a strong intellect and nothing more. In his talk there frequently crept a note of nostalgia to betray the melancholy behind the brave and realistic words: nostalgia for the highest fulfilment of his ideal, melancholy over the perverseness of a soulless contemporary environment.

Even so, no man eschewed sentimentality more than Jabotinsky did; he was diffident and cautious, to the point of shyness, in every expression of feeling, objective to the point of coldness almost. And yet he could also enter the house of mourning and sit with those who weep, that they might feel less lonely in the evening of sadness.

When I sat opposite Jabotinsky one afternoon in the

small office, on the second floor of the Rue Vineuse in Passy, where he published the Russian language periodical devoted to Jewish affairs called: "Rasviet," the conversation drifted to the subject of Bergson's genius. In the course of that short hour he said with a smile: "Genius really means to be able to see and feel what will come to pass ten years hence." That was in the early part of 1931. A quarter of an hour later, quite oblivious of his own earlier definition and totally unrelated with that part of the conversation, he sat calmly describing to me the conquest of Europe by a resurgent nationalist Germany, the refusal of the nations to stand together in the face of a common danger and the virtual extermination of the European Jewish communities.

How fantastic that sounded then! An editor of a national magazine to whom I sent a synopsis of the interview with Jabotinsky cabled back: "Tell that Jeremiah that his calamities can never come to pass; the world is too civilized!"

I once asked him in a mood of confidence why he should be so everlastingly kind in receiving me when it was convenient or not, me, a journalist whose voice assuredly did not carry very far in the world of men and events. "I surely cannot do a great deal," I said, "to spread your views and ideas. My heart is yours, but my talents are extremely limited."...

Jabotinsky waved his hand impatiently: "It isn't that," he said; "it isn't that at all. I like to look at you while we speak, because your eyes and not mine will see a regenerated Jewish people taking up its

national rôle in the community of peoples, in a truly free Palestine. It is for the reflection of that glory that I look in your eyes. And that reflection is there because you believe!"...

When he said that I thought back of my Uncle Kees, a Dutch landscape painter who, while strolling with me along a rural road in Brabant thirty years ago, made another prediction to me, this: "You, Pierre, you will see the day when the whole European kettle explodes and the débris comes tumbling down to bury this bourgeois world."

Even as that prediction is being fulfilled before our eyes today, so may Jabotinsky's blessed vision also come to pass!

The fulfilment of his dearest wish: to withdraw from the tumult and the shouting in the marketplace into the stillness of the sanctuary in order to engage in dialogue with the God in his heart, was never vouchsafed him. He thought of it frequently and during the last months of his life he laid the basis and the outline for an ambitious work on the philosophy of Jewish nationalism. But that part of life which he called "the other world," the world of action and endeavor ever and again claimed his whole attention and energy. His sense of duty did not allow him to say no.

Like Moses at the Burning Bush he had once heard the call to service for his people. His entire life was spent in obedience to that divine call, through the years, never flinching, through pain and humiliation, through disillusion and doubt, through misrepresentation and the hatred of the false prophets, against the very course of his personal interests, sacrificing career, glory and honor and happiness . . . for the sake of the ideal.

The greatness of Jabotinsky's spirit is revealed in his acknowledgment of a realm of values, which must assert themselves, which come to man with their ineluctible demands of loyalty and obedience, values which manifest themselves in a selfless human idealism and which are themselves the content of culture and the meaning of life.

What a tremendous thing it is when a man can say—right in the teeth of opposition and in defiance of the will of the world's mighty, diametrically at variance with his own profit and interest—here I stand, in the Name of God. You may jeer at me as a fanatical fool. You may smile at me with your official pity. You may lock me up as a dangerous revolutionary. You may taunt me with being a militarist and a terrorist and even take my life—nevertheless, here I stand in the Name of God!

I have not willed this task. . . . I have not sought it. . . . I have more than once turned aside from the call and pushed away from me as senseless the undertaking of speaking of God's greatness and of His right over man. . . . Tremblingly I have turned my ear when the voice came to me calling me to speak for my people. I felt myself too weak, too poor, too sinful to plead the cause of Israel. . . .

Nevertheless, here I stand in the world, in the Name of God!

You who build your empires on the tears of the poor, you who grow rich from the poverty of the oppressed, you who sow dissension and hate between brothers in order that your might will endure, you who declare your own power sacrosanct—against you I lift my voice, against you and your pretensions I call to revolt, the holy revolt of Love. . . .

I will not rest before my people has been called awake in the name of freedom! I will not rest until you let my people go! Even if I must go into battle with you and I must die: then yet will I preach and cry my cry of revolt: "Men of Israel, fight yourself free! Cast off the chains that bind you! the fire of God burns and His flames are the flames of freedom! . . .

What an unutterably tremendous thing it is when a man can honestly say: Here I stand, in the Name of God, I can do no other!

In doubt, in pain, in death, yet through and through illumined with courage, standing in the Name of God!

Thus stood the Prophets of old! Thus stood Vladimir Jabotinsky!

Bronxville, N. Y., May, 1942.

PART I

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

N THE outbreak of the present war the author of this book signed an appeal to the Jews which contained the following statements:

"A brutal enemy threatens Poland, the heart of the Jewish world-dispersion for nearly a thousand years, where over three million Jews dwell in loyalty to the Polish land and nation.

"France, all the world's fatherland of liberty, faces the same menace.

"England has decided to make that fight her own; and we Jews shall, besides, never forget that for twenty years, until recently, England had been our partner in Zion.

"The Jewish nation's place is therefore on all the fronts where these countries fight for those very foundations of society whose Magna Charta is our Bible."

Five months have passed since that was published, but it seems that there is no intention of treating the Jewish people as an Allied nation, nor the Jewish people's need as one of the causes for which the Allies are fighting.

With rare unanimity, all sections of the Jewish

national movement have asked for the formation of Jewish military units for active service on all fronts. There was nothing unprecedented in these demands: a "Judaean" infantry regiment (38th-41st Royal Fusiliers) was formed in 1917, and did good service in Allenby's Palestine campaign, and even before that there had been a Jewish transport unit, the Zion Mule Corps, in Gallipoli. Now the offer was for service not only in the East but wherever required. The only conditional demand was that Jews should be allowed to fight as Jews; that it should be recorded in the annals of this war that the Jews were one of the peoples fighting for the common good cause.

All these demands have so far been rejected. At the same time, a Polish army is being raised; Czechoslovak troops are recruited; and Jewish emigrants or refugees from both Poland and Czechoslovakia are being, in some cases advised, in some cases driven, to enlist in these formations, regardless of the fact that the brotherly treatment of Jewish recruits in some of them cannot always be guaranteed. A double humiliation is thus being inflicted: it is recognized that a destroyed nation is still a nation, and that its scattered members in exile should be given a chance to fight for their nation's reinstatement—but the Jew has no place on this waiting list of admitted claimants; he must give his devotion, his enthusiasm, his very life to the restoration of communities which have never pretended to love him, while fully aware that his own community is not to be included.

There is an obvious and deliberate policy behind

this refusal to revive the Jewish Legion. Once a nation had received recognition as a partner in the fight, it could not be prevented, in due course, from presenting and pressing its demands. In the councils of Allied statesmanship, the desire is lacking that the Jews should become entitled, now or later, to present and press any demands of their own, no longer as petitioners but as equal partners.

The bitterness which this attitude arouses in Jewish minds can be measured only by the horror of the Jewish misery throughout East-Central Europe. In that zone of chronic yet acute antisemitism the Jews have, so far, paid in actual human suffering infinitely more than the Czechs, considerably more even than the Poles. But in the majority of British Press organs their plight is hardly ever mentioned: their eagerness to serve, the justice of their cause, and even their agony are simply "not on the map."

British statesmen commonly discuss their war-aims without any reference to the Jewish problem. This attitude is even more unwise from the general standpoint than it is hurtful from the Jewish. It overlooks the fact that the abscess of Nazidom has been fed above all, on Jew-hatred, and would never have attained to such maturity but for that ailment; and an operation that failed to remove the roots of antisemitism would be no cure.

On the infrequent occasions when Allied statesmen are reminded that a Jewish problem exists, they vaguely hint at equal rights for all in a future Europe democratized by the Allies' impending victory. Only one of them, Sir Archibald Sinclair, has had the courage, so far, publicly to warn the Jews that even after that victory no such equality could be effectively guaranteed; and what he said in public others must realize in private. They are no doubt genuinely determined to enforce the recognition of Jewish equality in treaties and constitutions; but real equality for the Jews in that Zone of Distress—unless a great exodus relieves the situation—is doomed to remain a mirage; sullen hatred, boycott and starvation, with the threat of violence always in the offing, will be the rule as before; as the Allied statesmen surely realize.

The worst feature of the situation is the tendency, when the problem cannot be altogether ignored, at all events to minimize its importance; to make a pretence of believing that there is no actual Jewish tragedy; that it is simply a matter of just some tiresome skin-deep wounds which can be repaired with a couple of stitches. Whereas the truth is that the tragedy has reached a formidable intensity of pain and doom which is without precedent in all human history; that to end it a colossal world-effort is needed, an effort equally without precedent; and that this effort will have to be made.

In July 1938, Mr. Roosevelt made an endeavour to ensure international co-operation in the problem of initiating the great exodus; but as this means forcing a solution of the Palestine question, his effort—the Evian Conference—was cunningly frustrated, and his plan reduced to a futile patchwork.

Palestine today is regarded as out of bounds even

for fugitives perishing in what is worse than No Man's Land—in the frozen No Man's Waters of the Danube estuary—for Jews marooned on disused iron oiltankers, with newborn babies among them; and as for the future of Palestine, it is the policy of the 1939 White Paper—the death sentence of Zionist hopes—that now holds the field.

All the wholesome forces of the Jewish public in the Allied and neutral countries should join in a determined effort to smash the influences which are tending to obliterate the existence and the importance of a Jewish war-front. If that effort be strong and resolute enough, it will be victorious. They need have no patriotic scruples; the more rigorous the assault, the better for all concerned. Theirs is a struggle for the right to fight together and hope together; a struggle to overcome those who are obstructing the full scope of the supreme effort.

In this war the Jewish people should count as one of the Allied nations. Long before they are through with it the Allies will have to make room for our troops on their many fronts, for our leaders among their governments, for the redress of Jewish wrongs and the erection of Jewish statehood among their war aims.

CHAPTER II

NOT ON THE MAP

In THIS war (so it seems at the time of writing), it is not desired that the Jews should be "on the map": neither as active allies, nor as fellow-sufferers, nor as the subject-matter of any special Allied demands or war aims.

Arthur Szyk, the gifted miniaturist who recently exhibited in London his brilliant and terrible drawings of tortured Poles and Jews under the German invader, has also a genius for finding the mot juste. To describe the attitude of the majority of the Allied statesmen and the greater part of the Allied Press to this "Jewish" aspect of the war, he uses the word pornography.

"They treat us," he says, "as a pornographical subject. Pornography covers a most important department of life and nature; nobody denies it, but you cannot discuss it in polite society—it is not done."

There is a sort of shamefaced conspiracy, almost entirely dominating Parliament, the Press,*† and the

^* There are a few exceptions, the Manchester Guardian among them.

^† The author is referring, of course, to Great Britain. Public opinion in the United States, however, has not exhibited greater responsiveness in this respect.

public platform, to obliterate the Jewish war-issue by silence. The term "conspiracy" is not necessarily intended to suggest that there has been any explicit collusion on the subject between speakers and writers, or that all the newspapers have received a hint to that effect from some authoritative quarter. A "conspiracy" of this kind may be spontaneous and instinctive: then it is all the more deplorable in its callous unfairness.

For many months past it has been one of the writer's recreations to collect, from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's Daily Bulletin, those items which

he did not see reproduced in any of the leading British newspapers, at any rate not in the London Press. Here are a few samples:

Every Nazi in Lodz is free to engage any Jew he meets in the street to do his own private work without pay. No branch of trade and no profession is any longer open to the Jews in Lodz. Even Jewish cabdrivers and porters have now been forbidden to carry on with their work.

Ten Jews were executed by the Nazis in the township of Nove Miasto, in the Warsaw district. The Jews were chosen at random and shot dead without any reason being given.

In the township of Grojec, in the Warsaw district, the Jews were forced to set fire to their chief synagogue last Saturday. A number of Jews of the same township were shot dead by the Nazis while returning home from forced labour.

Hundreds of Jews, including many women and children, were killed in the town of Bendzin, near Katowice, when the Nazis set fire to Zachodnia Street, which is inhabited exclusively by Jews. Any Jew trying to escape was shot dead. Altogether several hundred men, women and children died in the flames, or were shot dead by the Nazis. All the synagogues in Bendzin have also been burnt down.

Wholesale executions of Jews by Nazis in many towns in the province of Lodz are openly admitted in official reports of Nazi police officers, extracts of which have been published in the Schlesische Zeitung of Breslau.

In the township of Lask, the Schlesische Zeitung states in quoting one of these official reports: "one

hundred Jews were executed for offering resistance to German soldiers who were searching their homes for concealed arms." The police also learned, the official report further states, that about a thousand Jews had surrounded the synagogue in Lask with the intention of preventing the Germans from entering it. The Jews were therefore fired on and "hundreds were killed on the spot." The synagogue was then set on fire. "The Jewish streets of the township," the report continues, "have been closed and the Jews have been forbidden to have any dealings with the peasants of the neighbourhood, whom they are trying to persuade to sell them milk, potatoes and cabbage."

To conclude, here is an item which will remind the reader of Enver Pasha's methods of "liquidating" Armenians as described by Werfel in The Forty Days of Musa Dagh:

Geneva, January 16th

On Thursday evening, November 30th, the Nazi authorities in Chelm ordered all Jewish men between the ages of fifteen and sixty to appear the next day, December 1st, at 8.30 a.m. in the market square. About two thousand Jews appeared. They were surrounded by Nazi auxiliary police, Black Guards, and a small detachment of soldiers armed with machineguns. A Gestapo officer then delivered a short speech to the Jews in which he informed them that, as Jews were responsible for the war and as all Jews were the mortal enemies of Germany, the Chelm Jews had been sentenced by the Nazi authorities to be deprived of their civil rights and to be expelled from the town.

At half-past twelve the Jews, surrounded by Nazi Storm-Troopers and soldiers on lorries and motorcycles, were marched off from the town along the high road in the direction of Hrubilszow.

A few kilometres from Chelm, near a military hospital situated in a wood, the party was stopped and told by the Nazis that; because one of them had attempted to escape, twenty would be executed, and that for each further attempt of this kind fifty would be executed. Twenty Jews were picked out at random and marched off.

The Nazi authorities in Hrubilszow issued a similar order to the Jews of the town on Friday night. At halfpast nine they were joined by the Chelm Jews.

Altogether it is estimated that there were in this party 1,100 Jews from Chelm and 850 Jews from Hrubilszow. Before being marched off, they were warned that if any of them returned home they would be treated as spies and executed. The Jews were chased across fields, woods and marshes from Hrubilszow to Mieniany, Cichoburze and Dolbyczow. Every five minutes the Nazis ordered those who were tired and unable to continue to stand aside. These were shot dead on the spot and their bodies left lying in the fields. The Jews were not given any food or drink during the whole of their dreadful march, and those who tried to help themselves to some water from the ditches were shot dead.

When Dolbyczow was reached, the survivors were divided into two groups: one numbering about 500 and the other 400.

From Dolbyczow the larger party was marched off in the direction of the frontier town of Sokal, and the smaller party of 400 to the frontier town of Belzy. The latter were the luckier ones, because only a few of them were shot dead by the Nazis, while about 250 of the larger party were shot by the Nazis before reaching the bridge on the River Bug which divides the Nazi from the Soviet part of the town of Sokal. Thus a total of over 1,300 Jews from Chelm and Hrubilszow were massacred by the Nazis during the four days' forced march to the Soviet frontier.

During their four days' march, the Jews were given only one loaf of bread a day, which had to be divided between thirty men. On the average, one Jew was shot dead by the Nazis every five to ten minutes of the march. From time to time the Nazis were heard to exchange notes with each other as to the number of Jews they had accounted for. One was heard to say:—"I myself have already settled seventy-six," which brought the reply, "I have killed only sixty-three."

Among the Jews killed there were many fathers and sons of the same family. The bookkeeper of the Hrubilszow Jewish People's Bank, Isaac Lewenfuss, aged 55, was completely exhausted and unable to carry on with his march when 15 kilometres from Hrubilszow. When ordered by the Nazis to lie down, which was the signal for his execution, his twenty-year-old son Mendel offered to die in his place, but his offer was refused. Mendel then declared:—"Then shoot me together with my father." The Nazi Storm-Troopers merely said: "Oh, you are volunteering to die? Very well." Father and son were then shot together.

In reporting this massacre about the middle of December, the official German news agency stated—"An attempt at a Jewish revolt in the Chelm and Hrubilszow districts was ruthlessly suppressed." It is useless to ask how much of all this the reader has seen in the general Press. Yet these incidents are not the consequences of a remote earthquake, or a typhoon in the antipodes, "something which after all is no concern of ours," from the standpoint of our sacro egoismo: they are the direct results of the conquest of Poland, the country for which the Allies solemnly assumed responsibility. Under these conditions a conspiracy of silence is unforgivable.

to be desirable that the Jewish claim should ever be presented.

Even more disturbing is the silence as regards the Jews in practically all statements of war aims issued by certain British leaders. The writer will be forgiven for not mentioning names: to do so might be unfair. He does not wish to pillory them as callous, for they probably regard themselves as genuine well-wishers of the unfortunate Jewish race; they would probably repudiate, with sincere indignation, any suspicion of conspiracy, insisting that the demand for the restoration of Jewish rights was omitted in their statements of war aims merely because such things obviously go without saying, etc. (Talleyrand once replied to a diplomat who used the same argument for not mentioning some "minor" item in a treaty: Si cela va sans le dire, cela ira mieux en le disant—If that goes without saying, it will go better by being said.)

Two prominent men shall, however, be quoted, for they at least have not forgotten to mention the Jews. Both are unimpeachably Liberal, and the intentions are unquestionably of the very best. The more depressing will be the conclusions which any Jew will be compelled to draw from their utterances.

Sir Walter Layton (in Allied War Aims) is courageous enough to quote Germany's behaviour in the Jewish question as one of the sins which "have made Germany an international nuisance":

It has often been argued in the past that it is no concern of ours what system of government or political

philosophy another country may choose to adopt. Events have proved that this is only a half truth. In the six years of Nazi rule . . . the persecution of the Jews has created for other countries a refugee problem on a scale hitherto unknown in history.

The other statement was made by Sir Archibald Sinclair, M.P. Speaking in the House of Commons on October 12th, he said:

One of the difficulties with which some people have come to me about our present position I would like to tell the House quite frankly. They say to me, "One of our war aims is the destruction of Hitlerism; another is to assert the right of nations to choose their own form of government. Are those two aims consistent? If the Germans want Hitlerism, have we the right or the power to demand its destruction?" Surely the answer is this, that we recognize the right of a nation to govern itself in its own way, even to choose a dictatorship if it wants it. We may be horrified by the results. We may see the loathsome spectres of racial and religious persecution rearing their ugly heads. We may witness the horror of secret police oppression and of concentration camps. We have the right and the duty to condemn these manifestations of barbarism, but it is not for us to chastise another people for its own misgovernment or to go to war on behalf of Pastor Niemöller or the German Jews. The German people must find means of setting their own house in order and we must recognize their rights of self-government in their own country.

It is only fair to point out that most of the other spokesmen—and precisely the bashful ones who avoid the Jewish theme—seem on the whole to be much more exacting in respect of internal arrangements in Central Europe after the Allies' victory. It is taken for granted that Germany, Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia will once again become liberal and democratic States, and that there will be a reinforced League of Nations to look after the treatment of minorities. But in so far as the Jews are concerned, that does not appreciably change the picture. The prospect is extremely arid, it seems to be a case of "as you were."

Sir Archibald Sinclair ought to be thanked for having said the only thing of essential significance in a welter of oratory: namely, that the actual and permanent supervision of internal developments in a sovereign country by outside organs is impracticable; that, in other words, the reality of any statute or treaty clauses as to equal rights will ultimately depend, in Germany, on the good will of the Germans; and in Poland, on that of the Poles. Roumania and Hungary, not being as yet at war, could not be mentioned, but the obvious inference is that in these two countries also the outside supervision of the Jewish position is out of question.

This affects some 5,000,000 Jews who are still living in the zone which, for twenty years, has been the main theatre of acute yet chronic Jewish distress. Apart from political oratory, what they are really promised is the restoration of the status quo ante. The general public, and probably many Jews, are very far from realizing all the hopelessness of this prospect. It will be worth their while to examine it more narrowly in the chapters that follow. The reader should not grudge me their length. He may think that the horror of the status quo is so obvious that nobody is likely to propose its restoration, even in an amended form. This is a mistake: for after the war, a great effort will be made, both by Gentile Machiavellis and by Jewish dupes, to draw this red herring across the trail of our national demands. The main battle over Jewish war aims will be fought around the lie that the ghetto can be made comfortable.

CHAPTER III

THE MONSTER'S FOOD

THE purpose of this book, which was written in January-February 1940, is to press a claim for the inclusion of the Jewish problem in the war aims of the Allied nations.

Responsible people, it is true, are tending to lose patience with the claim that the "war aims" of the Allies should be extended until they finally include the redress of almost every imaginable grievance. They object that the proper "aim" of a nation at war is —besides winning the war—to remove those factors which have caused the war, and that it should include hardly anything else; while other grievances, however urgent, will have to be settled by some other method.

Such responsible people are perfectly right. Nevertheless, if the causative factors of the war are to be abolished, the solution of the Jewish problem is undeniably entitled to a prominent place among the genuine and urgent aims of the war.

It is very desirable that we should realize that the many problems of reconstruction raised in connection with the war fall into two quite distinct categories: there are genuine "war aims" and there is what may be described as all-round "Revision," Much confusion would be avoided if these categories were kept rigorously apart. A war aim is something for which a nation actually and obviously fights, and if that nation does not achieve this aim as an outcome of the war, this will mean that it has been defeated. For instance, if a repetition of such acts of violence as the invasion of Poland is not rendered impossible, the Allies will have lost the war; crushing the Nazi régime is, therefore, a war aim. But such a purpose as—for instance —the restoration of free trade between the nations, excellent though it be, cannot be described as a war aim. A peace treaty signed without mentioning such restoration would still be regarded as satisfactory.

But a peace treaty cannot be effective unless it sweeps away the obstacles to any effective reconstruction; unless it excises the malignant ulcers which would prevent any real recovery.

One such ulcer is the Jewish tragedy of Central Europe. It is impossible to imagine even a beginning of universal restoration unless that is removed. This operation is a war aim in the fullest sense of the term.

The Jewish tragedy is, of course, not the microbe which has caused this war. It is only the culture-medium in which the microbe has grown to maturity.

The mysteries of mass psychology, when both the author and the reader are laymen, can best be explained, or at least illuminated, by metaphor and analogy; and no writer who means business need have any scruples as to mixing his metaphors. There are several metaphors which will help to illustrate the

organic rôle of Jew-hunting in the growth and progress of the war-disease. It may be likened to the rôle of a spice or sauce which enables the masses to swallow a species of poison which would be too corrosive without it; or to that of a lubricant which speeds down a chute a load which otherwise might get stuck; or to that of the sticks which a housewife lights to induce the heavy log or lumps of coal in her big fireplace to catch fire. We may find it convenient to use all these metaphors and others too, though none of them quite exactly fits the case. After all, food can be swallowed even without the spice or sauce; a load can be pushed down a chute without a lubricant, etc.; but Nazism would never have grown to its present proportions without the help of antisemitism. "Culture-medium for the microbe" is perhaps the aptest simile of all.

The man in the street may not be conscious of this intimate connection between the acuter forms of antisemitism and the war-peril. He may even think it a monstrous exaggeration to suggest that Jew-baiting in Nazi Germany, however objectionable, was in any way responsible for, let us say, the failure to heed the Anglo-French warning about Poland, which was the direct cause of the conflict. The man in the street will quite possibly dismiss such a suggestion as a symptom of megalomania: "These Jews imagine that everything, down to the weather, and the climate, and earthquakes, depends on what happens to them. Of course, the Nazi programme and practice, beside the greed for world-domination and the cult of violence, includes the persecution of Jews, but the latter is just

a concomitant, an accompanying phenomenon, not the essence of the thing. Nazism would have been just as dangerous if there had been no Jews on earth."

This is absolutely wrong. To destructive movements of the Nazi type, antisemitism is infinitely more than a "concomitant"; and "National Socialism" would probably never have achieved its rapid and sweeping conquests if it had not ridden the anti-Jewish horse.

mass training in collective hate, and that is the Jew. He is everywhere within reach; he can be pointed out at any street corner; and he can be insulted or assaulted with only the minimum of risk, or with none at all. To foster a movement of the Nazi type without the daily use of Jewish targets would be like staging a pageant without rehearsals.

Only the foolish would seek to explain this infatuation by using the term "mania." With a few exceptions, the Nazi chiefs are as sane as any other govern-

All this is nothing new; at least, not to the Jews. As early as the eighteen-eighties, after a pogrom in the Ukraine, a Russian Socialist party published a manifesto which should have comforted all the friends of liberty by arguing that an anti-Jewish pogrom was, after all, not such a bad thing, being rather in the nature of a rehearsal; the moujiks (it was explained) had only begun by attacking the Jews; they would continue by massacring the police, and would end by smashing autocracy. Years later, again in Russia, it was a Jewish revolutionary who uttered the often-quoted

formula: "Jewish blood is the best for oiling the wheels of progress."

^* Roumania's expressed attitude towards the Jews following her abandonment of her Western orientation in July 1940, supplies unquestionable evidence to this effect. The violent wave of horrible anti-Jewish terror that swept the country, and the drastic antisemitic legislation that accompanied it, were by no means a result of direct Nazi pressure. They were purely Roumanian phenomenon: the natural result of joining the Axis.

As for the analogous behaviour of Italy, this was even more striking than the Roumanian episode. In Roumania there had always been antisemitic tendencies in all classes of the population, high, middle and low; so there was at least something for the gamblers to stake upon. But in Italy? It is not enough to say that its people, for half a century at least, had genuinely forgotten the alleged necessity of discriminating against the Jew: they had actually lost all interest in the question of who was a Jew and who was not. Yet, when the time came for swinging the country into a certain orientation, it was immediately felt in some mysterious way that the new course could not be followed without a dose of the usual lubricant. But in this case the lubricant was applied in half-hearted fashion, with evident reluctance, and many apologies—as something a man does admittedly contre coeur, and only because he must: because, for this kind of job, the magical lubricant is indispensable.

The author is neither a historian nor a sociologist; he does not profess to explain precisely why this lubricant of antisemitism should be indispensable. Like others, he has often asked himself this question: Innumerable wars have been fought in the past, yet it was not thought necessary to prepare for these wars by especial emphasis on the Jewish question. Why does it appear so necessary now?

One explanation is perhaps almost comforting: It is because the world is, after all, progressing. The world has been moving on, despite all our scepticism.

The masses can no longer be sent to their death simply by order: nowadays they need some kind of "religion" to die for. Those observers of the Spanish civil war may have spoken truly who affirmed that the programmatic difference, or the clash of real interests, between Burgos and Madrid was infinitesimally small: it was not so much a fight over tangible issues as a pure and simple guerre de religion.

drive them away from their towns and villages to make room for Germans. Such action will be just and proper, and any opposition to it will be criminal, and the means to be used in suppressing such opposition need not be weighed in any balance of ethics, but only in the balance of efficiency."

We cannot, of course, deny that a similar mentality was displayed in primitive conquests—such as those described in the Old Testament; and also thousands of years later—in Europe's colonial policy, since the days of Columbus, and even down to a couple of generations ago. It is idle to defend our ancestors, to apologize for the sins of Gideon or justify the barbarities of Cortés. Such bygone instances have no bearing on our theme, for in those ancient times the mass-mind of humanity was still so liable to relapses of bestiality that there was no need to preface the relapse by any profound moral revolution. But the last century has brought such conceptions as humanity and equality home to the minds of countless millions: and to make a clean sweep of these conceptions, to clear the ground for the return of the beast, a formidable effort is required.

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

Our Western statesmen would be guilty of culpable blindness were they to disregard the historical truth of this statement. When the Nazis 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 of war would have died had it not been allowed to batten on the Jewish tragedy.

CHAPTER IV

THE "ANTISEMITISM OF MEN"

THERE are two distinct forces at work within the general phenomenon called Antisemitism: the one is a subjective repulsion, strong enough and permanent enough to become anything from a hobby to a religion; the other is an objective state of things which tends to ostracize the Jew almost independently of whether his neighbours like or dislike him. We shall call the first category "the Antisemitism of Men," and the second "the Antisemitism of Things." For a study of the former, the best field of observation is Germany; of the latter, Poland. In the present chapter we shall deal with Germany.

At the moment of writing, there are supposed to be some 200,000 Jews in Germany of the Versailles frontiers, 100,000 in Austria, 100,000 in Bohemia and Moravia, 130,000 in Slovakia and 2,000,000 in the parts of Poland occupied by the Nazis.* These figures

^* The number of Jews under Nazi domination has greatly increased since then. It comprises not only the entire Jewish population of Poland (3,250,000 in 1939), but also the Jews of the Baltic States (250,000), the Balkan countries (100,000), the Lowlands (60,000), Occupied France (approximately 50,000) and Occupied Russia (perhaps 2,000,000—the majority of Russian Jews). All in all, some 7,000,000 Jews—the bulk of European Jewry—are now under the yoke of Nazi oppression.

are largely guesswork rather than reliable estimates; moreover, they are bound to be considerably affected by the transfers of population effected by the Nazi government—some already carried out, and others planned for the near future. Finally, some may "hope" that a considerable proportion of all these Jews will die out before the war is over, so that the problem facing the managers of the future reconstruction will be appreciably facilitated. Nevertheless, it is sure even so to present a formidable problem.

The author assumes as an axiom that the war cannot end without the liquidation of the Nazi régime. Its collapse will probably be followed by the restoration of the sovereignty of all or most of the annexed territories, and by the establishment everywhere of constitutions as liberal and democratic as possible in accordance with the best Allied or American advice. And finally, the creation of something like a new and very much improved edition of the League may be expected. It would be futile now to attempt any guess at the details, even at the broader and more essential details, of that future; but the final political outlook may be described as essentially bright, and the writer very firmly believes in its reality.

Furthermore, he believes that all these oppressed peoples, restored to security and sanity, will honestly try to devote themselves to sober reconstruction. He believes that they will cherish a suppression of war; he hopes that they will, for at least a generation, discard all thought of armed revanche; he expects them to give much more active support to the new League of Nations, or the European Federation, or whatever else it may be called, than was ever enjoyed by the old Geneva League. True, one point is not quite clear yet, even to a trustful believer, and that is, how the nations will settle all those prickly questions of ethnically mixed provinces in such a way as to satisfy all and to stamp out irredentism; but so fervent is his desire to believe that he prefers not to think of the prickles. Everything, in short, will somehow get adjusted in time, with a great deal of labour, but without any further disasters. Some people may find this optimism absurd: but this the author denies; his most sanguine expectations are soberly and moderately realistic. Credo, quia NON absurdum.

There is, however, one aspect of such optimism which even the most sanguine should discard utterly and ruthlessly: namely, the belief that the cancer of antisemitism can be cured by such means as liberal constitutions and League supervision. No doubt, all the suitable provisions will be duly included in these constitutions, and in the League's new Covenant, ensuring the inviolability of equal rights for all. But the enforcement of these constitutions will have to be left, in every country, in the hands of national governments; and democratic electoral methods will ensure that those governments will be as representative of the true attitude of the masses as possible. It is therefore on the attitude of the masses that the actual operation of any clauses relating to equal rights will depend, so far as the Jews' rights are concerned. It is otherwise in the case of other minorities: they live for

the most part in close territorial clusters, in districts or even cantons, and they can to some extent look after themselves. The Jews live scattered throughout predominantly Gentile towns and villages: at every step, in the street or in public or private life, they are exposed to the impact of the good or ill will of the local majority. To pretend that under these conditions any essential results can be ensured by law is childish. Non credo quia absurdum.

ity clause seriously, and openly treated her Jews as "foreigners," never had any trouble on that account with any of the signatories of the Treaty of Berlin—one of whom was Great Britain and another France.

Strangely enough, the formidable past history of German antisemitism seems to be rapidly sinking into oblivion. In the democratic countries a myth is being created to the effect that the evil has originated with the advent of a person called Adolf Hitler, who was 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 the origin of this evil as Napoleon had with the invention of gunpowder. Napoleon did not invent gunpowder; he only made magnificent use of it; and when he was gone, others arose who surpassed him.

Germany—and in this respect Austria was one with her long before the Anschluss—has ever been the paramount workshop of modern antisemitism. There and not elsewhere was the discovery made, and the principle proclaimed, that the objection to the Jew is not religious but racial, and he must therefore be persecuted even if baptized. There and not elsewhere was antisemitism sublimated to the rank of a scientific philosophy. In no other nation was Jew-hatred as a mode of thought openly adopted by so many really prominent men, some of them even of the first eminence in the various walks of spiritual leadership: Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Dühring, Treitschke. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, to achieve success in antisemitism, had to settle in Germany. In Germany, too,

not elsewhere, was the practical aspect of antisemitism modernized and perfected: what had been a mere tendency to desultory street-rioting was by German initiative promoted to a political system. Stoecker and Ahlward founded the movement in Berlin, bringing into the Reichstag, about 1893, the first bunch of deputies to be solemnly (and quite democratically) elected as the Antisemitische Partei; and in Vienna, two years later, Lueger triumphantly conquered the Vienna Town Hall on a platform whose main, or rather only "plank" was hatred of the Jew, was elected burgomaster amidst scenes of the wildest mass-enthusiasm, and kept his seat for decades. Such things had been happening for three-quarters of a century before the Nazi Party was ever thought of.

It is nonsense to pretend that the Germans are manifesting antisemitism only by order, so that when the order is annulled by the liquidation of Nazism they will forget all about it. Germans abroad, who run no risk if they choose to disobey orders from Berlin, have amply and repeatedly shown that Nazism can win them by its own powers of fascination, and not through their fear of the Gestapo. The clearest proof of this was the Saar plebiscite of 1935, held under ideally democratic conditions, with British police ensuring the fullest freedom of propaganda, of conscience and of franchise: out of 525,000 valid votes, 477,000 were cast for incorporation in Nazi Germany. Perhaps even more significant are the impressive proportions of the Germans in Italy, Latvia and Estonia who have accepted the call to return to Germany:

all but autochthonous, the descendants of conquerors and settlers of centuries ago, they left their often comfortable homes and respectable social positions for the pleasure of breathing the Nazi atmosphere. To top it all, there is the record of the frank and vociferous delight displayed by all classes of the Vienna mob, in the first weeks after the Anschluss, when "Jewish ladies in fur coats" were ordered to scrub pavements and ganz Wien flocked to watch and yell with joy, and mothers lifted their babies over their neighbours' heads so that they should not miss the lovely sight. "By order?" Of course there must be an order to unleash the innermost brute: but the main point is the presence of the brute underneath; and what a multitudinous brute!

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, the author will not attempt to explain the phenomenon: but only a fool or a liar would deny it.

The collapse of Nazism can bring no essential remedy to this endemic disease. One must, of course, be realist enough to allow for the so-called swing of the pendulum: when Hitler goes, there may be some kind of popular scurry to atone for the antisemitic orgy, partly for opportunist reasons, but partly also, no doubt, out of genuine disgust at the sub-human, beastly forms which the persecution has assumed. Moreover, there will be those equality-clauses in the

peace treaty and the new constitution. And further: there is not the slightest doubt that many Jews who were forced to leave Germany after 1933 will then be most eager to return, and ready to forgive and forget: some because of discouraging experiences while in exile, some out of genuine attachment to the German land and civilization. That much we all admit. But all superficial optimists should be warned that the result of this backwash will be—almost immediately, perhaps within a few weeks only of the new édit de Nantes which will have opened the new era—a venomous recrudescence of the incurable evil.

Jews. These were posts filled by the middle class, the intelligentsia, the haute bourgeoisie—that is, by the most conspicuous, most vocal and most sensitive strata of modern society. To the members of these classes the return of the Jews would mean a vast influx of extremely dangerous competitors, in many cases far better qualified than the usurpers, and they would be faced, as a rule, with the alternative: "reconquer or starve." In all cases they would be morally entitled to the redress of an admitted grievance, an intolerable injustice.

is irrelevant: in the interval the brute has been unleashed and has tasted blood.

To make the outlook yet clearer, one may ask the reader—supposing him to be a Gentile—to forget that beggars cannot be choosers, and to 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 ninety-nine to one majority trained for generations to abhor the English, under the sole protection of paper paragraphs and the supervision of Geneva, or the substitute for Geneva;—and to work for the Allied victory with unfaltering zeal, though all it promises him is—just this prospect.

PART II

THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

CHAPTER V

THE HUNTING-GROUND

ERMANY was the war-monster's favoured pasture, rich in the spicy fodder which it loves. Poland was its coveted hunting-ground, ever more defenceless and more tempting to the monster as the same pungent weed grew more rankly on its soil.

Poland's part in the "Jewish" pre-history of the war is a drama by itself, which will be dealt with in later chapters; here the writer wishes only to point to the strange and tragic duality of her historical rôle during these twenty years of her renewed existence. This was a period during which the new world-war was hatching; during which her government strove in many ways to prevent the war; and yet, after Germany herself, Poland was, objectively, considered the main soil on which the war-microbe bred.

A story is told of the late Marshal Pilsudski's interview with an important French envoy, soon after the Nazis had taken power in Berlin. The Frenchman was trying to persuade him to join France and England (plus, of course, Soviet Russia) against Germany. Pilsudski took his guest to a big wall map, where Poland was shown squeezed in between the U.S.S.R. and Germany. "If these two clash some day," he said,

"all their battles will be fought on our soil. Now you just imagine that this soil is not Poland, but France, and tell me what would be your policy then!"

From the moment of Pilsudski's accession to power in 1926, and perhaps even earlier, the policy of the Polish Republic was dictated by this paramount aim: no war on Polish soil. And this—or so it seemed then —was tantamount to "no war at all." Of all intensely and inherently peaceable nations Poland was probably the most genuinely anxious for world peace: not because of what is generally understood as pacifism, but because of something much more effective than pacifism—namely, obvious and unmistakable self-interest.

At the same time the whole of the East-Central belt of Europe, extending from Riga on the Baltic down to Constanza on the Black Sea, was in the throes of the most pernicious kind of social fever: and the main focus of the infection, from which it spread to North and South, was Poland. It was, of course, the same old evil: the fever of antisemitism.

Its origin was the statistical fact that the Jews constituted 10% of Poland's total population, and about one third of her urban population. This inescapable fact vitiated and perverted every civic value. "Democracy" in this atmosphere meant that in the town halls of Warsaw, Cracow, Lodz and every other important city, the Poles would have to share mastery almost evenly with the Jews: that was what it meant, or so people thought. "Equality of rights" in this atmosphere meant that in every branch of economy which

requires a little learning the long-urbanized Jew would overtake and beat his Polish competitor, the son or grandson of slow-witted peasants: or so people thought. It is useless to speak of the moral beauty of fair play: the bare fact is that in Poland the Poles' jealousy and fear of the Jews were poisoning the very atmosphere of her public life. We shall see in other chapters how true it is that in some countries the decisive factor is not the antisemitism of men but the antisemitism of things. And here we have a first glimpse of this factual antisemitism.

The result of this statistical fact was that for twenty years Poland was always on the brink of inner convulsion. I do not mean to suggest that the Jewish question was her only painful spot; she had other and perhaps more serious troubles; for example, the Ukrainian problem. But neither this nor any other internal difficulty of "Gentile" origin possesses the one special and accursed peculiarity of antisemitism—its unremitting vitality, its power of accumulating social toxins. It was something like a bad chronic cold in the head, not a serious disease in itself but a constant invitation to all other kinds of disease. Party strife in that "pathological climate" became murderous hate; criticism degenerated into calumny; the temperature and temper of all public life was that of the proverbial bear with a sore head.

Yet this was Poland, by her size and numbers and prestige the central rock of East-Central Europe. Had she been given, by God or fate, a chance of developing calmly and steadily, her influence would have stabilized the whole of that zone, and would have made of it a real "Third Europe," a cohesive force capable of sobering its German neighbours, despite their numerical strength (for East-Central Europe has a total population not far short of 100 millions). As it was, Poland's unrelaxing feverishness acted as a constant provocation to her predatory neighbours.

The conclusion is clear: no restoration, in Central or East-Central Europe, will ever make for a durable peace unless the ulcer of antisemitism is excised. Among the factors whose interaction has produced this war, the Jewish bane was omnipresent. The war will have been fought in vain, the victory will be worse than a lie if that seed is left in the ground to poison the future.

CHAPTER VI

THE ANTISEMITISM OF "MEN" AND "THINGS"

It is unfortunately true that some of these Polish governments, especially in the period preceding Pilsudski's coup d'état, did much to aggravate the pressure; and none of them, not even the best, can claim to have done its duty, or the smallest fraction of its duty, in respect of alleviating the situation. Nothing would be easier than to denounce them with the bitterness they deserve, now that they are all defeated and swept away. A chapter of such denunciation might give a good deal of belated satisfaction to long repressed and outraged indignation. But the author confesses that to him it would give no satisfaction whatever. He prefers to adhere to his chosen line of enquiry, which considers not the sins of men, but the tendencies of an elemental social process.

Those men, ministers and officials, writers and priests, were often unforgivably guilty; and a long trail of Jewish tears, often tinged with something more salty than tears, leads up to their doors. If there is justice beyond this life, they will pay for their sins; if history be written by honest pens, they will stand condemned. But the purpose of this book is to force Jew and Gentile alike to realize that the fundamental curse of Jewish existence in the central zone of distress is due to something infinitely deeper than policies or ideologies or propagandas, whether anti or pro: and he would not have the attention of his readers diverted in the direction of easy and cheap emotion, from the necessary stern concentration on the essential and irremediable tragedy.

The ghetto of East-Central Europe was doomed

from of old. No government, no régime, no angel or devil could have transformed it into anything even remotely approaching a normal homeland. It is now utterly impossible to restore it as such unless the numerical and ethnical proportions undergo a drastic change.

notice of Allied statesmen, some of whom, if not all, may be genuinely forgetful 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 adequate solution of the problem. On the contrary: 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 over again.

To make this clear to outside observers, some bitter truths will have to be admitted and stated, however painful they may be to persons of exaggerated sensibility. These awkward admissions centre on the one essential and dominating feature of East-European reality: there are certain inevitable aspects in the normal social evolution of Eastern Europe (the words "inevitable" and "normal" should be emphasized) which are inherently, objectively, and organically fatal to the Jews' existence.

The fact will be abundantly illustrated in the course of the following chapters: and here, as introduction to the subject, let us consider what is held to be the classical example of this incompatibility between the normal evolution of East-Central economy and the Jews' foothold within that economy. It is the cooperative movement among the Gentile population, especially in the rural districts. In Poland there were some 750,000 Jews living in the villages, where they constituted, on an average, 3.2% of the total rural population. These three-quarters of a million souls,

There may have been a few Christian shopkeepers in these Ukrainian districts, and they too had to surrender before the onslaught of the co-operatives. But the "broken" Christian trader, as often as not, is absorbed into the administrative machinery of the movement: being a valuable specialist among simple peasants, he will be employed by the co-operative. The Jew will not be so employed; it is so obvious to all that there could be no question of absorbing the displaced Jewish trader into the executive staff of a

farmers' co-operative that no Jew would ever dream of asking for such an "absurdity." Is this, too, to be described as antisemitism? The managers of the co-operative movement, most of whom are men of enlightened views, would indignantly deny such a charge. It is "simply"—they would say—that one has to look after one's own people first.

A remarkable dictum is often quoted in that country; it is said to have been uttered by quite exalted lips: "Never trouble to kill the flies: but leave no crumbs for them." This aphorism is interpreted as a

formula of deliberate if "polite" antisemitism; but there is no proof that it was ever really spoken, and it matters little whether it was or not. The crux of the matter is whether in the atmosphere of East-Central Europe a government engaged upon such an unquestionably progressive adventure as the nationalization of pivotal industries would be allowed to act otherwise. The total population of the country is that of a London borough; but there is a university and a school for higher engineering, with several thousand pupils. Every year more and more of "one's own people," fully qualified, line up for jobs—mostly excellent types of young manhood, keen, gifted, honest and efficient. How long would any government be tolerated if it kept them waiting while Jews continued to staff and manage what would now be State concerns—though created by Jewish enterprise with Jewish capital?

A gross injustice! Of course; but mere disapproval is useless. The root of the trouble is not hatred of the Jews—that could be combated, if not eradicated—but something much more elemental and primordial: sympathy with "one's own people," an instinct which cannot be criticized, because, after all, it is as natural as preferring one's own children to one's neighbour's offspring.

The Antisemitism of Things, of course, is due in the last resort to a certain subjective attitude of human beings. The line here drawn between the two kinds of Judeophobia—that of Men and that of Things—is,

however, not an artificial distinction. Human antisemitism is an active enmity, a constant urge to harm
the hated race, to humiliate them, to see them
squirming and writhing beneath one's feet. Obviously,
such an aggressive and sadistic mentality cannot be
kept for ever on the boil in every average member of
the community: it must have its ups and downs, its
periods of eruption and of hibernation, and even at\nits strongest only a leading minority manifest it in its
greedily acute stage; the majority just follow suit and
mildly enjoy the fun. Being thus of a somewhat elastic
nature, the "Antisemitism of Men" can sometimes be
fought with a measure of success; the Germans, for\ninstance, a nation endowed with a remarkable genius
for collective obedience, might be expected to tone\nit down to order, if not exasperated by too great an\ninflux of revenants.

There seems to be something pathological in such a volcanic heat of hatred. However strong the genuine racial repulsion, however appalling the sins of Israel, the subject obviously does not justify even a fraction of such a turmoil. The suspicion inevitably arises that this attitude is subconsciously based not only on repulsion but also on attraction: as is the case with sadism. A remarkable political feature of such volcanic antisemitism is its inability to appreciate the Zionist or other similar aspirations. Logically, the Nazis ought to be inclined to encourage any movements tending towards the evacuation of the Jews from Germany: in practice, they have done more than any other government to stir up anti-Jewish trouble in Palestine,

though it could only hamper the exodus. Should Uganda and Angola or Mindanao be declared a national home for the Jews instead of Palestine, the Nazi attitude would evidently be the same. Sadism does not wish to lose its victim; the Biblical story of the Exodus was the first recorded instance of this curious interplay of two opposite passions: one longing to exterminate the hated breed and one determined to prevent their departure.

sinister, so that no written record can reveal the fact; they may have left no trace on the shape of his nose, or even the form of his eyes, but that is not essential: the "Jew-complex" itself is held to be a sufficient proof of racial atavism.

This may be true or it may be mere guesswork. A specialist in collective psychopathology might well investigate the theory. The Jews will remain unmoved: they are not likely to be flattered by the revelation of Dr. Goebbels' Rabbinical descent, nor would the discovery in any way diminish or increase their troubles. The author's purpose in this digression is to emphasize the morbid, hectic, fluctuating character of what he calls the "Antisemitism of Men"—as distinct from "Antisemitism of Things," which is steady, constant and immutable, and therefore much more formidable.

It derives from the instinctive discrimination which every normal person makes between his or her "own kind" and all outsiders. It need not be hatred; it need have nothing to do with actual repulsion. It may be dormant under normal conditions, and may remain dormant for generations, to awaken only when there is keen competition for some essential boon, when the choice is between one's own kin and the outsider, and the instinct of self-defence emerges. Even then it need not (though it may) flare up in an angry blaze: it may remain correctly polite, while inwardly merciless—as in the Baltic example; or it may run amok, as it sometimes does in Poland. It is not the form that matters, but the spirit. That spirit is the inextinguishable awareness of every Gentile that his Jewish neighbour

is not "his own kind," and of every Jew that his Aryan friends are not "his own kind." There is no intrinsic harm in this awareness; it is no obstacle to decent neighbourly intercourse, to mutual help, even to friendship, so long as the social "climate" is favourable. In the "climate" of East-Central Europe it becomes the Jew's death-sentence.

CHAPTER VII

THE POLISH GHETTO

THERE is no evidence that "Antisemitism of Men" has ever been an actual fixation in the collective Polish mind. The author has no intention of quoting any of the familiar and sympathetic references to the Jews in the works of the Polish poets and novelists, for they mean nothing; what he has in mind is the complete absence of any record—so far as he is aware—of any conscious anti-Jewish movement, either in literature or in society, since the partition of Poland and approximately down to the year 1909.

By this it is not suggested that there was no racial estrangement, no occasional cursing or baiting or beating of Jews; but in this peculiar position the Jew learns to distinguish between the ordinary little failures of national hospitality and such a special and deliberate phenomenon as a "movement."

Since 1909, however, and throughout the Great War, and after, Poland has been the theatre of unremitting attacks on every Jewish position; attacks delivered by every imaginable means—by words, fists, economic anathemata, and various kinds of Governmental action, falling short only of frankly discriminative legislation. Inflicted upon a multitude of 3,300,-

ooo Jewish souls, most of whom had been paupers for generations, these attacks resulted in indescribable economic misery, and an almost general stampede for emigration—a "frozen stampede," of course, for most of the outlets were closed.

Poland has thus finally established, throughout the Dispersion, her title as the most tragic of all the ghettos; and the Polish ghetto shows, in this most complete and typical form, all the morbid and painful phenomena which result from existence in the ghetto; and above all, that process which is the natural culmination of such an existence: the automatic, economic eviction of a scattered minority by local majorities. We call it "automatic" because this eviction is bound to occur independently of any conscious "movement" against the Jews, or any anti-Jewish legislation. In the case of a movement the process advances more rapidly, in the case of legislation perhaps a little more gradually; but in either case it proceeds with the obstinacy of a moving dune.

All Polish Jews (consciously or subconsciously, admittedly or despite their denials) are aware of this automatism, this lack of any real causative connection between the doom that weighs upon their economic horizon and the mood of masses or ministers. The author has never found any trace of permanent resentment against the Polish people among Jewish emigrants from Poland, nor even of resentment against the Polish State; whereas it cannot be denied that German-Jewish refugees are imbued with a profound and comminatory bitterness, not only towards Nazism, but

towards the whole national environment which tolerates Nazism. These exiles from Germany feel that it was some evil in the very nature of men, an evil ruling the men and women in the street, which wilfully transformed a decent country into a jungle. What the Polish Jew, sedentary or émigré, feels about the part played by human ill-will in producing the miseries of the ghetto, was once revealed to the writer in the wistful complaint of a Galician rabbi: "I wonder, if I were king, just how much I should be able to do to improve the lot of the Jews in this blessed country. It does not depend so entirely on what orders you give, nor on how many hooligans you put in jail. It is more like the falling of rain and snow."

This attitude of indulgence toward governmental system under which Polish Jewry has suffered so cruelly is of great significance. The writer must confess that it gives him pleasure to dwell upon it, as proof of the instinctive fairness and decency of his fellow-Jews; a twofold pleasure, since it has recently become the fashion in a section of the Western Press to speak disparagingly of the defeated allies of yesterday—of the Pilsudski school of statesmen, and even of Pilsudski himself. Colonel Beck in particular, the late Foreign Secretary, is sometimes depicted as a species of reactionary, a pro-Nazi, a pupil of the Biblical Haman. Such references are not only in the worst of taste: they are also evidence of defective memory. And here, without seeking to write their apology, the author may without irrelevance say something of that

unfortunate, long-foredoomed little company of pupils whom Pilsudski left in charge of his Poland.

Pilsudski was neither a friend of the Jews nor their enemy: he was politely indifferent—"politely" at all events in public. One cannot help suspecting (though he never said so) that he would not have thought it regrettable had Poland had only 1% of Jews instead of 10%; and as there were never enough jobs to go round,

one may imagine (though he never mentioned it) that he wanted them to go to the Poles and not to the Jews. But pogroms and ghetto laws and such things were to him like a boil on the tip of the beloved's nose: Pilsudski would not have them in his Poland.

How far he succeeded in cleansing the face of Poland of this particular blemish is another question. His efforts were not very effective, and one feels that he might have tried harder.

As we have seen, in Poland (as distinct from Germany) the onslaught was not a movement based upon sentiment or conviction. Apart from the hooligan element, there was little actual hatred of the Jews in Polish society. Often enough, those who were ready to sign a petition for anti-Jewish legislation would swear that they were honestly sorry for the harm which their action was bound to cause the Jews—but there was no other way out: "it's either my son or the Jew's

son, for there is only one loaf." This explains the lukewarmness of even the Polish Socialists in combating antisemitism: they too had to consider the inveterate attitude of organized labour. The Polish worker openly disliked the "intrusion" of the Jewish proletariat into the higher reaches of mechanized industry, and asked: "If they all come in, where shall I be?"

It will take generations of research to discover exactly what was at the bottom of this elemental phenomenon. The reader has already been warned that the author of this study is only a layman. He can offer no solution; but of the various explanations which he has heard one strikes him as credible. It is based on the sociological peculiarities of the ghetto on one hand and of Poland's industrial development on the other.

The same general conditions which, since the industrial revolution, have caused the great migration of villagers toward the towns in the Western countries, have been operative also in Poland, though they developed much later and were less intense in their effects. About 1863, after the collapse of the second Polish rebellion in Russia, the national energy was concentrated on what was called "Organic Work"—meaning mostly economic enterprise, commercialism and industrialization. The rise of Polish manufacturers began from that date; and the Jews, constituting about one-third of the country's urban population, took their full share in this development. At the same time, the Polish village began to pour its human surplus, in ever-increasing proportions, into the towns.

But the arrival of that surplus, during the first four decades, did not necessarily produce any clash with the Jews, for the growing industries demanded everincreasing numbers of labourers, and readily absorbed the village youths, leaving the Jews more or less undisturbed in the exercise of their old callings; those of wholesale or petty trader, general go-between, organiser, physician, lawyer, and so on, with the great class of unemployables, always a very conspicuous element of an Eastern Jewish community, clustering around the aristocracy of breadwinners.

the human surplus and of asking for more: especially, of course, in the backward East of Europe, where the progress of the Robot was naturally slow.

rule is that an influx of man-power is of no profit to the factory—even in Poland.

This "mechanized" interpretation of the elemental character of Poland's Jewish tragedy may be completely or partly correct, partly or completely errone ous. The essential fact remains: a situation in which the "Antisemitism of Men" is a mere trifle compared with the inexorable anti-Jewish pressure of Things. Men may hate the Jews, or they may hate the necessity of ousting the Jews, as many of them probably do; it does not matter. Governments may prevent or punish hooliganism: they cannot change the "climate" of the social structure. That Galician Rabbi who doubted whether he himself, even if equipped with the widest powers of autocracy, could stop the ousting of the Jew, was right; certainly no Polish government can do it, or is likely to attempt it.

Some Jewish Socialists, however (though not all), suggest that there is a remedy; Socialism throughout Poland would mean work and welfare for all, and no ousting of Jews or Gentiles. They would do well, before propounding this solution, to discuss it privately with their Gentile comrades. The latter may not be antisemites, but this does not mean that their ideal of a Socialist Poland is a country with 30% of Jews among the urban population. Every sober and honest Polish Socialist will admit, if asked for his frank opinion, that Socialism or no Socialism, an extensive emigration of Jews could only improve the situation, and the more extensive the better.

But this question is outside our present inquiry,

which deals only with the Allied war aims. In the writer's judgment the fate of a scattered ethnical minority in a Socialist State is just as painful as in a non-Socialist State. Some will think differently; but what does it matter to-day. A Socialist revolution, in Poland or elsewhere, is not among the Allied war aims. On the contrary, what the Allies want is a restored Poland, "democratic" in much the same sense as England or France or the United States. This is the only prospect which we need discuss realistically. The conclusion, from the Jewish point of view, is clear.

What the maximum of this development (if attainable) would be may be gauged from the following computation recently made by the Manchester Guardian. "The Nazis," that newspaper says, "have not indeed revealed how big the reserve is going to be. If

^* According to the latest information, the Nazis have ceased to use the Lublin ghetto as a dumping ground for Jews, on account of its overwhelming congestion. An eye witness report of the inhuman conditions prevalent in Lublin was published in The Contemporary Jewish Record of March-April 1940.

one generously assumes that it covers the whole of the Lublin vojvodship it will have an area of 13,000 (?) square miles. Its present population is 2,464,600, of whom 259,500 are Jews. The Jews will stay, but the other inhabitants will have to leave for the Remainder State, for Germany, or for Russia, according to their nationality. In their place it is planned to send 1,500,000 Jews from the Remainder State, 500,000 from the Polish territories annexed by Germany, 180,000 from Germany and the Sudetenland, 65,000 from Austria, and 75,000 from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In all, this province, already one of the poorest in Poland, would have to support over 3,000,000 people."

One thing is clear: in making any forecasts of the future of Poland's Jewish problem, the contingency must be very seriously taken into account that there may be found to exist, at the moment of restoration, an area of some importance to which hundreds of thousands of Jews have been transported from other parts of Poland. Two problems will immediately arise: first, the re-incorporation of that district into the general body of the republic, its administrative, economic, and—above all—ethnical assimilation with the remainder of the country; secondly—what to do with that agglomeration of Jews. If by then they have all starved to death, the problem will be solved; but one must allow also for the other eventuality—that by some miracle, perhaps by some magnificent effort of international charity, that easy way out will have been pre-

vented, so that the problem will still exist: what to do with these Iews?

Logically, the re-incorporation of the Lublin district into a democratic Poland where all enjoy equal rights can only mean that those hundreds of thousands of Jews would be free to disperse from the congested area and return to their former towns, or to towns in other parts of Poland. The correct application of this logical course would, however, threaten at once to upset the balance of economic interests (a precarious equilibrium at best, during the first stages of a reconstruction), to envenom the social atmosphere, and to force into the forefront a controversy which everyone would prefer, at least, to postpone.

This will be only one of the many similar facets of the situation: not only the Lublin Jews but all the Jews will, in a sense, be "coming back" to recover jobs from which they have been turned out, even if their exile did not take them any farther than round the corner. But the Lublin reservation is likely to prove a concentrated and magnified—and extremely suggestive—illustration of the general tragedy.

CHAPTER VIII

FREEDOM FOR BOTH

THERE is, at the moment of writing, a Polish government in exile, with its seat at Angers, France. The writer is one of its genuine well-wishers; he has read with satisfaction its formal promises to the effect that in the restored Polish republic there will be equality of rights and no racial oppression, and has no doubt as to the subjective sincerity of such pronouncements. But it would be only hypocrisy on his part, or anybody's part, to overrate the practical effectiveness of such statements so far as future realities are concerned. A future democracy will eventually choose its leaders, and determine, by popular vote, its lines of inner policy. Those lines will be "popular" in the profounder sense of the word—automatically true to the basic interests and fundamental idiosyncrasies of the nation. War-time undertakings, if they fit that nation's mentality, will be confirmed; if not, they will be disregarded.

No doubt a most excellent Polish treaty, probably linked with a whole chain of other excellent treaties, will be signed after the Allied victory, guaranteeing all the desirable things that have to be guaranteed. There is no need to insist on what the world knows

so well: that it may perhaps be possible to ensure by outside supervision the inviolability of regulations of an international character; but no outside supervision can permanently prevent a sovereign nation from doing exactly what it likes inside its own frontiers. What Sir Archibald Sinclair so thoughtfully said of future Germany applies equally to future Poland. Paper safeguards, if incompatible with realities, will be swept away or "interpreted" down to zero, possibly with the reluctant consent of the Supervising Outsider himself, under the pretext that "it can't be helped." Restored Poland will deal with Jews left within her gates exactly as she pleases.

There is every reason to fear that it may soon become politically awkward to insist on promises of real equality for the Jews in a Poland restored by an Allied victory. Nazi propaganda in the German-occupied section of the republic is sure to seize upon such undertakings as a useful means of making the Polish government in exile unpopular with Poles in Poland. One can almost anticipate the very wording of the broadcasts and articles which Dr. Goebbels' headquarters will devote to the subject: "They promise you restoration, but their first step is to be the reinstatement of the two million Jews in those economic positions from which the German victory has driven them, so that two million Poles will have to make room for these Jews and starve . . ." No matter how cynical, this line of argument cannot but impress the overwhelming majority of Poles in their present misery. This aspect of the situation should not be lost sight of, especially

by the well-wishers of the Angers government, of Poland, and of the Allied cause.

There was a time, long ago, years even before the Great War, when the author believed that Poland as a whole was responsible for the popular success of Roman Dmowski's early experiments in antisemitism. But time and closer observation taught him how negligible is the guilt of the journalists or the ringleaders or the masses, whether of omission or of positive action, in the face of the dead pressure of objective reality;—and he said as much publicly, thereby disappointing and paining many a short-sighted but honest and patriotic Jew, and the movement to which he belongs paid a heavy price for that attempt to be fair to the Polish nation even when dealing with a Jewish tragedy. We did not grudge the price because we realized that the relationship between the Jews as a nation and the land harbouring the largest of our East European communities was too important historically to both to be allowed to degenerate into mere bitterness and resentment.

The same feeling guides the author now. It is useless to urge the Polish Government in exile to declare that a restored Poland can really enact, not on paper but in facts of social life, a régime of equal opportunity for a Polish Jewry "restored" in its former millions; it is useless for Allied ministers or ambassadors or Members of Parliament to pretend that they believe in such a possibility. Probably the Polish people is essentially as decent as the English, but it was also a very decent Polish gentleman who wrote, many years

ago: "I should like the Jews in Poland to be as happy as the Jews in England, provided the percentage of Jews in Poland be the same as in England." It is 10% in Poland, less than ½% in Great Britain. Such a radical reduction is hardly possible and hardly necessary; but the two aspects of the problem are closely interrelated. Racial peace in Poland—and not in Poland only—will be possible only as a corollary to a very extensive, and very greatly accelerated repatriation of Jewish masses to whatever spot on earth they may consider their national homeland. There will be no equal rights, and no healthy social life generally, in the whole of East-Central Europe so long as these Jewish masses are not given a full and honourable opportunity to abandon all those positions which they have irretrievably lost; and if that means the overwhelming majority of their former positions, the fact cannot be helped.

Let this be clearly understood. It is the duty of a Polish government fighting on the side of the Allies to guarantee equal rights for all in future Poland. But it is equally its moral duty to warn those Allies that the burden of solving such a world-problem as the Jewish problem in Poland cannot be borne by Poland alone—it will have to be shared by other Powers, by the colonial empires especially, and above all, by Great Britain, the mandatory Power for Palestine. To sound this warning, the Polish Government in exile may have to risk the impatient frown of those who want the Jewish problem to be safely hushed up; but the gain in respect and dignity before the opinion of the world will be incalculable. This departure would also be in keeping

with a noble tradition, for in 1863 the motto of the Polish rebellion was an appeal not to one oppressed nation, but to two. "For our freedom—and yours!" Enslaved Russia was indicated, but she did not respond or help. The Jews will do both.

The following is the translation of a letter from a Catholic Aryan Pole:

The day must inevitably come, and the sooner the better, when those who speak in Poland's name will address the following message to the world, the Allies and the Jews:—

"With all her heart, Poland wishes to ensure, in her public life of the future, real and full equality among all her citizens of whatever creed, race or language Above all, she wants this rule to apply in the fullest measure to her Jewish citizens. But she earnestly warns all concerned that, in the case of the Jews, the achievement of real equality is threatened by an obstacle which, unless an exceptional effort is made to remove it, is bound to defy the best endeavours of statesmanship. This obstacle, a result of the historical injustice called the Jewish Dispersion, is the unique degree in which Poland's social life, and her urban life in particular, is complicated by the omnipresence of ethnical polarities. There is no real parallel to this state of things in any other country. Poland's civilization, proud as she is of it, cannot spiritually assimilate a minority so strong and so ubiquitous; nor would the Jews' own national conscience, which Poland respects, agree to such assimilation. As long as this situation exists, Poland can only promise to strive for, not to achieve, real equality;

and the result, whatever our efforts, will be hardship and injustice to all.

It is therefore Poland's duty to remind her Allies, and the world at large, that the Jewish problem in Poland is only a fraction of the Jewish world problem as a whole, and that the former can be solved only by a parallel endeavour and a parallel sacrifice on the part of Poland, her Allies, and all the other peoples claiming the Allies' friendship. While Poland will do her utmost to enforce equality within her borders, a concerted effort of the most exceptional magnitude will be necessary to make possible the accelerated mass emigration from Poland of all the Jews who desire to emigrate.

This plan, however, cannot even be contemplated unless it is conceived in a spirit of respect, not of humiliation, for the Jewish nation. To press for a mass-exodus to a new Dispersion would be a crime against a people whose suffering is rooted in dispersion. The migration which Poland foresees can only be a voluntary and dignified mass-repatriation to a Jewish State.

The greater its scope, the more effective will become Poland's power to translate the principle of equal rights into a reality, and to ensure a normal civic atmosphere for all those Jews whom the Polish national organism shall prove capable, to their mutual benefit, of absorbing.

Poland's complete renaissance to freedom, both external and inner, implies, therefore, two separate things: first, the restoration of Poland, and second, the creation of a Jewish State.

CHAPTER IX

THE WAR AND THE JEW*

^* Condensed from a memorandum submitted to the British Government early in 1940.

Despite the deliberate policy of Jewish extermination pursued by the Germans in the occupied territories, the Jewish angle has been almost completely suppressed in the Allied press and radio reports. Allied statesmen, while consistently referring to any and every aspect and phase of the war, with a studiousness that cannot be regarded as accidental, have carefully eschewed references to the Jew; every attempt to interest English political and military circles in the creation of Jewish military units has met with stubborn resistance. The general effect of this policy was to render Jews, so to say, non-existent for the duration of the war.

This policy fails wholly in its object. Indeed, it is designed to destroy the effects of German propaganda, presented for the consumption of the Allied populations in a positive fashion. Germans state facts or inventions dressed up as facts. They declare that they have cleansed the Reich of Jews and Jewish influence; that they have compelled Jews to disgorge what had been robbed from the German people; that they have purified German blood of Jewish defilement; and that the only obstacle to peace with England and France is a domineering Jewry which has forced England into war out of desire for revenge. Instead of fighting this German propaganda by equally positive arguments and figures, Allied propaganda deliberately ignores this perilous web of fact and fiction, hoping that by simply suppressing the Jew as an entity it will render German propaganda innocuous. This hope proved to be futile. Among the general population in

No less important is the effect of this set of conditions on the United States and neutral countries. These countries are exposed to the full blast of propaganda and information from all the belligerents, as well as to knowledge gleaned from their own ex-

perience. They are fully aware of the Jewish angle of the war. They have been witnesses to Jewish suffering and the extent of the Jewish problem in general. To them the outbreak of war, its continuance and the manner of its conduct could not remain unconnected with the question of Jewish participation.

It is useful to explore the effect which a con-

sidered policy on the part of the Allies to give the Jews as an entity a definite place in the conduct of the war would have on the American mind. First and foremost, there would emerge a fuller and more complete faith in the moral platform of Great Britain. The charge, of which German propaganda in the United States knows how to make good use, that the Allies are primarily concerned with the maintenance of their own imperial and economic positions and that the moral issue is a mere camouflage, would receive a decisive setback. If the Jew were given a place as a military Ally in the war, this would serve as a most effective assurance to the neutrals, and particularly to the United States, that the war is not being waged for the sole purpose of protecting British and French imperial interests.

The establishment of a Jewish Army would be equal, in effect, to the physical adhesion of a new ally. It would automatically produce in every neutral country Jewish centres of pro-allied activity and recruitment.

The emergence of a Jewish Army in the field would stifle the vicious argument that the war was being fought in the interests of the Jews, while the Jews were wholly absent from the various fields of operation. Jews would appear as an ally side by side with other allies, fully entitled to fight for a specific aim, in the same way as each of the other allies. This would provide the armory of Allied propaganda with an implement for the defeat of enemy propaganda.

serve as an assurance, more effective than any verbal declaration could be, that the Allied Powers envisage a constructive settlement of the Jewish problem after the war. It would mean that the success of the Allies is connected with a policy of including the Jews in post-war adjustments and that the Jewish Army was the first concrete step in that direction.

CHAPTER X

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS

Jews) and Hungary (550,000). At the moment of writing neither country is at war, so that the Allies cannot really be saddled with any responsibility for what may happen to the Jews in the Danubian valley.* In this book, which deals chiefly with the Allies' war aims, a closer enquiry into this sector of the Dispersion would be irrelevant. But no one can deny, no one should forget, that both Roumania and Hungary belong to the zone where the Jewish problem has long reached the stage of acute and painful incompatibility between the "equal rights" principle and the real situation. In both countries, with the Jews forming about 6% of the total population, that situation is somewhat like that obtaining in Poland; but only "somewhat like," for both countries are incomparably richer than Poland in respect to their agricultural possibilities, so that the scramble for urban jobs is not nearly so acute.

^* Territorial changes both in Hungary and Roumania were accompanied by a corresponding change in the size of their Jewish populations. By the end of 1941 there were some 500,000 Jews in Roumania, and over a million in Hungary. Mass murder and eviction to occupied Russia has again somewhat modified these numbers, especially in Roumania since that country entered the war.

In Roumania, however, what we call "Antisemitism of Men" has been conspicuously endemic since at least the middle of last century. In Hungary its acute form is of recent growth, but it is now very intense. In both, the rôle of the governments in fostering the anti-Jewish trend of economic life seems to be of secondary importance: the main driving force in the process tending to oust the Jew from all such positions as he still retains is rather the unanimous pressure of all those social classes with whom the Jew happens to have any economic or social contacts. Whether or not these two countries, in the end, will be invited to reconfirm their adherence to the principle of equal rights for all (which has never been absent from their constitutions) is really immaterial. "Things" will decide, and only fools or hypocrites can doubt what the nature 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 spent in the atmosphere of constant struggle for equal rights. In 1906, at Helsinki, in 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 recognized as a nationality equal to all others within the empire, its language equal to all languages, its religion equal to all other churches. Today he would be prepared to sign that programme again. But he would not be prepared to condone poli-

cies which are bound to make of that programme, or even of a much less ambitious conception of equal rights for the Jew, a doomed list of cant and impossible claims.

There are two possible ways of envisaging a nonexodus solution of the Jewish problem, i.e. a solution founded on the assumption that equality can "work": the one calls for "assimilation," the other for "minority nationalism."

The first is an elastic idea, whose adherents have been known to give it different interpretations. Some favour assimilation in language and manners, but no religious apostasy and no mixed marriages; which, after all, and despite all rhetoric 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 religion might gradually disappear; the comforting feature of this creed is the "proud" assurance that both race and religion will prove an excellent manure for enriching the physical and spiritual soil of humanity.

"Minority nationalism" is based on the theory that the essence of nationality is to be found in language, literature, music, philosophy, religion, and so forth, and that 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 forms of worship although their respective adherents are 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 but a law called "national-personal autonomy." All Jews who so desire will be registered in Dispersion as members of their 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 either of these two solutions; for argument's sake 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 tomorrow, they too may 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 continue to be real. Yet we have just seen that in East-Central Europe it cannot be made a reality without a great exodus.

Assimilation especially is conditioned by exodus. Only when the bulk of the Jews have gone may the diminishing remainder hope to find a favourable atmosphere for trying to solve its problem by the great final "merger": not an illusory merging as in the past, learning the language yet not the spiritual accent of the Gentile,—but this time, perhaps, an effective union.

For in the past the assimilation of the Jews has proved illusory throughout the whole of East-Central Europe. Real assimilation is not a solo performance:

it is a duet. 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 his Gentile neighbour has the same impression. Joining a new community or nation or class or set is not only a question of genuine endeavour, but above all of reception. Jewish assimilation in East-Central Europe has obviously failed in this respect; by bringing Jew and Gentile nearer to each other, by making them rub shoulders in many walks of life where they never met before, it merely extended the area of possible friction. If assimilation as an escape from Jewish distress is really worth trying again, the attempt will have to be made afresh from the very beginning. But even its enthusiasts, if any such still exist, must have realized by now that they stand no chance of success unless racial percentages in East-Central Europe undergo a staggering change.

A "successful" assimilation may or may not be worth while, may or may not be objectively possible: but in any case the preliminary condition is the exodus of the bulk of the Jews.

Mutatis mutandis the same judgment applies to minority nationalism: whether practicable or not, the preliminary condition for its success is the exodus of the bulk of the Jews.

It is by no means the author's intention to suggest that we should abandon all hope of ever securing a decent and normal existence for the Jews in this sector of Dispersion. On the contrary, he still believes that this can be done. But the preliminary condition for any such hope is the exodus of the bulk of the Jews.

The question touches some intimate susceptibilities so closely that the author may advisedly make a few comments in the first person.

foremost novelists, pre-war and post-war: "But for the two brothers Mann, all that count are Israelites—Schnitzler, Wassermann, Zweig, Werfel . . . mais ça finira mal." He was hurt and shocked when Léon Blum became Premier. I asked him, "Is it fear?" He denied it. "It is, my friend, a question of tact. This is too conspicuous for good taste. I should equally disapprove of it on the part of Protestants."

But of course, it was fear; and of course it was by no means unfounded. The German economist, Werner Sombart, 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 childish to deny that 99% of Jews (and particularly the non-Zionist, "assimilationist" Jews to whom equality is alpha and omega) consider this a very wise maxim, regret that they did not follow it themselves, and would be very glad to see their children do so.

But their children will not comply with this wise maxim, for such obedience is humanly impossible. Life is competition; equality of rights has only one concrete meaning—an equal chance in every aspect of life's competition; the right to win if you are better equipped. Twenty centuries of lopsided urbanism have made the Jew, on the average if not on the summits where genius dwells, better equipped for most of the ordinary competitions of modern life; there is no

This is the fateful inner contradiction of civic equality for Jews: it can be durable only if it is not enjoyed to the full, yet it is impossible to bring about a voluntary renunciation of such a privilege.

There are, of course, outside remedies which may be applied in order to keep the Jewish advance within "moderate" limits: and such attempts usually take the form of the policy of the numerus clausus. This policy consists in limiting the number of Jews who may be admitted to a certain profession (or school, or enterprise, or institute) to a fixed percentage of the total personnel. In Tsarist Russia, from 1888, it was the rule of all the universities and secondary schools that Jewish pupils were not to exceed 10% of the total in the Western part of the empire (the "Pale of Settlement"), and 5% 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 6%—which is exactly the proportion of Jews in the total population of Hungary.

Eloquent attempts have been made to justify the numerus clausus scheme as something not only consistent with the equal rights principle but actually based upon it. Why call it numerus clausus? Call it Proportional Representation of Races in all departments of the State's economy. If a given race constitutes 6% of the total population, the soundest and the fairest arrangement (so it is argued) would be for the members of that race to form 6% of the peasantry, 6% of the industrial proletariat, 6% of the doctors and lawyers and journalists. It is argued that this would be the surest antidote to antisemitism; and also the only way to straighten out and normalize the social structure of the Jewish people itself. The German Zionists, by the way, have been advocating for a generation the

"reshuffling of classes" ("Umschichtung der Schichten") as the main ideal of Zionism, meaning under that formula the formation of a Jewish social organism subdivided in a manner parallel to that of the Aryan environment. In Germany, for instance, it would mean that 20% of the Jews would be engaged in agriculture, 35% in industry and mining, less than 10% in trade, and still fewer in the professions. Aryan defenders of the numerus clausus argue that this is absolutely the same thing as proportional representation in the national economy: that is, the numerus clausus.

which is agriculture. In Hungary, where half the population works in cornfields and pastures, 6% of all the available land would have to be cleared of the present occupiers (about 250,000 souls) to make room for the Jewish settlers; or some other way of squeezing them out would have to be devised, so that half the Jewish population could be duly normalized as ploughboys and shepherds. A similar operation would be needed in mining and industry in order to absorb the 125,000 Jewish factory-hands required by the scheme. Only then could the numerus clausus in the professions and in commerce be justified as a step towards social normality. All this is so obviously and preposterously impossible that nobody really thinks 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.

And this, the author ventures to affirm, is precisely what it does imply. Any assertion that the cancer of antisemitism can be cured in its principal breedingzone, East-Central Europe, by the ointment of "equal rights" without a preliminary exodus of the bulk of the Jews, is empty, thoughtless and harmful twaddle.

Every man must be a king among kings, or life is not worth living. Equality is not only a state of things; it is also a principle. As a principle it has a tremendous value, no matter if translatable into everyday life or not. The Jews, if they are worth their salt, must fight to the last ditch to ensure that the equality principle, however unreal, shall be solemnly proclaimed in the statutes of every nation: this is a question of human dignity, something without which life would be morally despicable, and the refusal of which would justify any form of retaliation against the offending State. But it is one thing to fight for your dignity, and quite another to pretend that this dignity alone will feed you. It is utterly dishonest to pretend that legal equality, reproclaimed under the impact of Allied victories, can stop or retard, in that immense distressed area, the progress of the objective realities that are tending to oust the Jew from every economic foothold. To say that all that the Allies are aiming to win for us is a reaffirmation of civic equality, would mean that for us an Allied victory would have no value except as revenge on the Nazis. We do the Allies a disservice by accepting such a restricted purpose.

CHAPTER XI

EVACUATING A RUIN

IN 1936 the writer, assisted by two friends, published in a Warsaw 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 evidently could not be maintained. As it was even 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 recovery (while another million, hereditary paupers, had never possessed any positions), the solution was mass exodus.

The term "evacuation" wounded many susceptibilities; it seemed offensive and humiliating. It is difficult to see what is wrong with it. In September and October 1939, both in England and France, children were "evacuated" from the areas of danger; but apart from war, whenever a dam threatens to burst or a house to fall in, the inhabitants are invited to "evacuate" the spot; the same thing happens if the plague breaks out in a block of buildings. And what was the Jewish situation in East-Central Europe in 1936? Not a hand was raised. Crumbling walls, bursting dams, all forms of antisemitic plague at every corner, not a sin-

gle hand to defend the victims, and no plan for adequate self-defence, even among the victims themselves. At a conservative estimate, at least two-thirds of them ought to have been, if not evacuated, at all events earmarked for evacuation, even before any sensible scheme of salvaging the balance had been devised. But that was in 1936; they were halcyon days compared with the present.

The great advantage of the word "evacuation" is its implied suggestion of organized orderliness. No other term conveys that important quality: "emigration" has always meant a haphazard scramble (except when stopped); "exodus" inevitably recalls the pursuing enemy host, and it is always a risky proceeding, since but for a miracle not only the evil but also some of the righteous people may be 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. The author does not renounce either of the other terms, but he prefers "evacuation."

Mass evacuation is the only remedy for the cancer of Jewish distress. It may be superhumanly difficult, it may be atrociously costly, but as it is the only way to save Europe from being hustled into another catastrophe, the difficulties and the expense will have to be faced: when 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 can never claim to be.

How many will have to be evacuated? The question

Jews some kind of enticement or premium for remaining (history records even more incredible cases—when Jews were offered premiums for entering the country). On the other hand, it is also theoretically possible that in spite of such a commendable change of heart the evacuation would still continue on account of the greater appeal, material or ideological, of the reception area.

The only thing that can be said with certainty is that calculations, to be sober, should incline to the maximum. Some approximate figures will be given in the chapter on the "Max Nordau Plan" (Ch. xvii); here it will be enough to say that a solid evacuation policy should reckon with an eventual "ceiling" of some five million Jewish migrants within the ten to fifteen years following the war: and that the first million, taken from all the countries of the Zone, will have to be evacuated at once, at what the Germans would call "lightning" speed, by the same methods and at the same tempo which a modern army would apply to the transport of fifty divisions to a remote theatre of war.

Some critics of evacuation fear that it would have to be "compulsory." This is hardly likely: it will, on the contrary, prove extremely difficult to keep proper order among the multitude of volunteers lining up for places on the waiting list. Other critics merely demand that the mass-emigration of Jews should be treated as something concerning the Jews alone, and no business of any government, Polish or Roumanian or Hungarian. Not only should there be no hint of compulsory evacuation; there should be no application of pressure in any form; and if a national government should openly apply itself to organizing the emigration, that would be practically tantamount to pressure. The correct attitude for such a government would therefore be, to pretend to ignore the fact that Jewish emigration existed, and especially, that it was necessary, etc.

from East-Central Europe after the war, though it is of course to be expected that the paramount phenomenon in the field of mass migration will be the Jewish exodus. But the touchy inferiority-complex of the non-Zionist Jew should not lead him to take offence at his government's solicitude in acknowledging the existence of a social problem just because the problem happens to be predominantly Jewish.

Neither success nor order can be ensured in the exodus unless it is an international enterprise assisted by every government concerned. The above-mentioned bashful or touchy Jewish politicians probably know it themselves, for they can hardly imagine that arrangements for the transfer of capital or the liquidation of property can be made privately while ministers look the other way. The exodus will have to be a solemn and official performance, undertaken with banners flying; it will require not only administrative measures, but also special legislation, and above all, great international treaties. This cannot be helped and there is no need to shrink from it.

One understands, however, the reasons of this bashful shrinking. Tom and Dick have been roommates for years; there have been quarrels; now it is finally agreed that peace is to be restored, but Dick has decided to move to other quarters; the decision is absolutely voluntary, but there is nevertheless something in the very fact that it is Dick and not Tom who has decided to move away. Under these conditions Dick may prefer that Tom should leave him alone to do his house-

hunting and packing; should Tom prove too solicitous to help, his solicitude might look like eagerness to get rid of him. . . .

The prickly nature of the drama is obvious; yet the significant thing about the awkwardness of being too anxiously assisted to pack is that it is felt only if Dick is moving to another set of hired lodgings. Imagine for a moment that Dick has inherited a house, and a real freehold property, a thing he has long dreamed of: the whole psychological atmosphere would change, and all the awkwardness would disappear.

word, and the eagerness of the migrants will be hardly at all diminished by the fact that the new constitutions in the old countries promise civic equality.

Is Man essentially good or essentially bad? Here is another parable, which answers this foolish and idle

question. There was once a town of five hundred houses, and one day the Sultan sent to it fifty orphans and appealed to the citizens' mercy to give each of 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 in a frenzy of irritation; fifty mothers complained that the orphans were lousy, bad-mannered, and generally horrid. Then the town councillors got together again and decided to raise a public subscription to build an orphanage; and the people subscribed the required amount twice over, built a wonderful home for the orphans, and lived happily ever after.

Mass evacuation applied to the Jewish problem is not an alternative to civic equality: it is a corollary to equality, the indispensable condition of equality, and the only thing which can possibly make the latter a lasting reality for those—be they few or many—who remain.

But this is a side-issue. The essential rôle and value of evacuation is that it is the only cure for an evil which, if not removed, will continue to pervert humanity to commit further outrages: a thorough, clean and final cure. Also—provided the reception area is a Jewish State—it is a popular cure, a remedy which the overwhelming majority of men of all creeds regard with approval and respect; an ideal sanctified by the Bible and ennobled by the tradition of Zionism, whose consummation would be universally welcomed by all

countries inside the Zone of Distress and most nations outside it, and by all Jews—both those who want to go and those who want to remain.

What was said of the equality principle in Poland can be said of the equality principle in general—that complex of claims and dreams which our ancestors called "the Jewish emancipation" can become a reality only under two conditions: the enjoyment of equal rights in every Gentile country, and the existence, somewhere, of a Jewish State.

At this stage of our enquiry a question will probably arise in the minds of readers: How far can this aspect 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. How can this matter be the concern of a peace conference at which demands can be presented only to Germany?

But the forecast contained in this last sentence is an error. The Versailles treaty (and incidentally, the author refuses to join in the great chorus of that document's detractors: it was, with all its defects, quite a fine piece of statesmanship for its time)—the Versailles treaty in its 225 pages did much more than merely settle accounts with the beaten foe. For instance, it established the League of Nations: what had that to do with the war? Well, it had everything to do with it, for at the time it was universally realized that some kind of permanent association between

sovereign peoples might help to prevent further wars. The remedy has failed: and today the whole world is even more acutely aware that the only justification of the present conflict is the eventual provision of better safeguards against eruptions of the spirit of violence. Everything which is of value as such a safeguard is a proper war aim. Hardly anybody will deny that the uprooting of antisemitism, at least of its acute form, in East-Central Europe would be an essential safeguard against any further eruptions of brute aggression.

CHAPTER XII

EVIAN

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

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

• (a) That there is no probability whatever that the need for Jewish mass emigration will cease after an Allied victory: that, on the contrary, the balance of probability points to an increased urge towards evacuation after the war; and that all international plans with regard to the future of the "Jewish refugee" problem must therefore discard the cheap optimism which justifies neglect and adopt the forecast of the "greater need" as their basis of action.
• (b) The second principle is this: The territorial concentration of Jewish emigrants, and, above all, no encouragement of their further dispersion as minorities among other peoples.

No person of average intelligence will ask for an

VIAN 135

if not wholly Jews, he expects the statesmen thus engaged to apply their efforts 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," it being assumed that after the Allied victory there will be no need even for that.

IVIAN 137

a full-scale beginning of the offensive, plus a complete and courageous outline of the tasks ahead.

When his envoy, Mr. Myron Taylor, began to go round the European capitals, sounding their attitude to the President's initiative, it became evident at once that he was encountering serious obstacles—that powerful interests were alarmed and displeased by the scope of Roosevelt's plan, and were bent upon restricting it to the narrowest proportions. The chief centre of this obstruction was official London.

ence. Mr. Roosevelt was to be let down gently and cautiously. First, the scope of the problem was to be drastically reduced: it would not include all the refugees from all countries who had already escaped or were likely to escape in the future, but only those actual fugitives from Germany and Austria who had already escaped and were already such a burden to Germany's hospitable neighbours. In other words, it was a question of thousands, not of God knows how many eventual myriads or millions. Secondly, the problem thus limited would have to be treated as a question of international charity, not of international politics; no Jewish State proposals or the like were to be put on the agenda; and to drag in Palestine in this connection would mean embarrassing Great Britain and even making it impossible for her to attend the conference.

So far as is known, the same tactics were adopted at the second "refugee" conference—at Washington in October 1939. Here again Mr. Roosevelt was the initiator, and he is reported to have expressed the apprehension that after the war there would be many more refugees than before; indeed, according to some of the reports the American delegation went so far as to forecast a human flood amounting perhaps to twenty million homeless people of all races. Yet here again "some European delegates" firmly disagreed, and assured the gathering that, on the contrary, no refugee problem to speak of would be left in Europe after the Allied victory. Another report states, moreover, that it was decided to open a systematic enquiry

EVIAN 139

into the absorbent possibilities of a number of countries, but that Palestine (at the demand of "some European delegates") was excluded from the scope of such enquiry.

in this disproportion between the enormity of the harm and the puny cheapness of the advantage; a story of the Middle Ages, read in early boyhood, recurs to one's memory: "Yes, the village is burning, but do not sound the alarm lest you wake his Lordship..."

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, set up by the Evian Conference, has so far (February 1940) published no results of its investigation. This is not a reproach: a geo-political enquiry extending over half the globe must be slow work under the best of conditions, and this particular work has lately been handicapped by the war. The result is that no proper review can be offered of the settlement possibilities discovered by the Committee for the refugees generally and the Jewish refugees in particular.

A great many countries have been mentioned in the press as willing to accept a number of refugees, and various figures have been quoted, denied, confirmed, enlarged, or red ced. No reliance can be placed on any of this information until the official reports begin to appear. But even then, or rather especially then, the whole melancholy business of scattering fugitives among reluctant hosts will remain what it is now—arid and hopeless, pregnant of nothing but sorrow.

This is not said in any spirit of disparagement either of the workers of the Intergovernmental Committee or of the countries that still agree to practise hospitality. They are deserving of nothing but respectful gratitude. But the results of such hospitality would be as EVIAN 141

melancholy as the present position. However great may be the ultimate total of Jewish refugees allowed to infiltrate here and there and everywhere, that total, in comparison with the millions who must be evacuated from the Zone of Distress, will be as a pebble to an avalanche.

But the harm done will be great. Has anyone any illusion as to the universal atmosphere in which those kind-hearted people of the "Evian" Committee are trying to charm the governments into once more opening their gates to the Jewish tramp?

The following string of news items has been gleaned at leisure 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 proceeded with further at the present time. (August 19, 1938.)

It is stated that mass immigration into the Portuguese 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 council. (September 2, 1938.)

A memorandum urging the prohibition of foreign

immigrants into Cyprus has been submitted to the Municipal Council by local professional corporations. (September 16, 1938.)

Refugees from European countries will not be encouraged to emigrate to New Zealand, according to a statement made last week by Mr. Nash, the Minister of Finance (September 16, 1038.)

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

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

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

The names of twenty more countries could be added to this list. The Jewish tramp is not wanted. When he is admitted, his acceptance is due to pity, cajolery, or friendly pressure: precarious visas all of them. Time, effort and opportunity are wasted, and the seeds of future trouble are sown—trouble for the refugees, the hospitable countries and the world at large. The only redeeming feature of the plan is its narrow range, which must remain restricted, as the peoples are becoming ever more unwilling to grant hospitality which cannot be decently maintained.

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The only proper task for the Intergovernmental Committee so far as the Jewish "refugee" phenomenon is concerned is to discard the policy of infiltration (delegating it, if desired, to private institutions), and concentrate upon inquiry into the possibilities of the territorial solution. There are so far no indications to show that the Committee is working in this direction. At Evian, where it was first assembled, it certainly received no such commission; it may have obtained it from the Washington Conference, whose resolutions, it seems, have not been published; or it may

have set out along this only practicable path on its own initiative and responsibility. It is to be hoped that it has done so. If it has not, it will have to; or some other body will have to be appointed for the

purpose.

To avoid misunderstandings, it should here be explained that the Intergovernmental Committee as at present constituted is not adequately staffed for the EVIAN 145

CHAPTER XIII

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE

The Advisory Committee on Political Refugees ap-

pointed 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 (Palestine) White Paper which appeared in the same month. One homeland is closed, but here is another on the horizon.

more expensive, but quicker." A reply to the final question seems to be indirectly suggested by the Commission in another connection—in explaining why the fact that the same colony was found unsuitable for Assyrians need not imply its unsuitability for Central European refugees. The reason is that the Jewish refugee problem presents "a number of special features," of which the first is "the extreme urgency and necessity with which the refugees are being forced to find new homes." In short: needs must where the devil drives. A useful line of inquiry, overlooked by the worthy commissioners, would be to ask whether the devil can be persuaded to wait until all the other questions have been answered by experiment in a tropical country of hills and primeval forests, with no roads to speak of. To obtain the factual replies to these queries would take, one may suspect, not two years but a generation.

This should not be regarded as a criticism of British Guiana's fitness for close settlement. The Colonial Secretary told us last September that some "voluntary organizations in Great Britain had been on the point of establishing a corporation to carry out the [British Guiana] scheme, but owing to the outbreak of the war, action had been suspended for the time being." "Action," we assume, implies both the small experimental settlement to begin with and the investigation of vaster possibilities for the future. Some day "action" in this sense may be resumed, and may quite possibly result in the acquisition of useful knowledge, even though it may be that Gentile and not Jewish colonists

All this is said to prove that the author does not wish to disparage either British Guiana or any other place which sensible people may suggest for mass-settlement by Jews. Some day all these places may be successfully settled by some people or another. But

mass-settlement by Jews is not a vision of the radiant future when water, soil and climate will obey man's will. The Jewish exodus is a need of tomorrow, a literal tomorrow; it has its inherent conditions and limitations, due partly to the nature of the Jew as he is today, partly to the nature of other peoples as they are today, and partly to the technique of mass-settlement as it is today; it is still an extremely difficult and uphill undertaking. It is very questionable whether British Guiana is of today.

monwealth to his views. The story is a striking one, for it shows that very important political results can be accomplished single-handed by one quite unofficial person, with little popular backing and no particular credentials, without any use of the witchcraft known as personal magnetism: simply by talking timely common sense.

bly endorsing the scheme, and asking the Commonwealth authorities to consider it favourably.

What is not so clear as the fact of Australian sympathy is the question as to whether the area is

All this, of course, would be taken into account if the scheme ever came to be finally entertained as practicable and officially accepted. No doubt it would be found to be bristling with difficulties, and would require as astronomical an outlay as any other similar project; but such difficulties cannot be avoided so long as the suitable territory is outside Palestine; and all such obstacles to colonization will surely be overcome in the more or less remote future.

The real obstacle to the Freeland League's Australian scheme lies elsewhere. That obstacle was mentioned, without exception, in all favourable comments printed or spoken throughout Dr. Steinberg's campaign: not as an unsurmountable hindrance, but simply as a difficulty of secondary importance; and as such the Freeland League's delegate treated it in his replies as an apprehension which can easily be removed. In this respect, we fear, both sides were mistaken. The obstacle may prove not of secondary but of primary and overwhelming importance; and of the only two means by which it can be removed, the Jews are not likely to accept the first nor 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 colonists, once admitted, will be content to stay in 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 earning a livelihood."

Mr. A. Thompson, member of the Legislative Council, an expert on the Kimberleys and a sympathizer of the scheme: "It may be argued that the Jews might tend to drift southwards 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. Latham, also a sympathizer, the leader of the opposition in the State's Legislative Assembly, uttered a warning during the Address-in-Reply debate: "The Government must be careful, however, that these 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 settlement—they would have to go overseas."

And so on, without one single exception.

Dr. Steinberg seems to have fully realized the paramount importance of this apprehension, and the necessity of allaying it. Whether the solution he proposed was a satisfactory one remains to be seen. In addressing the 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."

The solution is anything but a happy one. The promise that the settlement area will be "incorporated in the Commonwealth" can only intensify the fear: for it would only make it easier for disappointed settlers to move to Perth or Melbourne or Sydney. Dr.

Steinberg's remedy is simply to prohibit these settlers from travelling outside their reservation, at least during the first five years. They would have to be issued special passports before they could leave; the reservation's boundary would have to be watched; and the 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 system applied in the case of natives in the Union of South Africa, or—mutatis mutandis—of Jews in Tsarist Russia, where they had to remain in the Pale of Settlement and were forbidden to enter the central provinces of the empire.

Doubtless Dr. Steinberg and his colleagues on the Freeland League's executive, when they realize 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 so dubious an experiment.

The only other solution would be to promote the settlement area from the start to the dignity of an independent State, divided from the Commonwealth by an international frontier with a proper visa control on both sides. The settlers would then bear no stigma of civic inferiority; but the other drawbacks would be so serious that no one is likely to propose this solution to 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 that so much space is given to this particular project. It deserves attention not only because of the honesty and devotion of its promoters, but also and more especially because the same sort of objections apply not only to Australia but to all "territorialist" schemes outside Palestine.

CHAPTER XIV

THE FATA MORGANA LAND

THIS title is intended to cover all projects present and future, to find a "suitable territory"—outside Palestine—where a Jewish State or province could be established. On the termination of the war the Jewish State must be established by international action: the State itself, not a commission for geographical research. Research must precede the end of the war; and one may add, with grim satisfaction, that it seems likely that there will be plenty of time for such research. The Evian Committee is quite competent to carry out the preliminary geographical quest, and it could not do better to justify its existence than by preparing the solution of the only refugee problem of historical significance.

The author does not believe in the reality of any "territorialist" projects for Jewish settlement outside Palestine; in his opinion, any search for other suitable areas will be hopeless. But the quest should nevertheless be treated with the fullest respect, even by the most zealous and uncompromising Zionists. Logically, it is in their interest to encourage the closest scrutiny of all non-Palestinian schemes.

There is a well-known Anglo-Saxon prejudice against the application of logic in politics; a mistaken prejudice. Life is always infallibly logical. Logic, however, is a complicated concept, as tortuous as the concept "arithmetic." There is a story of 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 629 minus 1,000 plus the square root of 625 plus 64 plus 30 times nine plus 20 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 arithmetic. The chain of ideas with which life's logic in this case will have to operate is composed of three main links.

• (a) Inevitability of the 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 suppressed. Even Herzl and Nordau, the founders of modern Zionism, had to pass through the phase of looking for the Fata Morgana Land before they realized the objective inevitability of the one and only "site." Today many Christian minds are going through the same process, and it would be a great mis-

take to betray irritation or impatience because they have not yet reached the final stage.

As to the outcome of the search, provided it be conducted in good faith, there is no need for anxiety: the outcome is pre-ordained.

The first consideration which might make one sceptical as to the chances of such a quest is this: Seeing that so many territories are now being mentioned as suitable for the Jews, why is it that no government ever thought of proposing one of them through all the years that have elapsed since the Great War?

Jews as nation-builders were most prominently "in the market" throughout this period; and not a bad "proposition" either. All governments, and all readers of the Press, were infallibly aware of at least two facts about Palestine: first—that for years Jewish colonization had been bringing to that country an unprecedented influx of gold; second—that all this time the Palestinian Jews were having trouble with the Arabs and friction with the British administration. In homely parlance, here was a case of a bride with quite an appetizing dowry, who, judging by all that one heard, might safely be assumed to feel displeased with her fiancé. This is a situation which invariably attracts attention in the matrimonial market and elicits other tentative offers. Why has nothing of the kind occurred in our case?

The first fact — the influx of gold — was known throughout the world, especially to the governments. Between 1922 and 1936, above all since 1925, consuls,

bankers, reporters and travellers had emphasized the fact in every language. The second fact—the persistence of trouble—was even better known, having been lavishly advertised, with sensational embellishments, in 1920, 1921 and 1929, and almost daily after April 1936. Why was there never a competing offer: Here is another territory, every bit as good as yours, or better (certainly not worse); why not 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: there is 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?

A territory (outside Palestine) suitable for the establishment of the Jewish State must satisfy, at least from the Gentile's point of view, three essential requirements; from the standpoint of the Jew there may be other requirements; but here, in this chapter, the problem is examined pragmatically, with the strictest elimination of sentimental idiosyncrasies. Briefly, the three requirements are these:

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

The first condition must not be taken literally—no land is absolutely "empty": but the population on the

spot must be insignificant. Where there is a considerable settled population the same trouble would be bound to arise as with the Arabs in Palestine. It would not matter who these natives might be: even if they were Haussas or Hereros, there would still be trouble. If they themselves were unable to write to the newspapers they would find white-skinned protectors (English, most probably) who would take up the cudgels on their behalf, and—quite justly—confront the government with a difficult ethical problem: "If it is unfair to give the Jews a country sparsely populated by Arabs, why is it right to give them a country sparsely populated by negroes?"

The second requisite—the territory must be "good"—means that it must be suitable for colonization by average Europeans. Greenland is empty, but so far, thank God, it has not been offered. An honest Christian woman, Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, recently said: "If a land is to be found for the Jews, it must be a land fit for white men to live in." Where other white pioneers have failed completely (and this, generations ago, when man was much less of a tenderfoot than now), Jewish colonists would obviously stand little chance, apart from all sentimental considerations. There may be quite a spate of preliminary nonsense about equatorial valleys and arctic ridges, but after serious scrutiny no government or commission will sponsor such an offer, simply because serious people hate making fools of themselves. Their belief in the Jews' genius for really rough pioneering is probably not excessive, and one may be sure that neither in

Labrador nor in the forests between the Orinoco and the Amazon will they look for the suitable territory. They will look for something really "good."

failed: out of 264 in 1927, only 124 of the settlers were still carrying on in 1935 ("many of them in a state of poverty and discontent," says Professor Griffith Taylor in Mr. Isaiah Bowman's report on Limits of Land Settlement, published by the American Council on Foreign Relations). Now the quitters are, of course, in Brisbane, Newcastle and Adelaide, or even in Sydney and Melbourne. As long, however, as they were Anglo-Saxons, the Australians did not mind so terribly. But to have their towns flooded with Jews would be quite a different thing (and the Jews would be full of complaints 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 the national territory—cut off so sharply and completely that the boundary would be actually impenetrable save 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 expedient: cession of sovereignty. The Jewish territory must become, formally and legally, a separate independent State from the outset of the experiment. 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 pariah class, introducing internal passports, and poisoning and degrading the whole civic atmosphere. Entry can be forbidden, in a decent modern com-

munity, only to "aliens," to people who come from "abroad." The Jewish territory must be legally and politically "abroad."

There is nothing impossible in such a separation—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 tract 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 such country, the Fata Morgana Land.

"But does Palestine answer any of those three criteria?" is the question one expects at this stage. "Why should Palestine be preferred?"

The "choice" of Palestine has nothing whatever to do with any such criteria. Zionists will joke freely about Palestine's natural drawbacks as a country for pioneers: they will readily confess that it is by no means the best kind of "colonial proposition," that there are countries much more suitable for the purpose—and that all this does not matter in the least, and has no bearing on the question. Still more readily do they admit that the local Arabs' unwillingness to welcome the transformation is a very regrettable fact, and that things would be much easier if it did not exist; but since it does exist it will have to be overcome, however costly this may prove. This is an attitude that has nothing to do with any search or quest

or choice. To "find" or "select" a country, one compares values, advantages and obstacles, and one ends without any parti pris by preferring that which offers the greatest attractions and the least resistance (and it is perhaps inevitable that the thing that "attracts and does not resist" cannot be anything but a mirage). Palestine does not even pretend to compete with any other country in points of attraction, or ease of access, or cheapness of colonization. The author fully shares his generation's dislike of totalitarian patriotism, but there are desperate situations where no "choice" is left, and the only attitude for a decent man to take is, right or wrong—my country. With much greater justification, a people foundering in chaos is entitled to say: good or bad, easy or hard, cheap or costly—my country.

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

PART IV THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FO PALESTINE

CHAPTER XV

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 until the common danger is over; there ought to be a firm determination to respect the legal status quo, bad as it is, with no attempts to steal a march on the opposition; there ought to be, but there is not.

On the outbreak of the war, at one of those moments when even experienced people are liable to be sentimentally trustful and confiding, the writer and his political associates frankly expected an immediate truce between the Zionist movement and the Colonial Office. True, they spoke of Palestine as the Jewish State in that appeal to world Jewry quoted at the beginning of this book: but that was a war-cry: it is in the usual tradition to proclaim one's highest ideal in calling for the utmost effort and sacrifice. We expected that soon the real business of the war, the efforts and the sacrifices, would begin for the Jews as one of the Allied nations; and above all, that Jewish troops would be raised on the precedent of the Great War. That—so we thought—would make all verbal claims superflu-

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ous; a much stronger claim to a place "on the map" would be staked out in the actual firing line. A nation with soldiers at the front can afford to leave argument alone until negotiations for a settlement begin; in the meantime, the less her spokesmen say the more plainly will her soldiers speak for her. In September we were quite ready to plunge into war work and withdraw the political batteries: assuming, of course, that the batteries would be withdrawn by the other side also, and that our war effort 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 merely as a nation, or any sort of entity at all; and in Palestine the bombardment of the status quo from the opposite side is hotter than ever. For, even if there is quibbling as to what a status quo does or does not include in circumstances complicated by three years' rioting, one thing is beyond a doubt: the 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.

A formal attempt to elucidate this question was made by the writer and his political associates as early as September 10th, one week after war had been declared, in a document:

Calling the attention of H.M. Government to the fact that since the September session of the League of Nations Council had been postponed sine die, no legal

validity could 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.

... The Permanent Mandates Commission was unanimous in recognizing that the [White Paper's] 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.

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 scope in the interpretation of a Mandate whose only authoritative interpreter (and the British Government admits it) 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 meantime, it is obviously the former interpretation which should form the basis of legality.

Some ten days later, the authors of this interpellation were informed, on unimpeachable authority, that it was the policy of the White Paper which was deliberately meant to hold the field.

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So it does, at least in the Mandatory Government's admitted intention. The restrictions on the sale of land to "non Arabs" in 94.8 per cent of Western Palestine's area announced at the end of February are bad and wicked enough in themselves; but their especial venom is in the fact that they have been officially introduced as implementing the "Statement of Policy of May, 1939."

This business deserves attention quite apart from the Palestine issue: it forms such a strange little dissonance in the solemn oratorio which declares the duty of the mighty to respect the Covenant and the supreme authority of the League, always to await Geneva's verdict, and never, by unilateral action to employ the trick of the fait accompli, least of all against the weak. . . . The dissonance might pass unnoticed in the roar of great events, except in the little corner which the weak inhabit: yet it is like one of those tiny squeaks which prove that somewhere something is wrong in the great machine.

In the field of administrative practice there have for long been many disquieting signs that the Palestine bureaucracy feels inspired, even without waiting for legal sanction, to treat the White Paper as its only guide-book. This tendency has been especially conspicuous in two directions. The first is that of immigration. In all negotiations as to the numbers to be admitted or refused, the officials in Jerusalem and London openly quote the White Paper as their authority: the White Paper established that 25,000 refugees might be allowed to enter, with certain provisos. The White Paper definitely prohibited the increase of such and such quota. . . . The moral result of this conscious, deliberate, calmly assertive disregard of legality in exalted quarters will be what it always must be at the first opportunity: lawlessness beneath the surface, and in all directions.

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A significant feature is the action of some ladies of the Bucharest British colony, headed by Miss Boyd (headmistress of the English high school), Miss Gadge and Mrs. Wallie: they collected donations from among the members of the colony and provided 100 beds for the babies and the old people, beside warm clothing and 75,000 lei. A stream of donations came from the Balkanic Jewish communities, and from the Jews of the United States and France 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, in what conditions, and at what cost—all these details, probably as notable in their way as those of the Danubian stage of their adventure, will only be told when their wanderings are over.*

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

From the moral point of view, Palestine should be the last country to reject Jewish 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 land. She would only be "doing her bit" if she served as a refugee camp: even apart from all question of a National Home, it would be a great service to the Allies and to Europe. Lithuania, with not one-tenth of the financial resources which Palestine can summon for the purpose from all

† The "closed door" policy of the Palestine Administration was manifested in an even more drastic manner by the deportation of 2,000 Jewish refugees who managed to reach the shores of Palestine,

^* These refugees eventually reached Palestine on February 14, 1940. The author's son, who had been instrumental in guiding the refugees to Palestine, was imprisoned by the Palestine Government for this crime. He was still in prison when Vladimir Jabotinsky died in August 1940.

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parts of the world, opens her gates almost daily to fugitives crowding over her so-called "green boundary" near Vilna. Why is Palestine exempted? *

As regards the law—if the Mandate is the law—the Mandate prescribes that the immigration of Jews be encouraged "under suitable conditions." What conditions can ever be more "suitable" than those of the present day? Here are people uprooted by disaster; all civilized humanity sympathizes with their agony; half the world's governments are searching for regions in which refugees could be absorbed; half a million Jews in 300 settlements are eagerly offering to look after the newcomers, and the charitable funds of all Jewry are ready to help them. But the Mandate has been superseded—by an illegal document.

In another direction the governmental policy is even more disturbing: the attempt to paralyze the Jewish self-defence organization. There is unfortunately no other explanation for two recent events: forty-two Jews were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for armed drilling in November, and thirty-eight 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

^* It is worth while to point out that Palestine was not "exempted" as far as non-Jewish refugees were concerned. It served as a welcome refuge for Polish, Greek, Yugoslav and other fugitives of war. Only for Jewish war fugitives did its doors remain shut. The recently reported fate of the 768 passengers of the S. S. Struma, who were refused permission to enter Palestine and forced back into the Black Sea only to find there a watery grave, demonstrated that this "exemption" with regard to the Jews is still in full force.

servitude by a military court on a charge of preparing for armed self-defence; but the proceedings of that court were afterwards ruthlessly quashed by the Army Council. Since then no attempt had been made, either by the civil or the 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 the British police and military actually collaborated with what Tommies called "Jewish patrols"; during the 1936—1939 troubles 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. Instances can be quoted when Jewish leaders were cordially thanked by the British military authorities. What has happened since then to cause this attempt to suppress "Jewish illegal drilling"?

The only new thing that has happened since the outbreak 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 "Irgun" (its full title is "the National Military Organization"), had been held responsible for active mass reprisals against the Arab terror in 1937—1939; it was the only section of the Jewish self-defence forces which could really be called "clandestine," and not merely unofficial like 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 declara-

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tion of loyalty to the Allies, of willingness to co-operate with the Government for the defence of Palestine, and on any other front, and of a resolve to "cease fire" and call a truce with the Arabs. In official circles this change of heart was acknowledged; one might even say that in some respects it was handsomely acknowledged. What has happened since to explain the fact that a few weeks later it was to be rewarded by something that looks like a minor crusade?

The thing is without precedent in Palestine or elsewhere. The only other country in which Jewish self-defence had ever functioned as a permanent institution was Tsarist Russia. In 1905, in Odessa, the author was present when the Oxford-blue uniformed gendarmerie, the Tsar's equivalent of the present Ogpu, invaded the flat of a Jewish family at night in search of revolutionary literature. Of that they found none, but they found a parcel of freshly-printed manifestoes bearing the name of a Jewish self-defence organization—a perfectly illegal body—urging the Jews to arm and drill and resist pogroms. "This is none of my business," said the officer in charge, waving the parcel away; "this has nothing to do with subversive political activity."

So matters continued until the fall of the Romanoffs. I do not recollect a single instance of a serious police attack on Jewish self-defence bodies or their modest arsenals. There was some queer strain of brigands' fair play in the psychological make-up of that police system: the police never stopped a pogrom, and were often suspected of staging one, but at least they felt that the Jews ought to be given a chance to fight the pogroms.

After the Tsar's downfall, Odessa—the largest Jewish community in the Ukraine—during two years of the civil war (1918-19) was garrisoned by a volunteer body called the Jewish Battle Company. It was uniformed, lived in barracks, and was rather well armed. It was of course entirely illegal; but the thirteen governments that followed one another in occupying the city (the French, the Greeks, the White Russians, the Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians, etc.), all respected the illegal Jewish self-defence organization. Its organizer, S. Y. Jacobi, then a boy of twenty, settled subsequently in England, dreaming, some day, of repeating the experience on a much larger scale, under the British aegis; but he died last November, and anyhow the British aegis does not seem to be available for the purpose.

Neither the author nor anyone else would suggest that the régimes can be compared. But the fact remains that in Palestine the anti-Jewish terror had been allowed to drag on for years; there is no doubt that the Government genuinely wanted to stop it, and 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 Tsarism, even chaos, respected?

The question was recently put, in formal writing, to the proper authority in London. The explanation elicited was to the effect that the competent authority

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

A curious attitude this, in the winter of 1939, after three years' experience had shown how little official protection can actually be given to Jewish settlements even in peace time; and less than ever is given now, when we are perhaps on the threshold of unpredictable complications. More than ever now, preparedness for self-protection should be openly recognized as justifiable. In this attitude there is no logic, no justice, no elementary care for the safety of an exposed minority: but there is method—it is that of the White Paper policy, resentful of all things in any way reminiscent of the Jewish dream of Statehood.

It would be ridiculous Quixotry for the Jew, who would have been the lesser partner in the truce, had there been a truce, to play the silly game of noblesse oblige when there is so obviously no truce. War or no war, the major partner has decided that the debate on Palestine's future shall continue, and we follow suit.

CHAPTER XVI

THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE

march on the Jews" may not be complimentary, but that it is so engaged is the impression shared by all observers in Palestine, who are watching the inroads of the White Paper policy on the deteriorating status quo. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this system of encroachment is its inevitable futility; for it is futile even from the standpoint of its authors and abettors. They produced the 1939 White Paper to placate the Palestinian Arabs; they are now showing the greatest eagerness to "implement" it, without even a show of legitimacy, and for the same reason—in order that the Arab Nationalist party may be satisfied. These authors and abettors of the anti-Mandate policy attempt to silence all complaints by the same argument—that this method can be relied upon to calm the Arabs and to keep them from insisting on further concessions.

This optimistic outlook is illusory. The Jews have been deeply hurt and injured by the White Paper of May 1939, but it is not therefore safe to conclude that the Arabs have really been "bought" by its promises. Not a single Arab Nationalist in Palestine, no matter whether he be Husseini or Nashashibi, has ever for a moment been deceived into regarding the White Paper as in any way satisfactory except as a blow to the Zionists. He has never considered that it contains one single item of real and positive value in respect to Arab aspirations—never regarded it as anything but a stepping-stone for tomorrow's renewed offensive. And in this negative appreciation, moreover, the Arabs, from their point of view, are perfectly justified: a blow to Jewish hopes, it is at the same time a 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 was conveyed to the writer immediately after the publication of that document, by reliable friends who are in close touch with Arab Nationalist circles; and its sound logic, which cannot but commend itself to the reader, is inner evidence of its reliability.

From the Arab point of view, almost the only good thing in the White Paper is that it explicitly rejects the ideal of the Jewish State and promises to stop further immigration (or to make it dependent on the Arabs' consent, which amounts to the same thing) after 75,000 more Jews have been admitted over a period of five years. However, the decision to prohibit land sales to Jews, outside those districts which are already predominantly Jewish, is in itself a good thing—although in this respect any law can easily be evaded. "No immigration" is a much more desirable

boon: it is actually the main point, being even more essential than the rejection of the Jewish State principle. Taking all three items together, this aspect of the White Paper policy is excellent—provided it proves to be permanent.

For such it actually seems to be. Take the Legislative Council issue. The 1922 White Paper "estab-

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lished" in Palestine 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 again it never came into existence. In 1935, the Wauchope White Paper promised it finally and definitely—a Legislative Council with an Arab majority; and again nothing came of it; then the Royal Commission's Report stated that the scheme was impracticable; and now this new White Paper contains no promise of an elective legislature. Three White Papers wasted!

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 permissible, the Passfield White Paper was published, and the Arabs hoped that the "flood" would stop. At that time there were already 200,000 Jews. A few years later the number was again doubled: there were 400,000 in 1936, and there are nearly half a million now. One really must not be surprised if the Arabs sometimes think that "White Paper" and "waste paper" are synonymous. No doubt a White Paper gives 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 Arabs were for all these good intentions, they would appreciate them much more if

a White Paper contained a real guarantee that such intentions would not be abandoned at the next contingency. What constitutes a real guarantee? There is only one answer: an Arab government, and immediately, before the wind has time to veer.

This is only one reason why the Arabs wanted "an Arab government immediately"; even if only to "implement" the purely negative aspect of the White Paper—the removal of the Jewish danger—it was, to them, indispensable. But this negative aspect of the matter was, of course, of only secondary importance. They are above all, patriots, and the paramount question to them is their positive ideal of the Arab State. This is what they had fought for during those difficult three years. They were diplomatic enough not to put it so bluntly as to speak of "Arab government"; their official formula sounded more moderate: "a government of Palestinians," in which the Jews would be invited to share, but in which the Arabs, of course, would be in the majority. But the main point was: this must come at once. The life of a White Paper is very short; when one has to deal with such fickle legislators one likes a cash payment.

In this they were disappointed. The White Paper promises to grant Palestine "independence"—what it calls "independence"—only in ten years' time, and that only if the Mandatory government (of 1949) should find it advisable. Listen to this: "If, at the end of ten years, it appears to H.M. Government that, contrary to their hope, circumstances require the postponement of the establishment of the independent State"—they

will postpone it "with a view to achieving the desired objective at the earliest possible date." Which means, say the Arabs, that if the Jews about that time begin to cry out that the Arabs are oppressing them, and provoke riots in a couple of towns with a few dozen casualties on both sides, and their friends in the House of Commons make the usual kind of speeches, there will be no "independence." From the Arab point of view, all this is a Jewish victory: the Jews always insisted that Palestine should become independent only when they should agree to it; and this is what the White Paper has promised them, in veiled but transparent terms.

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

• (a) "The security of, and freedom of access to, the Holy Places, and the protection of the interests and property of the various religious bodies."—Every Palestinian knows what this means: administration of the walled 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 Moslem and Jewish. In particular, the Wailing Wall business will remain outside Arab jurisdiction.
• (b) "The protection of the different communities in Palestine in accordance with the obligations of H.M. Government to both Arabs and Jews 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 cases where both peoples are affected, the rights of the two languages in public life, treasury grants to hospitals, and innumerable other items, covering practically the whole field of public life in a country like Palestine.

• (c) "Such requirements to meet the strategic situation as may be regarded as necessary . . ." In other words, military garrisons.
• (d) "The interests of certain foreign countries . . ." In other words, a finger in Palestine's "independent" Foreign Office.

For all this, the future constitution of Palestine will have to contain "adequate" safeguards. The Arabs think they know what this means. The British will say that, just as strategic responsibilities cannot be safeguarded by paragraphs, but only by British soldiers, so all the other responsibilities can be safeguarded only by British officials. They will probably be called "advisers"; and every Arab knows what that means. They know that an adviser is a British official attached to a native minister, and without the adviser's signature no order of that minister is valid; so that the adviser is really the minister, and the minister not even an adviser. Judging by the number of matters which will have to be safeguarded in this way, the Arab view is that, in comparison with this kind of independence, that which any provincial municipality enjoys would seem unfettered 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 claim it with pleasure, as long as they are in a minority), Great Britain's supervision would 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 will never be able to join an Arab Federation—unless that Federation too becomes "federated" into the British Empire.

It is obvious, from the Palestine Arabs' point of view, that this situation is entirely unacceptable. There has never been even a question of accepting it. Its only value in the eyes of the Arabs 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 Palestinian Arab Nationalists, and it is not his business to make out a case for them; moreover, as against the Jews he considers that they have no case at all, nor against a government firmly set on carrying out the Jewish National Home policy to its conclusion. But as against a policy aiming to bribe the Arabs by harming the Jews, the Arab case just quoted is unanswerable: the bribe is not even illusory—it simply does

not exist. The White Paper has not satisfied, and could not have satisfied, the Palestinian Arabs.

Which means, that at the first opportunity they can be expected to push their claims farther. This does not imply that the writer accuses them of disloyalty to the Allies: he prefers to assume that all the peoples in contact with Britain and France are united in one purpose, delenda est Carthago. India is so united; but India is pressing her demands at this moment, during the war; and the Moslems of India, being in a minority, are alarmed.

It remains for the Jews, then, to take up their side of the uninterrupted controversy. The future of Palestine is on the agenda of the day, by the will of factors for which we bear no responsibility; and no time should be lost in pressing 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 XVII

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN

THE late Max Nordau, Herzl's collaborator in founding political Zionism, was probably the most revolutionary thinker of the fin de siècle generation. In 1919 he was old and ailing, his bitterly contested yet world-wide literary fame was half forgotten, but he was still a great intellectual force, with a rare wealth of erudition at his command. That was the honeymoon period of the Balfour Declaration, and Max Nordau came forward with a plan which should make the best use of it once and for all. It was a plan for the immediate and simultaneous transportation to Palestine of the first half million immigrants from the East European ghettos.

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 of coping with a situation incomparably more urgent than that of 1919. Max Nordau's projects were concerned with Palestine only; so, in their true intentions, are the suggestions of the present writer; but for the sake of formal convenience, the following outline may be expressed in terms applicable to any

"suitable area," provided the area is to become the Jewish State and to absorb the great exodus.

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

• (a) The whole exodus to take about ten years.
• (b) The first million settlers to be transferred within the first year or less.
• (c) All planning to be done during the war, so that work can start on the morrow of the peace conference.

Expressed in a form less abrupt, it would mean:

• (a) The transfer to the Settlement Country of all the Jews of East-Central Europe who may voluntarily register for the purpose shall be effected within a period not exceeding ten years.
• (b) The first million settlers, assembled and summarily trained, shall be transferred simultaneously, at the very outset of the migration, within the minimum time indispensable for the technical operation of transport, which shall not exceed one year.
• (c) 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 through 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

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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 the draft of settlers ready for transporting completed.

It is not the author's intention here to attempt a systematic presentation of the Max Nordau Plan. A good comprehensive outline, with almost more figures than text, was published by Dr. S. Klinger.* In the following paragraphs only some of the less specialized aspects of the scheme will be indicated. They are:

• (a) the tempo;
• (b) manufacture, not agriculture, as the basis of mass immigration economy;
• (c) the method of planning;
• (d) the financial scheme.

Twenty-one years ago, the criticism of Max Nordau's idea was based on the assumption that mass colonization "must" be a very slow process. This was then regarded as a "scientific" truth admitting of no exception. It can hardly be so regarded now, after all the experiences of the quick displacement of human masses since the Great War. The Greek exodus of 700,000, so often quoted, is not the only example: between 1919 and 1924, 2,450,000 persons in all changed places between the Balkans and Asia Minor, with results which neutral observers hold to be much more satisfactory than the position that existed before the

^* The Ten Year Plan for Palestine, New Zionist Press, London, 1938.

migration. Those masses were not only moved quickly—they were very quickly absorbed in their new countries' economy.

Yet even if we accepted 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, quite apart from the Settlement Country, will be many and far-reaching. The tension in East-Central Europe will immediately be reduced. Roughly, 300,000 Jews will be at once assisted to emigrate from Germany and Austria, 500,000 from Poland, and 100,000 each from Hungary and Roumania. Still more effectual 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 towards paralyzing racial strife. Weighed against this, all the hardships of an overcrowded Newland are a trifling matter, especially to people who, just recently, have known worse hardships.

This effect of the exodus on the inter-racial atmosphere in the Antisemitic Zone must be further strengthened and perpetuated by the rule that the best age for the First Million pioneers is the age of maximum fertility. Among the Jews of Eastern Europe this is, approximately, from twenty-five to forty for men, from twenty-three to thirty-seven 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 in their early maturity rather than in

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their early youth. People of this age are quite adaptable 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 disregarded: namely, the axiom that the basis of society is agriculture. That may be so, but it has no bearing on our mission. Here a different axiom dominates: the sinew of mass-migration economy, in our day, is industry. It is obvious that in a colonizing enterprise of such magnitude, especially when speed is imperative, agriculture, as an absorber of large immigrant masses, is of only secondary value. The economy of mass immigration depends, above all, on manufactures and house-building; in a much less degree, on trade and transport; and least of all, 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, yet in the beginning precedence will have to be given to industry, allowing agriculture to come last, and to grow slowly and conquer pride and place if it can.

This rule is of predominant importance to every aspect of our colonization.

It overrides the traditional attitude to soil and water. A flourishing 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 long distances or to sink reservoirs for rainwater deep enough to reduce evaporation: but what is too expensive for the slow conservative profits of cereal cultivation might prove worth while if it helps to produce manufactured goods.

Geographical planning—i.e. mapping out the sites on which the future centres of population shall be established—also becomes much easier. It need no longer, in a country with few perennial rivers, be subordinated to the results of slow and uncertain borings for underground water: the suitable sites can be chosen for reasons immediately visible—because they are near the coast, or because they are convenient as a marketing centre for a number of existing villages, or because there is a cross-roads, or a quarry near by. State-planning, when approached from this angle, becomes almost akin to town-planning: future cities can be rationally marked upon the empty map of the Statearea just as future green areas can be indicated on the uncompleted map of a projected town, and highways be traced with the same logical forethought as main streets.

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

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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 calculation, expressed schematically, is very simple. One million people will need a very large mass of non-agricultural and non-pastoral goods. Certain components 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 proportion of the whole must be provided by the First Settlement forces themselves. In other words, the scheme will be to let the First Million feed and clothe and house the First Million in the maximum measure of possibility.

This method of computing the First Settlement's economy will always retain very largely the nature of an abstract and schematic framework, and will have to be readjusted to realities. Nevertheless, the framework will prove most useful in helping to solve the fundamental problem of all new communities—"how will the people manage to live by taking in each other's washing?" All humanity lives by "taking in each other's washing," without any outside financial help, as there is no other planet able to supply such help. The Jewish settlement will have the advantage of considerable outside assistance, represented by the International Loan, and subsequently, by the yearly income nities. But the basis of its initial economy must be an of national funds raised among the Western commu-

attempt to approach as nearly as possible a provisional
"autarchy."

This indicates the character of the enterprises which should be started immediately: house-building, road-building, transportation, and all kinds of light industry to provide elementary consumers' goods—simple clothing, simple furniture, simple crockery and all other primary needs that can be satisfied "simply" by local effort.

A brief period will in practice elapse between the conclusion of the peace conference and the actual beginning of transportation: probably not less than a year. This period could be utilized to give the First Settlement candidates opportunities for rough training in the rudiments of those branches of labour (mainly industrial and building) in which they are likely to engage after arrival in the country. Their output will be very poor at first, and therefore uneconomical: but this, weighed in the proper balance, is a matter of little moment.

A very large international loan will have to be raised. The writer will not venture to guess how large it will have to be. In Dr. Klinger's outline, the total sum required for the settlement of the initial million is estimated at £47,500,000, including £18,000,000 of private investment by individual capitalists: but this estimate was made in January 1938, when conditions were very different from those that may be expected to exist at the end of the war. The amount which will be needed to finance all the aspects of the Max Nordau

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Plan will probably be much in excess of Dr. Klinger's estimate. How large a proportion of it will come from private investments will depend on whatever may then be left of the resources of the Jewish capitalist class, taken as a whole throughout the non-ruined areas of the Dispersion.

The international loan will have to finance the

following operations:

(a) Liquidation and transportation of the emigrants' property. Special organs will have to be established, probably banks, for granting the emigrant advances against any kind of property he may 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 own. The Settlement Country will need a commercial fleet both during and after the rush; and a new field of employment—manning the ships—will be opened to thousands of young Jews.

(c) The actual settlement: house-building for the initial camps and the new town sites; building of highways, aqueducts, storage tanks and all public works

in general.

• (d) Establishment of factories (as far as not provided for by private capital); but probably—unless Western Europe and America also are ruined—the bulk of this 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 most hard-boiled of business men as reasonably safe. The charge will, of course, be borne entirely by Jews, mainly by the new Settlement itself. Various collateral securities can be suggested: the one most obviously able to guarantee the regular service of this Public Debt will be the Customs revenue of the Settlement Country.

Another source may be discovered if the enemy countries, under the future peace treaty, are required 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 must not be pushed too far. Mr. Norman Angell has no doubt most convincingly proved that making the enemy pay for his conquerors' war losses is a transaction ruinous to those conquerors themselves. But damage inflicted by the enemy on private citizens in Poland, as well as in Germany and Austria itself, is quite a different matter. It will hardly be found unfair that the perpetrator of the damage done should at least have to accept a share of the Public Debt incurred to save his victims.

Yet another possible source of income for such payment would be the introduction of a special tax by the Western Jewish communities. The idea need not be regarded as startling. The right of compulsory self-taxation by religious communities was recognized in Germany and Austria when these countries were still perfectly respectable. West-European and American

Jews have always raised considerable funds for relief in Eastern Europe and for Palestine, and will no doubt continue to do so: but when it has to be done by propaganda, a large proportion of the sum collected is unavoidably swallowed up by the expenses of the campaign. It will be to everyone's advantage if all these rather troublesome and not always very elegant methods are replaced by honest, clean taxation. At the same time, if some part of that taxation could be earmarked for the service of the Jewish Settlement Debt, this would increase the impression of its stability, and would very favourably influence the conditions of the loan.

The technique of building a new country under such conditions is not a matter on which the layman can express an opinion. It will take many months of planning by specialists: but the whole framework of the plan ought to be completed, as far as possible, during the war. Only the finishing touches of the technical plan, the actual launching of the loan, and the appointment of those to be in charge of the work, should be left until after the peace conference.

One thing, however, can be foretold as regards the technical plan: it will probably deal with the First Million only (subsequent repatriations, being slower, will be more like an ordinary migration, needing perhaps no special planning); and there will be three stages to consider—the initial camping of the new-comers; the construction of the new centres—mostly

industrial centres—on the appointed sites; and the first production of goods.

The second step, to begin on the morrow of the first arrivals, will consist in building all those widely-distributed workshops which will play a twofold part: they will supply as much as possible of the First Million's needs, and employ all the First Million's breadwinners, probably some 600,000 in all. Some will be dispatched to build the highways, leading as yet from nowhere to nowhere, but the chief arteries of tomor-

row; some will be told off to lay water-pipes, dig cisterns and sink wells, before there is anyone near them to drink the water; some will have to put up corrugated iron sheds where later on machinery will be installed; some, but not so many, will be sent to plough and sow. There will be a section in the technical plan for the production of furniture: a million people will need a million chairs to sit on; that means so much horse-power and so many hands; the total might be so distributed as to form twelve factories in different localities. There will be another section for butchers, another for dentists, another for lorry-drivers, complete with numbers and places as in an army mobilization plan. One of the most fascinating features of human planning is that things never turn out just as they were planned; but if the plan is good its unforeseen modifications will always, in the end, prove to be still better

The third stage will be the actual beginning of production, the delivery, storage and sale of the goods, and the manifold individual activities which all this entails, and the sum of which constitute a nation's economy: in other words, the birth of the nation.

All this is how a layman imagines an achievement which the experts can formulate more clearly: but the thing envisaged by both will be the same splendid reality.

Now the pseudonym can be dropped, and we can return to Palestine as the only "area" in which this achievement is destined to be realized.

Palestine is a country which enjoys a tolerable climate, and presents a by no means exceptional mixture of natural advantages and still greater natural drawbacks. The absorptive capacity of such a country depends less on those natural features than on the kind of men who will inhabit it: on their intelligence, skill, endurance, will-power, resourcefulness, financial means, and international connections, making for financial aid and promoting trade.

^* Schechtmann, Transjordanien, Vienna, 1937, p. 171.

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1937, Mr. Ormsby Gore, the Colonial Secretary—afterwards Lord Harlech—disagreed with his own advisers. In an address to the Mandates Commission in Geneva, he was recklessly optimistic in respect of Transjordan, quoting the opinions of other experts. "One of our most experienced agricultural officers," he stated, "says he is confident 100,000 families could be settled in Transjordan alone" (Minutes of the 32nd Session, p. 22). As he spoke of settling Arabs, not Jews, in the country, and as the Government's idea of an average lot viable for an Arab family is 140 dunams,* this expert obviously implied that there are in Transjordan about 14 million cultivable dunams over and above any areas already exploited by the inhabitants. But the Woodhead Commission, which studied the question in 1938, did not confirm this expert's finding. . . .

The chief problem (from the standpoint of agriculture, but not from that of mass colonization) is water for irrigation. The Woodhead Commission's Report devotes a careful 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 says that "the Beersheba sub-district has an area nearly equal to 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, in order to investigate so vital a mat-

^* Woodhead (Report of the Palestine Partition Commission), 1938, p. 29: "The average for taxable crop land, 140 dunams."

ter, only sixteen borings all told have been made in this area, at a total cost of £60,000. The results have been "mostly disappointing." Perhaps: but that was no exhaustive survey. A government really concerned with constructive issues, especially when its treasury has for years shown a comfortable surplus of revenue over expenditure, ought to spend half a million pounds and make many hundreds of borings in an area so extensive and so important for the purposes of settlement.

The question of Palestine's agricultural possibilities still awaits a really serious survey; so far nothing has been done in that direction which would justify a final conclusion.

But agriculture, as we have seen, must not be regarded as the main basis of immigrant economy. For the past century and longer the growth of a country has no longer been dependent upon its agriculture. Countries with the greatest density of population show 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%. Western Palestine's total rural population today is about 650,000; by the standard of Germany this population, without any increase in the number of farmers, would form a sufficient agricultural basis for a total population of over 2,500,000; by the Dutch standard, for a total of 3,250,000; and by the English standard, for a total of 8,000,000 souls. These figures, of course, do not claim to be of serious

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value, but they certainly serve as a reminder that the absorptive capacity of a country as a whole has very little to do with the absorptive capacity of its farmland.

Palestine on both sides of the Jordan has an area of about 40,000 square miles. Its total population today, to the west and east of the river, is 1,600,000, Jews and Arabs together. At the density of France it could hold over 8 million inhabitants: and France's density of population is one of the lowest among the industrialized countries of Europe.

But even a high density means a large population only if the land is big enough. To absorb the Jewish exodus Palestine must inevitably include Transjordan. Western Palestine contains only 10,000 square miles, Transjordan 30,000. The population west of the Jordan is 1,300,000; but east of the river only 300,000.

We are discussing a matter of business in this book; eminently grave business, the business of the health and sanity of Europe and of all the world; and in this spirit will the question of Palestine be discussed at the peace conference. The area needed to save Europe's stepchildren must be large enough to house them. This is not a question of a spiritual centre, of a slightly enlarged and glorified 'varsity quadrangle where the Jews could parade 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 40,000 square miles, with an average density of 40, can be reasonably considered for the quick reception of several millions: but not an area which is only a quarter that size, with 130 inhabitants per square mile already on the spot.

All this is very palpably obvious, and any reticence

It is very 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 delusion has always affected the energy with which we and our friends have pressed for the opening up of Transjor-

dan, as though we feared to tread on delicate ground. But the ground is much less delicate here than in the first instance. Arab opposition to Jewish claims on Transjordan—once these claims are really pressed—will prove much weaker than that which we have encountered in the long-drawn battle for Western Palestine.

a word in that resolution to specify whether this means "withholding" the application of the provisions of the Mandate or only "postponing" it; and omissions in such cases always indicate that the legislator foresaw, and prepared for, the contingency that the measure might some day be revoked. 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 intention of the resolution was simply to "postpone" the application of the Mandate's Zionist clauses to Transjordan in view of "existing local conditions"; and what has been postponed can now be enacted without any breach of the Mandate.*

The real difficulty, of course, is not the "resolution" but the existence of a certain dynastic fact. It might seem rather embarrassing, in the middle of this twentieth century, that we should have to discuss dynastic facts of such an obviously artificial origin as though 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 refrained from discussing how a Max Nordau Plan could be fitted into the framework of an existing Mandate. Where there is goodwill, anything can be fitted into anything. What is perfectly clear to all concerned is that where the serious business of the world is to be done, artificial titles cannot stand in the way.

^* Schechtmann, Transjordanien, Vienna, 1937, p. 259.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE ARAB ANGLE-UNDRAMATIZED

The transformation of Palestine can be effected to the full without dislodging the Palestinian Arabs. All current affirmations to the contrary are utterly incorrect. A territory of over 100,000 square kilometres settled at the average density of France (87 inhabitants per square kilometre) 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 Arabs and Jews and Transjordanians and all, just over one million and a half inhabitants. There is margin enough left for Palestine to absorb the better part of East-Central Europe's ghetto—the better part of five million souls—without approaching even the moderate density of France. Unless the Arabs choose to go away of their own accord, there is no need for them to emigrate.

Another fallacy is the assertion that if the Arabs were in the minority in a State predominantly Jewish, they would be persecuted and oppressed. The last people to repeat this fallacy ought to be the authors of the 1939 White Paper. Since they assure us that the Jews, condemned to remain a one-to-two minority in

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Palestine, would not only not be oppressed but would even enjoy the delights of a Jewish National Home, what grounds have they for suggesting that it would be disastrous for the Arabs if the position were reversed? It would be much more logical for the authors of the White Paper to offer the Arab minority the same safeguards which they consider to be sufficient to ensure the welfare of a Jewish minority.

Belgium and Switzerland, the Germans all over the world. Their position depends on the régime. Under a decent régime a minority can live in reasonable contentment. The world has no right to assume that Jewish statesmanship is unable to create as decent a régime as that created by English, Canadian or Swiss statesmanship. After all, it is from Jewish sources that the world has learned how the "stranger within thy gates" should be treated.

There is only one circumstance in which it is a tragedy to constitute a minority: it is the case of the people which is only a minority, everywhere and always a minority, dispersed among alien races, with no corner of the earth to call its own, and no home in which to find refuge. Such is not the position of the Arabs, with four Arabian countries on the east of the Suez Canal, and five others west of Suez. Some of these lands are already independent, others are not so as yet; but in each of them there is no question of any but an Arab majority; each of them is already an Arab national homeland.

It would be an idle pastime, at this present stage, to devise draft constitutions for the Jewish Palestine of the future. But it may be that some people are genuinely worried as to what would happen to the rights of the Palestinian Arabs if the country became a Jewish State. The author can at least give them some idea of what Jews themselves intend to do in this respect when they are in the majority and when Palestine is a self-governing State. It may reassure such

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ity in a Jewish Palestine the maximum of the rights which they claimed but never obtained 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 Zionist Revisionism, Palestine can be promoted to independent Statehood only after the constitution of a Jewish majority. On the other hand, the Revisionists' idea of an independent Palestine was then (1934) a Dominion within the British Empire, as it still is to many among them.

1. CIVIC EQUALITY

• 1. Provided nothing be done to hinder any foreign Jew from repatriating to Palestine, and, by doing so, automatically becoming a Palestinian citizen, the principle of equal rights for all citizens of any race, creed, language or class shall be enacted without limitation throughout all sectors of the country's public life.
• 2. In every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice-versa.
• 3. Proportional sharing by Jews and Arabs both in the charges and in the benefits of the State shall be the rule with regard to Parliamentary elections, civil and military service, and budgetary grants.
• 4. 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.

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• 2. 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.
• 3. Both Hebrew and Arabic shall be used with equal legal effect in Parliament, in the Courts, in the schools and in general before any office or organ of the State, as well as in any school of whatever degree.
• 4. All offices of the State shall answer any applicant, orally and in writing, in the language of his application, whether Hebrew or Arabic.

2. CULTURAL AUTONOMY

1. The Jewish and the Arab ethno-communities* shall be recognized as autonomous public bodies of equal status before the law.

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.

• 2. The following matters shall be delegated by the State to each ethno-community with regard to its members:
     • (a) religion and personal status;
     • (b) education in all its branches and grades, especially in the compulsory elementary stages;
     • (c) public relief, including all forms of social assistance;

^* The word used in the original is the Hebrew equivalent of "nationalities." As in English the term denotes State allegiance rather than ethnical allegiance, the word is translated as above.

• (d) settlement of ordinary law cases arising out of the above-mentioned matters.
• 3. Each ethno-community shall elect its National Diet with the right to issue ordinances and levy taxes within the limits of its autonomy, and to appoint a national executive responsible before the Diet.
• 4. A permanent Minister of Cabinet rank, independent of all parties, shall represent each ethno-community in the country's government.

4. THE HOLY PLACES

• 1. The relevant areas within the Old City of Jerusalem, to be delimited under the authority of the League of Nations, shall enjoy the same measure of extra-territoriality as that universally recognized in the case of embassies.
• 2. Each of these areas shall constitute a municipality under a council appointed by agreement between the ecclesiastic authorities concerned.
• 3. A similar régime shall apply, mutatis mutandis, to other holy sites within the country.
• 4. Except in war, pilgrim permits of sufficient duration shall be 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 in due course repatriated, at the expense of the respective ecclesiastic authority.
• 5. A delegate of the League of Nations, with the status of Ambassador, shall be appointed to represent the interests concerned.

5. LAND

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

2. All the waste lands, as well as all lands inadequately cultivated in the opinion of the Court, shall be requisitioned (under fair compensation in the case of

the latter) to form the State's Land Reserve.

3. After improvement at the expense of the State, reclaimed areas of the Land Reserve shall be divided into allotments to be granted, at fair prices and easy terms of credit, to individual applicants and groups.

4. Allotments shall be distributed under the Land Court's supervision to Jewish and Arab applicants and groups indiscriminately.

5. 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 that land, no matter whether his own or supplied by supporters;
• (c) that he will work the land personally.

Whether the Arabs would find all this a sufficient inducement to remain in a Jewish country is another question. Even if they did not, the author would refuse to see a tragedy or a disaster in their willingness to emigrate. The Palestine Royal Commission did not shrink from the suggestion. Courage is infectious. Since we have this great moral authority for calmly

envisaging the exodus of 350,000 Arabs from one corner of Palestine, we need not regard the possible departure of 900,000 with dismay. The writer, as he has already said, cannot see any necessity for this exodus: it would even be undesirable from many points of view; but if it should appear that the Arabs would prefer to migrate, the prospect can be discussed without any pretence of concern.

result? Andivia has now a minority of 300,000 Hedulians, who are causing trouble. Perhaps, then, we had better annex the province to Hedulia? But then Hedulia will have a minority of 500,000 Andivians, with the same result. Majority rule is perhaps not such a perfect panacea, even where political parties are concerned, but in the case of nationalities the medicine simply does not work except as an irritant; and the alternative, minority rule, would be still worse. One really radical remedy would be the Graeco-Turkish precedent of 1923. The writer frankly doubts whether that would be feasible; at all events, other solutions—which cannot be examined here—might be given a trial. But theoretically the idea of redistributing minorities en masse is becoming more popular among "the best people," and there is no longer any taboo on the discussion of the subject.

There is, moreover, one great ethical difference between the case of Palestine and that of all the other poly-ethnical areas with regard to this particular question of allowing the minority to migrate. In all the other areas friction is caused by ambition: one section wishes to dominate, or so at least the weaker section fears. Such an ambition may be, or seem, justifiable or excusable, in the sense that it is an expression of inherited vitality, so strongly dynamic that only the most angelic self-restraint could keep it always on the leash: but even so it is, after all, only an ambition, not a real need; a healthy "appetite," not a "hunger." In Palestine any inconvenience to the native population from the influx of immigrants arises from the tragic

One thing seems certain: any Arab country which should find the courage and the acreage for inviting such an immigration of trekkers would reap enormous material advantages. It would immediately have unlimited sums of capital and the world's best experts at its disposal for the most ambitious schemes of land reclamation and irrigation. The Arab trekkers, moreover, would probably migrate with donkeyloads of pelf. All the problems connected with the evacuation of the European "zone" would become incomparably easier. Who knows?

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

CHAPTER XIX

"SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM"

S A matter of cold and objective justice, the first of all Jewish war demands ought to be addressed to the Jews themselves: the demand for a united front. This they ought to have formed—or at least, they ought to have set about forming it—long ago; but now, since the war, the eleventh hour has really struck.

A united front means, above all, one single agreed 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, repeated exactly the same demands; or on the contrary, it might prove to be much less impressive than irritating. But that does not really matter, as the theory is unreal: an agreed programme, if there is any sanity in the people, would mean a united representation before the Peace Conference.

Yet even this—a single Jewish delegation before the conference table—falls far short of our needs. The historical hour demands a Jewish delegation at the table of the Peace Conference. In the next chapter,

spokesmen of the Jewish Agency not only do not intend to resist such loss of "face," but will deliberately invite it. Its chief spokesman's recent statement in New York—obviously an agreed "programme" speech, for its gist is being echoed by other spokesmen elsewhere—is significant. His main point was: "Conservative estimates of the number of Jews that could be absorbed annually would confine themselves to the existing opportunities: they would not take into account larger territories, like the Negeb and other regions, where tens of thousands will no doubt some day live and prosper, or the new horizon that may be opened up by soil research and new discoveries of water. But even within the limits of such a purely pragmatic point of view, Palestine is capable of absorbing approximately 50,000 new immigrants a year for years to come."

This means bidding for certain failure. 50,000 a year (even to those who believe in the "pragmatic" reality of this figure) is, under the present circumstances, a candid admission that Zionism raises no claim to solve the tragedy. Arithmetically, at this rate it would take twenty years to save from hell even one single million; actually, there would be hardly any evacuation at all, for under the "selective" system of the Jewish Agency, the bulk of the emigrants would be green youths, so that the age classes of maximum fertility (approximately, in the "Zone," twenty-three to thirty-nine) would be left behind to replace the losses. Before a Peace Conference concerned—if at all—only with what can be done to evacuate the ruined Zone, this is an

attitude calculated to make a Zionist Palestine just one of the partial and inadequate remedies that may be proposed.

One of the most inadequate, in fact. Taken even as "group settlement"—in the sense of a settlement certified as capable of becoming an all-Jewish territory if it is successful—this programme is obviously insufficient. British Guiana and the Kimberleys are a mirage, but there at least the first five thousand settlers, if they managed to remain, would build up a purely Jewish province, with no neighbours to cause trouble. But it would take a long generation to transform even Western Palestine alone into a country with a Jewish majority at the rate of 50,000 immigrants a year; and in the meantime—well, every member of the Peace Conference will know what would have to be faced in the meantime. Given only such a patchwork remedy, admittedly one of the several on the market, Palestine is really not an attractive business proposition.

Especially as no one at the Peace Conference is likely to accept the figure of "50,000 a year." The statesmen around the conference table are not likely to forget that there has been prolonged and conspicuous disagreement on this point, to say nothing of a statement of policy by the Mandatory, making 50,000 the final total of all the immigrants whom Palestine will ever accept. In order to transform "50,000 in all" into "50,000 a year," the British, and especially the Arab opposition, would have to be beaten down; otherwise a "conservative estimate" of all that Palestine can offer is very little immigration, and the ever-

present threat of trouble. But British Guiana, San Domingo, the Kimberleys, Mindanao and all the rest, whether promising success or doubtful—whether future "territories" or areas of "infiltration," whether examples of big patchwork or small patchwork—have at least this one advantage: the good will of the respective governments, no immediate prospect of friction with the people of the country, and in some cases no such people at all...

Palestine as one of many palliatives has no chance at all of being preferred, or even of being seriously considered by the future Peace Conference. Of all possible stopgap propositions Palestine is, politically, the most difficult, hampered by obstacles which can be surmounted only at the cost of considerable daring. Of course, it is not impossible to overcome the Arab obstruction and Great Britain's reluctance, but to do so a decisive effort will be required. Efforts are made only when it is worth while making them: when the prize is great and unique, and not a mere pittance which can more easily be secured elsewhere.

Palestine as a war aims problem has no locus standiumless it can be presented as the full solution of the Jewish problem, the only practicable theatre for a Max Nordau plan, the only complete remedy for the European cancer. Only as such can the Palestine claim be defended before the councils of such a world as we shall find on the morrow of a great cataclysm, facing the necessity of tremendous solutions, with neither time nor patience for trifles and trimmings: only if it is urged as a scheme unique in its material

and humanitarian range, exclusive and intolerant of all rival schemes, and indeed dwarfing all its competitors, and making their promise 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 equality for those whom Eastern Europe will not release. The amalgam is indissoluble, for without the Jewish State the second demand is unreal. It is, in fact, not an amalgam but a bi-atomic entity. This oneness of the Jewish war demand must be recognized by the entire collective authority of world Jewry, and it must be presented at the world's board of settlement by a single Jewish embassy in the name of a single world-Jewish leadership.

The writer is not quite sure if the old debate, as to whether the Jews are a nation or just a religious community, is still proceeding, or whether it has been dropped. But even if there still are people who "feel" about it one way or another, that should have no bearing on the question of a headquarters. One may favour a world-organization for the whole of scattered Jewry without committing oneself to the view that Jewry is a nation in dispersion. Churches in dispersion can also unite oecumenically. The late Nathan Birnbaum, a very fertile and penetrating thinker, who—after many ideological peregrinations—finally became converted to the view that the core of Israel's identity was not nationhood but religion, fervently advocated

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the creation of a "world-Kehillah"—a universal congregation or synagogue, democratically elected throughout the globe, and "governing" in all matters of mutual assistance and mutual defence. This is not the author's conception, but it would be waste of time to argue the matter here. What is needed is the recognition of a paramount common interest and a single headquarters to defend it: "Senatus Populusque Judaeorum."

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self-sacrifice of the parties as a really united leadership is likely to result from the voluntary submission of the Central Committees.

This short paragraph is quite inadequate for the exposition of so vast a subject. The problem will prob-

"SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM"

ably 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-à-vis the Gentile world. We shall leave it at that, only remembering that there will be no chance even of voicing such a claim unless a single world-Jewish "government" be elected to voice it.

CHAPTER XX

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS

THE Jewish war demands are:

• (a) A Jewish army on the Allied fronts.
• (b) Recognition of a world-Jewish civil Authority, with a seat on all international organs dealing with migration or reconstruction problems, and on the future Peace Conference.
• (c) A Covenant on civic equality as a war aim of the Allies.
  • (d) The Jewish State as a war aim of the Allies.

(a) 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 "Judaeans" and a special badge (the seven-branched candlestick, familiarly described under canvas as the toasting-fork). Its full strength on the register at Hounslow was probably over 10,000, but only half that number could be trained in time to reach Palestine. Of these, about 1,300 came from the United Kingdom, 1,000 from the southern part of Palestine which Allenby had liberated a year before the final conquest, about 2,500 from the United States,

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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 out, and there still is no reason.

But this time the precedent will have to be extended 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 attain a strength of at least 100,000; and it must fight on all the Allied fronts to prove just what some people would prefer to forget—that this is the Jews' war as much as Britain's, France's and Poland's.

There is no need to remind the writer of the thousand and one 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 valueless. Unusual, yes; "impossible?"—nonsense! Any child knows that there are not enough Jewish generals, or even officers, and especially noncommissioned officers, to staff an army; at the outset a Jewish army will be fully Jewish only as to the rank and file. But that alone will be enough to bring in very large numbers and to inspire a great and high spirit. The only question is whether an additional 100,000 men (or probably many more) are needed in the field; and, if so, what will be the best way of obtaining the maximum number of recruits, and securing from them the maximum effort. And this settles the problem of the treasury. If 100,000 men, or more than that, are needed, they will have to

be equipped, fed and trained—just as in the case of Poles and Czechs—at the Allies' expense, and it will make very little difference in the cost if they are styled an army. Secondly, while it is true that there is no Jewish State as yet, it is not quite exact to say that there is no Jewish treasury. It certainly exists as a spiritual but by no means negligible power, serving myriads of people in a score of countries, feeding a rather magnificent galaxy of social, educational and colonizing enterprises throughout all the continents. The formation of a Jewish army will mobilize its resources to limits never before suspected. It may yet prove extremely helpful in other connections also, especially if, simultaneously with the raising of the Jewish army, an all-Jewish civilian authority is recognized.

Outside the Allied countries, and the countries held or paralyzed by the enemy (U.S.S.R. included), there are more than six million Jews today whose dominating preoccupation, without any fear of overstatement, can be described as looking for some way to help in the destruction of the common enemy. About 1,200,000 of these Jews are males between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. An especially interesting corner of the Jewish world is Palestine, whose male Jewish population of army age could of itself provide 100,000 men, a large proportion of whom are not only trained but fairly experienced in that old-fashioned kind of warfare which in the Middle East is not yet quite out of fashion. These are potential resources which it would be unwise to neglect, merely on numerical

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grounds, quite apart from their value as a moral factor in the war.

are such obstinate relapses into peace talk, even from those neutrals whose wish to see Nazism crushed is every whit as ardent as our own: the quantitative pettiness of the incidents of this war, so strikingly out of keeping with the monstrous forces and the almost cosmic issues involved, saps their morale. There are, no doubt, very serious material reasons why this form of warfare has been allowed to predominate in the first stage of the conflict, and it certainly has been a godsend as permitting the accumulation of greater resources; but it cannot be permitted to continue longer than is strictly necessary and profitable.

These are doubtless very cruel thoughts, but they are consistent with human nature, and are probably shared, at the moment, by most of the peoples intimately affected. But even while the need for such monotonous warfare continues, its bromidic effect on the morale of the non-belligerent nations could be considerably counterbalanced if six million souls living in their midst had a concrete stake in the arena, instead of being concerned merely in the passive sense, as victims

The writer does not by any means forget the various laws affecting neutrality. These laws exist, and they must be taken into account and treated with the utmost discretion. Yet we know by experience that the network of "don'ts" which these laws represent is both extremely sensitive and extremely elastic. Sweden and Italy are not belligerents, but a nucleus of Swedes or Italians with an active interest in the Mannerheim line can be imagined as existing in either

But the most serious argument in favour of a Jewish army as preferable to Jewish units under other flags is that of numbers and élan. The author, for more than twenty-five years, has been obstinately engaged in fostering what some have been pleased to describe as Jewish militarism, and has thus been in close contact with the type of Jewish youth whose mentality responds to the appeal of the bugle (and today this

covers practically the whole young manhood of the race): and he can affirm, with the completest confidence, that while a call to join Jewish regiments under an Allied flag would attract thousands, whole over-crowded streets would be emptied in the rush for a Jewish army.

(b) THE "CIVIL HEADQUARTERS"

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would vitiate the very air we breathe. A statehood recognized by the comity of civilized nations cannot cease to be; it survives.

No analogy need be perfect in all details. Fortunately for the Polish nation and the Czech, their lot is lighter than that of the Jews: they inhabit the territory for whose freedom they are fighting 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. And when a list of destroyed nations waiting for restoration has been officially drawn up, the homeless section of the Jewish people has a fair claim to a place on that list.

With regard to the Polish claim, its recognition is expressed in the title "the Polish Government." With regard to Czechoslovakia, the official title is "the National Committee." It does not matter what term is selected to describe the idea of Senatus Populusque Judaeorum. What does matter is the fact that there is a problem of immense importance to the world's health and peace, clearly distinct from all other problems, a problem which means literally life or death to five or six million people, and affects the fate of sixteen millions; that these men and women are just as anxious to help in solving their problem as any normal nation can be; and that they possess a total sum of moral and material power that can go a long way towards that solution, and ought to be given a chance to do so. All this constitutes, in its essential character and its magnitude, exactly what the dictionary calls a "nation," with "national" tasks before it. If other

nations want to help, they must begin by inviting that Jewish entity to take a seat in the council chamber, to discuss aims and ways and means. This is the only meaning of "a Jewish government" with which we are concerned at the moment: a "headquarters," a "leadership," an "executive," a "presidency," an "authority" entitled to negotiate and to co-operate, not as petitioner but as partner.

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$\left( c\right)$ the covenant of equality

Should the Jewish problem, by some miracle, entirely disappear from the face of Europe, it would 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 could be efficiently "guaranteed" anywhere, simply by mention in a legal document. There still

are statesmen who pretend to believe this. Yet no sane adult can really share such optimism so far as Eastern or Central Europe is concerned. That zone is not among the areas where the miracle can be performed, unless it can be enforced by some ever-present and tangible reminder of supreme compulsion.

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And the writer believes that among those "internal" matters that have a direct and tangible bearing on the danger of war, the treatment of ethnical or religious minorities is among the most important. A hundred years of European history have proved this. No claim of sovereignty can be allowed to protect a breach of the covenant of equality; any step in that direction is equivalent to laying a train of gunpowder; the machin-

ery of compulsion must be set in motion, and the culprit knocked out.

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

"Solemn" means that there should be no interpolation of equal rights "clauses" or "paragraphs" in treaties dealing with other matters. None of those other matters can have one-tenth of the awful toxic power of the minorities problem; no chapter dealing with the former can possess one-tenth of the vast prophylactic importance of provisions affecting the latter. Nor is there, among all the problems of international or "internal" statecraft, any problem so complicated, any that requires such attention to detail and such penetrating foresight as this. A special session of the Peace Conference should be entirely devoted to this one problem: and there should be a separate Covenant of Equality.

But the Covenant must also be "reasonable." A law is unreasonable if it prescribes things which ordinary human nature cannot tolerate, or disregards conditions which, despite the best average will of the average obedient citizen, will render it exceedingly difficult for him to obey. Equality cannot be enforced where, by the nature of things, it is bound to degenerate into its opposite. Let us take an imaginary illustration: the case of Ruritania. The country is inhabited by two races. The Broadheads, the majority race, are decent people, but slow-witted; the Longheads, in a 20%

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A reasonable Covenant will take this into account. "Equal opportunity and the best man wins" does not cover the whole problem of equal rights; it has perhaps even very little to do with the real essence of that problem. Jockeys, to be really equal to one another in a race, are weighed and weighted; golfers are given varying handicaps. A Covenant of equality must ensure that, while the twenty Longheads get their full twenty loaves—and not nineteen—the eighty Broadheads get their eighty rations, and not seventy-nine.

work the miracle and produce such a state of affairs as will effectually prevent friction, is a query which only the future can answer. Some people doubt it, and believe that the only real 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 minorities. This may be an exaggeration. There are minorities which, though cut off from their ethnical mainland, still form mono-ethnical "islands" or enclaves, or at least villages of their own, so that it is, so to speak, only on market-day that they have to rub shoulders with the majority people. Or there may be cases where both races are more or less congenial, and "good mixers" mutually, so that if left alone and given time they might be encouraged to intermarry, or simply to forget the insignificant difference. The Covenant must foresee all that can be foreseen: time alone will show if the problem can be solved.

But the Covenant must be reasonable, 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 session of the Peace Conference, establish the Jewish State.

(d) THE STATE

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

The Jewish State is a true and proper war aim. Without it, the ulcer that poisons Europe's health

cannot be healed: for without it there can be no adequate emigration of the millions whose old homes are irretrievably condemned; without it there can be no equality; and without this, no peace.

There must be an organ of international authority to devote 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 Committee on Refugees, it must be rebuilt and reinforced in agreement with Jewish authorities, and instructed to abandon the prescription of partial remedies and concentrate on the problem of the Jewish State.

There can be no preliminary limitations as to the various geographical projects which this body may have to examine before it makes its choice. It must be instructed to investigate any plan which presents, prima facie, the essential features of a serious solution: if necessary, it must consider every province of what we have called the Fata Morgana Land. But the first item on its agenda must be the examination of the Palestine plan. This is a fair proposal, which excludes nothing except any attempt to steal a march in either direction

It will be for the Jews to prove what is, after all, not difficult to prove: that the Palestine plan with all its drawbacks, is—apart from all other considerations—the only one that is practicable.

CONCLUSION

By Col. John Henry Patterson, D.S.O.

T WAS my privilege to enjoy the friendship and confidence of Vladimir Jabotinsky for a quarter of a century. I watched him in the forefront of the battle, valiantly helping to drive the Turks out of Palestine. I listened to his powerful plea on behalf of his people before the Peel Commission in the House of Lords in London. I closely followed his heartbreaking efforts during all the years when he worked and gave every ounce of his strength in selfless, unremitting toil for the emancipation of the Jewish masses in Eastern Europe.

Throughout the whole of this period, in spite of countless rebuffs and bitter disappointments, caused by the failure of the anti-Jewish clique in the British Government to carry out England's promises, Jabotinsky never lost confidence in the British people's sense of righteousness and justice. Jabotinsky, great-hearted and fair-minded, never doubted that, once the true facts of the Jewish case were brought home to them, the British people would resent any breach of faith on the part of their Government, and would demand that England's solemn pledge to the Jewish people be fulfilled.

I always shared, and still share, Jabotinsky's belief in the justice of the British people. It would be sheer hypocrisy on the part of England to proclaim that she is fighting a war to uphold liberty, democracy and the sanctity of the pledged word, if at the same time she repudiates her own solemn promise.

Any such betrayal by England would leave millions of homeless and persecuted people shut out from their rightful place in the brotherhood of nations.

The Jewish people—and, for that matter, the true England—are under a heavy debt to Vladimir Jabotinsky, undaunted and gallant fighter for justice and right. At this vital moment in Jewish history, when all Jewry is tossing on a stormy sea, Jabotinsky's prophetic courage is sadly missing. Much that he thought and felt about the present situation is contained in this book, The Jewish War Front, written in 1939, and yet fully aware of the development and implications of this world struggle.

Had he been spared, his steadfastness and political acumen would have led his people in this supreme opportunity to gain for themselves a strong nationhood in Palestine.

But it was not to be.

Let his prophetic words, speaking clearly through the pages of this book, be read by many thousands.

May this book awaken the Jewish people, that they may close their ranks and, uniting as one people, make Jabotinsky's battle cry their own.

Eretz Israel for the Children of Israel!