BOOKS.

TWO BOOKS ON ZIONISM.* IN order to show that we are not exaggerating in what we have said in our leading article on " Problems of Zion " in respect of Mr. Zangwill's claim that the Jews have a right to supersede the Arabs in Palestine we have only to quote the following passages from his essay, The Voice of Jerusalem. Take, for example, the following outburst of fierce cynicism in which Mr. Zangwill describes the situation at the moment :- " In this tug of war between the Christian Powers, with the Arab pulling in a third direction, there is obviously scant chance of a real Jewish Palestine. To produce that out of the con- flicting ingredients is a task not for a statesman but a conjurer. Sir Herbert Samuel has no such thaumaturgic talent ; he is a conscientious British official whom even his love for his people and the gracious Zionist romance in his own family cannot bias. The interest of England in getting her new possession developed by Jewish capital and industry is out- weighed if the Arabs are antagonized too deeply, and since moreover the Jews are the Uriah Heeps and not the Oliver Twists of politics, England may safely ride roughshod over them. In placing all their hopes on a peaceful penetration, and in pretending that the Arabs can be safely submerged, the Zionists have presumed to know better than Jehovah, who protested : ` But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you ; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them shall be pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.' Is such a home worth having ? "

An equally significant and impressive passage is the following quotation from an article which Mr. Zangwill contributed to an

American journal entitled " Asia " :- " But a Hebrew Palestine, if it is to exist at all, must be a reality, not a sham. Such interpretations as have hitherto been vouchsafed us of the vaunted British Declaration scarcely seem serious. The ' Jewish National Home ' is to be a British Crown Colony with a predominantly Arab population, even if a French Syria does not lop off a considerable slice from its

10,000 square miles. The power in every country,

meagre tells us in his Autobiography, always resides in the landowning classes. Yet over 30,000 Arab landlords and some 600,000 fellahin are to continue in possession of the bulk (1) The New Jerusalem. By G. K. Chesterton. London : Hodder and Stoughton. [12s. 6d. net.]—(2) The Voice of Jorusakno. By Israel 7.angwill. London: Heinemann. [15s. net.) of the Holy soil. Moreover, Bethlehem and perhaps other places are to be too sacred for Jewish hands. Nor may we guard the shrines entrusted for so many centuries to the Turk, although there is no monument in Palestine, whether Christian, Jewish or Mohammedan, which is not a. memorial to Jewish genius and saintliness. While the Czecho-Slovaks and the Jugo-Slays and still other peoples scarcely known to history are to flourish on their own soil with all the apparatus of sovereignty, the greatest and longest-martyred of all the op- pressed peoples—a people which has supplied no small pro- portion of the outstanding figures of the world-crisis, and in whose literature this whole new era finds its inspiration— is to crawl into a corner of its own land like a leper colony, warned to keep off this and to keep off that, or to keep away from this Jew and to keep away from that Jew, and repeating on its own soil the humiliations and subservience of its 2,000 years of agony and ignominy. . . . One would have thought that this war was a sufficient object-lesson in the rankling poisons of race-hatred generated between peoples pent in the same territory. No, the Jews must possess Palestine as the Arabs are to possess Arabia or the Poles Poland. Otherwise, while not abandoning the existing Hebrew Colonies nor neglecting Palestine as an immigration area, Israel must look, like Jochanan ben Zakkai, for other means of continuing his chosen mission."

To show that all this is practical and not rhetorical we note that Mr. Zangwill reproves the Arab for his agriculture, or rather want of it, and says he has never made proper use of the

country in which he lives. It is at best an Arab encampment. Finally comes a passage which we are bound to say would fill us with forebodings if we were Arabs :-

" If, however, the Arabs will not, as Longfellow taught us to expect, fold their tents and silently steal away, if they elect to remain in Palestine, then, as I have emphasized in my speeches, ` their welfare must be as dear to us as our own.' But even so, painful though the necessity be, they should come at once under a Jewish Government, and Sir Herbert Samuel should represent the Zionists rather than the British Foreign Office ; the small but expansible Jewish force being backed up. by Britain or the Allies, exactly as Poland or Czecho-Slovakia has been backed up."

Lest his meaning should be in the least obscure, Mr. Zangwill, with a courage which we cannot but admire, boldly says that he

is for minority rule. He speaks of standing alone " in the wild contention that there are occasions when a minority has a right to govern a majority : a phenomenon apparently unknown even in India or South Africa."

Of course, it is possible that all this ought to be marked

" Wrote ironic," just as Artemus Ward used to mark passages in his work " Wrote sarcastic." It is just to say, however,

that there are plenty of other passages in Mr. Zangwill's book that force us to the conclusion that he means what he says and is not engaged in the weaving of any verbal subtlety. But here,

in fairness, we ought to add that Mr. Zangwill's fierceness

is often mingled with plenty of general assurances that if tho Arabs will not go voluntarily, or if for any other reason the Jews are not allowed to make good that right of extrusion to which he holds they have a complete moral claim, then the Jews will of course treat the Arabs and the rest of the non-Jewish population in Palestine quite fairly and indeed generously.

They must, however, rule as we rule in East Africa or Nigerit, and there must be no nonsense about self-determination by the majority. It must be minority rule till the Jews can make themselves into a majority.

It is difficult to read Mr. Zangwill's fiery words without the thought of how great an interpreter of Jews as well as of all human nature Shakespeare was when he made the character of his Jew of Venice centre in the thought of his absolute and

indefeasible right to the pound of flesh. Was it this literalness, this sense of law untempered by equity, this determination never to compromise, this dead certainty that you cannot be mistaken, that throughout the ages has been the cause of Jewish unpopularity ?

Though the temptation to quote further from Mr. Zangwill's

sincere if violent book is very great, we must be content to leave it to our readers, and must deal with Mr. Chesterton's volume. We spoke on a recent occasion of the Nemesis of Pretence as

regards Ireland. Mr. Chesterton shows us the Nemesis which comes from pretending that Jews are not Jews :—

" For years we were told that Jews were a sort of Englishmen because they were British subjects. It is all the worse for us now we have to regard them, not subjectively as subjects, but objectively as objects ; as objects of a fierce hatred among the Moslems and the Greeks. We are in the absurd position of introducing to these people a new friend whom they instantly recognize as an old enemy. It is an absurd position because it is a false position ; but it is merely the penalty of falsehood. Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be dig. cussed in a moment ; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger but the astonishment ; at least it is our astonishment at their astonishment. We might believe ourselves in the view that a Jew is an Englishman ; but there was no reason why they should regard him as an Englishman, since they already recognized him as a Jew. This is the whole present problem of the Jew in Palestine ; and it must be solved either by the logic of Zionism or the logic of purely English supremacy and im- partiality ; and not by what seems to everybody in Palestine a monstrous muddle of the two. But of course it is not only the peril in Palestine that has made the realization of the Jewish problem, which once suffered all the dangers of a fad, suffer the opposite dangers of a fashion. The same journalists who politely describe Jews as Russians are now very impolitely describing certain Russians who are Jews. Many who had no particular objection to Jews as Capitalists have a very great objection to them as Bolshevists. Those who had an innocent unconsciousness of the nationality of Eckstein, even when he called himself Eckstein, have managed to discover the nation- ality of Braunstein, even when he calls himself Trotsky. And much of this peril also might easily have been lessened, by the simple proposal to call men and things by their own names."

We cannot quote more from Mr. Chesterton's book, but we may remark that though he does not actually say so, he in effect holds opinions which we hold and which have often been set f rth in these columns. The trouble about the Jew is that he does not seem to realize the immense importance which English- men instinctively attach, and as we hold rightly attach, to the homogeneity of a nation. The more homogeneous a nation the safer and sounder it is. This does not mean that we want to kill, persecute, or expel those who cannot accept homogeneity as their ]deal. We would say, however, that people like the Jews, who are wrapped up in exclusiveness, spiritual and physical, cannot be regarded as full citizens. While they remain Jews first and Englishmen after, they cannot, ho,wever good Englishmen they may be in fact, claim to be yeti socii—the highest type of those who constitute the community.

The situation in which we find ourselves in Palestine is one which must cause extreme anxiety to all patriotic English. men, and to all who want to see our good name and good faith maintained. We have drifted into a position which nobody fully understands, but which at any moment may bring us into world-wide odium and create not stage enemies, but real enemies for this country throughout the habitable globe. Wherever there is a Jew there will soon, we fear, be a fierce hater of the British race and Empire. The Jew is a dangerous man when persecuted. He is an even more dangerous man when he holds himself to have been deceived, just because it is so exceedingly difficult to take him in. But if after trusting you he thinks you have taken advantage of him, whether his view is well founded or not, you have made a desperate foe.

At present the British Government, without meaning it, are taking in the Jews throughout the world. They have given them what the Jews think is a pledge to establish a Jewish national home. It is true that they put in a limiting condition and that this condition has proved to be incapable of being carried out, but the Jews are in a rapid process of forgetting about it. Depend upon it, like all people who have had their hopes shattered, the Jews will think that they have been deceived by us rather than by their own hastiness.

Therefore the time has come, and more than come, when, however disagreeable the task, we must explain to the Jews that it is not possible to give them a national home in the sense that we hoped was possible.