undreds.
But yet in much more subtle and more dangerous ways we are making
that very mistake. We are transferring the fictions and even the
hypocrisies of our own insular institutions from a place where they
can be tolerated to a place where they will be torn in pieces.
I have confined myself hitherto to descriptions and not to criticisms,
to stating the elements of the problem rather than attempting
as yet to solve it; because I think the danger is rather that we
shall underrate the difficulties than overdo the description;
that we shall too easily deny the problem rather than that we shall
too severely criticise the solution. But I would conclude this chapter
with one practical criticism which seems to me to follow directly
from all that is said here of our legal fictions and local anomalies.
One thing at least has been done by our own Government, which is entirely
according to the ritual or routine of our own Parliament. It is a
parliament of Pooh Bah, where anybody may be Lord High Everything Else.
It is a parliament of Alice in Wonderland, where the name of a thing is
different from what it is called, and even from what its name is called.
It is death and destruction to send out these fictions into a
foreign daylight, where they will be seen as things and not theories.
And knowing all this, I cannot conceive the reason, or even
the meaning, of sending out Sir Herbert Samuel as the British
representative in Palestine.

I have heard it supported as an interesting experiment in Zionism.
I have heard it denounced as a craven concession to Zionism.
I think it is quite obviously a flat and violent contradiction
to Zionism. Zionism, as I have always understood it, and indeed
as I have always defended it, consists in maintaining that it
would be better for all parties if Israel had the dignity
and distinctive responsibility of a separate nation; and that
this should be effected, if possible, or so far as possible,
by giving the Jews a national home, preferably in Palestine.
But where is Sir Herbert Samuel's national home? If it is in
Palestine he cannot go there as a representative of England.
If it is in England, he is so far a living proof that a Jew does
not need a national home in Palestine. If there is any point
in the Zionist argument at all, you have chosen precisely the wrong
man and sent him to precisely the wrong country. You have asserted
not the independence but the dependence of Israel, and yet you ha