ve
ratified the worst insinuations about the dependence of Christendom.
In reason you could not more strongly state that Palestine does not
belong to the Jews, than by sending a Jew to claim it for the English.
And yet in practice, of course, all the Anti-Semites will say he is
claiming it for the Jews. You combine all possible disadvantages
of all possible courses of action; you run all the risks of the hard
Zionist adventure, while actually denying the high Zionist ideal.
You make a Jew admit he is not a Jew but an Englishman; even while you
allow all his enemies to revile him because he is not an Englishman
but a Jew.

Now this sort of confusion or compromise is as local as a London fog.
A London fog is tolerable in London, indeed I think it is very
enjoyable in London. There is a beauty in that brown twilight
as well as in the clear skies of the Orient and the South.
But it is simply horribly dangerous for a Londoner to carry
his cloud of fog about with him, in the crystalline air about
the crags of Zion, or under the terrible stars of the desert.
There men see differences with almost unnatural clearness,
and call things by savagely simple names. We in England may
consider all sorts of aspects of a man like Sir Herbert Samuel;
we may consider him as a Liberal, or a friend of the Fabian Socialists,
or a cadet of one of the great financial houses, or a Member of
Parliament who is supposed to represent certain miners in Yorkshire,
or in twenty other more or less impersonal ways. But the people
in Palestine will see only one aspect, and it will be a very personal
aspect indeed. For the enthusiastic Moslems he will simply be a Jew;
for the enthusiastic Zionists he will not really be a Zionist.
For them he will always be the type of Jew who would be willing
to remain in London, and who is ready to represent Westminster.
Meanwhile, for the masses of Moslems and Christians, he will
only be the aggravation in practice of the very thing of which
he is the denial in theory. He will not mean that Palestine
is not surrendered to the Jews, but only that England is.
Now I have nothing as yet to do with the truth of that suggestion;
I merely give it as an example of the violent and unexpected
reactions we shall produce if we thrust our own unrealities amid
the red-hot realities of the Near East; it is like pushing a snow man
into a furnace. I have no objection to a snow man as a part of our
own Christmas festivities; inde