erful Western influence, French, English, and German alike, they
improved out of knowledge the values of the lands where they established
themselves, and by intelligent management, by conserving and increasing
the water supply with irrigation and well-digging, they have brought
many thousand acres into cultivation. Originally refugees, fleeing from
outrageous persecutions, their immigration by degrees took on a
different spirit. Not only were they coming out of captivity, but they
were entering into the ancient Land of Promise again. Zionism, the
spirit of the returning exiles, animated them, and, according to their
prophets, they realised that 'The Lord shall comfort Zion, He shall
comfort all her waste places.' They had sowed in tears; now, on their
return, they were reaping in joy, and, though their land was still
under the infidel yoke, they were allowed to dwell in peace, busy,
industrious, with the halo of home-coming in their hearts. They paid, of
course, their Turkish taxes, but these were not levied in any oppressive
manner, and their colonies were thrifty, self-governing, and prosperous.
Already before the war, one-tenth of the cultivated land in Palestine
was in their hands, they had their own schools, their own methods of
organisation, and, more significant than all, Hebrew became a living
language again. Germany, intent on her penetration of Turkey, made an
attempt to Germanise them also (for Germany, as we shall see, has a very
special interest in these Jewish colonies), shook her head over Zionism,
for which she tried to substitute Prussianism, and wanted to make the
German language compulsory in Jewish schools at Haifa and Jaffa, but her
effort completely failed. Nothing could show the inherent vitality of
this Jewish colonisation more strikingly.

These Jewish settlers then were left in peace; from minuteness they
escaped the notice of the Young Turk party in its schemes for the
complete Ottomanisation of the Empire, and, until the present year 1917,
no mention of 'the Jewish question' was propounded. But it will he
remembered that in 1915, certain Jewish refugees, taking warning from
the Armenian massacres, fled to Egypt, and there founded a Zionist
mule-corps, which served under the English in the Gallipoli campaign. It
seems very probable that it was this that directed the attention of
Jemal the Great to the Jewish colonies in Palestine: possibly it was
merely that he was a more thorough Ottomaniser t