LII. How the Jews Use Power—By an Eyewitness

“It is too soon to judge the future of the Zionist experiment in Palestine. If the English authorities will give fair play to all, and if the Jews will pursue the old policy of the Alliance Israelite and its schools of seeking to benefit all dwellers of the land alike, to break down, not to build up, religious, racial and social prejudices, then the Jew may perhaps overcome the present prejudice against him, and his invasion of Palestine may prove to be a blessing both to himself and to the land. The methods of those in control of the Zionist movement in Palestine while I was there were, however, aimed in the opposite direction and tended to make the Jew an object of hatred and violence wherever the opportunity for violence offered. This has been illustrated again by the recent bloody riot in Jaffa which compelled the expedition of a British warship to that port; and the order issued holding up all immigration shows that not Jaffa only but the whole country is unsafe. The Jews in Palestine are now protected only by force of British arms. Were the British troops withdrawn, the Jews would be exterminated by the angry natives, of whom the Moslems alone outnumber them in the ratio of more than ten to one; and with such action the neighboring countries would sympathize, yielding ready assistance if any were required. Mesopotamia and Egypt are seething with disaffection against British rule, and racial-religious ferment, and Palestine is to them and to the Arabs of Arabia a holy land included in the heritage of Islam. Moslem India also feels this keenly, and the British have been obliged to withdraw Moslem Indian troops from Palestine, because they will not fight fellow-Moslems.