The War And The Jew

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THE WAR AND THE JEW

THIS book will compel the attention ot

the war-ridden world. Its analysis of the
Jewish problem tears down the shams and
ignorance which have been built up
around it. The solution of the Jewish
problem is vital not only to the Jewish
people but to the health of the world.
Jabotinsky's proposals for the new world
after the war are not only the demands of
a Jewish patriot- they are the essence of
bold statesmanship, and constitute a
challenge to which the civilized world
must reply.

Vladimir Jabotlnsky, one of the best-
known figures in the Jewish world, fought
for the rights of the Jewish people for
nearly forty years. In World War I he
struggled against enormous odds for the
creation of the Jewish Legion which ulti-
mately participated in Allenby's Palestine
campaign. A brilliant orator, soldier, poet
and writer, he devoted his life to the re-

THE

AND THE JEW

BY

VLADIMIR JABOTINSKY

WITH

A Foreword by PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

AND
A Conclusion by COL. JOHN HENRY PATTERSON, D.S.O.

NEW YORK

THE DIAL PRESS

BURTON C. HOFFMAN

COPYRIGHT 1942 BY

JEANNE JABOTINSKY

All rights reserved no part of this book maybe reproduced
in any form without permission in writing from the pub-
lisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief
passages in connection with a review written for inclusion
in magazine or newspaper.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY RVTTLE, SHAW & WETHERILL, INC., PHILA,, PA.

CONTENTS

AS i REMEMBER HIM by Pierre van Paassen 7

Parti IS IT A WAR AIM?

I. INTRODUCTORY 25

II. NOT ON THE MAP 3!

m. THE MONSTER'S FOOD 42

iv. THE "ANTISEMITISM OF MEN" 53

Part II THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

V. THE HUNTING-GROUND 65

VI. THE ANTISEMITISM OF "MEN" AND "THINGS" 69

VII. THE POLISH GHETTO 80

VIII. FREEDOM FOR BOTH 96

IX. THE WAR AND THE JEW 1O2

5

T>/ QNTENTS

* **' *

r : fart III THE STATE EXODUS

X. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS 111

XL EVACUATING A RUIN 12J

XII. EVIAN 134

XIII. TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE 146

XIV. THE FATA MORGANA LAND 1 58

Part IV THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR
PALESTINE

XV. THE WHITE PAPER POLICY 1 69

XVI. THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE 1 8l

XVII. THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 190

XVIIL THE ARAB ANGLE UNDRAMATIZED 21 1

xix, "SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM" 223

XX. THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 2 34

CONCLUSION by Col. John Hemy Patterson, D.S.O. 251

AS I REMEMBER HIM

By PIERRE VAN PAASSEN

Ecce Homo!

Ja, icli weiss woher ich stamrne!
Ungesattigt glcich der Flammc
Gliihe und verzeh' icli mich,
Licht wird alles, was icli fasse,
Kohle alles was ich lasse:
Flamme bin ich sicherlich!

Nietzsche

HE WAS saying that even as the Roman Empire
ceased to exist not, to be sure., in the fifth cen-
tury of the Common Era, as the date-loaded school his-
tory books would have it, but right in the first year of
the first century, even so France, Germany and Britain
must des mamtenant be considered as very far ad-
vanced on the road to disintegration. ... It is some-
times pathetic, he went on, to hear politicians, states-
men and editorialists warn the nations that a great
danger has come to threaten them all since Germany
broke from her moorings and started on the rampage
once more, as if the danger were but a thing of yes-
terday, coincidental in genesis for instance with Hit-
ler's rise to power or with the shackling of the Reich
in the chains of Versailles. I do by no means wish to
minimize the threat of Nazism, he said, looking up,

7

8 AS I REMEMBER HIM

but I also believe that the hour of decision for our
civilization struck long ago.

With the rise of Hitler the crisis in human affairs
grew infinitely more acute. It was really the agony that
set in. But you must go back nearly a century to find
the more or less exact moment when the process of
dissolution itself began. The first alarming symptom
perhaps was the Franco-Prussian War. What followed
thereafter: the financial panics, the ever-recurrent busi-
ness depressions, the wars, the revolutionary upheavals,
all that was consecutive: ineluctable and logical se-
quence in the operation of the law of cause and
effect. ...

With the immediate, rapidly changing scene before
our eyes and the ground whereon we stand trembling
under our feet, he resumed after a short silence, our
attention is riveted on the petty affairs of the day, on
our personal, group or national interests and we are apt
to lose sight of the fact that civilizations, like all living
things, are born and die, sometimes never even reach
their maturity. It is a cycle everlastingly being devel-
oped and consummated. Like living organisms, civili-
zations eliminate their wornout and dead particles by
degrees, and assimilate others derived from their sur-
roundings which renew their flesh and blood until the
day when their powers of adaptation relax and finally
stop altogether. Then comes death because they no
longer nourish life. But the dying process, the agony
may be quite long. It may take as long as the life-span
of one or even more generations. . . .
And then, suddenly, dropping his chin on his breast

AS I REMEMBER HIM 9

and speaking in a voice of plaintive sadness in which
there crept a note both of disillusion and bitterness,
Jabotinsky sighed: "It is the tragedy of the men of my
generation to have lived in a dying era. To me person-
ally this knowledge has the last few years deepened
my ever-present sense of exile/'

It was in New York, on the evening of one of those
sultry, sweltering days in midsummer of 1940 that we
walked for the last time and sat on the green in Cen-
tral Park till the city grew hushed with the coming
of dawn.

He looked pale and worn, the Rosh Betar, after
weeks and weeks on end of writing and conferences
and discussions with journalists and politicians and
disciples, always planning, always thinking of some
new venture, some new approach to the old problem
of Jewish national emancipation. I had to tear him
away, literally, from the clutches of some devoted
chassidim who were gathered in the humble apart-
inent which he occupied during the last few months
of his life near the Park.

Once outside, however, in the open air, his cares
and worries seemed to leave him. He was as cheerful
as I had seldom seen him. His step was brisk and
light and he laughed heartily at the pranks of some
colored children who were playing with a dog on the
greensward.

That night after dinner he talked uninterruptedly,
not in a vainglorious display of his almost encyclo-
pedic knowledge and quiet wisdom or because he was

1O AS I REMEMBER HIM

of a garrulous nature. He merely felt released from
his most pressing cares for the moment. The breadth
of his spirit took a wider sway in the freedom of the
trees and meadows.

And of what did he not talk? Of the need not to
confuse the historical moment with the trend of his-
tory, the phase with the permanent Weltgefiihl; of
the campaign on the Jordan where the valley burned
like a fiery furnace when he led his men of the Jew-
ish legion to victory against the Turks; of the neo-
pagan movement in the days of the Borgias and of
the Italian Renaissance as proto-typical of the present-
day Hauser school in Germany; of his last-minute,
futile intervention with Malcolm MacDonald, the
son of Ramsay, "a ridiculously pedantic fellow with
the mind of a flunkey" to save the life of a young
Zionist activist in that Crusader's dungeon in Acco
where he himself spent weary months of incarcera-
tion and where Ronald Storrs and T. E. Lawrence
came to shake hands with him through the bars of
his cell; of the atmosphere in the Dutch public schools
which he thought so pleasant, that it was almost
inevitable that a love of learning should flourish in
that country; of Martin Buber's book on the Mythos
of the Jews; of his last interview with Joseph Beck, the
Foreign Minister of Poland; of the University of
Ghent as the center of the struggle for cultural auton-
omy in Flanders; of his son Eri, then in the Pales-
tinian gaol for the faith's sake; of the Calvinist doc-
trine of predestination and the contrasting doctrine
of man's free will: of the tendency of all socialistic

AS I REMEMBER HIM 1 1

revolutions to degenerate into etatism and tyranny;
then of course of the need to raise a Jewish army
forthwith, not only for the defence of Palestine but
as an instrument to speed up the redemption of Eretz
Israel and the founding of a Jewish State in the present
cataclysmic circumstances when history does not move
with the measured tread of a grandfather's clock, but
advances with the seven league boots of a giant and
with revolutionary shocks. . . .

For that: Eretz Israel and the Jewish State in Pales-
tine, that was his cause, his all in all, the sacred pas-
sion which entirely possessed and visibly consumed
him. In Jabotinsky the love of Zion was both an
unquenchable, ecstatic fire and also the still and steady
flame of grace which the sages called Hitlahabut and
of which the Baalshem once said that it sanctifies
every action in life with a holy significance.

The healing of Israel through a normalization of
its national and international status as a people, with
a history, traditions, a way of life and a religion of
its own, and therefore its need to live and work
within walls of its own, that is: in its own land,
master of its own destiny, not forced and twisted into
the moulds of this or that alien civilization, but apply-
ing its genius for justice to working out its own solu-
tion of man's relationship with his brother as in the
past it found for all mankind the way of man's rela-
tionship with God, and so as an independent factor,
in a personal-national sense, and in accord with its
own character and talents and ethos a contributor to
the sum total of civilization: that was Jabotinsky's

12 * AS I REMEMBER HIM

vision of Israel's place and r61e and function in the
ne\v7 humanity.

In order to bring this vision to reality by trans-
lating it into new covenants and into a new structure
of, international relationships, to lead Israel at least
part of the way along the long and weary road to the
ideal, he poured out his whole heart, all his strength
and his whole life. Jabotinsky lived Zionism. And it
was the cause, too, that made of his life one of won-
drous unity and singleness of purpose.

Vladimir Jabotinsky came from that intellectual
milieu in Russian Jewry which had fully absorbed
Russian civilization. When he first began to write his
feuilletons and poetry in the Russian language, he was
hailed by the critics of Petersburg and Moscow.
Maxim Gorki devoted an essay to the realism and
style of the young Jewish author. The great Tolstoy
himself welcomed in Jabotinsky "a new writer of
promise at last" The road to glory seemed open to the
budding poet.

Then, without a word of warning, Jabotinsky
stopped writing. His name disappeared from the
columns of the literary journals and the journals of
opinion to which he had but recently become a
contributor.

What had happened, what had brought about this
sudden change of direction? It was the wave of
pogroms that swept through his native land following
Russia's defeat in the war with Japan in 1905, which
had thrown the young writer completely off his track.

AS I REMEMBER HIM 13

Not unlike Theodor Herzl, scarcely a decade earlier,
Jabotinsky had suddenly beheld for himself and had
measured, as in some dread apocalyptic revelation, the
full magnitude of the Jewish tragedy. He had become
convinced of the permanent insecurity of the Jews
in the Galut because he had seen the frustration and
the futility of all their striving and that all their con-
tortions and wrenching in all sorts of humiliating
attitudes, physical and mental, in order to conform
to another's way of life not only gravely damaged
their own spirit and destroyed their human dignity,
but that in the end the process would lead to the
extinction of Jewish national culture and of Jewish
life itself to the grievous detriment of civilization
itself which would be the sufferer by the loss of the
Judaic contribution.

He saw the homelessness of the Jewish people as
the mortal disease to which Israel must ultimately
succumb, for his people's condition without land and
without a state was not unlike that of a human being
who has all his limbs and organs intact but whose
bone structure is devoid of marrow and who is there-
fore, though his outward appearance may be normal,
as flabby, hollow and unreal as a putty doll.

This was the realization that had dawned on the
young writer, causing him to be struck with an im-
mense lassitude and with a sense of betrayal of his
own people if he should continue his devotion to
Russian letters.

He was to sum up the anguish of his soul and of
the soul of Israel later in life, before the Royal Com-

14 AS I REMEMBER HIM

mission sitting in the House of Lords in February
1937 with the words: "Three generations of Jewish
thinkers and Zionists amongst whom there were many
great minds . , . have given much thought to analys-
ing the Jewish position and have come to the con-
clusion that the cause of Jewish suffering is the very
fact of the Diaspora, the bedrock fact that the Jews
are everywhere in the minority. , . .

"It is not the anti-Semitism of men; it is, above all,
the anti-Semitism of things, the inherent xenophobia
of the body social or the body economic under which
the Jews suffer. Of course there are ups and downs;
but there are also moments, there are whole periods
in history when 'this xenophobia of Life itself takes on
dimensions which no people can stand, and that is
what we are facing now." . . .

Yet Jabotinsky did not become a Jewish nationalist
merely because he had gained an insight at an early
age into the overwhelming tragedy of the Jewish
people in the Galut He was a nationalist because he
was an artist, a man of the world, a thinker of practical
understanding and high critical judgment in inter-
national political affairs, a man of the European spirit
and of a world outlook and in the love of his Father-
land and people: a man of action. His nationalism was
a protest and in diametric opposition to the deperson-
alization which is the goal and object of international-
ism. He knew that only by and in asserting one's own
particular and peculiar nature, talents and character
one can best serve the general interest and that this
applies to nations as well as to individuals.

AS I REMEMBER HIM 15

Nothing Jewish was alien to him except the cringing
spirit of Schultzjudentum, the abject defence mecha-
nism of assimilationism, and the eternal apologetics
for the existence of the Jewish people. To those whom
Zangwill once called the grand dukes of Judaism, the
self-appointed leaders and stadlonim, his name was
anathema. The professional compromise makers in
Jewish life, who lock up their ideals in the cupboard
under a layer of mothballs when there is a challenge
or the prospect of battle, dreaded him as King Ahab
dreaded Elisha, the adversary.

Nor did the movement which he led know him as
a light taskmaster, as a dreamer who contented him-
self with visionary speculations and Zukunftmusik or
as one who, like Eli, did not even look askance at the
misdeeds of commission and omission of his sons.
Jabotinsky's word could sear like a whiplash. He was
a leader who imposed an iron discipline, who did not
hesitate to ask for great sacrifices, the supreme sacrifice
not excluded. But if Jabotinsky asked a great deal it
was because he himself gave even more.

Like the trtfe prophet he castigated because he loved.
Because he wanted to see his people great and free,
he denounced its faults. He tolerated no betrayal of
values, national or spiritual. He always came back to
the central truth: You Jews, you are a nation, a nation
are you! for the renewal of Jewish life is only possible
when proceeding from this central thought. It is the
positivism of Prophetism which seeks the restoration
of the central thought. And therefore all creative

l6 AS I REMEMBER HIM

reforms proceed from prophetic action which never
advances the slogan of a return to the past, but always
seeks a break-through to the central truth in the
future.

Jabotinsk/s prophetism was social in character.
What mattered personal salvation? His own life was
but a flame that burned and consumed in order that
the nation might be saved and led into new paths of
life.

Although frequently impatient in debate and in
negotiations with his own, when opponents by tor-
tuous argument sought to divert attention or concen-
tration from the one essential, Jabotinsky never
wearied in his advocacy of Jewish rights with the Man-
datory Power and the governments who had sub-
scribed to the sentiments and ideas of the Balfour
Declaration. "I have appealed/' he told me once, "to
their honor and to their sensibility, to their self-
interests and to their own national cause, even to their
innermost anti-Semitism wherever that existed. I have
left nothing untried and I am ready to begin all over
again tomorrow. For they must hear me. They must
take heed. They must allow us to live/' . . .

If it is objected, as it frequently was, that Jabotinsky
was one-sided and repetitious, I would say that it is
of spiritual and moral profit to us to have certain
ideals put before us with intensity and one-sidedness.
All-roundness and comprehensiveness cannot be ex-
pressed with equal intensity. And balance prevents
enthusiasm.

AS I REMEMBER HIM IJ

In the course of my long years of wandering to and
fro on the earth, his path crossed mine again and
again: in Antwerp, in Warsaw, in London, Berlin,
New York, Paris and Vilna never, alas, in his own
Jewish Fatherland whence a nervous British bureauc-
racy, instinctively fearing "the Spirit that maketh
alive," kept him permanently barred. But whenever
and wherever, on his speaking and organizing tours,
the chance presented itself, he would snatch an hour
or so to sit still and discuss the plans and thoughts
and dreams that always occupied his restless mind.

In such moments his words, cast in a wondrous
clarity and precision of speech, were revelationary of
coming things and events. It was as if a light suddenly
went up over the dying and decaying phenomena of
the present. But he never played with flighty impres-
sions, nor was he just a strong intellect and nothing
more. In his talk there frequently crept a note of
nostalgia to betray the melancholy behind the brave
and realistic words: nostalgia for the highest fulfil-
ment of his ideal, melancholy over the perverseness
of a soulless contemporary environment

Even so, no man eschewed sentimentality more
than Jabotinsky did; he was diffident and cautious, to
the point of shyness, in every expression of feeling,
objective to the point of coldness almost. And yet he
could also enter the house of mourning and sit with
those who weep, that they might feel less lonely in
the evening of sadness.

When I sat opposite Jabotinsky one afternoon in the

l8 AS I REMEMBER HIM

small office, on the second floor of the Rue Vineuse
in Passy, where he published the Russian language
periodical devoted to Jewish affairs called: "Rasviet/'
the conversation drifted to the subject of Bergson's
genius. In the course of that short hour he said with
a smile: "Genius really means to be able to see and
feel what will come to pass ten years hence/* That
was in the early part of 1931. A quarter of an hour
later, quite oblivious of his own earlier definition and
totally unrelated with that part of the conversation,
he sat calmly describing to me the conquest of Europe
by a resurgent nationalist Germany, the refusal of the
nations to stand together in the face of a common
danger and the virtual extermination of the European
Jewish communities.

How fantastic that sounded then! An editor of a
national magazine to whom I sent a synopsis of the
interview with Jabotinsky cabled back: "Tell that
Jeremiah that his calamities can never come to pass;
the world is too civilized!"

I once asked him in a mood of confidence why he
should be so everlastingly kind in receiving me when
it was convenient or not, me, a journalist whose voice
assuredly did not carry very far in the world of men
and events. "I surely cannot do a great deal/' I said,
"to spread your views and ideas. My heart is yours,
but my talents are extremely limited." . . .

Jabotinsky waved his hand impatiently: "It isn't
that/' he said; "it isn't that at all. I like to look at
you while we speak, because your eyes and not mine
will see a regenerated Jewish people taking up its

AS I REMEMBER HIM 19

national role in the community of peoples, in a truly
free Palestine. It is for the reflection of that glory that
I look in your eyes. And that reflection is there because
you believe!". . .

When he said that I thought back of my Uncle
Kees, a Dutch landscape painter who, while strolling
with me along a rural road in Brabant thirty years ago,
made another prediction to me, this: "You, Pierre,
you will see the day when the whole European kettle
explodes and the debris comes tumbling down to bury
this bourgeois world/'

Even as that prediction is being fulfilled before our
eyes today, so may Jabotinsky's blessed vision also
come to pass!

The fulfilment of his dearest wish: to withdraw
from the tumult and the shouting in the marketplace
into the stillness of the sanctuary in order to engage
in dialogue with the God in his heart, was never
vouchsafed him. He thought of it frequently and dur-
ing the last months of his life he laid the basis and
the outline for an ambitious work on the philosophy
of Jewish nationalism. But that part of life which he
called "the other world/' the world of action and
endeavor ever and again claimed his whole attention
and energy. His sense of duty did not allow him to
say no.

Like Moses at the Burning Bush he had once heard
the call to service for his people. His entire life was
spent in obedience to that divine call, through the
years, never flinching, through pain and humiliation,
through disillusion and doubt, through misrepresenta-

20 AS I REMEMBER HIM

tion and the hatred of the false prophets, against the
very course of his personal interests, sacrificing career,
glory and honor and happiness ... for the sake of

the ideal.

The greatness of Jabotinsky's spirit is revealed in
his acknowledgment of a realm of values, which must
assert themselves, which come to man with their
ineluctible demands of loyalty and obedience, values
which manifest themselves in a selfless human ideal-
ism and which are themselves the content of culture
and the meaning of life.

What a tremendous thing it is when a man can
sayright in the teeth of opposition and in defiance
of the will of the world's mighty, diametrically at
variance with his own profit and interest here I stand,
in the Name of God. You may jeer at me as a fanatical
fool You may smile at me with your official pity.
You may lock me up as a dangerous revolutionary.
You may taunt me with being a militarist and a terror-
ist and even take my life nevertheless, here I stand in
the Name of God!

I have not willed this task. ... I have not sought
it ... I have more than once turned aside from
the call and pushed away from me as senseless the
undertaking of speaking of God's greatness and of His
right over man. . . . Tremblingly I have turned my
ear when the voice came to me calling me to speak
for my people. I felt myself too weak, too poor, too
sinful to plead the cause of Israel. . . .

AS I REMEMBER HIM 21

Nevertheless, here I stand in the world, in the
Name of God!

You who build your empires on the tears of the
poor, you who grow rich from the poverty of the
oppressed, you who sow dissension and hate between
brothers in order that your might will endure, you who
declare your own power sacrosanct against you I lift
my voice, against you and your pretensions I call to
revolt, the holy revolt of Love. . . .

I will not rest before my people has been called
awake in the name of freedom! I will not rest until
you let my people go! Even if I must go into battle
with you and I must die: then yet will I preach and
cry my cry of revolt: "Men of Israel, fight yourself
free! Cast off the chains that bind you! the fire of
God burns and His flames are the flames of free-
dom! . . .

What an unutterably tremendous thing it is when
a man can honestly say: Here I stand, in the Name
of God, I can do no other!

In doubt, in pain, in death, yet through and through
illumined with courage, standing in the Name of God!

Thus stood the Prophets of old!
Thus stood Vladimir Jabotinsky!

Bronxville, N. Y., May, 1942.

PARTI

IS IT A WAR AIM?

CHAP TER I .

INTRODUCTORY

ON THE outbreak of the present war the author
of this book signed an appeal to the Jews which
contained the following statements:

"A brutal enemy threatens Poland, the heart of the
Jewish world-dispersion for nearly a thousand years,
where over three million Jews dwell in loyalty to the
Polish land and nation.

"France, all the world's fatherland of liberty, faces
the same menace.

''England has decided to make that fight her own;
and we Jews shall, besides, never forget that for twenty
years, until recently, England had been our partner in
Zion.

"The Jewish nation's place is therefore on all the
fronts where these countries fight for those very founda-
tions of society whose Magna Charta is our Bible."

Five months have passed since that was published,
but it seems that there is no intention of treating the
Jewish people as an Allied nation, nor the Jewish
people's need as one of the causes for which the Allies
are fighting. "

With rare unanimity, all sections of the Jewish

25

26 IS IT A WAR AIM?

national movement have asked for the formation of
Jewish military units for active service on all fronts.
There was nothing unprecedented in these demands:
a "Judaean" infantry regiment (jSth-^ist Royal
Fusiliers) was formed in 191 y, and did good service
in Allenby's Palestine campaign, and even before that
there had been a Jewish transport unit, the Zion Mule
Corps, in Gallipot. Now the offer was for service not
only in the East but wherever required. The only
conditional demand was that Jews should be allowed
to fight as Jews; that it should be recorded in the
annals of this war that the Jews were one of the
peoples fighting for the common good cause.

All these demands have so far been rejected. At
the same time, a Polish army is being raised; Czecho-
slovak troops are recruited; and Jewish emigrants or
refugees from both Poland and Czechoslovakia are
being, in some cases advised, in some cases driven, to
enlist in these formations, regardless of the fact that
the brotherly treatment of Jewish recruits in some of
them cannot always be guaranteed. A double humili-
ation is thus being inflicted: it is recognized that a
destroyed nation is still a nation, and that its scattered
members in exile should be given a chance to fight
for their nation's reinstatement but the Jew has no
place on this waiting list of admitted claimants; he
must give his devotion, his enthusiasm, his very life
to the restoration of communities which have never
pretended to love him, while fully aware that his
own community is not to be included.
There is an obvious and deliberate policy behind

INTRODUCTORY 2J

this refusal to revive the Jewish Legion. Once a nation
had received recognition as a partner in the fight, it
could not be prevented, in due course, from present-
ing and pressing its demands. In the councils of
Allied statesmanship, the desire is lacking that the
Jews should become entitled, now or later, to present
and press any demands of their own, no longer as
petitioners but as equal partners.

The bitterness which this attitude arouses in Jewish
minds can be measured only by the horror of the
Jewish misery throughout East-Central Europe. In
that zone of chronic yet acute antisemitism the Jews
have, so far, paid in actual human suffering infinitely
more than the Czechs, considerably more even than
the Poles. But in the majority of British Press organs
their plight is hardly ever mentioned: their eagerness
to serve, the justice of their cause, and even their
agony are simply "not on the map/'

British statesmen commonly discuss their war-aims
without any reference to the Jewish problem. This
attitude is even more unwise from the general stand-
point than it is hurtful from the Jewish. It overlooks
the fact that the abscess of Nazidom has been fed
above all, on Jew-hatred, and would never have at-
tained to such maturity but for that ailment; and an
operation that failed to remove the roots of anti-
semitism would be no cure.

On the infrequent occasions when Allied statesmen
are reminded that a Jewish problem exists, they
vaguely hint at equal rights for all in a future Europe
democratized by the Allies' impending victory. Only

28 IS IT A WAR AIM?

one of them, Sir Archibald Sinclair, has had the
courage, so far, publicly to warn the Jews that even
after that victory no such equality could be effectively
guaranteed; and what he said in public others must
realize in private. They are no doubt genuinely deter-
mined to enforce the recognition of Jewish equality
in treaties and constitutions; but real equality for the
Jews in that Zone of Distress unless a great exodus
relieves the situation is doomed to remain a mirage;
sullen hatred, boycott and starvation, with the threat
of violence always in the offing, will be the rule as
before; as the Allied statesmen surely realize.

The worst feature of the situation is the tendency,
when the problem cannot be altogether ignored, at
all events to minimize its importance; to make a
pretence of believing that there is no actual Jewish
tragedy; that it is simply a matter of just some tire-
some skin-deep wounds which can be repaired with a
couple of stitches. Whereas the truth is that the
tragedy has reached a formidable intensity of pain
and doom which is without precedent in all human
history; that to end it a colossal world-effort is needed,
an effort equally without precedent; and that this
effort will have to be made.

In July 1938, Mr. Roosevelt made an endeavour to
ensure international co-operation in the problem of
initiating the great exodus; but as this means forcing
a solution of the Palestine question, his effort the
Evian Conference was cunningly frustrated, and his
plan reduced to a futile patchwork.
Palestine today is regarded as out of bounds even

INTRODUCTORY 29

for fugitives perishing in what is worse than No Man's
Landin the frozen No Man's Waters of the Danube
estuaryfor Jews marooned on disused iron oil-
tankers, with newborn babies among them; and as for
the future of Palestine, it is the policy of the 1939
White Paper the death sentence of Zionist hopes
that now holds the field.

So, if we summarize our outlook, it is this: No
admission to the national homeland; nothing but the
status quo ante in the chief centres of distress; not
even the right to fight as Jews, nor the honour of
acknowledgment as an ally in a cause for which we
have paid and are paying more in blood and tears
than any other race on earth. The Jewish people is
the one and only people to whpm Allied victory is
to bring no positive guarantees of welfare; nothing but
the negative satisfaction of the Nazis' downfall. There
is a short-sighted statesmanship that believes this to
be quite enough: the Jews fear and hate the Nazis;
they have no choice but to side with the Allies; why
then trouble to offer them prospects of betterment?
This is a poor wisdom. A thoughtful organizer of
victory will want those who support his cause to pull
their maximum weight. Supporters are of doubtful
value when their sole incentive is hatred of the enemy,
without a spark of constructive hope; when the only
national anthem to suit their case would be a hymn
to the lesser Evil!

All the wholesome forces of the Jewish public in
the Allied and neutral countries should join in a
determined effort to smash the influences which are

30 IS IT A WAR AIM?

tending to obliterate the existence and the importance
of a Jewish war-front. If that effort be strong and
resolute enough, it will be victorious. They need have
no patriotic scruples; the more rigorous the assault,
the better for all concerned. Theirs is a struggle for
the right to fight together and hope together; a
struggle to overcome those who are obstructing the
full scope of the supreme effort.

In this war the Jewish people should count as one
of the Allied nations. Long before they are through
with it the Allies will have to make room for our
troops on their many fronts, for our leaders among
their governments, for the redress of Jewish wrongs
and the erection of Jewish statehood among their
war aims.

CHAPTER II

NOT ON THE MAP

IN THIS war (so it seems at the time of writing ) f
it is not desired that the Jews should be "on the
map": neither as active allies, nor as fellow-sufferers,
nor as the subject-matter of any special Allied de-
mands or war aims.

Arthur Szyk, the gifted miniaturist who recently
exhibited in London his brilliant and terrible drawings
of tortured Poles and Jews under the German invader,
has also a genius for finding the mot juste. To describe
the attitude of the majority of the Allied statesmen
and the greater part of the Allied Press to this "Jew-
ish" aspect of the war, he uses the word pornography.

"They treat us/' he says, "as a pornographical sub-
ject. Pornography covers a most important depart-
ment of life and nature; nobody denies it, but you
cannot discuss it in polite society it is not done/'

There is a sort of shamefaced conspiracy, almost
entirely dominating Parliament, the Press,* t and the

* There are a few exceptions, the Manchester Guardian among
them.

t The author is referring, of course, to Great Britain. Public
opinion in the United States, however, has not exhibited greater
responsiveness in this respect.

31

32 IS IT A WAR AIM?

public platform, to obliterate the Jewish war-issue by
silence. The term "conspiracy" is not necessarily
intended to suggest that there has been any explicit
collusion on the subject between speakers and writers,
or that all the newspapers have received a hint to that
effect from some authoritative quarter. A "conspiracy"
of this kind may be spontaneous and instinctive: then
it is all the more deplorable in its callous unfairness.

So far this is written early in 1940 of all the
peoples attacked by Germany the one which has paid
the greatest price of all in human suffering has been
the Jewish people. No careful observer is likely to
question this statement. True, the Czechs have lost
let us hope only temporarily their independence,
and the Poles have lost more than that: but in terms
of actual human misery, hunger, torture and death,
the Jews head the list, even in Poland. There are
indications that the number of Jewish civilians who
have died in Poland since the invasion is already in ex-
cess of the combined casualty list of both armies, Ger-
man and Polish. All this is not said to minimize the
greatness of the Polish people's losses; they are surely
greater than those which any other nation excepting
one has ever suffered in modern times outside of the
trench or the battlefield. That one exception is the
Jewish people: the Jews still head the list, and are
hardly ever mentioned as fellow-sufferers.

For many months past it has been one of the
writer's recreations to collect, from the Jewish Tele-
graphic Agency's Daily Bulletin, those items which

NOT ON THE MAP 33

he did not see reproduced in any of the leading
British newspapers, at any rate not in the London
Press. Here, are a few samples:

Every Nazi in Lodz is free to engage any Jew he
meets in the street to do his own private work with-
out pay. No branch of trade and no profession is any
longer open to the Jews in Lodz. Even Jewish cab-
drivers and porters have now been forbidden to carry
on with their work.

Ten Jews were executed by the Nazis in the town-
ship of Nove Miasto, in the Warsaw district. The Jews
were chosen at random and shot dead without any
reason being given.

In the township of Grojec, in the Warsaw district,
the Jews were forced to set fire to their chief synagogue
last Saturday. A number of Jews of the same township
were shot dead by the Nazis while returning home
from forced labour.

Hundreds of Jews, including many women and
children, were killed in the town of Bendzin, near
Katowice, when the Nazis set fire to Zachodnia Street,
which is inhabited exclusively by Jews. Any Jew trying
to escape was shot dead. Altogether several hundred
men, women and children died in the flames, or were
shot dead by the Nazis. All the synagogues in Bendzin
have also been burnt down.

Wholesale executions of Jews by Nazis in many towns
in the province of Lodz are openly admitted in official
reports of Nazi police officers, extracts of which have
been published in the Schlesische Zeitung of Breslau.

In the township of Lask, the Schlesische Zeitung
states in quoting one of these official reports: "one

34 IS IT A WAR AIM?

hundred Jews were executed for offering resistance to
German soldiers who were searching their homes for
concealed arms." The police also learned, the official
report further states, that about a thousand Jews had
surrounded the synagogue in Lask with the intention of
preventing the Germans from entering it. The Jews
were therefore fired on and "hundreds were killed on
the spot." The synagogue was then set on fire. "The
Jewish streets of the township/' the report continues,
"have been closed and the Jews have been forbidden to
have any dealings with the peasants of the neighbour-
hood, whom they are trying to persuade to sell them
milk, potatoes and cabbage,"

To conclude, here is an item which will remind the
reader of Enver PashaV methods of "liquidating''
Armenians as described by Werfel in The Forty Days
of Mnsa Dagh:

Geneva, January i6th

On Thursday evening, November 3oth, the Nazi
authorities in Chelm ordered all Jewish men between
the ages of fifteen and sixty to appear the next day,
December ist, at 8.30 a.in. in the market square.
About two thousand Jews appeared. They were sur-
rounded by Nazi auxiliary police, Black Guards, and a
small detachment of soldiers armed with machine-
guns. A Gestapo officer then delivered a short speech
to the Jews in which he informed them that, as Jews
were responsible for the war and as all Jews were the
mortal enemies of Geimany, the Chelm Jews had
been sentenced by the Nazi authorities to be deprived
of their civil rights and to be expelled from the town.

NOT ON THE MAP 35

At half-past twelve the Jews, surrounded by Nazi
Storm-Troopers and soldiers on lorries and motorcycles,
were marched off from the town along the high road
in the directioii of Hrubilszow.

A few kilometres from Chelm, near a military hos-
pital situated in a wood, the party was stopped and
told by the Nazis thatj because one of them had
attempted to escape, twenty would be executed, and
that for each further attempt of this kind fifty would
be executed. Twenty Jews were picked out at random
and marched off.

The Nazi authorities in Hrubilszow issued a similar
order to the Jews of the town on Friday night. At half-
past nine they were joined by the Chelm Jews.

Altogether it is estimated that there were in this
party 1,100 Jews from Chelm and 850 Jews from
Hrubilszow. Before being marched off, they were
warned that if any of them returned home they would
be treated as spies and executed. The Jews were chased
across fields, woods and marshes from Hrubilszow to
Mieniany, Cichoburze and Dolbyczow. Every five
minutes the Nazis ordered those who were tired and
unable to continue to stand aside. These were shot
dead on the spot and their bodies left lying in the
fields. The Jews were not given any food or drink
during the whole of their dreadful march, and those
who tried to help themselves to some water from the
ditches were shot dead.

When Dolbyczow was reached, the survivors were
divided into two groups: one numbering about 500 and
the other 400.

From Dolbyczow the larger party was marched off
in the direction of the frontier town of Sokal, and the

36 IS IT A WAR AIM?

smaller party of 400 to the frontier town of Belzy.
The latter were the luckier ones, because only a few
of them were shot dead by the Nazis, while about 250
of the larger party were shot by the Nazis before
reaching the bridge on the River Bug which divides
the Nazi from the Soviet part of the town of Sokal.
Thus a total of over 1,300 Jews from Chelni and
Hrubilszow were massacred by the Nazis during the
four days' forced march to the Soviet frontier.

During their four days' march, the Jews were given
only one loaf of bread a day, which had to be divided
between thirty men. On the average, one Jew was
shot dead by the Nazis every five to ten minutes of
the march. From time to time the Nazis were heard
to exchange notes with each other as to the number
of Jews they had accounted for. One was heard to
say: "I myself have already settled seventy-six," which
brought the reply, "I have killed only sixty-three."

Among the Jews killed there were many fathers and
sons of the same family. The bookkeeper of the Hru-
bilszow Jewish People's Bank, Isaac Lewenfuss, aged
55, was completely exhausted and unable to carry on
with his march when 15 kilometres from Hrubilszow.
When ordered by the Nazis to lie down, which was the
signal for his execution, his twenty-year-old son Mendel
offered to die in his place, but his offer was refused.
Mendel then declared: "Then shoot me together with
my father." The Nazi Storm-Troopers merely said:
"Oh, you are volunteering to die? Very well." Father
and son were then shot together.

In reporting this massacre about the middle of De-
cember, the official German news agency stated "An
attempt at a Jewish revolt in the Chelm and Hrubilszow
districts was ruthlessly suppressed/'

NOT ON THE MAP 37

It is useless to ask how much of all this the reader
has seen in the general Press. Yet these incidents are
not the consequences of a remote earthquake, or a
typhoon in the antipodes, "something which after all
is no concern of ours/' from the standpoint of our
sacro egoismo: they are the direct results of the con-
quest of Poland, the country for which the Allies
solemnly assumed responsibility. Under these condi-
tions a conspiracy of silence is unforgivable.

But the worst feature of this conspiracy is the
inevitable suggestion that the Allies feel bashful of
acknowledging Jews as fellow-sufferers. There is, both
in England and France, a moral underworld which
is for ever trying to "get at" the non-defeatist camp
by the taunt of a "Jewish war." It is perhaps a much
bigger underworld than some people imagine; it may
have its colonies in every class of society; it may feel
not repelled but rather attracted by the Nazis' treat-
ment of the Jews. ("That's the stuff to give 'em!")
All the more urgent, if this be true, is the duty of
decent society to submerge and crush that underworld.
But polite society also evidently shrinks from such
"pornography." The result is that the Jewish fellow-
sufferer is denied even the last and most elementary
privilege of a sufferer: to have his losses registered in
fair and proper perspective, so that he may at least
hope, when the day comes for a general redress, resto-
ration and retribution, to present his claims on equal
terms with others. The only explanation of the con-
spiracywhether instinctive or planned which the
bewildered victim can conceive is that it is not felt

38 IS IT A WAR AIM?

to be desirable that the Jewish claim should ever be
presented.

Even more disturbing is the silence as regards the
Jews in practically all statements of war aims issued
by certain British leaders. The writer will be forgiven
for not mentioning names: to do so might be unfair.
He does not wish to pillory them as callous, for they
probably regard themselves as genuine well-wishers
of the unfortunate Jewish race; they would probably
repudiate, with sincere indignation, any suspicion of
conspiracy, insisting that the demand for the resto-
ration of Jewish rights was omitted in their statements
of war aims merely because such things obviously go
without saying, etc. (Talleyrand once replied to a
diplomat who used the same argument for not men-
tioning some "minor" item in a treaty: Si cela va sans
le dire, cela ira mieux en le disant If that goes with-
out saying, it will go better by being said.)

Two prominent men shall, however, be quoted,
for they at least have not forgotten to mention the
Jews. Both are unimpeachably Liberal, and the inten-
tions are unquestionably of the very best. The more
depressing will be the conclusions which any Jew will
be compelled to draw from their utterances.

Sir Walter Layton (in Allied War Aims) is cou-
rageous enough to quote Germany's behaviour in the
Jewish question as one of the sins which "have made
Germany an international nuisance":

It has often been argued in the past that it is no
concern of ours what system of government or political

NOT ON THE MAP 39

philosophy another country may choose to adopt.
Events have proved that this is only a half truth. In
the six years of Nazi rule . . . the persecution of the
Jews has created for other countries a refugee problem
on a scale hitherto unknown in history.

Hypercritical minds, in weighing this charge, might
remark that it is somewhat narrowly conceived: its
formulation by Sir Walter Layton suggests that, had
the Nazis only followed the example of Pharaoh, and
had prevented the victims from escaping to "other
countries/' there would have been nothing to. com-
plain about. But this is not important: the main point
is that the whole charge, in the opinion of the Liberal
author, entails no consequences worth mentioning.
When he comes to stating his war aims he demands
the restoration of a free Poland and a free Czechoslo-
vakia, a free plebiscite in Austria, and steps towards
a federation of Central European States, with a "com-
mon citizenship" which "should ensure certain fun-
damental rights, such as freedom of speech, the right
not to be imprisoned without trial, and freedom to
move about and trade within the federation. The
guarantee of such rights would go a long way towards
remedying the grievances of minorities and removing
racial distrust." That is all there is to be said about it.

The other statement was made by Sir Archibald
Sinclair, M.P. Speaking in the House of Commons
on October i2th, he said:

One of the difficulties with which some people have
come to me about our present position I would like to

40 IS IT A WAR AIM?

tell the House quite frankly. They say to me, "One of
our war aims is the destruction of Hitlerism; another
is to assert the right of nations to choose their own
form of government. Are those two aims consistent? If
the Germans want Hitlerism, have we the right or the
power to demand its destruction?" Surely the answer is
this, that we recognize the right of a nation to govern
itself in its own way, even to choose a dictatorship if it
wants it. We may be horrified by the results. We may
see the loathsome spectres of racial and religious perse-
cution rearing their ugly heads. We may witness the
horror of secret police oppression and of concentration
camps. We have the right and the duty to condemn
these manifestations of barbarism, but it is not for us
to chastise another people for its own rnisgovernment
or to go to war on behalf of Pastor Niemoller or the
German Jews. The German people must find means of
setting their own house in order and we must recognize
their rights of self-government in their own country.

It is only fair to point out that most of the other
spokesmen and precisely the bashful ones who avoid
the Jewish theme seem on the whole to be much
more exacting in respect of internal arrangements in
Central Europe after the Allies* victory. It is taken for
granted that Germany, Austria, Poland and Czecho-
slovakia will once again become liberal and demo-
cratic States, and that there will be a reinforced League
of Nations to look after the treatment of minorities.
But in so far as the Jews are concerned, that does
not appreciably change the picture. The prospect is
extremely arid; it seems to be a case of "as you were."

NOT ON THE MAP 41

Sir Archibald Sinclair ought to be thanked for having
said the only thing of essential significance in a welter
of oratory: namely, that the actual and permanent
supervision of internal developments in a sovereign
country by outside organs is impracticable; that, in
other words, the reality of any statute or treaty clauses
as to equal rights will ultimately depend, in Germany,
on the good will of the Germans; and in Poland, on
that of the Poles. Roumania and Hungary, not being
as yet at war, could not be mentioned, but the obvious
inference is that in these two countries also the outside
supervision of the Jewish position is out of question.
This affects some 5,000,000 Jews who are still living
in the zone which, for twenty years, has been the
main theatre of acute yet chronic Jewish distress.
Apart from political oratory, what they are really
promised is the restoration of the status quo ante. The
general public, and probably many Jews, are very far
from realizing all the hopelessness of this prospect.
It will be worth their while to examine it more nar-
rowly in the chapters that follow. The reader should
not grudge me their length. He may think that the
horror of the status quo is so obvious that nobody is
likely to propose its restoration, even in an amended
form. This is a mistake: for after the war, a great effort
will be made, both by Gentile Machiavellis and by
Jewish dupes, to draw this red herring across the trail
of our national demands. The main battle over Jewish
war aims will be fought around the lie that the ghetto
can be made comfortable.

CHAPTER III

THE MONSTER'S FOOD

THE purpose of this book, which was written
in January-February 1940, is to press a claim for
the inclusion of the Jewish problem in the war aims
of the Allied nations.

Responsible people, it is true, are tending to lose
patience with the claim that the "war aims" of the
Allies should be extended until they finally include
the redress of almost every imaginable grievance. They
object that the proper "aim" of a nation at war is
besides winning the war to remove those factors
which have caused the war, and that it should include
hardly anything else; while other grievances, however
urgent, will have to be settled by some "other method.

Such responsible people are perfectly right. Never-
theless, if th<? causative factors of the war are to be
abolished, the solution of the Jewish problem is un-
deniably entitled to a prominent place among the
genuine and urgent aims of the war.

It is very desirable that we should realize that the
many problems of reconstruction raised in connection
with the war fall into two quite distinct categories:
there are genuine "war aims" and there is what may
be described as all-round "Revision/' Much confusion

THE MONSTER S FOOD 43

would be avoided if these categories were kept rigor-
ously apart. A war aim is something for which a nation
actually and obviously fights, and if that nation does
not achieve this aim as an outcome of the war, this
will mean that it has been defeated. For instance, if
a repetition of such acts of violence as the invasion
of Poland is not rendered impossible, the Allies will
have lost the war; crushing the Nazi regime is, there-
fore, a war aim. But such a purpose as for instance
the restoration of free trade between the nations,
excellent though it be, cannot be described as a war
aim. A peace treaty signed without mentioning such
restoration would still be regarded as satisfactory.

But a peace treaty cannot be effective unless it
sweeps away the obstacles to any effective reconstruc-
tion; unless it excises the malignant ulcers which
would prevent any real recovery.

One such ulcer is the Jewish tragedy of Central
Europe. It is impossible to imagine even a beginning
of universal restoration unless that is removed. This
operation is a war aim in the fullest sense of the term.

The Jewish tragedy is, of course, not the microbe
which has caused this war. It is only the culture-
medium in which the microbe has grown to maturity.

The mysteries of mass psychology, when both the
author and the reader are laymen, can best be ex-
plained, or at least illuminated, by metaphor and
analogy; and no writer who means business need have
any scruples as to mixing his metaphors. There are
several metaphors which will help to illustrate the

44 IS IT A WAR AIM?

organic role of Jew-hunting in the growth and progress
of the war-disease. It may be likened to the r61e of a
spice or sauce which enables the masses to swallow
a species of poison which would be too corrosive
without it; or to that of a lubricant which speeds down
a chute a load which otherwise might get stuck; or
to that of the sticks which a housewife lights to induce
the heavy log or lumps of coal in her big fireplace to
catch fire. We may find it convenient to use all these
metaphors and others too, though none of them quite
exactly fits the case. After all, food can be swallowed
even without the spice or sauce; a load can be pushed
down a chute without a lubricant, etc.; but Nazism
would never have grown to its present proportions
without the help of antisemitism. "Culture-medium
Eor the microbe" is perhaps the aptest simile of all.
The man in the street may not be conscious of this
intimate connection between the acuter forms of anti-
Semitism and the war-peril. He may even think it a
monstrous exaggeration to suggest that Jew-baiting in
Nazi Germany, however objectionable, was in any
way responsible for, let us say, the failure to heed the
Ajiglo-French warning about Poland, which was the
direct cause of the conflict. The man in the street
will quite possibly dismiss such a suggestion as a symp-
tom of megalomania: "These Jews imagine that every-
:hing, down to the weather, and the climate, and
earthquakes, depends on what happens to them. Of
course, the Nazi programme and practice, beside the
jreed for world-domination and the cult of violence,
ncludes the persecution of Jews, but the latter is just

THE MONSTER S FOOD 45

a concomitant, an accompanying phenomenon, not
the essence of the thing. Nazism would have been
just as dangerous if there had been no Jews on earth."

This is absolutely wrong. To destructive movements
of the Nazi type, antisemitism is infinitely more than
a "concomitant"; and "National Socialism" would
probably never have achieved its rapid and sweeping
conquests if it had not ridden the anti-Jewish horse.

Everybody knows that in propaganda the appeal of
love is slow and lumbering in comparison with the
appeal of hatred. Hatred is the piquant sauce which
accelerates both the swallowing and the digestion of
ideas and policies. And the "sauce" can be fully effec-
tive only if the object of hatred is close at hand,
familiar to all, and easily and safely attacked. Had the
Nazi propaganda been confined from the beginning to
preaching rebellion against the Versailles peace terms
and the wickedness of the English or the French or
the Americans, its theoretical appeal might have been
still powerful, but its actual progress among the masses
would have been so gradual that it is doubtful whether
it would ever have gathered enough energy for an
explosion. A Versailles Treaty is not a tangible object
of real and palpable hatred; the emotions of the
masses cannot be stirred by an object which can only
be seen at the public library. On the other hand, hat-
ing the English or the Americans or the French is
either a torture to the hater himself, so long as he dare
not express his hatred by deeds, or a very dangerous
enterprise, if he tries prematurely to translate his
hatred into action. There is only one ideal object for

46 IS IT A WAR AIM?

mass training in collective hate, and that is the Jew.
He is everywhere within reach; he can be pointed out
at any street corner; and he can* be insulted or
assaulted with only the minimum of risk, or with none
at all. To foster a movement of the Nazi type with-
out the daily use of Jewish targets would be like stag-
ing a pageant without rehearsals.

The world outside Germany does not realize to
what an extent the Nazi movement has depended,
through all the twenty years of its existence, on the
hatred of the Jew for its vitality and driving power.
Theoretically, a complete gospel of German National
Socialism could have been composed without any
reference whatsoever to the Jews: rearmament, the
militarization of the Rhine district, the restoration
of the colonies, the AnscMuss of Austria, and the
annexation of the Sudetenland (to say nothing of
that childish scheme of social reform devised in 1923
by Feder, incorporated into the "immutable" pro-
gramme of the party, and a little later abandoned).
All these aims could have been preached every whit
as forcibly had their authors never thought of Israel
and Judah. But they evidently felt, from the very
beginning, that none of these aims would "go down"
properly with the masses unless they were duly sea-
soned. So not a single spoonful of this witches' brew
was offered without the spice of antisemitism.

Only the foolish would seek to explain this infatu-
ation by using the term "mania/' With a few excep-
tions, the Nazi chiefs are as sane as any other govern-

THE MONSTER'S FOOD 47

ment or party leaders in any other country. Nor is
it to be explained by "sadism"; nor by any other
abnormal urge rooted in the morbid subconscious of
men, almost every one of whom, if cleansed of his
war-paint and examined in the ordinary light of every-
day reality, would probably appear as just an average
human being. Some of these chiefs have been quite
credibly reported as confessing how utterly "fed-up"
they were with the necessity of always talking of Jews,
Jews, Jews. One does not do such things for pleasure:
one does them only because of necessity. They knew
that their propaganda would not be accepted quickly
enough and widely enough without the piquant sauce.
It is only thanks to the sauce that it has won such
wide and rapid acceptance. The word only is deliber-
ately italicized in order to emphasize the fact that
Jew-baiting is no essential ingredient of the Nazi prop-
aganda, it is simply the lubricant without which the
indigestible meal could never have slid down so
smoothly.

All this is nothing new; at least, not to the Jews.
As early as the eighteen-eighties, after a pogrom in
the Ukraine, a Russian Socialist party published a
manifesto which should have comforted all the friends
of liberty by arguing that an anti-Jewish pogrom was,
after all, not such a bad thing, being rather in the
nature of a rehearsal; the moujiks (it was explained)
had only begun by attacking the Jews; they would con-
tinue by massacring the police, and would end by
smashing autocracy. Years later,,again in Russia, it was
a Jewish revolutionary who uttered the often-quoted

48 IS IT A WAR AIM?

formula: "J ew ^h blood is the best for oiling the
wheels of progress."

The success of the Nazi experiment has proved
instructive. Now, in the light of the present confla-
gration, the whole story of the last decade looks very-
much like a vast shunting operation, in which the
several nations have gradually moved into the one or
the other of the two great camps about to clash. And
it is a curious and significant fact that whenever any
one of these nations has thought of joining the ene-
mies of the Western bloc (even in a hesitating
attempt, soon to be abandoned ), it has invariably
begun by qualifying for admission in the same way-
by administering to its people a dose of the "Jewish
spice/' This was the meaning of the Goga intermezzo
in Roumania: for a moment, at the end of 1937, ^e
ruling circles of that country were on the verge of
adopting the anti-Western orientation and the first
visible symptom of this was the application of the
usual lubricant, through a violently antisemitic cabinet
and a broadside of anti-Jewish legislation. A few weeks
later the anti-Western orientation was thought to be
undesirable; M. Goga was dismissed, and his legisla-
tion was quashed. If we recall this short-lived incident,
it is only to point its moral, which is obvious, and
which should not be forgotten.*

* Roumania's expressed attitude towards the Jews following her
abandonment of her Western orientation in July 1940, supplies un-
questionable evidence to this effect. The violent wave of horrible
anti-Jewish terror that swept the country, and the drastic antisemitic
legislation that accompanied it, were by no means a result of direct
Nazi pressure. They were purely Roumanian phenomenon: the nat-
ural result of joining the Axis.

THE MONSTER S FOOD 49

As for the analogous behaviour of Italy, this was
even more striking than the Roumanian episode. In
Roumania there had always been antisemitic tenden-
cies in all classes of the population, high, middle and
low; so there was at least something for the gamblers
to stake upon. But in Italy? It is not enough to say
that its people, for half a century at least, had genu-
inely forgotten the alleged necessity of discriminating
against the Jew: they had actually lost all interest in
the question of who was a Jew and who was not Yet,
when the time came for swinging the country into a
certain orientation, it was immediately felt in some
mysterious way that the new course could not be
followed without a dose of the usual lubricant. But
in this case the lubricant was applied in half-hearted
fashion, with evident reluctance, and many apologies
as something a man does admittedly contre coeur,
and only because he must: because, for this kind of
job, the magical lubricant is indispensable.

The author is neither a historian nor a sociologist;
he does not profess to explain precisely why this lubri-
cant of antisemitism should be indispensable. Like
others, he has often asked himself this question: In-
numerable wars have been fought in the past, yet it
was not thought necessary to prepare for these wars
by especial emphasis on the Jewish question. Why
does it appear so necessary now?

One explanation is perhaps almost comforting: It
is because the world is, after all, progressing. The
world has been moving on, despite all our scepticism.

50 IS IT A WAR AIM?

The masses can no longer be sent to their death
simply by order: nowadays they need some kind of
"religion" to die for. Those observers of the Spanish
civil war may have spoken truly who affirmed that
the programmatic difference, or the clash of real
interests, between Burgos and Madrid was infinitesi-
mally small: it was not so much a fight over tangible
issues as a pure and simple guerre de religion.

But a "religion" to fit Germany's claim to world-
domination must be a formidable faith. Populations
speaking German dialects and occupying contiguous
territories in Europe count close upon ninety mil-
lions, as against 40 to 45 millions each of Britons,
Frenchmen, or Italians. There is an inherent sugges-
tion of supremacy in these very figures: a suggestion
not of ascendency or predominance or influence
merely, but of actual subjugation, of power such as
a slave-owner could wield over his negroes. The temp-
tation to succumb to such suggestion can be curbed
only by some powerful spiritual self-discipline: by that
combination of complex traditions ethical, philo-
sophical, religious, cultural, democratic which we call
civilization, and whose end is progress. All these had
to be swept away before a nation with such a literature
as the German could be made to put the clock back
a thousand yearscould be induced to accept a creed
as primitive and cynical as this: "We Germans are
the salt of the earth; our neighbours' land is our living-
space; their human value can be acknowledged only
in so far as it is useful to us; we may impose forced
labour on their able-bodied men and women; we may

THE MONSTER S FOOD $1

drive them away from their towns and villages to
make room for Germans. Such action will be just and
proper, and any opposition to it will be criminal, and
the means to be used in suppressing such opposition
need not be weighed in any balance of ethics, but only
in the balance of efficiency/'

We cannot, of course, deny that a similar mentality
was displayed in primitive conquestssuch as those
described in the Old Testament; and also thousands
of years later in Europe's colonial policy, since the
days of Columbus, and even down to a couple of
generations ago. It is idle to defend our ancestors,
to apologize for the sins of Gideon or justify the
barbarities of Cort6s. Such bygone instances have no
bearing on our theme, for in those ancient times the
mass-mind of humanity was still so liable to relapses
of bestiality that there was no need to preface the
relapse by any profound moral revolution. But the
last century has brought such conceptions as humanity
and equality home to the minds of countless millions:
and to make a clean sweep of these conceptions, to
clear the ground for the return of the beast, a formi-
dable effort is required.

And not only a formidable effort, but a formidable
amount of training by rehearsal, by cheap and easy
experimentation in corpore vfli. The dormant brute
in the German soul seems to have been hibernating
very near the surface, but even so it had to be trained
in beastliness and cruelty by a gradual drill. Like
Voltaire's deity, if the Jews had not existed they would
have had to be invented.

52 IS IT A WAR AIM?

Our Western statesmen would be guilty of culpable
blindness were they to disregard the historical truth
of this statement When the Nazis across the fron-
tiers, or their hirelings in Britain and France, yell or
whisper that this is a "Jewish War/' they are perfectly
right: the microbe of war would have died had it not
been allowed to batten on the Jewish tragedy.

CHAPTER IV

THE "ANTISEMITISM OF MEN"

rriHERE are two distinct forces at work within
JL the general phenomenon called Antisemitism:
the one is a subjective repulsion, strong enough and
permanent enough to become anything from a hobby
to a religion; the other is an objective state of things
which tends to ostracize the Jew almost independently
of whether his neighbours like or dislike him. We
shall call the first category "the Antisemitism of
Men/' and the second "the Antisemitism of Things/'
For a study of the former, the best field of observation
is Germany; of the latter, Poland. In the present chap-
ter we shall deal with Germany.

At the moment of writing, there are supposed to
be some 200,000 Jews in Germany of the Versailles
frontiers, 100,000 in Austria, 100,000 in Bohemia and
Moravia, 130,000 in Slovakia and 2,000,000 in the
parts of Poland occupied by the Nazis.* These figures

* The number of Jews under Nazi domination has greatly in-
creased since then. It comprises not only the entire Jewish population
of Poland (3,250,000 in 1939), but also the Jews of the Baltic
States (250,000), the Balkan countries (100,000), the Lowlands
(60,000), Occupied France (approximately 50,000) and Occupied
Russia (perhaps 2,000,000 the majority of Russian Jews). All in
all, some 7,000,000 Jews the bulk of European Jewry are now
under the yoke of Nazi oppression.

53

54 IS IT A WAR AIM?

are largely guesswork rather than reliable estimates;
moreover, they are bound to be considerably affected
by the transfers of population effected by the Nazi
governmentsome already carried out, and others
planned for the near future. Finally, some may "hope"
that a considerable proportion of all these Jews will
die out before the war is over, so that the problem
facing the managers of the future reconstruction will
be appreciably facilitated. Nevertheless, it is sure even
so to present a formidable problem.

The author assumes as an axiom that the war can-
not end without the liquidation of the Nazi regime.
Its collapse will probably be followed by the restora-
tion of the sovereignty of all or most of the annexed
territories, and by the establishment everywhere of
constitutions as liberal and democratic as possible in
accordance with the best Allied or American advice.
And finally, the creation of something like a new and
very much improved edition of the League may be
expected. It would be futile now to attempt any guess
at the details, even at the broader and more essential
details, of that future; but the final political outlook
may be described as essentially bright, and the writer
very firmly believes in its reality.

Furthermore, he believes that all these oppressed
peoples, restored to security and sanity, will honestly
try to devote themselves to sober reconstruction. He
believes that they will cherish a suppression of war;
he hopes that they will, for at least a generation, dis-
card all thought of armed revanche; he expects them
to give much more active support to the new League

THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN 55

of Nations, or the European Federation, or whatever
else it may be called, than was ever enjoyed by the
old Geneva League. True, one point is not quite clear
yet, even to a trustful believer, and that is, how the
nations 'will settle all those prickly questions of eth-
nically mixed provinces in such a way as to- satisfy all
and to stamp out irredentism; but so fervent is his
desire to believe that he prefers not to think of the
prickles. Everything, in short, will somehow get ad-
justed in time, with a great deal of labour, but without
any further disasters. Some people may find this
optimism absurd: but this the author denies; his most
sanguine expectations are soberly and moderately real-
istic. Credo, quia NON absurdurn.

There is, however, one aspect of such optimism
which even the most 'sanguine should discard utterly
and ruthlessly: namely, the belief that the cancer of
antisemitism can be cured by such means as liberal
constitutions and League supervision. No doubt, all
the suitable provisions will be duly included in these
constitutions, and in the League's new Covenant, en-
suring the inviolability of equal rights for all. But the
enforcement of these constitutions will have to be
left, in every country, in the hands of national gov-
ernments; and democratic electoral methods will en-
sure that those governments will be as representative
of the true attitude of the masses as possible. It is
therefore on the attitude of the masses that the actual
operation of any clauses relating to equal rights will
depend, so far as the Jews' rights are concerned. It is
otherwise in the case of other minorities: they live for

56 IS IT A WAR AIM?

the most part in close territorial clusters, in districts
or even cantons, and they can to some extent look
after themselves. The Jews live scattered throughout
predominantly Gentile towns and villages: at every
step, in the street or in public or private life, they are
exposed to the impact of the good or ill will of the
local majority. To pretend that under these conditions
any essential results can be ensured by law is childish.
NON credo qufa absurdum.

This aspect of the matter will be the better appre-
ciated if the reader recalls that the principle of equal
rights for Jews, even in East-Central Europe, is noth-
ing new. On the contrary, in almost every one of
these States the legal recognition of this principle is
just as old as the State itself. Only Austria-Hungary
was older than its Jewish equality law, which was
inscribed on her statute book in 1867. When the
German Empire was created in 1871 its imperial con-
stitution established equality for all, irrespective of
creed or origin. When the Treaty of Berlin (1878)
definitely delimited the frontiers of Roumania, Serbia
and Bulgaria, it was guaranteed by the same treaty
that in all these countries all citizens would enjoy
equal rights. When the peace treaties of 1919 created
Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic States, special
minority clauses were solemnly inserted to ensure
equality, and the League of Nations was to supervise
and guarantee their execution. To tell once again how
all these provisions proved ineffective would be
tedious; the only fact that may not be widely known
is that pre-war Roumania, which never took the equal-

THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN 57

ity clause seriously, and openly treated her Jews as
"foreigners," never had any trouble on that account
with any of the signatories of the Treaty of Berlin-
one of whom was Great Britain and another France.

Strangely enough, the formidable past history of
German antisemitism seems to be rapidly sinking into
oblivion. In the democratic countries a myth is being
created to the effect that the evil has originated with
the advent of a person called Adolf Hitler, who was
bora in 1888, so that if he can be removed it will
disappear. But the truth is that Hitler has just as much
to do with the origin of this evil as Napoleon had with
the invention of gunpowder. Napoleon did not invent
gunpowder; he only made magnificent use of it; and
when he was gone, others arose who surpassed him.

Germany and in this respect Austria was one with
her long before the Anschluss has ever been the para-
mount workshop of modern antisemitism. There and
not elsewhere was the discovery made, and the prin-
ciple proclaimed, that the objection to the Jew is not
religious but racial, and he must therefore be perse-
cuted even if baptized. There and not elsewhere was
antisemitism sublimated to the rank of a scientific
philosophy. In no other nation was Jew-hatred as a
mode of thought openly adopted by so many really
prominent men, some of them even of the first emi-
nence in the various walks of spiritual leadership:
Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Duhring, Treitschke. Hous-
ton Stewart Chamberlain, to achieve success in anti-
semitism, had to settle in Germany. In Germany, too,

58 IS IT A WAR AIM?

not elsewhere, was the practical aspect of antisemitism
modernized and perfected: what had been a mere
tendency to desultory street-rioting was by German
initiative promoted to a political system. Stoecker and
Ahlward founded the movement in Berlin, bringing
into the Reichstag, about 1893, the first bunch of
deputies to be solemnly (and quite democratically)
elected as the Antisemitische Partef; and in Vienna,
two years later, Lueger triumphantly conquered the
Vienna Town Hall on a platform whose main, or
rather only "plank" was hatred of the Jew, was elected
burgomaster amidst scenes of the wildest mass-enthusi-
asin, and kept his seat for decades. Such things had
been happening for three-quarters of a century before
the Nazi Party was ever thought of.

It is nonsense to pretend that the Germans are
manifesting antisemitism only by order, so that when
the order is annulled by the liquidation of Nazism
they will forget all about it. Germans abroad, who run
no risk if they choose to disobey orders from Berlin,
have amply and repeatedly shown that Nazism can
win them by its own powers of fascination, and not
through their fear of the Gestapo. The clearest proof
of this was the Saar plebiscite of 1935, held under
ideally democratic conditions, with British police en-
suring the fullest freedom of propaganda, of con-
science and of franchise: out of 525,000 valid votes,
477,000 were cast for incorporation in Nazi Germany.
Perhaps even more significant are the impressive pro-
portions of the Germans in Italy, Latvia and Estonia
who have accepted the call to return to Germany:

THE "ANTISEMITISM OF MEN" 59

all but autochthonous, the descendants of conquerors
and settlers of centuries ago, they left. their often
comfortable homes and respectable social positions for
the pleasure of breathing the Nazi atmosphere. To
top it all, there is the record of the frank and vocifer-
ous delight displayed by all classes of the Vienna mob,
in the first weeks after the Anschluss, when "Jewish
ladies in fur coats" were ordered to scrub pavements
and ganz Wien flocked to watch and yell with joy,
and mothers lifted their babies over their neighbours'
heads so that they should not miss the lovely sight.
"By order?" Of course there must be an order to
unleash the innermost brute: but the main point is
the presence of the brute underneath; and what a
multitudinous brute!

Antisemitism is traditionally and organically en-
demic in Germany; not in Germany alone by any
means, but in no other country more than in Ger-
many. Here again, being neither a sociologist nor a
student of psychology, the author will not attempt to
explain the phenomenon: but only a fool or a liar
would deny it.

The collapse of Nazism can bring no essential
remedy to this endemic disease. One must, of course,
be realist enough to allow for the so-called swing of
the pendulum: when Hitler goes, there may be some
kind of popular scurry to atone for the antisemitic
orgy, partly for opportunist reasons, but partly also,
no doubt, out of genuine disgust at the sub-human,
beastly forms which the persecution has assumed.
Moreover, there will be those equality-clauses in the

60 IS IT A WAR AIM?

peace treaty and the new constitution. And further:
there is not the slightest doubt that many Jews who
were forced to leave Germany after 1933 will then be
most eager to return, and ready to forgive and forget:
some because of discouraging experiences while in
exile, some out of genuine attachment to the German
land and civilization. That much we all admit. But all
superficial optimists should be warned that the result
of this backwash will bealmost immediately, per-
haps within a few weeks only of the new 6dit de
Nantes which will have opened the new era a venom-
ous recrudescence of the incurable evil.

One shudders to think how venomous it would be.
Apart from racial idiosyncrasies, sheer material interest
will constitute a formidable charge of high explosive.
The value of Jewish property in Germany which, in
one form or another, has passed into German hands,
is in the vicinity of 25 billion marks. At a conservative
estimate, since 1933 in Germany and since 1938 in
Austria, over 300,000 Jewish breadwinners of all kinds
have been affected by the Nazi r6gime; most of them
(and the proportion is constantly increasing) have
been altogether deprived of their employment or pro-
fession, while a dwindling minority are still clinging
to some sort of job. All that they have lost has been
grabbed by the "Aryans." That "all" includes myriads
of commercial and industrial positions, from director
to typist or shop-assistant, thousands of professional
jobs from panel doctor to journalist, while a compara-
tively important percentage of civil servants, from
school teacher up to fudge and chief constable, were

THE "ANTISEMITISM OF MEN" 61

Jews. These were posts filled by the middle class, the
intelligentsia, the haute bourgeoisie that is, by the
most conspicuous, most vocal and most sensitive strata
of modern society. To the members of these classes
the return of the Jews would mean a vast influx of
extremely dangerous competitors, in many cases far
better qualified than the usurpers, and they would be
faced, as a rule, with the alternative: "reconquer or
starve." In all cases they would be morally entitled to
the redress of an admitted grievance, an intolerable
injustice.

The kind of welcome which would await them may
be imagined. I do not presume to foretell how soon it
would rise to the pitch of direct persecution, or how
the inevitable de facto denial of "equal rights" would
be disguised to suit the constitution and the peace
treaty: but it should be remembered that under a
democratic constitution parliaments and governments
are bound to be powerfully influenced, firstly, by the
endemic idiosyncrasy of which I have spoken, and sec-
ondly, by the menace of competition, more desperate
than ever before. Nor should anyone be misled by the
pleasant recollection that in the good old days of
Bismarck and Wilhelm the Last, the principles of
antisemitism were put into practice without any ugly
and disorderly brutality, but with due restraint and
moderation; so that the new after-war regime, under
which all brutality will be strictly prohibited by proto-
col, may in the end prove "not so bad," or at all events,
not so bad for the Jews, who, after all, must not forget
that they cannot be the choosers. . . . The recollection

62 IS IT A WAR AIM?

is irrelevant: in the interval the brute has been un-
leashed and has tasted blood.

To make the outlook yet clearer, one may ask the
readersupposing him to be a Gentile to forget that
beggars cannot be choosers, and to imagine that a
similar prospect is offered not to us, but to him and
to other Englishmen: the prospect of living at the
mercy of a ninety-nine to one majority trained for
generations to abhor the English, under the sole pro-
tection of paper paragraphs and the supervision of
Geneva, or the substitute for Geneva; and to work
for the Allied victory with unfaltering zeal, though all
it promises him is just this prospect

PART II
THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

CHAPTER V

THE HUNTING-GROUND

GERMANY was the war-monster's favoured pas-
ture, rich in the spicy fodder which it loves.
Poland was its coveted hunting-ground, ever more de-
fenceless and more tempting to the monster as the
same pungent weed grew more rankly on its soil.

Poland's part in the "Jewish" pre-history of the war
is a drama by itself, which will be dealt with in later
chapters; here the writer wishes only to point to the
strange and tragic duality of her historical r61e during
these twenty years of her renewed existence. This was
a period during which the new world-war was hatch-
ing; during which her government strove in many
ways to prevent the war; and yet, after Germany her-
self, Poland was, objectively, considered the main soil
on which the war-microbe bred.

A story is told of the late Marshal Pilsudski's inter-
view with an important French envoy, soon after the
Nazis had taken power in Berlin. The Frenchman was
trying to persuade him to join France and England
(plus, of course, Soviet Russia) against Germany.
Pilsudski took his guest to a big wall map, where
Poland was shown squeezed in between the U.S.S.R.
and Germany. "If these two clash some day," he said,

65

66 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

"all their battles will be fought on our soil. Now you
just imagine that this soil is not Poland, but France,
and tell me what would be your policy then!"

From the moment of Pilsudski's accession to power
in 1926, and perhaps even earlier, the policy of the
Polish Republic was dictated by this paramount aim:
no war on Polish soil. And this or so it seemed then
was tantamount to "no war at all." Of all intensely
and inherently peaceable nations Poland was probably
the most genuinely anxious for world peace: not
because of what is generally understood as pacifism,
but because of something much more effective than
pacifism namely, obvious and unmistakable self-
interest.

At the same time the whole of the East-Central
belt of Europe, extending from Riga on the Baltic
down to Constanza on the Black Sea, was in the
throes of the most pernicious kind of social fever: and
the main focus of the infection, from which it spread
to North and South, was Poland. It was, of course,
the same old evil: the fever of antisemitism.

Its origin was the statistical fact that the Jews con-
stituted 10% of Poland's total population, and about
one third of her urban population. This inescapable
fact vitiated and perverted every civic value. "Democ-
racy" in this atmosphere meant that in the town halls
of Warsaw, Cracow, Lodz and every other important
city, the Poles would have to share mastery almost
evenly with the Jews: that was what it meant, or so
people thought. "Equality of rights" in this atmos-
phere meant that in every branch of economy which

THE HUNTING-GROUND 67

requires a little learning the long-urbanized Jew would
overtake and beat his Polish competitor, the son or
grandson of slow-witted peasants: or so people
thought It is useless to speak of the moral beauty of
fair play: the bare fact is that in Poland the Poles'
jealousy and fear of the Jews were poisoning the very
atmosphere of her public life. We shall see in other
chapters how true it is that in some countries the de-
cisive factor is not the antisemitism of men but the
antisemitism of things. And here we have a first
glimpse of this factual antisemitism.

The result of this statistical fact was that for twenty
years Poland was always on the brink of inner con-
vulsion. I do not mean to suggest that the Jewish
question was her only painful spot; she had other
and perhaps more serious troubles; for example, the
Ukrainian problem. But neither this nor any other
internal difficulty of "Gentile" origin possesses the
one special and accursed peculiarity of antisemitism
its unremitting vitality, its power of accumulating
social toxins. It was something like a bad chronic cold
in the head, not a serious disease in itself but a con-
stant invitation to all other kinds of disease. Party
strife in that "pathological climate" became murder-
ous hate; criticism degenerated into calumny; the
temperature and temper of all public life was that of
the proverbial bear with a sore head.

Yet this was Poland, by her size and numbers and
prestige the central rock of East-Central Europe. Had
she been given, by God or fate, a chance of developing
calmly and steadily, her influence would have stabi-

68 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

lized the whole of that zone, and would have made of
it a real "TTiird Europe," a cohesive force capable of
sobering its German neighbours, despite their numer-
ical strength (for East-Central Europe has a total
population not far short of 100 millions). As it was,
Poland's unrelaxing feverishness acted as a constant
provocation to her predatory neighbours.

The conclusion is clear: no restoration, in Central
or East-Central Europe, will ever make for a durable
peace unless the ulcer of antisemitism is excised.
Among the factors whose interaction has produced
this war, the Jewish bane was omnipresent. The war
will have been fought in vain, the victory will be worse
than a lie if that seed is left in the ground to poison
the future.

CHAPTER VI

THE ANTISEMITISM OF "MEN" AND
"THINGS"

SOME Jewish readers may find these chapters too
lenient with regard to the several Polish govern-
ments which succeeded one another from 1920 to
1939, and which, between them, should be held re-
sponsible for the progressive economic degradation of
Poland's Jewry, for the systematic stultification of its
legal equality, guaranteed under both the Versailles
treaty and the Polish constitution, and for the many
recurrent and unchecked outbursts of brutal violence.
The charge will be justified; but it is here the consid-
ered intention of the author to pass over the guilt of
human beings in order to examine what is much more
important the objective reality, whose trend, in the
central zone of Europe, is inherently and organically
hostile to a scattered minority. The policy of govern-
ments can affect this trend only to a certain extent;
or it will perhaps be more exact to say that any govern-
ment has it in its power to increase the hardship
inflicted by this trend up to the limit of human en-
durance, or beyond it, but it can do very little to soften
or diminish the inevitable pressure, and nothing at all
to remove it.

jo THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

It is unfortunately true that some of these Polish
governments, especially in the period preceding Pil-
sudskf s coup d'etat, did much to aggravate the pres-
sure; and none of them, not even the best, can claim
to have done its duty, or the smallest fraction of its
duty, in respect of alleviating the situation. Nothing
would be easier than to denounce them with the bit-
terness they deserve, now that they are all defeated
and swept away. A chapter of such denunciation might
give a good deal of belated satisfaction to long re-
pressed and outraged indignation. But the author con-
fesses that to him it would give no satisfaction what-
ever. He prefers to adhere to his chosen line of enquiry,
which considers not the sins of men, but the tenden-
cies of an elemental social process.

Those men, ministers and officials, writers and
priests, were often unforgivably guilty; and a long trail
of Jewish tears, often tinged with something more
salty than tears, leads up to their doors. If there is
justice beyond this life, they will pay for their sins;
if history be written by honest pens, they will stand
condemned. But the purpose of this book is to force
Jew and Gentile alike to realize that the fundamental
curse of Jewish existence in the central zone of distress
is due to something infinitely deeper than policies or
ideologies or propagandas, whether anti or pro: and
he would not have the attention of his readers diverted
in the direction of easy and cheap emotion, from the
necessary stern concentration on the essential and
irremediable tragedy.

The ghetto of East-Central Europe was doomed

THE ANTISEMITISM OF "MEN" AND "THINGS" Jl

from of old. No government, no regime, no angel or
devil could have transformed it into anything even
remotely approaching a normal homeland. It is now
utterly impossible to restore it as such unless the
numerical and ethnical proportions undergo a drastic
change.

Some people are so sensitive on the subject that
they regard it as disloyalty to the cause of Jewish
emancipation if facts are adduced to prove that legal
equality alone is utterly insufficient to ensure the Jews
of even a minimum normal existence, least of all in
East-Central Europe. One is reminded that the same
sort of political prudery existed in Tsarist Russia: the
Russian Liberals were so enamoured of "constitution"
and "parliament" that they resented as political trea-
son any hint that life in a country that was strictly
constitutional and parliamentary was by no means
immune from injustice, oppression, bribery, antisemi-
tism and other troubles. But theirs at least was a justi-
fiable ignorance; they had never lived under a con-
stitutional regime. The excuse is not valid in the case
of the Jews of East-Central Europe: they have all had
experience of what legal equality is really worth; the
Jews of Germany, Austria, the western half of Poland,
and the Balkans, for three generations; and those of
eastern Poland and the Baltic countries for twenty
years. All these Jews, without single exception, are fully
and absolutely convinced that legal equality alone is
no cure for the disease which has poisoned their ex-
istence, and will poison it again. It is unforgivably
shortsighted now to withhold this experience from the

72 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

notice of Allied statesmen, some of whom, if not all,
may be genuinely forgetful of it, and sincerely deluded
into imagining that to restore the "equal rights"
clauses in peace treaties, constitutions and covenants
would be an efficient and adequate solution of the
problem. On the contrary: the most urgent need of
the day is to drive it home to all concerned that in
East-Central Europe the equality principle alone
means no equality, but the same old chaos over again.

To make this clear to outside observers, some bitter
truths will have to be admitted and stated, however
painful they may be to persons of exaggerated sensi-
bility. These awkward admissions centre on the one
essential and dominating feature of East-European
reality: there are certain inevitable aspects in the
normal social evolution of Eastern Europe (the words
"inevitable" and "normal" should be emphasized)
which are inherently, objectively, and organically fatal
to the Jews' existence.

The fact will be abundantly illustrated in the course
of the following chapters: and here, as introduction
to the subject, let us consider what is held to be the
classical example of this incompatibility between the
normal evolution of East-Central economy and
the Jews' foothold within that economy. It is the co-
operative movement among the Gentile population,
especially in the rural districts. In Poland there were
some 750,000 Jews living in the villages, where they
constituted, on an average, 3.2% of the total rural
population. These three-quarters of a million souls,

THE ANTISEMltISM OF "MEN" AND "THINGS" 73

with a few exceptions, lived by shopkeeping and ped-
dling goods to the farmers. The co-operative move-
ment began long before the Great War, but its maxi-
mum development was reached during the last decade.
In 1938 there were in rural Poland 3,207 -consumers'
co-operatives (membership: 350,000), 1,475 ^ or ^ e
marketing of dairy produce (membership: 626,000),
and 453 for general marketing (76,000 members).
This development was killing the Jewish traders en
masse. The effect, remarkably enough, was most deadly
in precisely the Ukrainian districts, where direct anti-
semitic propaganda was much weaker than among the
Poles, and where the government had much less rea-
son for desiring to weaken the Jewish influence than
in the purely Polish provinces: a proof that the phe-
nomenon has little to do with any conscious will to
harm the Jews qua Jews, but is rather inherent in the
very nature of the development. It would oust the
rural shopkeeper just as surely if he were an Armenian
or a Chinaman; but he happens to be a Jew, who has
nowhere to go.

There may .have been a few Christian shopkeepers
in these Ukrainian districts, and they too had to sur-
render before the onslaught of the co-operatives. But
the "broken" Christian trader, as often as not, is
absorbed into the administrative machinery of the
movement: being a valuable specialist among simple
peasants, he will be employed by the co-operative.
The Jew will not be so employed; it is so obvious to
all that there could be no question of absorbing the
displaced Jewish trader into the executive staff of a

74 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS

farmers' co-operative that no Jew would ever dream
of asking for such an "absurdity/* Is this, too, to be
described as antisemitism? The managers of the co-
operative movement, most of whom are men of en-
lightened views, would indignantly deny such a charge.
It is "simply"~~they would saythat one has to look
after one's own .people first.

The same phenomenon, but in a much more serious
form, can be observed in one of the Baltic States (or
perhaps in all). Violent antisemitism is not tolerated.
What actually goes on is a social process rather com-
mendable in itself: the State, in one form or another,
is gradually taking over the more or less direct admin-
istration of all the valuable industrial or commercial
concerns. The owners are paid fair value; or shall we
say, more or less fair value. If the owners are Gentiles,
they generally remain in charge. If they are Jews the
case is different: they are gradually replaced by non-
Jews. This, as a rule, is done without any harsh abrupt-
ness, but nevertheless effectively. As one of the victims
put it to the author: 'In Poland, when the govern-
ment takes over a Jewish-owned factory, all the Jews
on the staff have to go. Here there is no such indecent
haste. Ninety per cent of my former staff were left in
employment when it happened; that was three years
ago. A year later only 70% were left; last year 50%, and
now the end is in sight"

A remarkable dictum is often quoted in that coun-
try; it is said to have been uttered by quite exalted
lips: "Never trouble to kill the flies: but leave no
crumbs for them/' This aphorism is interpreted as a

ct _ ?> . tc

THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN AND THINGS 75

formula of deliberate if "polite" antisemitism; but
there is no proof that it was ever really spoken, and
it matters little whether it was or not. The crux of
the matter is whether in the atmosphere of East-
Central Europe a government engaged upon such an
unquestionably progressive adventure as the nation-
alization of pivotal industries would be allowed to act
otherwise. The total population of the country is that
of a London borough; but there is a university and a
school for higher engineering, with several thousand
pupils. Every year more and more of "one's own
people/' fully qualified, line up for jobs mostly ex-
cellent types of young manhood, keen, gifted, honest
and efficient. How long would any government be
tolerated if it kept them waiting while Jews continued
to staff and manage what would now be State concerns
though created by Jewish enterprise with Jewish
capital?

A gross injustice! Of course; but mere disapproval
is useless. The root of the trouble is not hatred of the
Jewsthat could be combated, if not eradicated but
something much more elemental and primordial: sym-
pathy with "one's own people," an instinct which
cannot be criticized, because, after all, it is as natural
as preferring one's own childien to one's neighbour's
offspring.

The Antisemitism of Things, of course, is due in the
last resort to a certain subjective attitude of human
beings. The line here drawn between the two kinds of
Judeophobia that of Men and that of Things is,

76 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

however, not an artificial distinction. Human anti-
semitism is an active enmity, a constant urge to harm
the hated race, to humiliate them, to see them
squirming and writhing beneath one's feet. Obviously,
such an aggressive and sadistic mentality cannot be
kept for ever on the boil in every average member of
the community: it must have its ups and downs, its
periods of eruption and of hibernation, and even at
its strongest only a leading minority manifest it in its
greedily acute stage; the majority just follow suit and
mildly enjoy the fun. Being thus of a somewhat elastic
nature, the "Antisemitism of Men" can sometimes be
fought with a measure of success; the Germans, for
instance, a nation endowed with a remarkable genius
for collective obedience, might be expected to tone
it down to order, if not exasperated by too great an
influx of reverzants.

There seems to be something pathological in such
a volcanic heat of hatred. However strong the genuine
racial repulsion, however appalling the sins of Israel,
the subject obviously does not justify even a fraction
of such a turmoil. The suspicion inevitably arises that
this attitude is subconsciously based not only on re-
pulsion but also on attraction: as is the case with
sadism. A remarkable political feature of such volcanic
antisemitism is its inability to appreciate the Zionist
or other similar aspirations. Logically, the Nazis ought
to be inclined to encourage any movements tending
towards the evacuation of the Jews from Germany:
in practice, they have done more than any other gov-
ernment to stir up anti-Jewish trouble in Palestine,

THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN AND THINGS JJ

though it could only hamper the exodus. Should
Uganda and Angola or Mindanao be declared a na-
tional home for the Jews instead of Palestine, the
Nazi attitude would evidently be the same. Sadism
does not wish to lose its victim; the Biblical story of
the Exodus was the first recorded instance of this curi-
ous interplay of two opposite passions: one longing to
exterminate the hated breed and one determined to
prevent their departure.

Other curious hypotheses have been suggested by
observers of this morbid phenomenon. The most pop-
ular one of these was revived, some years ago, by Henri
Bernstein, in a play entitled Israel: it told the story of
a young French aristocrat, a virulent enemy of the
Jews, who lived to learn that his real father was not
son cher papa, but a fashionable Jewish banker. The
obvious suggestion is that all volcanic antisemitism is
an abnormal infatuation, which must have some physi-
ological basis, probably racial. Baron Etovos (pro-
nounced approximately, "Etvesh" ) , a great Hungarian
statesman, wrote almost a century ago: "An antisemite
is a man who dislikes the Jews more than he should/'
Why more? Why so excited? The simplest explana-
tion is that he "has Jews on the brain," and that this
mania is due to the presence of a drop of Jewish
blood, which produces some mysterious and atavistic
reaction in the hybrid psyche. According to this
theory, any "volcanic" Jew-hater that is, a man who
does not just dislike them "as much as he should" but
who makes a fuss about it very probably has Jewish
ancestors; they may be very remote, or hidden by bar

78 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS

sinister, so that no written record can reveal the fact;
they may have left no trace on the shape of his nose,
or even the form of his eyes, but that is not essential:
the ''Jew-complex" itself is held to be a sufficient
proof of racial atavism.

This may be true or it may be mere guesswork. A
specialist in collective psychopathology might well
investigate the theory. The Jews will remain unmoved:
they are not likely to be flattered by the revelation of
Dr. Goebbels' Rabbinical descent, nor would the dis-
covery in any way diminish or increase their troubles.
The author's purpose in this digression is to empha-
size the morbid, hectic, fluctuating character of what
he calls the "Antisemitism of Men" as distinct from
"Antisemitism of Things/' which is steady, constant
and immutable, and therefore much more formidable.

It derives from the instinctive discrimination which
every normal person makes between his or her "own
kind" and all outsiders. It need not be hatred; it need
have nothing to do with actual repulsion. It may be
dormant under normal conditions, and may remain
dormant for generations, to awaken only when there
is keen competition for some essential boon, when the
choice is between one's own kin and the outsider, and
the instinct of self-defence emerges. Even then it need
not (though it may) flare up in an angry blaze: it may
remain correctly polite, while inwardly merciless- as
in the Baltic example; or it may run amok, as it some-
times does in Poland. It is not the form that matters,
but the spirit. That spirit is the inextinguishable
awareness of every Gentile that his Jewish neighbour

THE ANTISEMITISM OF MEN AND THINGS 79

is not "his own kind/' and of every Jew that his Aryan
friends are not "his own kind." There is no intrinsic
harm in this awareness; it is no obstacle to decent
neighbourly intercourse, to mutual help, even to
friendship, so long as the social "climate" is favour-
able. In the "climate" of East-Central Europe it be-
comes the Jew's death-sentence.

CHAPTER VII

THE POLISH GHETTO

nnHERE is no evidence that "Antisemitisin of
"

Men" has ever been an actual fixation in the
collective Polish mind. The author has no intention
of quoting any of the familiar and sympathetic refer-
ences to the Jews in the works of the Polish poets
and novelists, for they mean nothing; what he has in
mind is the complete absence of any recordso far as
he is aware of any conscious anti-Jewish movement,
either in literature or in society, since the partition
of Poland and approximately down to the year 1909.

By this it is not suggested that there was no racial
estrangement,, no occasional cursing or baiting or
beating of Jews; but in this peculiar position the Jew
learns to distinguish between the ordinary little fail-
ures of national hospitality and such a special and
deliberate phenomenon as a "movement/'

Since 1909, however, and throughout the Great
War, and after, Poland has been the theatre of unre-
mitting attacks on every Jewish position; attacks de-
livered by every imaginable means by words, fists,
economic anathemata, and various kinds of Govern-
mental action, falling short only of frankly discrimina-
tive legislation. Inflicted upon a multitude of 3,300,-

80

THE POLISH GHETTO 8l

ooo Jewish souls, most of whom had been paupers for
generations, these attacks resulted in indescribable
economic misery, and an almost general stampede for
emigration a "frozen stampede/' of course, for most
of the outlets were closed.

Poland has thus finally established, throughout the
Dispersion, her title as the most tragic of all the
ghettos; and the Polish ghetto shows, in this most
complete and typical form, all the morbid and painful
phenomena which result from existence in the ghetto;
and above all, that process which is the natural cul-
mination of such an existence: the automatic, eco-
nomic eviction of a scattered minority by local majori-
ties. We call it "automatic" because this eviction is
bound to occur independently of any conscious
"movement" against the Jews, or any anti-Jewish legis-
lation. In the case of a movement the process advances
more rapidly, in the case of legislation perhaps a little
more gradually; but in either case it proceeds with the
obstinacy of a moving dune.

All Polish Jews (consciously or subconsciously, ad-
mittedly or despite their denials) are aware of this
automatism, this lack of any real causative connection
between the doom that weighs upon their economic
horizon and the mood of masses or ministers. The
author has never found any trace of permanent resent-
ment against the Polish people among Jewish emi-
grants from Poland, nor even of resentment against
the Polish State; whereas it cannot be denied that Ger-
man-Jewish refugees are imbued with a profound and
comminatory bitterness, not only towards Nazism, but

82 THE "ANTSSEMITISM OF THINGS"

towards the whole national environment which toler-
ates Nazism. These exiles from Germany feel that it
was some evil in the very nature of men, an evil ruling
the men and women in the street, which wilfully trans-
formed a decent country into a jungle. What the
Polish Jew, sedentary or emigre, feels about the part
played by human ill-will in producing the miseries of
the ghetto, was once revealed to the writer in the wist-
ful complaint of a Galician rabbi: "I wonder, if I were
king, just how much I should be able to do to improve
the lot of the Jews in this blessed country. It does not
depend so entirely on what orders you give, nor on
how many hooligans you put in jail. It is more like the
falling of rain and snow."

This attitude of indulgence toward governmental
system under which Polish Jewry has suffered so
cruelly is of great significance. The writer must confess
that it gives him pleasure to dwell upon it, as proof
of the instinctive fairness and decency of his fellow-
Jews; a twofold pleasure, since it has recently become
the fashion in a section of the Western Press to speak
disparagingly of the defeated allies of yesterday of
the Pilsudski school of statesmen, and even of Pil-
sudski himself. Colonel Beck in particular, the late
Foreign Secretary, is sometimes depicted as a species
of reactionary, a pro-Nazi, a pupil of the Biblical
Haman. Such references are not only in the worst of
taste: they are also evidence of defective memory.
And here, without seeking to write their apology, the
author may without irrelevance say something of that

THE POLISH GHETTO 83

unfortunate, long-foredoomed little company of pupils
whom Pilsudski left in charge of his Poland.

"His Poland." The writer never saw nor heard
Pilsudski, but he believes that the impression which
he gathered of the Marshal's brand of patriotic philos-
ophy is essentially just. For Pilsudski patriotism was
a stern, austere and ascetic religion, scornful of all
emotionalism. There was a universally current myth
that Pilsudski "hated the Russians as fervently as he
adored the Poles": it was probably nonsense, for the
man was organically impervious to such girlish senti-
mentalities as worship of A and detestation of B. One
wonders what he would have answered if he had
been questioned on the subject. "Absurd," he might
have said. "My attitude to all peoples is merely polite
indifference, except as regards my own people; I may
not be polite to them, because their shortcomings
always get on my nerves." This is the only real cri-
terion of authentic and unalloyed patriotism, which
is a permanent state of dry, pragmatic concern with-
out any "banjo stuff." Pilsudski was eminently prag-
matic; he was always frowning upon some Polish
shortcoming which got on his nerves, always building
or repairing or tidying up. Strictly speaking he never
had a "programme," in the usual sense of a string of
paragraphs dealing with this and that; though for all
we know he may have signed one or several in the
earlier stages of his career. But his life's work is proof
that he always possessed and followed a clear plan of
action, a plan so direct and simple that one feels that

84 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS

it should be possible to express it in a few lapidary
words. He probably never troubled about "hating"
Russia (which is not to say that he was not con-
cerned to guard against Russia's greed of encroach-
ment): but he certainly feared the contagion of that
semi-Asiatic untidiness, sloppiness and lack of thor-
oughness which have always constituted Russia's
charm and often her undoing. For Poland, Pilsudski
would have none of the familiar ame slave nonsense;
none of the mingling of golden dreams and prosper-
ous lice; none of that profound mystical* rumbling
which sounds like thunder and is actually only a snore.
His Poland was to be tidy, clean, punctual, efficient,
decent, "Western/' in short Perhaps one might say
that his policy was to push Poland westward across the
map nearer, say, to Switzerland, This does not imply
that he was an unreserved admirer of all Western
ways, but they were at all events preferable to certain
peculiarities of the East as represented by Soviet Rus-
sia. "I remember Russia/' Pilsudski once told a visitor;
"interesting, but somewhat unwashed." He wanted
Poland to wash properly, to be clean in every sense,
material and moral. Among the stains that he wanted
her to wash away was the degrading habit of Jew-
baiting.

Pilsudski was neither a friend of the Jews nor their
enemy: he was politely indifferent "politely" at all
events in public. One cannot help suspecting (though
he never said so) that he would not have thought it
regrettable had Poland had only 1% of Jews instead of
10%; and as there were never enough jobs to go round,

THE POLISH GHETTO 85

one may imagine (though he never mentioned it) that
he wanted them to go to the Poles and not to the
Jews. But pogroms and ghetto laws and such things
were to him like a boil on the tip of the beloved's
nose: Pilsudski would not have them in his Poland.

How far he succeeded in cleansing the face of
Poland of this particular blemish is another question.
His efforts were not very effective, and one feels that
he might have tried harder.

One is certainly justified in bringing this charge
against his successors: they assuredly could have tried
harder. Some of them the author has met personally
Colonel Beck, Marshal Smigly-Rydz, General Slawoj-
Skladkowski, and a number of younger men, whose
r61e might be compared with that of the famous
"Lloyd George Secretariat" in 1917; and he has had
other opportunities of gauging the general trend of
their wishes and their efforts. None of them pretended
to be a lover of the Jews though we should seek in
vain, amongst our sincerest well-wishers in Western
Europe, for any such intimate intuition as theirs, de-
rived from centuries of close proximity, of the Jew's
Weltanschauung, the atmosphere of the Jewish home,
and the Jewish sou! But it would be hardly exact to
class them as political antisemites. As acutely as their
teacher, Pilsudski, they felt and feared the degrading,,
besmirching vulgarity of pogroms in the street and
pogrom-like pages on the statute book. But they had
to face a host of elemental forces within the country,
pressing for anti-Jewish legislation and breaking out

86 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

into murderous rioting. There were moments after
Pilsudskf s death when the only barrier left between
the Jews and the crusade of all against the Jews was
the Government and the small controlling group
which supported it the Pilsudski clique, commonly
known as "the Colonels"; a group small in number
and isolated, with no proper roots in any social stratum
of importance. The "Colonels" tried to stem the gen-
eral clamour for brutal Nazi methods by offering a
more dignified alternative: they sponsored efforts to-
ward preparing an orderly scheme of voluntary mass-
evacuation; in Geneva they intervened for more
extensive emigration to Palestine; and they encouraged
various projects for Jewish settlements in Australia
and Madagascar. Many Jews who knew them would
vouch for the sincerity of these attempts, though they
could wish that they had been ten times as whole-
hearted and forcible. But the relevant fact is that the
onslaught which they sought to ward off was an offen-
sive of formidable intensity, backed by members of all
classes, and resisted by few of any class; it was truly
"elemental," truly "a crusade of all against the Jews."
As we have seen, in Poland (as distinct from Ger-
many) the onslaught was not a movement based upon
sentiment or conviction. Apart from the hooligan ele-
ment, there was little actual hatred of the Jews in
Polish society. Often enough, those who were ready
to sign a petition for anti-Jewish legislation would
swear that they were honestly sorry for the harm which
their action was bound to cause the Jewsbut there
was no other way out: "it's either my son or the Jew's

THE POLISH GHETTO 87

son, for there is only one loaf/' This explains the luke-
warmness of even the Polish Socialists in combating
antisemitism: they too had to consider the inveterate
attitude of organized labour. The Polish worker openly
disliked the "intrusion" of the Jewish proletariat into
the higher reaches of mechanized industry, and asked:
'If they all come in, where shall I be?"

It will take generations of research to discover ex-
actly what was at the bottom of this elemental phe-
nomenon. The reader has already been warned that
the author of this study is only a layman. He can offer
no solution; but of the various explanations which he
has heard one strikes him as credible. It is based on the
sociological peculiarities of the ghetto on one hand
and of Poland's industrial development on the other.

The same general conditions which, since the indus-
trial revolution, have caused the great migration of
villagers toward the towns in the Western countries,
have been operative also in Poland, though they de-
veloped much later and were less intense in their
effects. About 1863, after the collapse of the second
Polish rebellion in Russia, the national energy was
concentrated on what was called "Organic Work"
meaning mostly economic enterprise, commercial-
ism and industrialization. The rise of Polish manufac-
turers began from that date; and the Jews, constituting
about one-third of the country's urban population,
took their full share in this development At the same
time, the Polish village began to pour its human sur-
plus, in ever-increasing proportions, into the towns.

88 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

But the arrival of that surplus, during the first four
decades, did not necessarily produce any clash with the
Jews, for the growing industries demanded ever-
increasing numbers of labourers, and readily absorbed
the village youths, leaving the Jews more or less undis-
turbed in the exercise of their old callings; those of
wholesale or petty trader, general go-between, or-
ganiser, physician, lawyer, and so on, with the great
class of unemployables, always a very conspicuous
element of an Eastern Jewish community, clustering
around the aristocracy of breadwinners.

So matters continued peacefully until the decade
before the war of 1914, when a new phase of industrial
evolution began to ripen, though it arrived at full
maturity only after that war. This new phase was the
rise of the Robot, the advent of rationalization, and
increasing horse-power, which was beginning to en r
croach upon the interests of the human motor. Per-
haps one should hardly call it a "new" iphase, for the
workers in the West had foreseen it since the first
riots against the earliest experiments in steam weav-
ing; but for more than a century, even in those coun-
tries which led the world in respect of technical
progress, the workers' fear had proved premature.
During that century, it is true, the productive power
of steam-machinery had advanced in a steady arith-
metical progression, but at the same time, thanks to
the steamship and the locomotive, the markets for all
products increased in what was more like a geometrical
progression. Industry was still capable of absorbing

THE POLISH GHETTO OQ

the human surplus and of asking for more: especially,
of course, in the backward East of Europe, where the
progress of the Robot was naturally slow.

But towards the dawn of the twentieth century the
proportions were gradually reversed: it was now the
power of machinery, driven by motors more efficient
than the old steam engine, that began to advance in
geometrical progression, while the growth of the mar-
kets naturally slackened. The result, which did not
become fully apparent until the nineteen-twenties, was
the promotion of the unemployed from what used
to be under normal conditions a comparatively
moderate fluctuating reserve, to the rank of a perma-
nent social class; and a class even under normal
conditions of very great numerical importance. It
now looks as though modern industry needs no more
labour; and soon, perhaps, the question will arise, for
how long is the "proletariat/' in the classical Marxian
sense of the term, likely to retain its raison d'&re as
one of the main factors of industrial production? It
seems as though this tendency of social evolution can
be checked only under abnormal conditions: in coun-
tries technically advanced, including Germany, by a
race of armaments; in a backwood waste like Soviet
Russia, where a worker of average Western efficiency
is called a Stakhanovist, in comparison with whom
the average local worker is a slacker, by a hectic at-
tempt to overtake "in a Five Years' Plan" what the
West achieved in fifty: both stimuli being obviously
ephemeral. Apart from these exceptional cases, the

go THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS

rule is that an influx of man-power is of no profit to

the factory even in Poland.

This, it may be suggested, is the main reason why
in Poland, since 1905; and especially since 1920, eco-
nomic positions which used to be regarded as "per-
mitted to Jews'' began to be violently disputed. The
village boy on coming to town no longer found
employment at the loom, and had to try for other jobs
-engaging at first in retail trading and hawking, in
which illiteracy was no obstacle; only to find that these
jobs were filled by the half-starved Jew. This, of course,
was only one aspect of the automatic interaction that
began to develop out of the situation: as one sector of
the field encroached upon another, in the end a gen-
eral and concerted claim of all the Gentiles to all the
jobs held by Jews was bound to arise. This had nothing
to do with theories or national idiosyncrasies. Had
there been no Jews in Poland, the "crusade" would
probably have been as violent; only in the absence of
a clearly recognisable objective it would have assumed
a less concentrated form, a struggle of "all against all"
instead of "all against the Jews/ 7 The basic fact is this,
that the Polish community has not enough jobs to go
round, and the Jews, for a thousand and one reasons,
are an ideally handy target for the old game which the
French call dte-toi de la que ;e m'y mette. Among
these many reasons, one is particularly effective: there
are over three million of Jews, constituting 10% of the
general population, and fully one-third of the popula-
tion of the principal cities.

THE POLISH GHETTO 91

This "mechanized" interpretation of the elemental
character of Poland's Jewish tragedy may be com-
pletely or partly correct, partly or completely errone-
ous. The essential fact remains: a situation in which
the "Antisemitism of Men" is a mere trifle compared
with the inexorable anti-Jewish pressure of Things.
Men may hate the Jews, or they may hate the necessity
of ousting the Jews, as many of them probably do; it
does not matter. Governments may prevent or punish
hooliganism: they cannot change the "climate" of
the social structure. That Galician Rabbi who doubted
whether he himself, even if equipped with the widest
powers of autocracy, could stop the ousting of the
Jew, was right; certainly no Polish government can do
it, or is likely to attempt it.

Some Jewish Socialists, however (though not all),
suggest that there is a remedy; Socialism throughout
Poland would mean work and welfare for all, and no
ousting of Jews or Gentiles. They would do well, be-
fore propounding this solution, to discuss it privately
with their Gentile comrades. The latter may not be
antisemites, but this does not mean that their ideal of
a Socialist Poland is a country with 30% of Jews among
the urban population. Every sober and honest Polish
Socialist will admit, if asked for his frank opinion, that
Socialism or no Socialism, an extensive emigration of
Jews could only improve the situation, and the more
extensive the better.

But this question is outside our present inquiry,

92 THE ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS

which deals only with the Allied war aims. In the
writer's judgment the fate of a scattered ethnical
minority in a Socialist State is just as painful as in a
non-Socialist State. Some will think differently; but
what does it matter to-day. A Socialist revolution, in
Poland or elsewhere, is not among the Allied war aims.
On the contrary, what the Allies want is a restored
Poland, "democratic" in much the same sense as Eng-
land or France or the United States. This is the only
prospect which we need discuss realistically. The con-
clusion, from the Jewish point of view, is clear.

At the close of this war there will evidently be an
additional complication in Poland's Jewish problem:
the question of the Lublin reservation. It is apparently
the intention of the Nazi government to carve out a
district around the city of Lublin in the south-eastern
corner of German-occupied Poland and to use it for
the compulsory settlement of Jews. There is some
method in this choice: the Lublin province had the
highest percentage of Jews among all provinces of
Poland 42.9% in the towns, 6% in villages, 13% in
all. A beginning has already been made in respect of
the transportation of Jews to this district, but the
scope of the project is uncertain. It is not yet known
whether the reservation is intended for all the Jews
under the control of Germany or only for certain
sections or categories. It is impossible, at the time of
writing, to ascertain what is actually happening there.
It has already been rumoured that the plan has been
abandoned; and again, that 90,000 Jews from Bo-

THE POLISH GHETTO 93

hemia and Moravia, 100,000 from Vienna, and so
on, would soon be transferred to Lublin.* The area
of the reservation was alleged to be two hundred
square miles, or two thousand, or five thousand, or
more (the Polish province had an area of about
10,000 square miles). All this may mean that the
German government has not yet condescended to re-
veal all the details of its plan, and we have no other
choice but to rely on gossip and guesswork; and it also
may mean that the German government has nothing
to reveal that the plan is no plan, but a vague im-
provisation. There is, by the way, a universal but
foolish tendency to overestimate Germany's "plan-
ning" abilities, which overlooks the very obvious fact
that quite often, at crucial moments, both before and
during the war, the Nazi government has gone to
work without any definite design, political or strategic,
has changed its schemes every day, and generally
lives from hand to mouth. It is, therefore, quite pos-
sible that the Lublin reservation scheme may be aban-
doned, or that it may develop into something big, or
may stop in the middle of this development.

What the maximum of this development (if attain-
able) would be may be gauged from the following
computation recently made by the Manchester Guard-
ian. "The Nazis," that newspaper says, "have not
indeed revealed how big the reserve is going to be. If

* According to the latest information, the Nazis have ceased to
use the Lublin ghetto as a dumping ground for Jews, on account of
its overwhelming congestion. An eye witness report of the inhuman
conditions prevalent in Lublin was published in The Contemporary
Jewish Record of March-April 1940.

94 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

one generously assumes that it covers the|whole of the
Lublin vojvodship it will have an area of 13,000 (?)
square miles. Its present population is 2,464,600, of
whom 259,500 are Jews. The Jews will stay, but the
other inhabitants will have to leave for the Remainder
State, for Germany, or for Russia, according to their
nationality. In their place it is planned to send
1,500,000 Jews from the Remainder State, 500,000
from the Polish territories annexed by Germany, 180,-
ooo from Germany and the Sudetenland, 65,000 from
Austria, and 75,000 from the Protectorate of Bohemia
and Moravia. In all, this province, already one of the
poorest in Poland, would have to support over 3,000,-
ooo people/*

One thing is clear: in making any forecasts of the
future of Poland's Jewish problem, the contingency
must be very seriously taken into account that there
may be found to exist, at the moment of restoration,
an area of some importance to which hundreds of
thousands of Jews have been transported from other
parts of Poland. Two problems will immediately arise:
first, the re-incorporation of that district into the gen-
eral body of the republic, its administrative, economic,
and above all ethnical assimilation with the remain-
der of the country; secondly what to do with that
agglomeration of Jews. If by then they have all starved
to death, the problem will be solved; but one must
allow also for the other eventualitythat by some mir-
acle, perhaps by some magnificent effort of interna-
tional charity, that easy way out will have been pre-

THE POLISH GHETTO 95

vented, so that the problem will still exist: what to do
with these Jews?

Logically, the re-incorporation of the Lublin district
into a democratic Poland where all enjoy equal rights
can only mean that those hundreds of thousands of
Jews would be free to disperse from the congested area
and return to their former towns, or to towns in other
parts of Poland. The correct application of this logical
course would, however, threaten at once to upset the
balance of economic interests (a precarious equilib-
rium at best, during the first stages of a reconstruc-
tion), to envenom the social atmosphere, and to force
into the forefront a controversy which everyone would
prefer, at least, to postpone.

This will be only one of the many similar facets of
the situation: not only the Lublin Jews but all the
Jews will, in a sense, be "coming back" to recover jobs
from which they have been turned out, even if their
exile did not take them any farther than round the
corner. But the Lublin reservation is likely to prove a
concentrated and magnified and extremely suggestive
illustration of the general tragedy.

CHAPTER VIII

FREEDOM FOR BOTH

rTlHERE is, at the moment of writing, a Polish
JL government in exile, with its seat at Angers,
France. The writer is one of its genuine well-wishers;
he has read with satisfaction its formal promises to the
effect that in the restored Polish republic there will be
equality of rights and no racial oppression, and has no
doubt as to the subjective sincerity of such pronounce-
ments. But it would be only hypocrisy on his part, or
anybody's part, to overrate the practical effectiveness
of such statements so far as future realities are con-
cerned. A future democracy will eventually choose its
leaders, and determine, by popular vote, its lines of
inner policy. Those lines will be "popular" in the pro-
founder sense of the wordautomatically true to the
basic interests and fundamental idiosyncrasies of the
nation. War-time undertakings, if they fit that na-
tion's mentality, will be confirmed; if not, they will be
disregarded.

No doubt a most excellent Polish treaty, probably
linked with a whole chain of other excellent treaties,
will be signed after the Allied victory, guaranteeing
all the desirable things that have to be guaranteed.
There is no need to insist on what the world knows-

96

FREEDOM FOR BOTH 97

so well: that it may perhaps be possible to ensure by
outside supervision the inviolability of regulations of
an international character; but no outside supervision
can permanently prevent a sovereign nation *from
doing exactly what it likes inside its own frontiers.
What Sir Archibald Sinclair so thoughtfully said of
future Germany applies equally to future Poland.
Paper safeguards, if incompatible with realities, will be
swept away or "interpreted" r down to zero, possibly
with the reluctant consent of the Supervising Outsider
himself, under the pretext that "it can't be helped/'
Restored Poland will deal with Jews left within her
gates exactly as she pleases.

There is every reason to fear that it may soon be-
come politically awkward to insist on promises of real
equality for the Jews in a Poland restored by an Allied
victory. Nazi propaganda in the German-occupied sec-
tion of the republic is sure to seize upon such under-
takings as a useful means of making the Polish govern-
ment in exile unpopular with Poles in Poland. One
can almost anticipate the very wording of the broad-
casts and articles which Dr. Goebbels' headquarters
will devote to the subject: "They promise you restora-
tion, but their first step is to be the reinstatement of
the two million Jews in those economic positions from
which the German victory has driven them, so that
two million Poles will have to make room for these
Jews and starve . . ." No matter how cynical, this line
of argument cannot but impress the overwhelming
majority of Poles in their present misery. This aspect
of the situation should not be lost sight of, especially

98 THE "ANHSEMITISM OF THINGS

by the well-wishers of the Angers government, of

Poland, and of the Allied cause.

There was a time, long ago, years even before the
Great War, when the author believed that Poland
as a whole was responsible for the popular success of
Roman Dmowskf s early experiments in antisemitism.
But time and closer observation taught him how
negligible is the guilt of the journalists or the ring-
leaders or the masses, whether of omission or of posi-
tive action, in the face of the dead pressure of objec-
tive reality; and he said as much publicly, thereby
disappointing and paining many a short-sighted but
honest and patriotic Jew, and the movement to which
he belongs paid a heavy price for that attempt to be
fair to the Polish nation even when dealing with a
Jewish tragedy. We did not grudge the price because
we realized that the relationship between the Jews as a
nation and the land harbouring the largest of our East
European communities was too important historically
to both to be allowed to degenerate into mere bitter-
ness and resentment.

The same feeling guides the author now. It is use-
less to urge the Polish Government in exile to declare
that a restored Poland can really enact, not on paper
but in facts of social life, a regime of equal opportu-
nity for a Polish Jewry "restored" in its former mil-
lions; it is useless for Allied ministers or ambassadors
or Members of Parliament to pretend that they believe
in such a possibility. Probably the Polish people is
essentially as decent as the English, but it was also a
very decent Polish gentleman who wrote, many years

FREEDOM FOR BOTH 99

ago: "I should like the Jews in Poland to be as happy
as the Jews in England, provided the percentage of
Jews in Poland be the same as in England." It is 10%
in Poland, less than l /2% in Great Britain. Such a radi-
cal reduction is hardly possible and hardly necessary;
but the two aspects of the problem are closely interre-
lated. Racial peace in Poland and not in Poland only
will be possible only as a corollary to a very extensive,
and very greatly accelerated repatriation of Jewish
masses to whatever spot on earth they may consider
their national homeland. There will be no equal rights,
and no healthy social life generally, in the whole of
East-Central Europe so long as these Jewish masses are
not given a full and honourable opportunity to aban-
don all those positions which they have irretrievably
lost; and if that means the overwhelming majority of
their former positions, the fact cannot be helped.

Let this be clearly understood. It is the duty of a
Polish government fighting on the side of the Allies
to guarantee equal rights for all in future Poland. But
it is equally its moral duty to warn those Allies that the
burden of solving such a world-problem as the Jewish
problem in Poland cannot be borne by Poland alone-
it will have to be shared by other Powers, by the colo-
nial empires especially, and above all, by Great Britain,
the mandatory Power for Palestine. To sound this
warning, the Polish Government in exile may have to
risk the impatient frown of those who want the Jewish
problem to be safely hushed up; but the gain in respect
and dignity before the opinion of the world will be
incalculable. This departure would also be in keeping

ioo THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

with a noble tradition, for in 1863 the motto of the
Polish rebellion was an appeal not to one oppressed
nation, but to two. 'Tor our freedom and yours !"
Enslaved Russia was indicated, but she did not re-
spond or help. The Jews will do both.

The following is the translation of a letter from a
Catholic Aryan Pole:

The day must inevitably come, and the sooner the
better/ when those who speak in Poland's name will
address the follo\Wng message to the world, the Allies
and the Jews:

'With all her heart, Poland wishes to ensure, in her
public life of the future, real and full equality among
all her citizens of whatever creed, race or language.
Above all, she wants this rule tb apply in the fullest
measure to her Jewish citizens. But she earnestly warns
all concerned that, in the case of the Jews, the achieve-
ment of real equality is threatened by an obstacle
which, unless an exceptional effort is made to remove
it, is~bo*uiid to defy the best endeavours of statesman-
ship. This obstacle, a result of the historical injustice
called the Jewish Dispersion, is the unique degree in
which Poland's social life, and her urban life in par-
ticular, is complicated by the omnipresence of ethnical
polarities. There is no real parallel to this state of things
in any other country. Poland's civilization, proud as she
is of it, cannot spiritually assimilate a minority so strong
and so ubiquitous; nor would the Jews' own national
conscience, which Poland respects, agree to such as-
similation. As long as this situation exists, Poland can
only promise to strive for, not to achieve, real equality;

FREEDOM FOR BOTH 101

and the result, whatever our efforts, will be hardship
and injustice to all.

It is therefore Poland's duty to remind her Allies,
and the world at large, that the Jewish problem in
Poland is only a fraction of the Jewish world problem
as a whole, and that the former can be solved only
by a parallel endeavour and a parallel sacrifice on the
part of Poland, her Allies, and all the other peoples
claiming the Allies' friendship. While Poland will do
her utmost to enforce equality within her borders, a
concerted effort of the most exceptional magnitude will
be necessary to make possible the accelerated mass emi-
gration from Poland of all the Jews who desire to
emigrate.

This plan, however, cannot even be contemplated
unless it is conceived in a spirit of respect, not of
humiliation, for the Jewish nation. To press for a mass-
exodus to a new Dispersion would be a crime against a
people whose suffering is rooted in dispersion. The
migration which Poland foresees can only be a volun-
tary and dignified mass-repatriation to a Jewish State.

The greater its scope, the more effective will become
Poland's power to translate the principle of equal rights
into a reality, and to ensure a normal civic atmosphere
for all those Jews whom the Polish national organism
shall prove capable, to their mutual benefit, of absorb-
ing.

Poland's complete renaissance to freedom, both ex-
ternal and inner, implies, therefore, two separate things:
first, the restoration of Poland, and second, the creation
of a Jewish State.

CHAPTER IX

THE WAR AND THE JEW*

THE apparently deliberate policy of keeping the
Jews as a people at arm's length in the prosecu-
tion of the war is providing the enemy with a power-
ful weapon of psychological warfare against the Allied
countries. It appears that the Allied governments
have, since the beginning of the war, been preoccupied
with what they regarded as the need to stultify the
German effort to make the war appear as a "Jewish
war/' By radio, press, and word of mouth the enemy
has disseminated the legend that the German govern-
ment harbored no hostile intentions against the Allies,
and that it was only the Nazi "struggle against the
Jew" that had induced the Allies to risk the blood
of their peoples in order to save the Jews and wreak
vengeance on the Nazis. This was the line pursued by
the enemy. The only method the Allies have shown
themselves able to find for countering it was to force
the Jewish factor into the background and to suppress
Jewish identity in the war operations. It seems that the
Allies hoped, by withdrawing the Jew from public no-
tice, to destroy the effect of the German propaganda.

* Condensed from a memorandum submitted to the British Gov-
ernment early in 1940.

102

THE WAR AND THE JEW 103

Despite the deliberate policy of Jewish extermina-
tion pursued by the Germans in the occupied terri-
tories, the Jewish angle has been almost completely
suppressed in the Allied press and radio reports. Allied
statesmen, while consistently referring to any and
every aspect and phase of the war, with a studiousness
that cannot be regarded as accidental, have carefully
eschewed references to the Jew; every attempt to in-
terest English political and military circles in the
creation of Jewish military units has met with stub-
born resistance. The general effect of this policy was
to render Jews, so to say, non-existent for the dura-
tion of the war.

This policy fails wholly in its object. Indeed, it is
designed to destroy the effects of German propaganda,
presented for the consumption of the Allied popula-
tions in a positive fashion. Germans state facts or
inventions dressed up as facts. They declare that they
have cleansed the Reich of Jews and Jewish influence;
that they have compelled Jews to disgorge what had
been robbed from the German people; that they have
purified German blood of Jewish defilement; and
that the only obstacle to peace with England and
France is a domineering Jewry which has forced Eng-
land into war out of desire for revenge. Instead of
fighting this German propaganda by equally positive
arguments and figures, Allied propaganda deliberately
ignores this perilous web of fact and fiction, hoping
that by simply suppressing the Jew as an entity it
will render German propaganda innocuous. This hope
proved to be futile. Among the general population in

104 THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS

England, German propaganda, in combinatoin with
anti-Jewish and anti-war agitation by certain groups,
is producing a definite effect. Despite this conspiracy
of silence around the Jews, the various grievances and
dissatisfactions provoked by the war are prone to be
directed in considerable measure towards the Jew
as a culpable factor. Throughout the country one
hears talk of the war as a "J ewis h war -" T* 16 g enera l
population is fully aware of the brutally anti-Jewish
policy of the Nazi regime. Therefore, it finds it easy
to conclude that it is the Jew who would benefit by
a British victory, and that it is consequently the Jew
who must in one way or another be responsible both
for the outbreak of the war and for its continuance.
Proceeding on this basis, the man in the street looks
for the Jewish contribution in what he has come to
regard as a "Jewish war/ 7 He finds that there is no
Jewish army in the field, that Jews as an entity are
wholly absent from the various day-to-day operations
which form the narrative of the war. This mental
process is well-known to the enemy and to the anti-
war groups who have set themselves the task of
weakening national morale. With the progress of the
war, the multiplication of casualties, and the inten-
sification of personal hardship, they will be in a
position to utilize it to the full.

No less important is the effect of this set of con-
ditions on the United States and neutral coun-
tries. These countries are exposed to the full blast of
propaganda and information from all the belligerents,
as well as to knowledge gleaned from their own ex-

THE WAR AND THE JEW 105

perience. They are fully aware of the Jewish angle
of the war. They have been witnesses to Jewish suffer-
ing and the extent of the Jewish problem in general.
To them the outbreak of war, its continuance and
the manner of its conduct could not remain uncon-
nected with the question of Jewish participation.

In the United States, particularly, ideologies and
ideals play a compelling role in the shaping of public
opinion and policies. The people of ,the United States,
which includes several millions of Jews with consider-
able influence on the life of the country, are watch-
ing the deployment of forces and the gradual
evolution of the war aims with deep interest. For
them, the brutal persecution of the Jews under the
Nazi regime has served as a sort of subjective pig-
mentation which has colored their attitude not only
to that regime but also to the Allies. The British
and French governments have known well how to
make use of this American attitude, and it is no
exaggeration to say that in the American mind the
Jew therefore exists not o^ly as a target of German
policy and action but also as a physical factor in the
war. The exclusion of the Jew as a people from the
war aims declarations by Allied statesmen, the sup-
pression of the Jew as a factor in the war, and the
effort to conceal Jewish identity in Europe under
the headings of the various national legions of which
they form a considerable portion are bound, as the
war continues, to produce doubts and suspicions
which cannot but prove deplorable.

It is useful to explore the effect which a con-

106 * THE "ANTISEMITISM OF THINGS"

sidered policy on the part of the Allies to give the
Jews as an entity a definite place in the conduct of
the war would have on the American mind. First
and foremost, there would emerge a fuller and more
complete faith in the moral platform of Great
Britain. The charge, of which German propaganda in
the United States knows how to make good use, that
the Allies are primarily concerned with the main-
tenance of their own imperial and economic posi-
tions and that the moral issue is a mere camouflage,
would receive a decisive setback. If the Jew were
given a place as a military Ally in the war, this would
serve as a most effective assurance to the neutrals,
and particularly to the United States, that the war
is not being waged for the sole purpose of protecting
British and French imperial interests.

The establishment of a Jewish Army would be
equal, in effect, to the physical adhesion of a new
ally. It would automatically produce in every neutral
country Jewish centres of pro-allied activity and re-
cruitment.

The emergence of a Jewish Army in the field would
stifle the vicious argument that the war was being
fought in the interests of the Jews, while the Jews
were wholly absent from the various fields of opera-
tion. Jews would appear as an ally side by side with
other allies, fully entitled to fight for a specific aim,
in the same way as each of the other allies. This
would provide the armory of Allied propaganda with
an implement for the defeat of enemy propaganda.

The existence of a separate Jewish Army would

THE WAR AND THE JEW IOJ

serve as an assurance, more effective than any verbal
declaration could be, that the Allied Powers envisage
a constructive settlement of the Jewish problem after
the war. It would mean that the success of the
Allies is connected with a policy of including the
Jews in post-war adjustments and that the Jewish
Army was the first concrete step in that direction.

PART III
THE STATE EXODUS

CHAPTER X

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS

WE MUST not forget Roumania (1,000,000
Jews) and Hungary (550,000). At the moment
of writing neither country is at war, so that the Allies
cannot really be saddled with any responsibility for
what may happen to the Jews in the Danubian valley.*
In this book, which deals chiefly with the Allies' war
aims, a closer enquiry into this sector of the Dispersion
would be irrelevant. But no one can deny, no one
should forget, that both Roumania and Hungary be-
long to the zone where the Jewish problem has long
reached the stage of acute and painful incompatibility
between the "equal rights" principle and the real situa-
tion. In both countries, with the Jews forming about
6% of the total population, that situation is somewhat
like that obtaining in Poland; but only "somewhat
like/' for both countries are incomparably richer than
Poland in respect to their agricultural possibilities, so
that the scramble for urban jobs is not nearly so acute.

* Territorial changes both in Hungary and Roumania were accom-
panied by a corresponding change in the size of their Jewish popula-
tions. By the end of 1941 there were some 500,000 Jews in Rou-
mania, and over a million in Hungary, Mass murder and eviction to
occupied Russia has again somewhat modified these numbers, espe-
cially in Roumania since that country entered the war.

112 THE STATE EXODUS

In Rouimnia, however, what we call "Antisemitism
of Men" has been conspicuously endemic since at least
the middle of last century. In Hungary its acute form
is of recent growth, but it is now very intense. In both,
the r61e of the governments in fostering the anti-Jew-
ish trend of economic life seems to be of secondary
importance: the main driving force in the process
tending to oust the Jew from all such positions as he
still retains is rather the unanimous pressure of all
those social classes with whom the Jew happens to
have any economic or social contacts. Whether or not
these two countries, in the end, will be invited to
reconfirm their adherence to the principle of equal
rights for all (which has never been absent from their
constitutions) is really immaterial. "Things" will de-
cide, and only fools or hypocrites can doubt what the
nature of the decision will be.

The writer was born in Russia, in a generation that
knew what Jewish inequality tasted like, and his youth
was spent in the atmosphere of constant struggle for
equal rights. In 1906, at Helsinki, in a conference of
Jewish nationalists who came from all corners of the
Russian empire, he was co-editor of what is known as
The Helsingfors Programmea demand for perfect
and absolute equality of civic rights: every Jew to be
a citizen of Russia equal to all others, Russian Jewry
as a whole to be recognized as a nationality equal to
all others within the empire, its language equal to all
languages, its religion equal to all other churches.
Today he would be prepared to sign that programme
again. But he would not be prepared to condone poli-

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS 113

cies which are bound to make of that programme, or
even of a much less ambitious conception of equal
rights for the Jew, a doomed list of cant and impossible
claims.

There are two possible ways of envisaging a non-
exodus solution of the Jewish problem, i.e. a solution
founded on the assumption that equality can "work":
the one calls for "assimilation," the other for "minor-
ity nationalism."

The first is an elastic idea, whose adherents have
been known to give it different interpretations. Some
favour assimilation in language and manners, but no
religious apostasy and no mixed marriages; which,
after all, and despite all rhetoric to the contrary,
means the perpetuation of some kind of separate racial
community held together by a collective ideology.
Others, more radical, foresee or even desire mixed
marriages, so that both the race and the religion might
gradually disappear; the comforting feature of this
creed is the "proud" assurance that both race and
religion will prove an excellent manure for enriching
the physical and spiritual soil of humanity.

"Minority nationalism" is based on the theory that
the essence of nationality is to be found in language,
literature, music, philosophy, religion, and so forth,
and that these can be preserved and cultivated with-
out any territorial segregation. "Nationalities," accord-
ing to this doctrine, are very much like churches, in
that they can perfectly well carry on their separate
forms of worship although their respective adherents

114 THE STATE

are intermingled not only in the same district but in
the same street. What is needed to save them from the
drabness of mutual assimilation is not separate home-
lands but a law called * 'national-personal autonomy."
All Jews who so desire will be registered in Dispersion
as members of their own national community, will
have their own schools, use their own language in
public life, and feel equal to anyone else.

This is not the place to debate the practical worth
of either of these two solutions; for argument's sake
let us assume that both are excellent. Let us go a step
farther, and agree in advance that should a third or a
fourth non-exodus solution of the Jewish problem be
invented tomorrow, they too may be excellent. But
their efficiency will always depend on one condition:
the equality of individual civic rights (which they all
presuppose as the fundamental condition of normal
existence) must be real and continue to be real Yet
we have just seen that in East-Central Europe it can-
not be made a reality without a great exodus*

Assimilation especially is conditioned by exodus.
Only when the bulk of the Jews have gone may the
diminishing remainder hope to find a favourable at-
mosphere for trying to solve its problem by the great
final "merger": not an illusory merging as in the past,
learning the language yet not the spiritual accent of
the Gentile, but this time, perhaps, an effective
union.

For in the past the assimilation of the Jews has
proved illusory throughout the whole of East-Central
Europe. Real assimilation is not a solo performance:

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS

it is a duet. It is not enough for the Jew to feel con-
vinced that he has become absolutely like his Gentile
neighbour: what is more decisive is whether his Gen-
tile neighbour has the same impression. Joining a new
community or nation or class or set is not only a ques-
tion of genuine endeavour, but above all of reception.
Jewish assimilation in East-Central Europe has obvi-
ously failed in this respect; by bringing Jew and Gen-
tile nearer to each other, by making them rub shoul-
ders in many walks of life where they never met
before, it merely extended the area of possible friction.
If assimilation as an escape from Jewish distress is
really worth trying again, the attempt will have to be
made afresh from the very beginning. But even its
enthusiasts, if any such still exist, must have realized
by now that they stand no chance of success unless
racial percentages in East-Central Europe undergo a
staggering change.

A "successful" assimilation may or may not be
worth while, may or may not be objectively possible:
but in any case the preliminary condition is the exodus
of the bulk of the Jews.

Mutatis mutandis the same judgment applies to
minority nationalism: whether practicable or not, the
preliminary condition for its success is the exodus of
the bulk of the Jews.

It is by no means the author's intention to suggest
that we should abandon all hope of ever securing a
decent and normal existence for the Jews in this sector
of Dispersion. On the contrary, he still believes that

Il6 THE STATE EXODUS

this can be done. But the preliminary condition for
any such hope is the exodus of the bulk of the Jews.

The question touches some intimate susceptibilities
so closely that the author may advisedly make a few
comments in the first person.

I warn my fellow-Jews (if they still need the warn-
ing, which I doubt) that equal rights are, at best, a
very perishable kind of goods, infinitely prickly, to be
handled and used with caution, moderation and tact.
In Paris, for some ten years or more, I enjoyed the
acquaintance of a Jewish gentleman whose French
ancestry went back into the seventeenth century, and
whose heart's Ten Commandments consisted of the
word "France" ten times repeated. He never said
"Juif," but only "Israelite": he firmly believed in what
was known, two "Israelite" generations ago, as "the
mission" theorythat it is the Jews' sacred "mission"
to live scattered among the Gentiles and to help them
to reach ever loftier ethical summits. Yet I never met
any other Jew who so genuinely disliked any manifes-
tation of Jewish prominence. When there were "too
many" Jewish names at the head of what they call
le Palmares (the list of successful candidates to one
of the Grancifes Ecoles), he 'frowned. Somebody men-
tioned in his presence the remarkable fact that the
three most original thinkers of the period were Jews
Bergson, Einstein, and Freud: "I regret," he said,
"that I must add one more name the late Hermann
Cohen, and the coincidence is extremely unfortunate."
On another occasion, years before the Nazis' triumph,
he called my attention to the pleiad of Germany's

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS

foremost novelists, pre-war and postwar: "But for the
two brothers Mann, all that count are Israelites
Schnitzler, Wassermann, Zweig, Werfel . . . mais ga
finira mal." He was hurt and shocked when Leon Blum
became Premier. I asked him, "Is it fear?" He denied
it. "It is, my friend, a question of tact. This is too con-
spicuous for good taste. I should equally disapprove of
it on the part of Protestants/'

But of course, it was fear; and of course it was by
no means unfounded. The German economist, Wer-
ner Sombart, who after all was neither a fool nor a
sworn enemy of the Jews, gave them this advice at the
beginning of the century: "Our German laws and our
ethical outlook admit Jewish equality but if you Jews
want to preserve it, do not take it too seriously. Always
stick to the second place/' It would be childish to
deny that 99% of Jews (and particularly the non-
Zionist, "assimilationist" Jews to whom equality is
alpha and omega) consider this a very wise maxim,
regret that they did not follow it themselves, and
would be very glad to see their children do so.

But their children will not comply with this wise
maxim, for such obedience is humanly impossible. Life
is competition; equality of rights has only one concrete
meaning an equal chance in every aspect of life's
competition; the right to win if you are better
equipped. Twenty centuries of lopsided urbanism
have made the Jew, on the average if not on the sum-
mits where genius dwells, better equipped for most of
the ordinary competitions of modern life; there is no

Il8 THE STATE EXODUS

pride in stating this, for the advantage has long been
a curse to us, a curse and a nuisance. Nor can the Jew
help his success: as well advise a red-haired fellow not
to be "conspicuous," or a tall man, or a fat man. It is
beyond human nature that any man should compel
himself, for the good of the community, to withhold
the best that is in him, to write or speak worse than he
could if he let himself go, to plead, build, diagnose, or
act on the stage worse than he really can. True, I know
of cases where Jewish statesmen, though they were
legitimately as ambitious as their Christian colleagues,
have offered to decline high office so as to avoid stir-
ring up antisemitic feeling, but often enough their
Christian party-comrades told them that it was their
patriotic duty to accept; and only a Simeon the Stylite
type could withstand this kind of pressure. So it is in
every branch of civic, cultural, economic and social
life: ordinary human beings are psychologically unable
to reject chances of success and advancement when
these are unimpeachably fair and legitimate. The re-
sult is, inevitably, "conspicuousness," jealousy, resent-
ment, and the rise or increase of what we have termed
the "Antisemitism of Men": this is true even of
wealthy countries, where conditions are not suffi-
ciently strained to produce the other kind of anti-
Semitism, the one inherent in the objective power of
Things.

This is the fateful inner contradiction of civic equal-
ity for Jews: it can be durable only if it is not enjoyed
to the full, yet it is impossible to bring about a
voluntary renunciation of such a privilege.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS 3.19

There are, of course, outside remedies which may
be applied in order to keep the Jewish advance within
"moderate" limits: and such attempts usually take the
form of the policy of the numerus clausus. This policy
consists in limiting the number of Jews who may be
admitted to a certain profession (or school, or enter-
prise, or institute) to a fixed percentage of the total
personnel. In Tsarist Russia, from 1888, it was the rule
of all the universities and secondary schools that
Jewish pupils were not to exceed 10% of the total
in the Western part of the empire (the 'Tale of
Settlement"), and 5% or 3% in other provinces. The
most modern experiment on the same lines is the
Hungarian law limiting the number of Jews in certain
professions to 6% which is exactly the proportion of
Jews in the total population of Hungary.

Eloquent attempts have been made to justify the
numerus clausus scheme as something not only con-
sistent with the equal rights principle but actually
based upon it. Why call it nurnerus clausus? Call it
Proportional Representation of Races in all depart-
ments of the State's economy. If a given race consti-
tutes 6% of the total population, the soundest and the
fairest arrangement (so it is argued) would be for the
members of that race to form 6% of the peasantry,
6% of the industrial proletariat, 6% of the doctors and
lawyers and journalists. It is argued that this would be
the surest antidote to antisemitisrn; and also the only
way to straighten out and normalize the social structure
of the Jewish people itself. The German Zionists, by
the way, have been advocating for a generation the

120 THE STATE EXODUS

"reshuffling of classes" ("Umschichtung der Schich-
ten") as the main ideal of Zionism, meaning under
that formula the formation of a Jewish social organism
subdivided in a manner parallel to that of the Aryan
environment. In Germany, for instance, it would mean
that 20% of the Jews would be engaged in agriculture,
35% in industry and mining, less than 10% in trade,
and still fewer in the professions. Aryan defenders of
the numerus clausus argue that this is absolutely the
same thing as proportional representation in the na-
tional economy: that is, the numerus clausus.

We are here not concerned with deciding whether
this argument is right or wrong: what matters is that it
is bound to prove irresistible in societies where Jewish
competition is "conspicuous/' and yet the open nega-
tion of the equality principle is felt to be undesirable.
Well-chosen phrases are a great help in the smuggling
of offensive ideas. In an enlightened Western country
the author has heard the numerus clausus device de-
fended from the standpoint of "social congeniality/'
a term much more diplomatic than "racial purity."
The harm of such phraseological disguises is in their
insidious plausibility: they lend themselves so grace-
fully to inclusion in a system in full accordance with
liberal treaties and democratic constitutions. And yet,
at all events in the case of the Jewish minorities, the
actual introduction of "proportional representation in
the national economy" is entirely impossible, even
though the Jews should beg for it and the govern-
ments decree it. To be real, such a redistribution would
have to begin at the base of the national economy,

THE PHILOSOPHY OF EQUAL RIGHTS 121

which is agriculture. In Hungary, where half the popu-
lation works in cornfields and pastures, 6% of all the
available land would have to be cleared of the present
occupiers (about 250,000 souls) to make room for the
Jewish settlers; or some other way of squeezing them
out would have to be devised, so that half the Jewish
population could be duly normalized as ploughboys
and shepherds. A similar operation would be needed
in mining and industry in order to absorb the 125,000
Jewish factory-hands required by the scheme. Only
then could the numerus chusus in the professions and
in commerce be justified as a step towards social nor-
mality. All this is so obviously and preposterously im-
possible that nobody really thinks of proposing it. Yet
all talk of eliminating the Jewish tragedy by "re-in-
stating 7 ' civic equality in East-Central Europe can only
imply this: unless it implies nothing but lip-service
and twaddle.

And this, the author ventures to affirm, is precisely
what it does imply. Any assertion that the cancer of
antisemitism can be cured in its principal breeding-
zone, East-Central Europe, by the ointment of "equal
rights" without a preliminary exodus of the bulk of
the Jews, is empty, thoughtless and harmful twaddle.

Every man must be a king among kings, or life is
not worth living. Equality is not only a state of things;
it is also a principle. As a principle it has a tremendous
value, no matter if translatable into everyday life or not.
The Jews, if they are worth their salt, must fight to the
last ditch to ensure that the equality principle, however

122 THE STATE EXODUS

unreal, shall be solemnly proclaimed in the statutes of
every nation: this is a question of human dignity,
something without which life would be morally des-
picable, and the refusal of which would justify any
form of retaliation against the offending State. But it
is one thing to fight for your dignity, and quite another
to pretend that this dignity alone will feed you. It is
utterly dishonest to pretend that legal equality, re-
proclaimed under the impact of Allied victories, can
stop or retard, in that immense distressed area, the
progress of the objective realities that are tending to
oust the Jew from every economic foothold. To say
that all that the Allies are aiming to win for us is a
reaffirmation of civic equality, would mean that for us
an Allied victory would have no value except as re-
venge on the Nazis. We do the Allies a disservice by
accepting such a restricted purpose.

CHAPTER XI

EVACUATING A RUIN

IN 1936 the writer, assisted by two friends, pub-
lished in a Warsaw daily a pronouncement to the
effect that the only reasonable thing for the Polish
Jews to do would be to evacuate all those economic
positions which evidently could not be maintained.
As it was even then a matter of common conviction
that no less than one-third of Poland's 3,300,000 Jews
had already lost their "positions'* beyond any hope of
recovery (while another million, hereditary paupers,
had never possessed any positions), the solution was
mass exodus.

The term "evacuation" wounded many suscepti-
bilities; it seemed offensive and humiliating. It is
difficult to see what is wrong with it. In September
and October 1939, both in England and France, chil-
dren were "evacuated" from the areas of danger; but
apart from war, whenever a dam threatens to burst or
a house to fall in, the inhabitants are invited to "evacu-
ate" the spot; the same thing happens if the plague
breaks out in a block of buildings. And what was the
Jewish situation in East-Central Europe in 1936? Not
a hand was raised. Crumbling walls, bursting dams, all
forms of antisemitic plague at every corner, not a sin-

123

124 THE STATE EXODUS

gle hand to defend the victims, and no plan for ade-
quate self-defence, even among the victims themselves.
At a conservative estimate, at least two-thirds of them
ought to have been, if not evacuated, at all events
earmarked for evacuation, even before any sensible
scheme of salvaging the balance had been devised. But
that was in 1936; they were halcyon days compared
with the present

The great advantage of the word "evacuation" is its
implied suggestion of organized orderliness. No other
term conveys that important quality: "emigration" has
always meant a haphazard scramble (except when
stopped); "exodus" inevitably recalls the pursuing
enemy host, and it is always a risky proceeding, since
but for a miracle not only the evil but also some of the
righteous people may be drowned. "Evacuation," in
modern times and under decent governments, has al-
ways been associated with forethought, careful plan-
ning, and decent accommodation at the end of the
journey. The author does not renounce either of the
other terms, but he prefers "evacuation."

Mass evacuation is the only remedy for the cancer
of Jewish distress. It may be superhumanly difficult,
it may be atrociously costly, but as it is the only way
to save Europe from being hustled into another catas-
trophe, the difficulties and the expense will have to be
faced: when it will, of course, be discovered that the
operation, at its maximum, is infinitely easier and
cheaper than a modern war, besides being a profitable
investment, which a war can never claim to be.

How many will have to be evacuated? The question

EVACUATING A RUIN 125

is important, but it cannot be answered. To begin
with, heaven alone knows how many Jews in the Zone
of Distress will survive; and how far southwards, north-
wards, eastwards and perhaps even westwards the Zone
may expand before the crisis ends. Secondly: there
probably exists, even in countries which are the home
of acute antisemitism (objective or subjective or
both), a certain level at which peaceful symbiosis be-
comes normally possible between the Gentile majority
and a Jewish minority reduced to a proportion small
enough to be tolerable. To foretell exactly how deep
on the scale that happy level lies is impossible. It will
depend upon a whole complex of conditions: the
character of the majority people, the natural resources
of the soil, the upward or downward trend of its trade
are only the most obvious factors, but not neces-
sarily the most essential. The truth will become
apparent only during the process of the migration, and
it will probably conform to a kind of osmotic princi-
ple: in other words, the area to be evacuated and the
reception area will behave like two vessels separated
by a diaphragm, each one with its own degree of
pressure. The outflow will depend not only on the
anti-Jewish factors in Europe but also on the attrac-
tiveness of the new home. Theoretically, the outflow
will stop when a state of equilibrium has been reached,
e.g. when the Polish or the Hungarian or the Rou-
manian state and society begin to feel that the Jewish
exodus has reached its "useful" limit, and that its
continuation would be a total loss; whereupon they
might conceivably begin to offer the not yet evacuated

126 THE STATE EXODUS

Jews some kind of enticement or premium for remain-
ing (history records even more incredible cases when
Jews were offered premiums for entering the country).
On the other hand, it is also theoretically possible that
in spite of such a commendable change of heart the
evacuation would still continue on account of the
greater appeal, material or ideological, of the reception
area.

The only thing that can be said with certainty is .
that calculations, to be sober, should incline to the
maximum. Some approximate figures will be given in
the chapter on the "Max Nordau Plan" (Ch. xvir);
here it will be enough to say that a solid evacuation
policy should reckon with an eventual "ceiling'* of
some five million Jewish migrants within the ten to
fifteen years following the war; and that the first mil-
lion, taken from all the countries of the Zone, will have
to be evacuated at once, at what the Germans would
call "lightning" speed, by the same methods and at the
same tempo which a modern army would apply to the
transport of fifty divisions to a remote theatre of war.

Some critics of evacuation fear that it would have to
be "compulsory." This is hardly likely: it will, on the
contrary, prove extremely difficult to keep proper order
among the multitude of volunteers lining up for
places on the waiting list. Other critics merely demand
that the mass-emigration of Jews should be treated as
something concerning the Jews alone, and no business
of any government, Polish or Roumanian or Hun-
garian. Not only should there be no hint of compulsory

EVACUATING A RUIN 127

evacuation; there should be no application of pressure
in any form; and if a national government should
openly apply itself to organizing the emigration, that
would be practically tantamount to pressure. The cor-
rect attitude for such a government would therefore
be, to pretend to ignore the fact that Jewish emigration
existed, and especially, that it was necessary, etc.

All this is foolish. There is no reason why govern-
ment and parliament, or citizens, in a State which finds
emigration a necessity, should feel bashful about it.
On the contrary, it is the State's duty to help the emi-
grant by every means in its power. Italy before the
Great War was an excellent example of such sound,
sober and perfectly patriotic treatment of the emigra-
tion problem. Italy had no ethnical minorities to get
rid of; all her emigrants were of pure Italian breed: but
her government was always busy devising shipping
facilities, credit facilities, training facilities for the
emigrants, and negotiating with the Argentine and
other overseas countries for their admission. When-
ever it was felt that an Italian cabinet was not properly
exerting itself in these directions, the Radical and
Socialist opposition criticized it most severely for such
dereliction of its true democratic duty. They were
quite right: it is a decent government's duty to look
after all the needs of all its citizens, and if among such
needs there is that of migrating en masse in search of
conditions which cannot be provided at home, a de-
cent government must give its help, no matter whether
these migrants be Gentile or Jewish. As a matter of
fact, many Gentiles also will probably have to migrate

128 THE STATE EXODUS

from East-Central Europe after the war, though it is
of course to be expected that the paramount phe-
nomenon in the field of mass migration will be the
Jewish exodus. But the touchy inferiority-complex of
the non-Zionist Jew should not lead him to take
offence at his government's solicitude in acknowledg-
ing the existence of a social problem just because the
problem happens to be predominantly Jewish.

Neither success nor order can be ensured in the
exodus unless it is an international enterprise assisted
by every government concerned. The above-mentioned
bashful or touchy Jewish politicians probably know it
themselves, for they can hardly imagine that arrange-
ments for the transfer of capital or the liquidation of
property can be made privately while ministers look
the other way. The exodus will have to be a solemn
and official performance, undertaken with banners fly-
ing; it will require not only administrative measures,
but also special legislation, and above all, great inter-
national treaties. This cannot be helped and there is
no need to shrink from it.

One understands, however, the reasons of this bash-
ful shrinking. Tom and Dick have been roommates for
years; there have been quarrels; now it is finally agreed
that peace is to be restored, but Dick has decided to
move to other quarters; the decision is absolutely
voluntary, but there is nevertheless something in the
very fact that it is Dick and not Tom who has decided
to move away. Under these conditions Dick may pre-
fer that Tom should leave him alone to do his house-

EVACUATING A RUIN 129

hunting and packing; should Tom prove too solicitous
to help, his solicitude might look like eagerness to get
rid of him. . . .

The prickly nature of the drama is obvious; yet the
significant thing about the awkwardness of being too
anxiously assisted to pack is that it is felt only if Dick
is moving to another set of hired lodgings. Imagine for
a moment that Dick has inherited a house, and a real
freehold property, a thing he has long dreamed of: the
whole psychological atmosphere would change, and
all the awkwardness would disappear.

This is no idle parable, but a cogent argument.
When people who admit the inevitable necessity of
"evacuating lost positions" still feel it necessary to
insist with so much heat that the process must be
absolutely voluntary, that no pressure must be applied,
etc., they are simply beating about the bush. The most
absolutely voluntary emigration may contain some as-
pects of compulsion: it depends on what the emigrant
expects to find overseas. Imagine the Italian emigrant
of fifty years ago leaving Genoa for Buenos Aires: was
he migrating of his free will or under pressure? If he
felt that he was going into a dismal exile he was an
exile; if he felt he was going to meet friends and make
his fortune, he was a free adventurer. An exodus of
Jews towards a new Dispersion would be equivalent to
forcible mass expulsion, no matter how scrupulously
the "voluntary" principle was respected and safe-
guarded. Exodus to a Jewish State will, under all con-
ditions, be spontaneous in the purest sense of the

THE STATE EXODUS

word, and the eagerness of the migrants will be hardly
at all diminished by the fact that the new constitutions
in the old countries promise civic equality.

<r :

On the contrary, the prospect of civic equality may
be affected by the fact of evacuation perhaps very
notably and favourably affected. The man in the street,
on the average, is never altogether beastly. The impor-
tance attributed in this book to the objective "Anti-
semitism of Things" should help us to avoid over-
estimating the malignancy of men: men may vote for
anti-Jewish measures, men may boycott Jewish shops,
and may still be decent kind-hearted fellows in other
respects. It would do some Jewish leaders an enormous
amount of good if they realized this truth once and for
all, and drew some conclusions from it. The average
human biped in the antisemitic Zone does not enjoy
downing and harming the Jew; but he is quite willing
to do so again and again if he fears that the Jew may
crowd him out, economically, socially, or politically.
Give the average man a concrete and tangible proof
that an earnest endeavour is actually being made to
thin out the ranks of his Jewish competitors, and he
will probably relax his belligerency. This is not op-
timism, just as the refusal to believe in the efficiency
of equal rights under the climate of the Zone is not
pessimism: it is just impartial realism, scornful but
benevolent, taking Jew and Gentile at their true value,
terre a terre.

Is Man essentially good or essentially bad? Here is
another parable, which answers this foolish and idle

EVACUATING A RUIN 13!

question. There was once a town of five hundred
houses, and one day the Sultan sent to it fifty orphans
and' appealed to the citizens' mercy to give each of
these unfortunates a home. So the town carefully
selected fifty of the most affluent and virtuous families,
and placed one orphan in each. A month later the
whole town was in a frenzy of irritation; fifty mothers
complained that the orphans were lousy, bad-man-
nered, and generally horrid. Then the town councillors
got together again and decided to raise a public sub-
scription to build an orphanage; and the people sub-
scribed the required amount twice oyer, built a won-
derful home for the orphans, and lived happily ever
after.

Mass evacuation applied to the Jewish -problem is
not an alternative to civic equality: it is a corollary to
equality, the indispensable condition of equality, and
the only thing which can possibly make the latter a
lasting reality for those be they few or many who
remain.

But this is a side-issue. The essential r61e and value
of evacuation is that it is the only cure for an evil
which, if not removed, will continue to pervert hu-
manity to commit further outrages: a thorough, clean
and final cure. Also provided the reception area is a
Jewish State it is a popular cure, a remedy which the
overwhelming majority of men of all creeds regard
with approval and respect; an ideal sanctified by the
Bible and ennobled by the tradition of Zionism, whose
consummation would be universally welcomed by all

THE STATE EXODUS

countries inside the Zone of Distress and most nations
outside it, and by all Jews-both those who want to go
and those who want to remain.

What was said of the equality principle in Poland
can be said of the equality principle in general-that
complex of claims and dreams which our ancestors
called "the Jewish emancipation'' can become a reality
only under two conditions: the enjoyment of equal
rights in every Gentile country, and the existence,
somewhere, of a Jewish State.

At this stage of our enquiry a question will prob-
ably arise in the minds of readers: How far can this
aspect of the solution here proposed be regarded as a
"war aim of the Allies?" The war is against Germany.
Wherever the area for a Jewish State may be reserved,
in Palestine or elsewhere, it certainly will not be on
any soil now held by Germany. How can this matter
be the concern of a peace conference at which de-
mands can be presented only to Germany?

But the forecast contained in this last sentence is
an error. The Versailles treaty (and incidentally, the
author refuses to join in the great chorus of that docu-
ment's detractors: it was, with all its defects, quite a
fine piece of statesmanship for its time) the Ver-
sailles treaty in its 225 pages did much more than
merely settle accounts with the beaten foe. For in-
stance, it established the League of Nations: what
had that to do with the war? Well, it had everything
to do with it, for at the time it was universally realized
that some kind of permanent association between

EVACUATING A RUIN 133

sovereign peoples might help to prevent further wars.
The remedy has failed: and today the whole world is
even more acutely aware that the only justification of
the present conflict is the eventual provision of better
safeguards against eruptions of the spirit of violence.
Everything which is of value as such a safeguard is a
proper war aim. Hardly anybody will deny that the
uprooting of antisemitism, at least of its acute form, in
East-Central Europe would be an essential safeguard
against any further eruptions of brute aggression.

CHAPTER XII

EVIAN

THE official Allied attitude to the Jewish evacua-
tion problem (in so far as the official Allied view
admits the existence of such a thing, under the
euphemistic name of the "refugee problem") is in
contradiction to all our essential and vital interests.
The essential and vital interests of the Jewish masses
in the Zone of Distress, even if considered apart from
their spiritual aspects, such as the appeal of religion or
of Zionism, demand the recognition of two principles:

(a) That there is no probability whatever that the
need for Jewish mass emigration will cease after an
Allied victory: that, on the contrary, the balance of
probability points to an increased urge towards evacu-
ation after the war; and that all international plans
with regard to the future of the "Jemsli refugee"
problem must therefore discard the cheap optimism
which justifies neglect and adopt the forecast of the
"greater need" as their basis of action.

(b) The second principle is this: The territorial con-
centration of Jewish emigrants, and, above all, no
encouragement of their further dispersion as minor-
ities among other peoples.

No person of average intelligence will ask for an

EVIAN 135

explanation with regard to this second principle. It is
by now clear to all that the formation of new Jewish
minorities in countries or districts or towns where
there are as yet no Jewish communities is bound to
spread the germs of the antisemite cancer where they
will proliferate in the future, perhaps the very near
future. Any sane observer, whether friendly or indif-
ferent or even unsympathetic to the Jews, will realize
that the only sound policy is to look for some way of
allowing these emigrants to create a homeland of
their own. Theoretically speaking, there might be one
homeland for all, or several homelands: though the
author does not believe in the latter alternative. But
the problem need not be analyzed here: the main
point is the principle of the homeland. A homeland
for the Jews means a land where they would dwell
only among Jews, or would at least constitute a
majority sufficiently overwhelming in numbers to
eliminate the possibility of pogroms, or economic
ousting, or even the uneasy distress of the unwanted
lodger. Perhaps this does not necessarily imply full
political independence; but it certainly implies a very
considerable degree of internal sovereignty; above all,
it implies the reservation for this purpose of a suffi-
ciently extensive area (or, in theory, several extensive
areas). That the task of finding such areas is not an
easy one is obvious; but to look for "easy" ways out
of a problem of such magnitude would be childish.
When the plain man hears that intergovernmental
conferences are being called and committees set up to
devise schemes for settling "refugees" who are mainly

1^6 THE STATE EXODUS

if not wholly Jews, he expects the statesmen thus en-
gaged to apply their efforts in the direction not of
scattered but of concentrated settlement.

The official Allied attitude, so far as can be ascer-
tained, favours the scattering of the "refugees/ 7 it
being assumed that after the Allied victory there will
be no need even for that

The Evian Conference (July 1938), convened to
deal with the question of "refugees from Germany
and Austria" and attended by delegates of some thirty
governments, was due to President Roosevelt's initi-
ative. His original intention was comprehensive: he
wanted the civilized governments to provide an ade-
quate solution not only for the plight of the actual
refugees, but for the whole phenomenon which, by
then, already promised to become a fixed feature of
the European situation. The scope of his intentions
embraced "all" refugees, present and future, those
from Germany and Austria and those who were being
daily squeezed out of other parts of East-Central
Europe. There are some indications that Mr. Roose-
velt's initial plan went even farther: relief was to be
provided not only for those who were actually expelled
or had fled, but also for those left behind in their
agony; in other words, there was to be not only refugee
relief but also preventive evacuation. It is of course
unlikely that Mr. Roosevelt should have expected an
initial conference to solve these problems in their
formidable entirety; what he probably intended was

EVIAN 137

a full-scale beginning of the offensive, plus a complete
and courageous outline of the tasks ahead.

When his envoy, Mr. Myron Taylor, began to go
round the European capitals, sounding their attitude
to the President's initiative, it became evident at once
that he was encountering serious obstacles that pow-
erful interests were alarmed and displeased by the
scope of Roosevelt's plan, and were bent upon re-
stricting it to the narrowest proportions. The chief
centre of this obstruction was official London.

The spring of 1938, when Mr. Taylor was travelling
on his exploratory mission, was the time when Foreign
Office and Colonial Office circles were busily looking
for some way of reducing Great Britain's Zionist obli-
gations. It was the same tendency which a year later
found expression in Mr. MacDonald's White Paper
on Palestine. This tendency could not possibly have
attained to complete precision so early in 1938, but
its trend was perfectly clear: England's pledge to the
Jews must be so interpreted as to leave her free to
buy Arab good-will by stopping immigration to Pales-
tine. Mr. Roosevelt's project was a most inopportune
check to that tendency. An international body sum-
moned to provide a really adequate solution of the
refugee problem in its entirety would inevitably end
in a quest for a suitable territory or territories, and
the first object of its investigation would naturally be
Palestine. This danger was to be averted at all costs.
How? It would never do to offend Mr. Roosevelt by
anything like an abrupt refusal to hold such a confer-

138 THE STATE EXODUS

ence. Mr. Roosevelt was to be let down gently and
cautiously. First, the scope of the problem was to be
drastically reduced: it would not include all the refu-
gees from all countries . who had already escaped or
were likely to escape in the future, but only those
actual fugitives from Germany and Austria who had
already escaped and were already such a burden to
Germany's hospitable neighbours. In other words, it
was a question of thousands, not of God knows how
many eventual myriads or millions. Secondly, the
problem thus limited would have to be treated as a
question of international charity, not of international
politics; no Jewish State proposals or the like were to
be put on the agenda; and to drag in Palestine in this
connection would mean embarrassing Great Britain
and even making it impossible for her to attend the
conference.

So far as is known, the same tactics were adopted
at the second "refugee" conference at Washington
in October 1939. Here again Mr. Roosevelt was the
initiator, and he is. reported to have expressed the
apprehension that after the war there would be many
more refugees than before; indeed, according to some
of the reports the American delegation went so far as
to forecast a human flood amounting perhaps to
twenty million homeless people of all races. Yet here
again "some European delegates" firmly disagreed,
and assured the gathering that, on the contrary, no
refugee problem to speak of would be left in Europe
after the Allied victory. Another report states, more-
over, that it was decided to open a systematic enquiry

EVIAN 139

into the absorbent possibilities of a number of coun-
tries, but that Palestine (at the demand of "some
European delegates") was excluded from the scope of
such enquiry.

All this is no small matter. This is a deliberate
policy of scuttling the chances of Jewish salvation;
of discouraging our well-wishers and paralyzing their
attempts to help us; a policy more than just unfriendly
a policy of wrecking. Moreover, even a wrecker does
not always act so wantonly as to rob a neighbour of a
pound in order to save himself a penny. Half a century
of Jewish endeavour, since Theodor HerzFs day and
before, had been devoted to the one supreme purpose:
to make the civilized governments realize that the
Jewish hunger for migration is a world-problem, and
agree on an international effort to solve it in all its
magnitude*. At long last a powerful initiative had
begun to move in this direction, at a period when the
sympathy of all nations with the Jews' agony of home-
lessness might (so we thought) be assumed to be
, unanimous. The entire future of the race depends on
the success of this step; and it is not only the Jews'
one chance of salvationit is also Europe's chance.
Here is a prospect of profound and lasting perhaps of
permanentinternational and humanitarian value. As
against this, there is the petty apprehension that if the
Palestine question is reopened, a British Cabinet may
be put in an awkward position and its Palestine policy
jammed: a policy which most British leaders dislike,
and which nine-tenths of their reluctant supporters
accept only as provisional. There is something mean

140 THE STATE EXODUS

in this disproportion between the enormity of the
harm and the puny cheapness of the advantage; a
story of the Middle Ages, read in early boyhood, recurs
to one's memory: "Yes, the village is burning, but do
not sound the alarm lest you wake his Lordship . . ."

The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees,
set up by the Evian Conference, has so far (February
1940) published no results of its investigation. This
is not a reproach: a geo-political enquiry extending
over half the globe must be slow work under the best
of conditions, and this particular work has lately been
handicapped by the war. The result is that no proper
review can be offered of the settlement possibilities
discovered by the Committee for the refugees generally
and the Jewish refugees in particular.

A great many countries have been mentioned in
the press as willing to accept a number of ref ugees,
and various figures have: been quoted, denied, con-
firmed, enlarged, or red ced. No reliance can be placed
on any of this information until the official reports
begin to appear. But even then, or rather especially
then, the whole melancholy business of scattering
fugitives among reluctant hosts will remain what it
is now arid and hopeless, pregnant of nothing but
sorrow.

This is not said in any spirit of disparagement either
of the workers of the Intergovernmental Committee
or of the countries that still agree to practise hospital-
ity. They are deserving of nothing but respectful grati-
tude. But the results of such hospitality would be as

EVIAN 141

melancholy as the present position. However great
may be the ultimate total of Jewish refugees allowed
to infiltrate here and there and everywhere, that total,
in comparison with the millions who must be evacu-
ated from the Zone of Distress, will be as a pebble to
an avalanche.

But the harm done will be great. Has anyone any
illusion as to the universal atmosphere in which those
kind-hearted people of the "Evian" Committee are
trying to charm the governments into once more
opening their gates to the Jewish tramp?

The following string of news items has been gleaned
at leisure from the London Jewish Chronicle files of
1938 and 1939:

According to a statement issued by the Government
of Northern Rhodesia the elected members of the
Legislative Council have unanimously opposed any
immigration of Jewish refugees. The acting Governor,
therefore, felt unable to advise the Secretary of State
that the matter would be proceeded with further at
the present time. (August 19, 1938.)

It is stated that mass immigration into the Portu-
guese colonies is strictly forbidden. (August 19, 1938.)

President Vargas of Brazil has issued a decree pro-
hibiting the establishment of communities of one
nationality, fixing the annual quota of immigration
at two per cent of the total number of immigrants of
the same nationality during the last fifty years and
establishing an immigration council. (September 2,

1938.)

A memorandum urging the prohibition of foreign

THE STATE EXODUS

immigrants into Cyprus has been submitted to the
Municipal Council by local professional corporations*
(September 16, 1938.)

Refugees from European countries will not be en-
couraged to emigrate to New Zealand, according to a
statement made last week by Mr. Nash, the Minister
of Finance. (September 16, 1938.)

It is understood that the Government of South
Africa is unwilling to contemplate any modification
in the stringent provisions of the Aliens Act, which
makes Jewish immigration virtually impossible. (De-
cember 2, 1938.)

It is reported that the Uruguay Government has
instructed its consuls to refuse visas to Jews who are
emigrating for racial or political reasons. (December
23, 1938.)

The Foreign Office of Ecuador advised consuls and
agents in foreign countries not to issue permanent
visas to aliens. (July 14, 1939.)

The names of twenty more countries could be added
to this list. The Jewish tramp is not wanted. When
he is admitted, his acceptance is due to pity, cajolery,
or friendly pressure: precarious visas all of them. Time,
effort and opportunity are wasted, and the seeds of
future trouble are sowntrouble for the refugees, the
hospitable countries and the world at large. The only
redeeming feature of the plan is its narrow range,
which must remain restricted, as the peoples are be-
coming ever more unwilling to grant hospitality which
cannot be decently maintained.

EVIAN 143

Two distinct lines of policy are traceable In this
chaos: the policy of individual infiltration and the
policy of group settlement. (Sometimes instead of
"group settlement" the term "colonization" is used.)
The difference is twofold. Infiltration (to begin with)
has characterized our overseas migration (except in
Palestine) throughout the last fifty years: "immi-
grants" have no ambition to create a new social or-
ganism; they find one ready-made, and look for some
unoccupied spots within it where they can find or
build a foothold for themselves. "Colonizers" on the
other hand, are people who migrate in groups to large
empty areas in order to erect a new body social where
there was none before. The second difference, more
to the point in our case, is this: infiltration means the
creation of new ghettos, while colonization or group
settlement is a conception more or less related to the
"territorialist" idea of a Jewish State, or a Jewish
province, or several Jewish provinces.

The only proper task for the Intergovernmental
Committee so far as the Jewish "refugee" phenome-
non is concerned is to discard the policy of infiltration
(delegating it, if desired, to private institutions), and
concentrate upon inquiry into the possibilities of the
territorial solution. There are so far no indications to
show that the Committee is working in this direction.
At Evian, where it was first assembled, it certainly
received no such commission; it may have obtained
it from the Washington Conference, whose resolu-
tions, it seems, have not been published; or it may

THE STATE EXODUS

have set out along this only practicable path on its
own initiative and responsibility. It is to be hoped
that it has done so. If it has not, it will have to; or
some other body will have to be appointed for the

purpose.

Nothing can be more deplorable than the strange
passivity of Jewish public opinion in this regard. Since
Leo Pinsker wrote "Auto-Emancipation" sixty years
ago, since Theodor Herd founded political Zionism,
it has been the hope of all Jews that some day the
civilized world would realize the international char-
acter of the problem of Jewish migration, and that
an intergovernmental organ would be established to
study and to solve it. And now here is that very organ
apparently wasting time, when all delay is disastrous,
on stop-gap futilities. It is no secret that its most
influential members are themselves convinced of the
damnable uselessness of patchwork: their legitimate
ambition is to produce something really adequate; it is
only the ungenerous shprt-sightedness of one bu-
reaucracy that appears to hinder them. A few months
of concerted counter-attack by public opinion, over-
whelmingly supported by the facts of the tragedy now
being enacted in Eastern Europe, would sweep away
this obstruction, and force the Intergovernmental
Committee, to the Committee's own relief, to con-
centrate on the problem of the Jewish State.

To avoid misunderstandings, it should here be ex-
plained that the Intergovernmental Committee as at
present constituted is not adequately staffed for the

EVIAN 145

great purpose. It includes excellent brains, but has no
real contact with the main forces of organized Jewish
democracy. The defect is largely due to a weakness of
the Jews which is partly their misfortune and partly
their own fault: there is no united organ to claim the
title of an Exilarchate, a "government" of the Jewish
people in dispersion. This lack will be discussed in
one of our concluding chapters: here it is mentioned
only to explain that a committee of eminent Gentile
well-wishers alone is not the competent authority for
solving problems of Jewish history. When Pinsker and
Herzl spoke of "international" efforts to solve these
problems, what they meant was the efforts of the Gen-
tile nations together with the Jewish nation. This
co-operation, however, is bound to come. For if the
present Evian Committee breaks its bounds and enters
upon the only true path, it will of itself realize the
inadequacy of its composition and demand to be
enlarged. Perhaps even then it will be only a forerun-
ner, and not the definitive assembly which will pro-
nounce the final decision; nor does the author forget
that the really "final" decision as to a people's fate
can be pronounced only in deeds and not in formulas,
and only by the people itself. But, all these reserva-
tions notwithstanding, the Evian Committee of today
is an important factor, a lever that can remove many
obstacles: and it is deplorable that Jewish public opin-
ion should neglect this lever.

CHAP TER XIII

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE

PALESTINE

PART from Palestine, two or three schemes of a
_ "territorialist" nature schemes for creating a
Jewish State or provincehave emerged into promi-
nence recently. One of these is the British Guiana
project. Mr. Neville Chamberlain said in the House
of Commons on November 21, 1938: "I turn now
to British Guiana. It is not possible at this stage to
give exact figures of the total area which could be
made available to be leased for this purpose, but it
would certainly not be less than 10,000 square miles,
and probably more/' Sir Samuel Hoare, on the same
day, "admitted that the territory envisaged included
that which had proved unsuitable for the settlement
of 5,000 Assyrians a few years ago/' (Sir John Hope
Simpson, in his monumental "Refugee Problem" re-
port to the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
in a chapter dealing with the Assyrian tragedy, devotes
only two lines to that little disappointment: "Search
was made in many quarters of the globe, among others
in Brazil and in British Guiana, but no suitable site
for settlement could be found.")

The Advisory Committee on Political Refugees ap-
146

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE 147

pointed by President Roosevelt dispatched a commis-
sion of experts to investigate British Guiana. They
spent a few weeks in touring various sections of the
country and produced a report. The British Colonial
Office hastened to publish it as a White Paper in
May 1939, obviously to offset or soften the blow to
the Jews dealt by the other (Palestine) White Paper
which appeared in the same month. One homeland is
closed, but here is another on the horizon.

The Commission's conclusions are moderately op-
timistic but cautious. The territory "is not an ideal
place for refugees from middle European countries"
and "could not be considered for immediate large
scale settlement/ 7 but it is worth "a trial settlement."
The trial should involve 5,000 pioneers; it would cost
three million dollars and would take two years. (Both
the cost and the time would probably be exceeded.)
The points to be ascertained during the trial are:
whether the actual area of fertile soil is as extensive
as assumed; whether forests and savannahs (which
undoubtedly are extensive) can be utilized; whether
there is any opening for industries, heavy and light;
whether any sort of road could be built at a reason-
able cost in order to make the settlement accessible;
and whether Europeans can work in such a climate,
despite the fact that other Europeans have tried and
failed. The query as to the possibility of a road can
perhaps be illustrated by the information offered in
respect of another South American country: "You
can reach our interior from our sea coast either by
plane or on mule-back: the former method is of course

148 THE STATE EXODUS

more expensive, but quicker." A reply to the final
question seems to be indirectly suggested by the Com-
mission in another connection in explaining why the
fact that the same colony was found unsuitable for
Assyrians need not imply its unsuitability for Central
European refugees. The reason is that the Jewish
refugee problem presents "a number of special fea-
tures/' of which the first is ''the extreme urgency
and necessity with which the refugees are being forced
to find new homes/' In short: needs must where the
devil drives. A useful line of inquiry, overlooked by
the worthy commissioners, would be to ask whether
the devil can be persuaded to wait until all the other
questions have been answered by experiment in a
tropical country of hills and primeval forests, with no
roads to speak of. To obtain the factual replies to
these queries would take, one may suspect, not two
years but a generation.

This should not be regarded as a criticism of British
Guiana's fitness for close settlement The Colonial
Secretary told us last September that some 'Voluntary
organizations in Great Britain had been on the point
of establishing a corporation to carry out the [British
Guiana] scheme, but owing to the outbreak of the
war, action had been suspended for the time being."
"Action/ 7 we assume, implies both the small experi-
mental settlement to begin with and the investigation
of vaster possibilities for the future. Some day "action"
in this sense may be resumed, and may quite possibly
result in the acquisition of useful knowledge, even
though it may be that Gentile and not Jewish colonists

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE 149

will ultimately profit by it. Speaking generally and
theoretically, it is unlikely that any spot on God's
earth is destined to remain unused for all eternity.
With the progress of technique, in a hundred years
or less perhaps, even the Sahara will be colonized, with
the help of water brought from the Niger in pipe-lines
five hundred miles long, or from underground sources
five thousand feet underground. Countries like the
Guianas, where the obstacle is rather the super-
abundance of natural vitality than the opposite, will
probably be inhabited long before that. Humanity
is too crowded, space too valuable: they will not be
allowed to lie waste indefinitely. Aeroplanes will an-
nihilate distance, radio and television will permit a
dweller of Central Africa to attend first nights of the
New York Metropolitan Opera, and electricity will
reduce the burden of labour. All our present reasons
for herding people together will disappear; townsmen
by heredity will long for the luxury enjoyed by the
Boer roortreMcer, who felt crowded when he could
see his neighbour's smoke; people will migrate overseas
not because of hunger and persecution, but just for
the adventure of space, which is perhaps as fascinating
for most of us as the adventure of speed. Then all the
waste places around the globe will have their settlers,
including the Guianas, including even Biro-Bidjan.

All this is .said to prove that the author does not
wish to disparage either British Guiana or any other
place which sensible people may suggest for mass-
settlement by Jews. Some day all these places may be
successfully settled by some people or another. But

150 THE STATE EXODUS

mass-settlement by Jews is not a vision of the radiant
future when water, soil and climate will obey man's
will The Jewish exodus is a need of tomorrow, a
literal tomorrow; it has its inherent conditions and
limitations, due partly to the nature of the Jew as he
is today, partly to the nature of other peoples as they
are today, and partly to the technique of mass-settle-
ment as it is today; it is still an extremely difficult and
uphill undertaking. It is very questionable whether
British Guiana is of today.

The most interesting of all the "territorial" projects
is the proposal to settle not British Guiana but West-
ern Australia. One of the most remarkable features of
this scheme is that its advancement is due to the sole
effort of one single man, and this man is neither young
nor wealthy. Nor is he skilled in the kind of nuisance
known as propaganda. His only secret seems to be just
that calm obstinacy which still wants today what it
wanted yesterday. His name is Dr. I. Steinberg. In
Russia, long ago, he was a prominent member of a
party with a formidable name the Socialist-Revolu-
tionary Party;* S.R. for short. It was the non-Marxist
wing of Russian Socialism. The Bolsheviks wiped it
out. Before that happened Dr. Steinberg managed to
hold a ministerial post in one of the transitional gov-
ernments. Now he lives in London. At some time in
the course of the last decade he formed, or perhaps
only joined, a group called the "Freeland League for
Jewish Territorial Colonization/' Last year he went to .
Australia and actually converted a State of the Corn-

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE

monwealth to his views. The story is a striking one,
for it shows that very important political results can be
accomplished single-handed by one quite unofficial
person, with little popular backing and no particular
credentials, without any use of the witchcraft known
as personal magnetism: simply by talking timely com-
mon sense.

That Dr. Steinberg has converted practically the
whole of West Australia is undeniable. There is a vast
waste territory lying along the northern half of the
continents' north-western sea coast known as "the
Kimberleys." The districts which the Freeland League
has under consideration are Ivanhoe and Argyle in the
Ord River region, which belongs to West Australia,
and Newry and Auvergne in the North Australian
territory, but these are probably not the final limits
of the scheme. The whole area which could be claimed
for colonization is probably larger than England and
Wales. It is practically uninhabited. The West
Australian, Perth's leading daily, voiced what seems to
be the general opinion, admitting, in a lengthy edi-
torial, that neither Australians nor British immigrants
judging by all the experience of the last few dec-
adescould be expected to make a success of opening
up that part of the continent; and as Australia, for
various reasons, including that of safety, ought not to
tolerate any longer an unpopulated North, the Jews
were greatly to be preferred to any other non-British
stock. This view was supported by representative
men and women of all classes; it even appears that a
resolution was passed in the State's Legislative Assem-

THE STATE EXODUS

bly endorsing the scheme, and asking the Common-
wealth authorities to consider it favourably.

The full scope of the scheme has not been defined
in precise figures, neither the number of square
miles which would be needed ultimately, nor the
number of immigrants ultimately to be brought in.
Before the Perth Chamber of Commerce Dr. Stein-
berg said that "if six to seven million acres could be
obtained on Ord River, it would be possible there to
establish a Jewish settlement backed with pastoral and
agricultural activities/' As to the numbers of the im-
migrants, he was always careful to insist that at first
only some 500 to 600 young pioneers, men and
women, would be sent out to test possibilities and
methods. Later on he envisaged a settlement of about
ten thousand. In another address he mentioned 75,000
and 100,000 as a more remote aim, but he did not say
that this was the final limit. In an interview "he
visualized a new British province well established in
ten to fifteen years." The ultimate goal of the Free-
land League is of course a Jewish State roomy enough
to absorb a real exodus. The Australian sympathizers,
intelligent people and themselves descendants of im-
migrant colonists, obviously understand this; more-
over, as one of the reasons for their sympathy is their
fear of a Japanese invasion, it is clear that in consid-
ering colonization schemes they think not in terms of
thousands, but rather of hundreds of thousands, at the
very least.

What is not so clear as the fact of Australian
sympathy is the question as to whether the area is

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE 153

suitable for European pioneers. The West Australian's
favourable editorial, in enumerating the causes of pre-
vious failures, referred to "isolation, transport difficul-
ties, stock pests and diseases, and an unfriendly
climate/' But in the same article this half of the
Kiinberley division of the State was described as a
'Veil-watered area of large rivers and fertile valleys,
almost unknown and completely unpopulated except
by natives." On the other hand, Dr. Steinberg himself
admitted in a speech to the Perth Labour Women's
Organization that "the site picked was not exactly a
pleasant place, and he was sure that Australians would
never go there in effective numbers to work . . ." As
to whether the new settlers could stand the climate,
it was explained that "there are five winter months
which are quite pleasant; two months are extremely
hot and dry, and five months are hot and humid/'
(The area is situated, roughly, between 12 and 20
South.) In an interview with the Melbourne Age, Dr.
Steinberg, referring to the water supply, qualified the
optimism of the West Australian by stating that "in
the wet season there were good streams and lakes in
evidence, and water conservation would not be a
difficult project" Mr. A. C. Angelo, of Carnarvon,
an enthusiastic supporter of the scheme, also spoke
guardedly of this aspect of the site: "there are miles
of good water in the Ord River above the tidal limit,
and thousands of acres fertile and easy to irrigate."

All this, of course, would be taken into account
if the scheme ever came to be finally entertained as
practicable and officially accepted. No doubt it would

154 THE STATE EXODUS

be found to be bristling with difficulties, and would
require as astronomical an outlay as any other similar
project; but such difficulties cannot be avoided so
long as the suitable territory is outside Palestine; and
all such obstacles to colonization will surely be over-
come in the more or less remote future.

The real obstacle to the Freeland League's Austral-
ian scheme lies elsewhere. That obstacle was men-
tioned, without exception, in all favourable comments
printed or spoken throughout Dr. Steinberg's cam-
paign: not as an unsurmountable hindrance, but
simply as a difficulty of secondary importance; and as
such the Freeland League's delegate treated it in his
replies as an apprehension which can easily be re-
moved. In this respect, we fear, both sides were mis-
taken. The obstacle may prove not of secondary but
of primary and overwhelming importance; and of the
only two means by which it can be removed, the Jews
are not likely to accept the first nor the Australian
Commonwealth the second.

The nature of that obstacle had better be illustrated
by a few quotations:

The West Australian's editorial asks "whether the
Jewish colonists, once admitted, will be content to
stay in the settlement; whether there would be a
serious risk of their migrating south in large numbers
and attacking Australian industrial standards from
the sheer necessity of earning a livelihood."

Mr. A. Thompson, member of the Legislative
Council, an expert on the Kimberleys and a sympa-
thizer of the scheme: "It may be argued that the

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE 155

Jews might tend to drift southwards after experiencing
the hard work of development I think that could be
regulated easily by agreement and the issue of permits
from the State or Commonwealth authorities/'

Mr. Latham, also a sympathizer, the leader of the
opposition in the State's Legislative Assembly, uttered
a warning during the Address-in-Reply debate: "The
Government must be careful, however, that these
people did not come South and provide additional
labour for a market which did not want them. Some
agreement should be entered into with these people,
by which if they left the settlement they would have
to go overseas/'

And so on, without one single exception.

Dr. Steinberg seems to have fully realized the para-
mount importance of this apprehension, and the
necessity of allaying it. Whether the solution he pro-
posed was a satisfactory one remains to be seen. In
addressing the Labour women at Perth he "spoke of
the suggested possibility that these new settlers might
compete in the Southern areas for work. . . . He said
that, first of all, this settlement would not be a sep-
arate section but would be incorporated in the Austral-
ian Commonwealth; and guarantees would be given
to the Government that they would remain there for
at least five years."

The solution is anything but a happy one. The
promise that the settlement area will be "incorporated
in the Commonwealth" can only intensify the fear:
for it would only make it easier for disappointed set-
tlers to move to Perth or Melbourne or Sydney. Dr.

156 THE STATE EXODUS

Steinberg's remedy is simply to prohibit these settlers
from travelling outside their reservation, at least dur-
ing the first five years. They would have to be is-
sued special passports before they could leave; the
reservation's boundary would have to be watched; and
the police in the southern cities would have the right
to track offenders and send them back to the reserva-
tion, oras Mr. Latham suggested make them "go
overseas/ 7 There is nothing new in such an arrange-
ment: essentially it is the system applied in the case of
natives in the Union of South Africa, or mutatis
mutandis -of Jews in Tsarist Russia, where they had
to remain in the Pale of Settlement and were forbidden
to enter the central provinces of the empire.

Doubtless Dr. Steinberg and his colleagues on the
Freeland League's executive, when they realize all the
implications of such a "guarantee," will themselves"
reject such a solution. Nor is any Australian Govern-
ment, in view of the country's fine Liberal traditions,
likely to agree to so dubious an experiment.

The only other solution would be to promote the
settlement area from the start to the dignity of an
independent State, divided from the Commonwealth
by an international frontier with a proper visa control
on both sides. The settlers would then bear no stigma
of civic inferiority; but the other drawbacks would be
so serious that no one is likely to propose this solution
to an Australian Government.

This is no doubt the main reason why last January
an official answer to an M,P/s question was given in

TWO STATE PROJECTS OUTSIDE PALESTINE 157

the Commonwealth Parliament to the effect that the
Government rejected the Kimberley scheme.

Readers should not be surprised that so much space
is given to this particular project. It deserves attention
not only because of the honesty and devotion of its
promoters, but also and more especially because the
same sort of objections apply not only to Australia but
to all "territorialist" schemes outside Palestine.

CHAPTER XIV

THE FATA MORGANA LAND

THIS title is intended to cover all projects present
and future, to find a "suitable territory" outside
Palestine where a Jewish State or province could be
established. On the termination of the war the Jewish
State must be established by international action:
the State itself, not a commission for geographical
research. Research must precede the end of the war;
and one may add, with grim satisfaction, that it seems
likely that there will be plenty of time for such re-
search. The Evian Committee is quite competent to
carry out the preliminary geographical quest, and it
could not do better to justify its existence than by
preparing the solution of the only refugee problem of
historical significance.

The author does not believe in the reality of any
"territorialist" projects for Jewish settlement outside
Palestine; in his opinion, any search for other suitable
areas will be hopeless. But the quest should neverthe-
less be treated with the fullest respect, even by the
most zealous and uncompromising Zionists. Logically,
it is in their interest to encourage the closest scrutiny
of all non-Palestinian schemes.

158

THE FATA MORGANA LAND 159

There is a well-known Anglo-Saxon prejudice against
the application of logic in politics; a mistaken preju-
dice. Life is always infallibly logical. Logic, however,
is a complicated concept, as tortuous as the concept
"arithmetic/' There is a story of the Russian peasant
who once propounded this mathematical theory:
"Four and four make eight, with this I can agree; some
say that five and three also make eight but that's a
Jewish trick/ 7 He would be astounded to learn that
629 minus 1,000 plus the square root of 625 plus 64
plus 30 times nine plus 20 also makes eight.

Still more involved are the methods of political
logic. In this problem of a "suitable territory," in
particular, one should be warned against lapses into
simplified bucolic arithmetic. The chain of ideas with
which life's logic in this case will have to operate is
composed of three main links:

(a.) Inevitability of the exodus.

(b) No exodus possible except to a Jewish State.

(c) No suitable site for the Jewish State but one.

In this chain every link is of equal importance;
should one of them break, it is the end of the chain.
This is why it would not be wise to imagine that point
"c" can be suppressed. Even Herzl and Nordau, the
founders of modern Zionism, had to pass through the
phase of looking for the Fata Morgana Land before
Chey realized the objective inevitability of the one and
pnly "site/' Today many Christian minds are going
through the same process, and it would be a great mis-

l6o THE STATE EXODUS

take to betray irritation or impatience because they
have not yet reached the final stage.

As to the outcome of the search, provided it be
conducted in good faith, there is no need for anxiety:
the outcome is pre-ordained.

The first consideration which might make one
sceptical as to the chances of such a quest is this:
Seeing that so many territories are now being men-
tioned as suitable for the Jews, why is it that no govern-
ment ever thought of proposing one of them through
all the years that have elapsed since the Great War?

Jews as nation-builders were most prominently "in
the market' ' throughout this period; and not a bad
"proposition" either. All governments, and all readers
of the Press, were infallibly aware of at least two facts
about Palestine: first that for years Jewish coloniza-
tion had been bringing to that country an unprece-
dented influx of gold; secondthat all this time the
Palestinian Jews were having trouble with the Arabs
and friction with the British administration. In homely
parlance, here was a case of a bride with quite an ap-
petizing dowry, who, judging by all that one hearid,
might safely be assumed to feel displeased with her
fiance. This is a situation which invariably attracts
attention in the matrimonial market and elicits other
tentative offers. Why has nothing of the kind occurred
in our case?

The first fact the influx of gold was known
throughout the world, especially to the governments.
Between 1922 and 1936, above all since 1925, consuls,

THE FATA MORGANA LAND l6l

bankers, reporters and travellers had emphasized the
fact in every language. The second factthe per-
sistence of trouble was even better known, having
been lavishly advertised, with sensational embellish-
ments, in 1920, 1921 and 1929, and almost daily after
April 1936. Why was there never a competing offer:
Here is another territory, every bit as good as yours,
or better (certainly not worse); why not change over,
and bring your gold, and have no trouble?

The only explanation, purely deductive but difficult
to evade, is that there are no such "suitable" territories
in the market: there is no territory combining in itself
all those characteristics which are necessary to make
it "suitable." This brings us to the question: what are
those characteristics?

A territory (outside Palestine) suitable for the
establishment of the Jewish State must satisfy, at
least from the Gentile's point of view, three essential
requirements; from the standpoint of the Jew there
may be other requirements; but here, in this chapter,
the problem is examined pragmatically, with the strict-
est elimination of sentimental idiosyncrasies. Briefly,
the three requirements are these:

(a) the territory must be empty;

(b) it must be good;

(c) it must be of no value to its present owners.

The first condition must not be taken literally no
land is absolutely "empty": but the population on the

162 THE STATE EXODUS

spot must be insignificant Where there is a consid-
erable settled population the same trouble would be
bound to arise as with the Arabs in Palestine. It would
not matter who these natives might be: even if they
were Haussas or Hereros, there would still be trouble.
If they themselves were unable to write to the news-
papers they would find white-skinned protectors (Eng-
lish, most probably) who would take up the cudgels on
their behalf, andquite justly confront the govern-
ment with a difficult ethical problem: "If it is unfair
to give the Jews a country sparsely populated by Arabs,
why is it right to give them a country sparsely popu-
lated by negroes?"

The second requisitethe territory must be "good"
means that it must be suitable for colonization by
average Europeans. Greenland is empty, but so far,
thank God, it has not been offered. An honest Chris-
tian woman, Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, recently said:
"If a land is to be found for the Jews, it must be a
land fit for white men to live in." Where other white
pioneers have failed completely (and this, generations
ago, when man was much less of a tenderfoot than
now), Jewish colonists would obviously stand little
chance, apart from all sentimental considerations.
There may be quite a spate of preliminary nonsense
about equatorial valleys and arctic ridges, but after
serious scrutiny no government or commission will
sponsor such an offer, simply because serious people
hate making fools of themselves. Their belief in the
Jews' genius for really rough pioneering is probably
not excessive, and one may be sure that neither in

THE FATA MORGANA LAND 163

Labrador nor in the forests between the Orinoco and
the Amazon will they look for the suitable territory.
They will look for something really "good."

As for the third condition that it must be a terri-
tory of no value to its present owners this can be
taken literally. The Australian example is conclusive.
The same apprehension is bound to arise wherever
there is a common frontier between the owners 7 coun-
try and the Jewish province. This is probably why the
Guiana proposal is so popular with its British spon-
sors: the colony is entirely isolated, so that the danger
that the settlers would invade any British territory
would be nil. But in every other case the State that ,
offers the Jews a territory must begin by renouncing
it completely must make it an independent country
from the start, not just virtually but formally. The
Australians' fear of "failures coming South" is based
on hard experience. In modern agricultural coloniza-
tion there will inevitably be a large proportion of
failures, and these must inevitably gravitate toward
the large towns. In Australia this has been experienced
over and over again: her cities are full of such deserters
from stations in the bush. One of the latest disap-
pointments was the settlement of Theodore on the
Dawson River. It was started by the Government in
1927. It had many advantages over the Kimberley
project: it was not in the tropics, there was a total
rainfall of 28 inches, water from the Dawson provided
for nine irrigations a year, and the expenditure was
eight thousand pounds per settler, which is a generous
figure. Yet before long, more than half the settlers had

164 THE STATE EXODUS

failed: out of 264 in 1927, only 124 of the settlers
were still carrying on in 1935 ("many of them in a
state of poverty and discontent/' says Professor Grif-
fith Taylor in Mr. Isaiah Bowman's report on Limits
of Land Settlement, published by the American Coun-
cil on Foreign Relations). Now the quitters are, of
course, in Brisbane, Newcastle and Adelaide, or even
in Sydney and Melbourne. As long, however, as they
were Anglo-Saxons, the Australians did not mind so
terribly. But to have their towns flooded with Jews
would be quite a different thing (and the Jews would
be full of complaints if Tel Aviv were similarly threat-
ened by an Aryan wave).

With the best will in the world, no friendly govern-
ment is likely to grant the Jews a territory unless it
can be cut off from the national territory cut off so
sharply and completely that the boundary would be
actually impenetrable save with a special passport, in
special cases, and for a limited period. As the Russian
method is evidently out of question, there remains
only the other expedient: cession of sovereignty. The
Jewish territory must become, formally and legally,
a separate independent State from the outset of the
experiment Not an "autonomous" province, not a
"canton" in a federated commonwealth: for between
the provinces of the same state, between the cantons
of the same federation, the free intermigration of
citizens cannot be prohibited without establishing a
pariah class, introducing internal passports, and poi-
soning and degrading the whole civic atmosphere.
Entry can be forbidden, in a decent modern com-

THE FATA MORGANA LAND 165

munity, only to "aliens," to people who come from
"abroad/' The Jewish territory must be legally and
politically "abroad/'

There is nothing impossible in such a separation-
provided the territory has no value in the eyes of the
nation that owns it But that would be very strange
in the case of a tract of land fulfilling the first two
requirements. "Uninhabited" plus "habitable" is a
value, and rather an enviable one. To look for a land
combining such three mutually incompatible attri-
butes as "uninhabited," "habitable," and "valueless"
is not a hopeful quest. In the author's opinion there
is only one such country, the Fata Morgana Land.

"But does Palestine answer any of those three
criteria?" is the question one expects at this stage.
"Why should Palestine be preferred?"

The "choice" of Palestine has nothing whatever to
do with any such criteria. Zionists will joke freely
about Palestine's natural drawbacks as a country for
pioneers: they will readily confess that it is by no
means the best kind of "colonial proposition," that
there are countries much more suitable for the pur-
poseand that all this does not matter in the least,
and has no bearing on the question. Still more readily
do they admit that the local Arabs* unwillingness to
welcome the transformation is a very regrettable fact,
and that things would be much easier if it did not
exist; but since it does exist it will have to be over-
come, however costly this may prove. This is an atti-
tude that has nothing to do with any search or quest

l66 THE STATE EXODUS

or choice. To "find" or "select" a country, one com-
pares values, advantages and obstacles, and one ends
without any parti pris by preferring that which offers
the greatest attractions and the least resistance (and
it is perhaps inevitable that the thing that "attracts
and does not resist" cannot be anything but a mirage) .
Palestine does not even pretend to compete with any
other country in points of attraction, or ease of access,
or cheapness of colonization. The author fully shares
his generation's dislike of totalitarian patriotism, but
there are desperate situations where no "choice" is
left, and the only attitude for a decent man to take is,
right or wrong my country. With much greater
justification, a people foundering in chaos is entitled
to say: good or bad, easy or hard, cheap or costlymy
country.

Incidentally, it will prove not so costly, not so hard,
and even not so bad.

PART IV

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR
PALESTINE

C HAP TEK. XV

THE WHITE PAPER POLICY

WHY discuss Palestine? Is there not a truce?
It would be empty hypocrisy to pretend that
there is a truce in the debate on the proper interpreta-
tion of the Palestine Mandate. There ought to be
one until the common danger is over; there ought to
be a firm determination to respect the legal status
quo, bad as it is, with no attempts to steal a march on
the opposition; there ought to be, but there is not.

On the outbreak of the war, at one of those mo-
ments when even experienced people are liable to be
sentimentally trustful and confiding, the writer and
his political associates frankly expected an immediate
truce between the Zionist movement and the Colonial
Office. True, they spoke of Palestine as the Jewish
State in that appeal to world Jewry quoted at the be-
ginning of this book: but that was a war-cry: it is in
the usual tradition to proclaim one's highest ideal in
calling for the utmost effort and sacrifice. We expected
that soon the real business of the war, the efforts and
the sacrifices, would begin for the Jews as one of the
Allied nations; and above all, that Jewish troops would
be raised on the precedent of the Great War. That
so we thoughtwould make all verbal claims superflu-

169

I JO THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

ous; a much stronger claim to a place "on the map"
would be staked out in the actual firing line. A nation
with soldiers at the front can afford to leave argument
alone until negotiations for a settlement begin; in the
meantime, the less her spokesmen say the more plainly
will her soldiers speak for her. In September we were
quite ready to plunge into war work and withdraw
the political batteries: assuming, of course, that the
batteries would be withdrawn by the other side also,
and that our war effort was wanted.

In both these assumptions we were mistaken. The
Jews' war effort is not wanted; there is no desire to
treat them as an Allied nation, or merely as a nation,
or any sort of entity at all; and in Palestine the bom-
bardment of the status quo from the opposite side is
hotter than ever. For, even if there is quibbling as to
what a status quo does or does not include in circum-
stances complicated by three years' rioting, one thing
is beyond a doubt: the legal status quo ante in Pales-
tine cannot include active encroachments by a White
Paper which has never been ratified, never even dis-
cussed by the Council of the League of Nations.

A formal attempt to elucidate this question was
made by the writer and his political associates as
early as September loth, one week after war had been

declared, in a document:

%

Calling the attention of ELM. Government to the
fact that since the September session of the League of
Nations Council had been postponed sine die, no legal

THE WHITE PAPER POLICY iyi

validity could even provisionally be attached to last
May's White Paper on Palestine.

This view has already been submitted to the

Colonial Secretary; but this matter, especially under

war time conditions, obviously transcends the com-

, petence of one single department and should be

brought to the notice of the Government as a whole.

. . . The Permanent Mandates Commission was
unanimous in recognizing that the [White Paper's]
policy was not in accordance with the interpretation
of the Palestine Mandate hitherto adopted by the
Council of the League of Nations. Even that minority
of three, who felt that the Council might perhaps not
refuse, at its impending session, to change its former
view and adopt the White Paper's interpretation, also
agreed that that would mean a change.

It is obvious, now that the Council's meeting has
been postponed, that the Mandatory Government has
no authority whatever to make changes of such a scope
in the interpretation of a Mandate whose only authori-
tative interpreter (and the British Government admits
it) is the Council.

. . . The only correct way is to treat the White
Paper as in English law one would treat a Bill approved
by Ministers but not yet granted assent by King in
Parliament; and, in the meantime, it is obviously the
former interpretation which should form the basis of
legality.

Some ten days later, the authors of this interpella-
tion were informed, on unimpeachable authority, that
it was the policy of the White Paper which was
deliberately meant to hold the field.

IJ2 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

So it does, at least in the Mandatory Government's
admitted intention. The restrictions on the sale of land
to "non Arabs" in 94.8 per cent of Western Palestine's
area announced at the end of February are bad and
wicked enough in themselves; but their especial venorn
is in the fact that they have been officially introduced
as implementing the "Statement of Policy of May,

1939.-

This business deserves attention quite apart from
the Palestine issue: it forms such a strange little dis-
sonance in the solemn oratorio which declares the
duty of the mighty to respect the Covenant and the
supreme authority of the League, always to await
Geneva's verdict, and never, by unilateral action to
employ the trick of the fait accompli, least of all
against the weak. . . . The dissonance might pass un-
noticed in the roar of great events, except in the little
corner which the weak inhabit: yet it is like one of
those tiny squeaks which prove that somewhere some-
thing is wrong in the great machine.

In the field of administrative practice there have
for long been many disquieting signs that the Pales-
tine bureaucracy feels inspired, even without waiting
for legal sanction, to treat the White Paper as its only
guide-book. This tendency has been especially con-
spicuous in two directions. The first is that of immi-
gration. In all negotiations as to the numbers to be
admitted or refused, the officials in Jerusalem and
London openly quote the White Paper as their au-

THE WHITE PAPER POLICY 173

thority: the White Paper established that 25,000 refu-
gees might be allowed to enter, with certain provisos.
The White Paper definitely prohibited the increase of
such and such quota. . . . The moral result of this
conscious, deliberate, calmly assertive disregard of le-
gality in exalted quarters will be what it always must
be at the first opportunity: lawlessness beneath the
surface, and in all directions.

Some other practical results are already visible;
results which, despite the reticence of the British Press,
have become known and have produced a painful im-
pression: but the actual experience has unfortunately
been a thousand times more painful. Between October
1939 and February 1940, over 2,000 Jewish refugees
were detained on the Danube, marooned on four old
barges. None of the four was fit to contain even fifty
human passengers: they had to accommodate 500 to
600 each, including many women and children. Before
those people boarded the barges, probably at Bratis-
lava, steamers had been chartered to take them on
board at the Danube estuary and convey them "il-
legally" to Palestine; so the barge trip was meant to
last only a few days a trip downstream from Bratis-
lava to the Black Sea shore, in the mild autumn
weather of the Balkan plains. But "official influences/'
the source of which is only too easy to identify, inter-
vened at Ankara and Athensand the chartered steam-
ers, owned by Turkish and Hellenic subjects, were
forced to denounce their contracts and withdraw. To
replace them proved for many months impossible, for

174 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

apart from the official pressure from the readily iden-
tified sourcefreights were mounting day by day to
fabulous heights, partly on account of the privileged
position of the Mediterranean in the war. What espe-
cially drives the freight charges upward in the "illegal"
immigration business is its own peculiar "war risk": for
if such a ship is caught in Palestine's territorial waters,
the captain and crew will go to jail and the vessel will
be confiscated. So these 2,000 were stuck in the Dan-
ube estuary, permitted neither to land, nor to sail on,
nor to sail back. In the meantime winter came and the
river froze. People who were allowed to bring food to
the barges, earnestly and soberly report that some fea-
tures of the refugees' plight were definitely worse than
anything experienced in the Nazi concentration
camps: for weeks and weeks on end in the horrible
cold of this memorable winter, there was no possibil-
ity of exercise, of even stretching the limbs, since the
authorities on shore prohibited the refugees from land-
ing, as their visas were only for transit via the Danube,
which is an international waterway. One at least of the
barges was a disused oil tanker, whose unpanelled iron
walls sweated moisture which turned to ice. Two
babies were born on that tanker.

A significant feature is the action of some ladies of
the Bucharest British colony, headed by Miss Boyd
(headmistress of the English high school), Miss Gadge
and Mrs. Wallie: they collected donations from
among the members of the colony and provided 100
beds for the babies and the old people, beside warm

THE WHITE PAPER POLICY 175

clothing and 75,000 lei. A stream of donations came
from the Balkanic Jewish communities, and from the
Jews of the United States and France and South
Africa. At the time of writing this chapter, early in
February, the marooned refugees have been enabled
to leave: by how many steamers, of what tonnage, in
what conditions, and at what cost all these details,
probably as notable in their way as those of the Danu-
bian stage of their adventure, will only be told when
their wanderings are over.*

The "closed door" policy which is the cause of all
this misery has no justification either in moral con-
science or in law.t

From the moral point of view, Palestine should be
the last country to reject Jewish war fugitives. So far
she has been spared by the war, in comparison not only
with the countries from which those refugees fled, but
even with many a neutral land. She would only be
"doing her bit" if she served as a refugee camp: even
apart from all question of a National Home, it would
be a great service to the Allies and to Europe. Lithu-
ania, with not one-tenth of the financial resources
which Palestine can summon for the purpose from all

* These refugees eventually reached Palestine on February 14,
1940. The author's son, who had been instrumental in guiding the
refugees to Palestine, was imprisoned by the Palestine Government
for this crime. He was still in prison when Vladimir Jabotinsky died
in August 1940.

t The "closed door" policy of the Palestine Administration was
manifested in an even more drastic manner by the deportation of
2,000 Jewish refugees who managed to reach the shores of Palestine,
to the island of Mauritius.

Ij6 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

parts of the world, opens her gates almost daily to
fugitives crowding over her so-called "green boundary"
near Vilna, Why is Palestine exempted? *

As regards the law if the Mandate is the lawthe
Mandate prescribes that the immigration of Jews be
encouraged "under suitable conditions." What condi-
tions can ever be more "suitable" than those of the
present day? Here are people uprooted by disaster; all
civilized humanity sympathizes with their agony; half
the world's governments are searching for regions in
which refugees could be absorbed; half a million Jews
in 300 settlements are eagerly offering to look after
the newcomers, and the charitable funds of all Jewry
are ready to help them. But the Mandate has been
supersededby an illegal document.

In another direction the governmental policy is even
more disturbing: the attempt to paralyze the Jewish
self-defence organization. There is unfortunately no
other explanation for two recent events: forty-two Jews
were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for
armed drilling in November, and thirty-eight more in
January. There is no precedent for this action in the
history of Palestine under British rule since 1920. In
that year, twenty-one Jews were sentenced to penal

*"~* It is worth while to point out that Palestine was not "exempted"
as far as non-Jewish refugees were concerned. It served as a welcome
refuge for Polish, Greek, Yugoslav and other fugitives of war. Only
for Jewish war fugitives did its doors remain shut. The recently re-
ported fate' of the 768 passengers of the S. S. Struma, who were
refused permission to enter Palestine and forced baclc into the Black
Sea only to find there a watery grave, demonstrated that this "exemp-
tion" with regard to the Jews is still in full force*

THE WHITE PAPER POLICY 177

servitude by a military court on a charge of preparing
for armed self-defence; but the proceedings of that
court were afterwards ruthlessly quashed by the Army
Council. Since then no attempt had been made, either
by the civil or the military authorities in Palestine, to
hamper the development of the force. Its existence
was known to the authorities; during the anti-Jewish
riots of 1921 and 1929 the British police and military
actually collaborated with what Tommies called "Jew-
ish patrols"; during the 19361939 troubles this Jew-
ish militia rendered invaluable service to the Govern-
ment and the troops, both by providing trained men
for the official auxiliary police and by autonomous
action. Instances can be quoted when Jewish leaders
were cordially thanked by the British military authori-
ties. What has happened since then to cause this
attempt to suppress "Jewish illegal drilling"?

The only new thing that has happened since the
outbreak of the war ought to have produced quite the
opposite result an increase of mutual confidence be-
tween the Government and the Jewish self-defence.
One section of the latter, the "Irgun" (its full title is
"the National Military Organization" ), had been held
responsible for active mass reprisals against the Arab
terror in 1937- 1939; it was the only section of the
Jewish self-defence forces which could really be called
"clandestine," and not merely unofficial like the re-
mainder; and it possessed a secret broadcasting station
in the country, which was used for warnings, an-
nouncements and propaganda. A few days after the
outbreak of the war, the "Irgun" broadcasted a declara-

178 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOE PALESTINE

tion of loyalty to the Allies, of willingness to co-operate
with the Government for the defence of Palestine, and
on any other front, and of a resolve to "cease fire" and
call a truce with the Arabs. In official circles this
change of heart was acknowledged; one might even
say that in some respects it was handsomely acknowl-
edged. What has happened since to explain the fact
that a few weeks later it was to be rewarded by some-
thing that looks like a minor crusade?

The thing is without precedent in Palestine or else-
where. The only other country in which Jewish self-
defence had ever functioned as a permanent institution
was Tsarist Russia. In 1905, in Odessa, the author was
present when the Oxford-blue uniformed gendarmerie,
the Tsar's equivalent of the present Ogpu, invaded the
flat of a Jewish family at night in search of revolu-
tionary literature. Of that they found none, but they
found a parcel of freshly-printed manifestoes bearing
the name of a Jewish self-defence organization a per-
fectly illegal bodyurging the Jews to arm and drill
and resist pogroms. "This is none of my business," said
the officer in charge, waving the parcel away; ''this has
nothing to do with subversive political activity/'

So matters continued until the fall of the Roman-
offs. I do not recollect a single instance of a serious
police attack on Jewish self-defence bodies or their
modest arsenals. There was some queer strain of
brigands' fair play in the psychological make-up of that
police system: the police never stopped a pogrom, and
were often suspected of staging one, but at least they

THE WHITE PAPER POLICY 179

felt that the Jews ought to be given a chance to fight
the pogroms.

After the Tsar's downfall, Odessa the largest Jew-
ish community in the Ukraineduring two years of
the civil war (1918-19) was garrisoned by a volunteer
body called the Jewish Battle Company. It was uni-
formed, lived in barracks, and was rather well armed.
It was of course entirely illegal; but the thirteen gov-
ernments that followed one another in occupying the
city (the French, the Greeks, the White Russians, the
Bolsheviks, the Ukrainians, etc.), all respected the ille-
gal Jewish self-defence organization. Its organizer, S. Y,
Jacobi, then a boy of twenty, settled subsequently in
England, dreaming, some day, of repeating the experi-
ence on a much larger scale, under the British aegis;
but he died last November, and anyhow the British
aegis does not seem to be available for the purpose.

Neither the author nor anyone else would suggest
that the regimes can be compared. But the fact re-
mains that in Palestine the anti-Jewish terror had been
allowed to drag on for years; there is no doubt that the
Government genuinely wanted to stop it, and some
may even admit that they "did all they could" to stop
itbut apparently what they "could" was not enough.
Why, then, should a decent administration fail to ob-
serve an unwritten law which even Tsarism, even
chaos, respected?

The question was recently put, in formal writing, to
the proper authority in London., The explanation
elicited was to the effect that the competent authority

l8o THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

is unable to admit that any justification exists for the
illegal arming and military training of Jews in
Palestine.

A curious attitude this, in the winter of 1939, after
three years' experience had shown how little official
protection can actually be given to Jewish settlements
even in peace time; and less than ever is given now,
when we are perhaps on the threshold of unpredicta-
ble complications. More than ever now, preparedness
for self-protection should be openly recognized as
justifiable. In this attitude there is no logic, no justice,
no elementary care for the safety of an exposed minor-
ity: but there is method it is that of the White Paper
policy, resentful of all things in any way reminiscent of
the Jewish dream of Statehood.

It would be ridiculous Quixotry for the Jew, who
would have been the lesser partner in the truce, had
there been a truce, to play the silly game of noblesse
oblige when there is so obviously no truce. War or no
war, the major partner has decided that the debate on
Palestine's future shall continue, and we follow suit

CHAPTER XVI

THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE

TO ACCUSE the Government of "stealing a
march on the Jews" may not be complimentary,
but that it is so engaged is the impression shared by all
observers in Palestine, who are watching the inroads
of the White Paper policy on the deteriorating status
quo. Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this system
of encroachment is its inevitable futility; for it is
futile even from the standpoint of its authors and
abettors. They produced the 1939 White Paper to
placate the Palestinian Arabs; they are now showing
the greatest eagerness to "implement" it, without even
a show of legitimacy, and for the same reason in
order that the Arab Nationalist party may be satisfied.
These authors and abettors of the anti-Mandate policy
attempt to silence all complaints by the same argu-
mentthat this method can be relied upon to calm
the Arabs and to keep them from insisting on further
concessions.

This optimistic outlook is illusory. The Jews have
been deeply hurt and injured by the White Paper of
May 1939, but it is not therefore safe to conclude that
the Arabs have really been "bought" by its promises.
Not a single Arab Nationalist in Palestine, no matter

181

182 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

whether he be Husseini or Nashashibi, has ever for
a moment been deceived into regarding the White
Paper as in any way satisfactory except as a blow to
the Zionists. He has never considered that it contains
one single item of real and positive value in respect to
Arab aspirations never regarded it as anything but a
stepping-stone for tomorrow's renewed offensive. And
in this negative appreciation, moreover, the Arabs,
from their point of view, are perfectly justified: a blow
to Jewish hopes, it is at the same time a blow to Arab
aspirations.

It may be useful here to reproduce a short analysis
of this White Paper as seen through the eyes of a
group of intelligent Palestinian Arabs. It was conveyed
to the writer immediately after the publication of that
document, by reliable friends who are in close touch
with Arab Nationalist circles; and its sound logic,
which cannot but commend itself to the reader, is
inner evidence of its reliability.

From the Arab point of view, almost the only good
thing in the White Paper is that it explicitly rejects
the ideal of the Jewish State and promises to stop
further immigration (or to make it dependent on the
Arabs' consent, which amounts to the same thing)
after 75,000 more Jews have been admitted over a
period of five years. However, the decision to prohibit
land sales to Jews, outside those districts which are
already predominantly Jewish, is in itself a good thing
although in this respect any law can easily be
evaded. "No immigration" is a much more desirable

THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE 183

boon: it is actually the main point, being even more
essential than the rejection of the Jewish State princi-
ple. Taking all three items together, this aspect of the
White Paper policy is excellent provided it proves to
be permanent.

As to the permanent reliability of British White
Papers on Palestine, the Arabs, judging by precedent,
have no especial confidence. The official attitude to-
wards the "Jewish State 7 ' claim, for instance, has been
stated in quite a series of authoritative documents-
each differing from the rest In 1922 the Churchill
White Paper formulated the claim in five pages of
prose so eloquent and so involved that no one could
properly make out whether the government did or did
not want to preclude the transformation of Palestine
into a Jewish State: but later Mr. Churchill himself
confessed to the Royal Commission that there was
nothing in that text to preclude such a development.
Then the Royal Commission found that the only way
to fulfil the Mandate's obligation to the Jews was to
give them a Jewish State somewhere in Palestine; and
a 1937 White Paper, the Partition paper, was issued
accordingly. A year later, the partition plan was dis-
carded; and now, in 1939, there is a White Paper
stating jthat the government is unequivocally opposed
to the creation of a Jewish State. Very good; but one
cannot help feeling uneasy as to whether this Paper is
the last in what seems to be a series of contradictory
papers.

For such it actually seems to be. Take the Legisla-
tive Council issue. The 1922 White Paper "estab-

184 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

listed" in Palestine a Legislative Council with an Arab
majority; but another. White Paper, published also in
1922, cancelled it. In 1930 the Passfield White Paper
"established" it again, a Legislative Council with an
Arab majority: and again it never came into existence.
In 1935, the Wauchope White Paper promised it
finally and definitelya Legislative Council with an
Arab majority; and again nothing came of it; then the
Royal Commission's Report stated that the scheme
was impracticable; and now this new White Paper
contains no promise of an elective legislature. Three
White Papers wasted!

Or take Jewish immigration. The 1922 White Paper
promised to tone it down: at that time there were less
than 100,000 Jews in Palestine. A few years later the
number was doubled. Then, in 1930, the Simpson
Report showed that no further immigration was eco-
nomically permissible, the Passfield White Paper was
published, and the Arabs hoped that the ''flood" would
stop. At that time there were already 200,000 Jews. A
few years later the number was again doubled: there
were 400,000 in 1936, and there are nearly half a
million now. One really must not be surprised if the
Arabs sometimes think that "White Paper" and
"waste paper" are synonymous. No doubt a White
Paper gives a precise and genuine indication of what
a government wanted when it was published; but that
is no indication of what the government may want a
year later.

So, grateful as the Arabs were for all these good
intentions, they would appreciate them much more if

THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE 185

a White Paper contained a real guarantee that such
intentions would not be abandoned at the next con-
tingency. What constitutes a real guarantee? There is
only one answer: an Arab government, and immedi-
ately, before the wind has time to veer.

This is only one reason why the Arabs wanted "an
Arab government immediately"; even if only to
"implement" the purely negative aspect of the White
Paper the removal of the Jewish dangerit was, to
them, indispensable. But this negative aspect of the
matter was, of course, of only secondary importance.
They are above all, patriots, and the paramount ques-
tion to them is their positive ideal of the Arab State.
This is what they had fought for during those difficult
three years. They were diplomatic enough not to put
it so bluntly as to speak of "Arab government"; their
official formula sounded more moderate: "a govern-
ment of Palestinians," in which the Jews would be
invited to share, but in which the Arabs, of course,
would be in the majority. But the main point was:
this must come at once. The life of a White Paper is
very short; when one has to deal with such fickle legis-
lators one likes a cash payment.

In this they were disappointed. The White Paper
promises to grant Palestine "independence" what it
calls "independence" only in ten years' time, and that
only if the Mandatory government (of 1949) should
find it advisable. Listen to this: "If, at the end of ten
years, it appears to H.M. Government that, contrary
to their hope, circumstances require the postponement
of the establishment of the independent State" they

l86 THE MAX NORDAIT PLAN FOR PALESTINE

will postpone it "with a view to achieving the desired
objective at the earliest possible date/' Which means,
say the Arabs, that if the Jews about that time begin
to cry out that the Arabs are oppressing them, and
provoke riots in a couple of towns with a few dozen
casualties on both sides, and their friends in the
House of Commons make the usual kind of speeches,
there will be no "independence/ 7 From the Arab
point of view, all this is a Jewish victory: the Jews
always insisted that Palestine should become inde-
pendent only when they should agree to it; and this
is what the White Paper has promised them, in veiled
but transparent terms.

Still worse, from the Arab point of view, is the pic-
ture of that independence itself if they ever live to
see it as defined in the White Paper. Great Britain
"will require to be satisfied that adequate provision has
been made" for the following matters:

(a) "The security of, and freedom of access to, the
Holy Places, and the protection of the interests and
property of the various religious bodies/' Every
Palestinian knows what this means: administration of
the walled City of Jerusalem and parts of Nazareth,
Bethlehem and Hebron; control of the railways leading
to these places; control of all arrangements regulating
the relations between the various churches, including
Moslem and Jewish. In particular, the Wailing Wall
business will remain outside Arab jurisdiction.

(b) "The protection of the different communities
in Palestine in accordance with the obligations of
H.M, Government to both Arabs and Jews and for

THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE 187

the special position of the Jewish National Home."
This means all the legislative and administrative activity
regarding education, representation on municipalities,
justice in cases where both peoples are affected, the
rights of the two languages in public life, treasury
grants to hospitals, and innumerable other items, cover-
ing practically the whole field of public life in a country
like Palestine.

(c) "Such requirements to meet the strategic situa-
tion as may be regarded as necessary . . ." In other
words, military garrisons.

(d) 'The interests of certain foreign countries . . ."
In other words, a finger in Palestine's "independent"
Foreign Office.

For all this, the future constitution of Palestine will
have to contain "adequate" safeguards. The Arabs
think they know what this means. The British will say
that, just as strategic responsibilities cannot be safe-
guarded by paragraphs, but only by British soldiers,
so all the other responsibilities can be safeguarded
only by British officials. They will probably be called
"advisers"; and every Arab knows what that means.
They know that an adviser is a British official
attached to a native minister, and without the ad-
viser's signature no order of that minister is valid; so
that the adviser is really the minister, and the minister
not even an adviser. Judging by the number of mat-
ters which will have to be safeguarded in this way, the
Arab view is that, in comparison with this kind of
independence, that which any provincial municipality
enjoys would seem unfettered autocracy.

l88 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

The truth about the 1939 White Paper, from the
Arab point of view, is this: it is an attempt virtually
to annex Palestine to the British Empire for ever and
ever, using the Jewish National Home as a justifica-
tion. As it can always be claimed that the Jews are
afraid of the Arabs (the Jews will claim it with pleas-
ure, as long as they are in a. minority ), Great Britain's
supervision would never cease. Whatever glorified
name may be given that relationship alliance, for
instance Palestine is to remain a British colony. This
is the sense of the White Paper. Palestine will never
be able to join an Arab Federationunless that Fed-
eration too becomes "federated'' into the British
Empire.

It is obvious, from the Palestine Arabs' point of
view, that this situation is entirely unacceptable. There
has never been even a question of accepting it. Its
only value in the eyes of the Arabs is its formal repu-
diation of the Jewish State idea. As to the rest of the
White Paper, the next step will be a concerted Arab
effort to wipe out every line of it.

The writer's interest is diametrically opposed to that
of the Palestinian Arab Nationalists, and it is not his
business to make out a case for them; moreover, as
against the Jews he considers that they have no case
at all, nor against a government firmly set on carrying
out the Jewish National Home policy to its conclusion.
But as against a policy aiming to bribe the Arabs by
harming the Jews, the Arab case just quoted is unan-
swerable; the bribe is not even illusory it simply does

THE INEFFECTUAL BRIBE 189

not exist. The White Paper has not satisfied, and
could not have satisfied, the Palestinian Arabs.

Which means, that at the first opportunity they
can be expected to push their claims farther. This does
not imply that the writer accuses them of disloyalty to
the Allies: he prefers to assume that all the peoples in
contact with Britain and France are united in one
purpose, delenda est Carthago. India is so united; but
India is pressing her demands at this moment, during
the war; and the Moslems of India, being in a minor-
ity, are alarmed.

It remains for the Jews, then, to take up their side
of the uninterrupted controversy. The future of Pales-
tine is on the agenda of the day, by the will of factors
for which we bear no responsibility; and no time
should be lost in pressing the claim that Palestine, on
both sides of the Jordan, is the only "suitable" site for
that Jewish State which, being the only remedy against
Europe's cancer, is the world's urgent need.

CHAPTER XVII

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN

THE late Max Nordau, Head's collaborator in
founding political Zionism, was probably the most
revolutionary thinker of the fin de sBcIe generation. In
1919 he was old and ailing, his bitterly contested yet
world-wide literary fame was half forgotten, but he
was still a great intellectual force, with a rare wealth of
erudition at his command. That was the honeymoon
period of the Balfour Declaration, and Max Nordau
came forward with a plan which should make the best
use of it once and for all. It was a plan for the im-
mediate and simultaneous transportation to Palestine
of the first half million immigrants from the East
European ghettos.

The leading Jewish circles of the period did not
respond, and the plan was forgotten. Now the time
has arrived to revive it as the only practical and reason-
able way of coping with a situation incomparably
more urgent than that of 1919. Max Nordau's projects
were concerned with Palestine only; so, in their true
intentions, are the suggestions of the present writer;
but for the sake of formal convenience, the following
outline may be expressed in terms applicable to any

190

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN

"suitable area/' provided the area is to become the
Jewish State and to absorb the great exodus.

Adapted to present conditions, the Max Nordau
Plan can be summarized as follows:

(a) The whole exodus to take about ten years.

(b) The first million settlers to be transferred within

the first year or less.

(c) All planning to be done during the war, so that

work can start on the morrow of the peace con-
ference.

Expressed in a form less abrupt, it would mean:

(a) The transfer to the Settlement Country of all
the Jews of East-Central Europe who may voluntarily
register for the purpose shall be effected within a
period not exceeding ten years.

(b) The first million settlers, assembled and sum-
marily trained, shall be transferred simultaneously, at
the very outset of the migration, within the minimum
time indispensable for the technical operation of trans-
port, which shall not exceed one year.

(c) All preliminary planning as to the methods of
settlement, financial arrangements, and any other rele-
vant matters, should be accomplished as far as possible
during the war, by the Intergovernmental Committee
on Refugees, reinforced through the addition of Jew-
ish representatives, or by another suitable body to be
established for the purpose.

The actual transportation of the First Million to the

ig2 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

Country of Settlement shall begin within the shortest
possible interval after the close of hostilities, as soon as
the necessary international loan has been raised and
the draft of settlers ready for transporting completed.

It is not the author's intention here to attempt a
systematic presentation of the Max Nordau Plan. A
good comprehensive outline, with almost more figures
than text, was published by Dr. S. Klinger.* In the
following paragraphs only some of the less specialized
aspects of the scheme will be indicated. They are:

(a) the tempo;

(b) manufacture, not agriculture, as the basis of mass

immigration economy;
, (c) the method of planning;
(d) the financial scheme.

Twenty-one years ago, the criticism of Max Nor-
dau's idea was based on the assumption that mass
colonization "must" be a very slow process. This was
then regarded as a "scientific" truth admitting of no
exception. It can hardly be so regarded now, after all
the experiences of the quick displacement of human
masses since the Great War. The Greek exodus of
700,000, so often quoted, is not the only example: be-
tween 1919 and 1924, 2,450,000 persons in all changed
places between the Balkans and Asia Minor, with re-
sults which neutral observers hold to be much more
satisfactory than the position that existed before the

* The Ten Year Plan for Palestine, New Zionist Press, London,
1938.

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 193

migration. Those masses were not only moved quickly
they were very quickly absorbed in their new coun-
tries' economy.

Yet even if we accepted the alleged "rule" that the
economic absorption of immigrants is a slow process,
their actual transfer to the Country of Settlement can
obviously be accelerated at will: and this is the essence
of the Max Nordau Plan.

Its advantages, quite apart from the Settlement
Country, will be many and far-reaching. The tension
in East-Central Europe will immediately be reduced.
Roughly, 300,000 Jews will be at once assisted to emi-
grate from Germany and Austria, 500,000 from Po-
land, and 100,000 each from Hungary and Roumania.
Still more effectual will be the assurance, inherent in
the very essence of a Jewish State, that the process will
continue: an assurance which will go a long way to-
wards paralyzing racial strife. Weighed against this, all
the hardships of an overcrowded Newland are a trifling
matter, especially to people who, just recently, have
known worse hardships.

This effect of the exodus on the inter-racial atmos-
phere in the Antisemitic Zone must be further
strengthened and perpetuated by the rule that the best
age for the First Million pioneers is the age of maxi-
mum fertility. Among the Jews of Eastern Europe this
is, approximately, from twenty-five to forty for men,
from twenty-three to thirty-seven for women. The
Zionist prejudice in favour of sweet seventeen will have
to be discarded: at least two-thirds of the First Million
will have to be in their early maturity rather than in

194 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

their early youth. People of this age are quite adaptable
for pioneer tasks in a not too exotic climate; and, as
they are chiefly responsible for the nation's birth-rate,
it is most important that they should not be left be-
hind to refill the gap, but should do their best in the
new country.

In dealing with mass-migration of this character,
one traditional premise of political economy must be
disregarded: namely, the axiom that the basis of so-
ciety is agriculture. That may be so, but it has no
bearing on our mission. Here a different axiom domi-
nates: the sinew of mass-migration economy, in our
day, is industry. It is obvious that in a colonizing
enterprise of such magnitude, especially when speed is
imperative, agriculture, as an absorber of large immi-
grant masses, is of only secondary value. The economy
of mass immigration depends, above all, on manufac-
tures and house-building; in a much less degree, on
trade and transport; and least of all, on farming.

This has nothing to do with the future of the
colony: even if it is desired that the Settlement Coun-
try should in the end become a predominantly bucolic
community, yet in the beginning precedence will have
to be given to industry, allowing agriculture to come
last, and to grow slowly and conquer pride and place
if it can.

This rule is of predominant importance to every
aspect of our colonization.

It overrides the traditional attitude to soil and
water. A flourishing industrial city, feeding thousands

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 195

of people, can be built on stony soil where no farmer
could thrive. Water of the poorest quality, unfit for
the irrigation of fields, can be used in boilers to drive
steam-engines. In agriculture it may not pay to carry
the water in pipelines over long distances or to sink
reservoirs for rainwater deep enough to reduce evapo-
ration: but what is too expensive for the slow con-
servative profits of cereal cultivation might prove worth
while if it helps to produce manufactured goods.

Geographical planningi.e. mapping out the sites
on which the future centres of population shall be
established also becomes much easier. It need no
longer, in a country with few perennial rivers, be
subordinated to the results of slow and uncertain
borings for underground water: the suitable sites can
be chosen for reasons immediately visible because
they are near the coast, or because they are convenient
as a marketing centre for a number of existing villages,
or because there is a cross-roads, or a quarry near by.
State-planning, when approached from this angle, be-
comes almost akin to town-planning: future cities can
be rationally marked upon the empty map of the State-
area just as future green areas can be indicated on the
uncompleted map of a projected town, and highways
be traced with the same logical forethought as main
streets.

Basing our calculations on the supremacy of indus-
try has also another advantage: modern society spends
incomparably more on the consumption of manufac-
tured goods than on the consumption of agricultural

196 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

produce. Immigrants concentrating on industry can
supply a much larger proportion of the new Settle-
ment's needs than if they devoted themselves chiefly
to agriculture.

The calculation, expressed schematically, is very
simple. One million people will need a very large mass
of non-agricultural and non-pastoral goods. Certain
components of that mass will have to be imported,
because the Settlement Country cannot supply them
(e.g., raw materials or the heavier kinds of machinery) .
But the balance can be provided locally, and the larg-
est possible proportion of the whole must be provided
by the First Settlement forces themselves. In other
words, the scheme will be to let the First Million feed
and clothe and house the First Million in the maxi-
mum measure of possibility.

This method of computing the First Settlement's
economy will always retain very largely the nature of
an abstract and schematic framework, and will have
to be readjusted to realities. Nevertheless, the frame-
work will prove most useful in helping to solve the
fundamental problem of all new communities '''how
will the people manage to live by taking in each other's
washing?" All humanity lives' by "taking in each
other's washing," without any outside financial help>
as there is no other planet able to supply such help.
The Jewish settlement will have the advantage of con-
siderable outside assistance, represented by the Inter-
national Loan, and subsequently, by the yearly income
nities. But the basis of its initial economy must be an
of national funds raised among the Western commu-

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 197

attempt to approach as nearly as possible a provisional
"autarchy/'

This indicates the character of the enterprises which
should be started immediately: house-building, road-
building, transportation, and all kinds of light industry
to provide elementary consumers' goods simple cloth-
ing, simple furniture, simple crockery and all other
primary needs that can be satisfied "simply" by local
effort.

A brief period will in practice elapse between the
conclusion of the peace conference and the actual be-
ginning of transportation: probably not less than a
year. This period could be utilized to give the First
Settlement candidates opportunities for rough train-
ing in the rudiments of those branches of labour
(mainly industrial and building) in which they are
likely to engage after arrival in the country. Their
output will be very poor at first, and therefore un-
economical: but this, weighed in the proper balance,
is a matter of little moment

A very large international loan will have to be raised.
The writer will not venture to guess how large it will
have to be. In Dr. Klinger's outline, the total sum
required for the settlement of the initial million is
estimated at 47,500,000, including 18,000,000 of
private investment by individual capitalists: but this
estimate was made in January 1938, when conditions
were very different from those that may be expected to
exist at the end of the war* The amount which will be
needed to finance all the aspects of the Max Nordau

198 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

Plan will probably be much in excess of Dr. Klinger's
estimate. How large a proportion of it will come from
private investments will depend on whatever may then
be left of the resources of the Jewish capitalist class,
taken as a whole throughout the non-ruined areas of
the Dispersion.

The international loan will have to finance the
following operations:

(a.) Liquidation and transportation of the emigrants'
property. Special organs will have to be established,
probably banks, for granting the emigrant advances
against any kind of property he may leave in their
hands for liquidation.

(b) Transportation. The only reasonable way to
cope with the transportation of such masses will be for
the Jews to found one or several big shipping com-
panies of their own. The Settlement Country will need
a commercial fleet both during and after the rush; and
a new field of employmentmanning the ships will
be opened to thousands of young Jews.

(c) The actual settlement: house-building for the
initial camps and the new town sites; building of high-
ways, aqueducts, storage tanks and all public works
in general.

(d) Establishment of factories (as far as not pro-
vided for by private capital); but probablyunless
Western Europe and America also are ruined the
bulk of this development will be financed by private
capital alone.

(e) Health, schools, public security.

(f) Administrative expenditure.

The repayment of this international loan, principal
and interest, will probably be regarded even by the
most hard-boiled of business men as reasonably safe.
The charge will, of course, be borne entirely by Jews,
mainly by the new Settlement itself. Various collateral
securities can be suggested: the one most obviously
able to guarantee the regular service of this Public
Debt will be the Customs revenue of the Settlement
Country.

Another source may be discovered if the enemy
countries, under the future peace treaty, are required
to pay indemnities. The indemnity clauses of Ver-
sailles have left a bad taste, and there is at present a
strong prejudice against the usual catchword "Let the
enemy pay/' But this attitude must not be pushed too
far. Mr. Norman Angell has no doubt most convinc-
ingly proved that making the enemy pay for his con-
querors' war losses is a transaction ruinous to those
conquerors themselves. But damage inflicted by the
enemy on private citizens in Poland, as well as in
Germany and Austria itself, is quite a different mat-
ter. It will hardly be found unfair that the perpetrator
of the damage done should at least have to accept a
share of the Public Debt incurred to save his victims.

Yet another possible source of income for such pay-
ment would be the introduction of a special tax by
the Western Jewish communities. The idea need not
be regarded as startling. The right of compulsory self-
taxation by religious communities was recognized in
Germany and Austria when these countries were still
perfectly respectable. West-European and American

2OO THE MAX NOKDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

Jews have always raised considerable funds for relief
in Eastern Europe and for Palestine, and will no doubt
continue to do so: but when it has to be done by
propaganda, a large proportion of the sum collected is
unavoidably swallowed up by the expenses of the
campaign. It will be to everyone's advantage if all
these rather troublesome and not always very elegant
methods are replaced by honest, clean taxation. At the
same time, if some part of that taxation could be ear-
marked for the service of the Jewish Settlement Debt,
this would increase the impression of its stability, and
would very favourably influence the conditions of the
loan.

The technique of building a new country under
such conditions is not a matter on which the layman
can express an opinion. It will take many months of
planning by specialists: but the whole framework of
the plan ought to be completed, as far as possible,
during the war. Only the finishing touches of the
technical plan, the actual launching of the loan, and
the appointment of those to be in charge of the work,
should be left until after the peace conference.

One thing, however, can be foretold as regards the
technical plan: it will probably deal with the First
Million only (subsequent repatriations, being slower,
will be more like an ordinary migration, needing per-
haps no special planning); and there will be three
stages to consider the initial camping of the new-
comers; the construction of the new centres mostly

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 201

industrial centres on the appointed sites; and the
first production of goods.

The first stage would present a formidable difficulty
in a country where there were no Jewish colonies. In
a land where there are already Jewish towns, Jewish
quarters in the cities, and some 300 Jewish villages,
large and small, scattered over a considerable area, the
task is much simpler. Theoretically and schematically
speaking, where 500,000 people are domiciled (not
uncomfortably) another 500,000 could at once be
provisionally accommodated by the rough and ready
method of billeting. In our case, however, billeting will
probably be an exception: as the influx of newcomers
is to be a permanent feature, it will be worth while to
build barracks or huts. There will be a shifting popula-
tion, batch after batch of immigrants, going off to
other places; during the influx of the First Million
probably over one-third of this number will need some
kind of hutment accommodation. This gives us an
outline of the first item of the scheme: to construct,
in the neighbourhood of the existing Jewish colonies,
barrack accommodation for some 300,000 to 400,000
pioneers.

The second step, to begin on the morrow of the
first arrivals, will consist in building all those widely-
distributed workshops which will play a twofold part:
they will supply as much as possible of the First Mil-
lion's needs, and employ all the First Million's bread-
winners, probably some 600,000 in all. Some will be
dispatched to build the highways, leading as yet from
nowhere to nowhere, but the chief arteries of tomor-

2O2 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

row; some will be told off to lay water-pipes, dig cis-
terns and sink wells, before there is anyone near them
to drink the water; some will have to put up corru-
gated iron sheds where later on machinery will be
installed; some, but not so many, will be sent to
plough and sow. There will be a section in the techni-
cal plan for the production of furniture: a million
people will need a million chairs to sit on; that means
so much horse-power and so many hands; the total
might be so distributed as to form twelve factories in
different localities. There will be another section for
butchers, another for dentists, another for lorry-drivers,
complete with numbers and places as in an army
mobilization plan. One of the most fascinating fea-
tures of human planning is that things never turn out
just as they were planned; but if the plan is good its
unforeseen modifications will always, in the end, prove
to be still better.

The third stage will be the actual beginning of pro-
duction, the delivery, storage and sale of the goods,
and the manifold individual activities which all this
entails, and the sum of which constitute a nation's
economy: in other words, the birth of the nation.

All this is how a layman imagines an achievement
which the experts can formulate more clearly: but the
thing envisaged by both will be the same splendid
reality.

Now the pseudonym can be dropped, and we can
return to Palestine as the only "area" in which this
achievement is destined to be realized.

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 203

Palestine is a country which enjoys a tolerable cli-
mate, and presents a by no means exceptional mixture
of natural advantages and still greater natural draw-
backs. The absorptive capacity of such a country de-
pends less on those natural features than on the kind
of men who will inhabit it: on their intelligence, skill,
endurance, will-power, resourcefulness, financial
means, and international connections, making for
financial aid and promoting trade.

One would like to treat the colonial experts with
respect, but it is a fact that the many experts who
have, in recent years, made pronouncements as to the
prospects of settlement of Palestine have all contra-
dicted one another. Their judgments are somehow
lacking in reality; they do not sound "scientific"; they
have not the appearance of finality. Sir John Hope
Simpson, in 1930, found that the only really cultivable
land in Western Palestine was the land actually then
under cultivation -8 million dunams out of a total
area of 36 millions. The Royal Commission's Report
(1937) dismissed this verdict by admitting frankly that
there was no reliable information as to whether the
waste area was cultivable or not, and that the first
requirement was a geophysical and hydrographical
survey, which should be extended to Transjordan. As
to Transjordan, the 1935 Report of the Mandatory to
the Mandates Commission estimated that only about
5% of its area could be regarded as cultivable.* Five
per cent of Transjordan's area is 1,150,000 acres, or
4,600,000 dunams. But two years later, in August
* Schechtmann, Trans/ordamen, Vienna, 1937, p. 171.

204 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

1937, Mr. Ormsby Gore, the Colonial Secretary-
afterwards Lord Harlech~~disagreed with his own ad-
visers. In an address to the Mandates Commission in
Geneva, he was recklessly optimistic in respect of
Transjordan, quoting the opinions of other experts.
"One of our most experienced agricultural officers/'
he stated, "says he is confident 100,000 families could
be settled in Trans Jordan alone'' (Minutes of the 32nd
Session, p. 22). As he spoke of settling Arabs, not
Jews, in the country, and as the Government's idea of
an average lot viable for an Arab family is 140
dunams,* this expert obviously implied that there are
in Transjordan about 14 million cultivable dunarns
over and above any areas already exploited by the
inhabitants. But the Woodhead Commission, which
studied the question in 1938, did not confirm this
expert's finding. . . .

The chief problem (from the standpoint of agricul-
ture, but not from that of mass colonization) is water
for irrigation. The Woodhead Commission's Report
devotes a careful chapter to this matter, only to show
that nothing is really known on the subject, and next
to nothing has been done to learn anything about it
The report says that "the Beersheba sub-district has an
area nearly equal to that of the whole of Palestine,"
and quotes Sir John Hope Simpson to the effect that
"given the possibility of irrigation, there is practically
an inexhaustible supply of cultivable land in the Beer-
sheba area." Yet, in order to investigate so vital a mat-

* Woodhead (Report of the Palestine Partition Commission),
10,38, p. 2p: "The average for taxable crop land, 140 dunams."

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 205

ter, only sixteen borings all told have been made in
this area, at a total cost of ^6o ? ooo. The results have
been "mostly disappointing." Perhaps: but that was
no exhaustive survey. A government really concerned
with constructive issues, especially when its treasury
has for years shown a comfortable surplus of revenue
over expenditure, ought to spend half a million pounds
and make many hundreds of borings in an area so
extensive and so important for the purposes of settle-
ment.

The question of Palestine's agricultural possibilities
still awaits a really serious survey; so far nothing has
. been done in that direction which would justify a final
conclusion.

But agriculture, as we have seen, must not be re-
garded as the main basis of immigrant economy. For
the past century and longer the growth of a country
has no longer been dependent upon its agriculture.
Countries with the greatest density of population show
the smallest percentage of people living by the plough
and the pasture. Germany (density 360 per square
mile) has 24%; Holland (618 per sq. m.) 20%; Bel-
gium (702 per sq. m.) 16%; England and Wales (703
per sq. m.) 8%. Western Palestine's total rural popula-
tion today is about 650,000; by the standard of Ger-
many this population, without any increase in the
number of farmers, would form a sufficient agricul-
tural basis for a total population of over 2,500,000; by
the Dutch standard, for a total of 3,250,000; and by
the English standard, for a total of 8,000,000 souls.
These figures, of course, do not claim to be of serious

206 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

value, but they certainly serve as a reminder that the
absorptive capacity of a country as a whole has very
little to do with the absorptive capacity of its farmland.
Far more important than soil and irrigation, from
the standpoint of immigration policy, is the other
"natural advantage"-the geographical position of a
country. Nearly all the main sea routes between West
and East traverse the Suez Canal; the main air lines
cross it; and so will the main land routes of the future,
linking Cape Town to Damascus and Peking. That
corner of the Mediterranean in which Egypt and
Palestine are waiting for their chance is the site of the
most important cross-roads of the future. Its real hin-
terland is not Arabia: it is the whole of that south-
eastern corner of Asia where dwells one-half of the
human race nearly one thousand millions of human
beings. Their foreign trade, imports and exports to-
gether, averages today about ^3 per head annually. In
Denmark it is ^40 per head. Those countries will
develop, and their requirements will increase; before
long their overseas trade may have doubled itself, and
at some remoter period it may even reach the Danish
level. The imagination staggers at the thought of the
monstrous avalanche of goods which will then be car-
ried to and fro, by sea, air and land, between the two
halves of humanity: practically half of it passing over
that corner of the world in which Palestine and Egypt
await their future. Crossroads districts are populous
districts. Palestine will one day be among the most
densely populated countries on earth. That day is in
the remote future, but every decade brings it nearer.

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 2OJ

Palestine on both sides of the Jordan has an area of
about 40,000 square miles. Its total population today,
to the west and east of the river, is 1,600,000, Jews
and Arabs together. At the density of France it could
hold over 8 million inhabitants: and France's density
of population is one of the lowest among the indus-
trialized countries of Europe.

But even a high density means a large population
only if the land is big enough. To absorb the Jewish
exodus Palestine must inevitably include Transjordan.
Western Palestine contains only 10,000 square miles,
Transjordan 30,000. The population west of the Jor-
dan is 1,300,000; but east of the river only 300,000.

We are discussing a matter of business in this book;
eminently grave business, the business of the health
and sanity of Europe and of all the world; and in this
spirit will the question of Palestine be discussed at the
peace conference. The area needed to save Europe's
stepchildren must be large enough to house them.
This is not a question of a spiritual centre, of a slightly
enlarged and glorified Varsity quadrangle where the
Jews could parade their cultural excellence: this is a
grim matter of numbers, of hunger and need, of square
inches to stand upon and cubic feet of air to breathe.
A reception area covering 40,000 square miles, with an
average density of 40, can be reasonably considered for
the quick reception of several millions: but not an area
which is only a quarter that size, with 1 30 inhabitants
per square mile already on the spot.

All this is very palpably obvious, and any reticence

2O8 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

can only lead to mutual deceit. Nor is there really any
need for reticence. A curious atmosphere of taboo has
been created around the name "Trans Jordan": a sort
of myth or superstition to the effect that precisely
Transjordan, in Arab eyes, is an especially sacred por-
tion of Palestine's soil, infinitely more valuable and
more inaccessible than the Western strip; that if the
Arabs begrudge us the acres of Sharon and Galilee so
stubbornly, their reaction would be incomparably more
violent if we laid hands on Gilead! This is fiction. It
is only Western Palestine that contains Moslem
shrines, in Jerusalem and Hebron; Transjordan has
hardly any place at all on the pages of Islam's classic
tradition. What is equally important is the fact that
there are 900,000 Arabs (Moslem and Christian) west
of Jordan as against only 300,000 on the east; the great
feudal families, the intelligentsia, the industrial and
commercial bourgeoisie of the Palestinian Arabs, what-
ever their number and value, dwell almost exclusively
west of the river, and regard the handful of Bedouins
across the stream as primitives. Should any Arab
Nationalistand this not only in Jerusalembe or-
dered by Allah to choose which he would prefer to
keep, as the other must be given to the Jews, he would
certainly rather give the Jews Transjordan.

It is very important to disabuse public opinion,
Jewish and Christian, of this delusion as to the com-
parative degree of our neighbours' and cousins' jealousy
with regard to the two parts of Palestine. This delusion
has always affected the energy with which we and our
friends have pressed for the opening up of Transjor-

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN 209

dan, as though we feared to tread on delicate ground.
But the ground is much less delicate here than in the
first instance. Arab opposition to Jewish claims on
Transjordan once these claims are really pressed
will prove much weaker than that which we have
encountered in the long-drawn battle for Western
Palestine.

Nor is the legal position under the Mandate so
formidable as some people imagine. These are times
when hardly anyone is much concerned about the
legal aspects of international issues, least of all about
a Mandate which the Mandatory Government itself
treated as "unworkable" in 1937 and worse than that
in 1939. The author, however, is old-fashioned enough
to retain some interest in the legality of treaties; and
he thinks, moreover, that a moment will soon come
when this old fashion of respect for legality will again
become the only reliable thing left on earth. It is there-
fore worth while to remember that in the Palestine
Mandate the term "Palestine" embraces also Trans-
Jordan, and that this meaning has never been revised.
One of the Mandate's articles (Article 25) merely
provided that "in the territories lying between the
Jordan and the Eastern boundary of Palestine" the
Mandatory "shall be entitled to postpone or withhold
application of such provisions of this Mandate as he
may consider inapplicable to the existing local condi-
tions." Two months later the Council of the League
of Nations passed a resolution stating that the Zionist
portions of the Palestine Mandate "are not applicable
to the territory known as Transjordan." There is not

21O THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

a word in that resolution to specify whether this means
"withholding" the application of the provisions of the
Mandate or only "postponing" it; and omissions in
such cases always indicate that the legislator foresaw,
and prepared for, the contingency that the measure
might some day be revoked. The very title "resolu-
tion/' in comparison with the title "Mandate," clearly
emphasizes a lesser degree of durability. In other
words, it is perfectly reasonable and lawful to assume
that the intention of the resolution was simply to
"postpone" the application of the Mandate's Zionist
clauses to Transjordan in view of "existing local condi-
tions"; and what has been postponed can now be
enacted without any breach of the Mandate.*

The real difficulty, of course, is not the "resolution"
but the existence of a certain dynastic fact. It might
seem rather embarrassing, in the middle of this twen-
tieth century, that we should have to discuss dynastic
facts of such an obviously artificial origin as though
they were decisive factors in a situation involving the
fate of peoples. It is perhaps more practical to leave it
undiscussed; as, for different reasons, we have refrained
from discussing how a Max Nordau Plan could be
fitted into the framework of an existing Mandate.
Where there is goodwill, anything can be fitted into
anything. What is perfectly clear to all concerned is
that where the serious business of the world is to be
done, artificial titles cannot stand in the way.

* Schechtmann, Trans/ordanien, Vienna, 1937, p. 259.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE ARAB ANGLE~~UNDRAMATIZED

THE transformation of Palestine can be effected
to the full without dislodging the Palestinian
Arabs. All current affirmations to the contrary are
utterly incorrect. A territory of over 100,000 square
kilometres settled at the average density of France
(87 inhabitants per square kilometre) would hold over
8 million inhabitants; at the density of Switzerland
(104) over 10 million; at the density of Germany or
Italy (140) about 14 million. It now holds, counting
Arabs and Jews and Transjordanians and all, just over
one million and a half inhabitants. There is margin
enough left for Palestine to absorb the better part of
East-Central Europe's ghetto the better part of five
million souls without approaching even the moder-
ate density of France. Unless the Arabs choose to go
away of their own accord, there is no need for them
to emigrate.

Another fallacy is the assertion that if the Arabs
were in the minority in a State predominantly Jewish,
they would be persecuted and oppressed. The last peo-
ple to repeat this fallacy ought to be the authors of
the 1939 White Paper. Since they assure us that the
Jews, condemned to remain a one-to-two minority in

an

212 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

Palestine, would not only not be oppressed but would
even enjoy the delights of a Jewish National Home,
what grounds have they for suggesting that it would
be disastrous for the Arabs if the position were re-
versed? It would be much more logical for the authors
of the White Paper to offer the Arab minority the
same safeguards which they consider to be sufficient
to ensure the welfare of a Jewish minority.

It is absurd to assume that an ethnical minority is
always and everywhere an oppressed minority. The
assumption is untrue. The Scots who have left Scot-
land and the Welsh who have left Wales live scattered
all over England, yet it has not been suggested that
their rights are curtailed. Consider the position of the
Catholic French-speaking minority in the mixed prov-
ince of Ontario, Canada; they are anything but op-
pressed. Soviet Russia has been guilty of many sins,
but no one can deny that her ethnical minorities enjoy
a very reasonable equality of status in so far as any-
thing can be "enjoyed" in that political climate.
Czechoslovakia was a model state in this respect; as is
Finland today, where the Swedish minority enjoys a
position even better in some respects than that of the
Scots in Great Britain. Nothing, of course, is perfect
on this earth, and there is no doubt that it is pleasanter
to be in the majority than in the minority, even under
the best conditions imaginable; but that does not
mean that the status of a minority is everywhere and
always a tragedy. Every great people has its outlying
fragments which form minorities in other countries:
the English in South Africa, the French in Canada,

THE ARAB ANGLE UNDRAMATIZED 213

Belgium and Switzerland, the Germans all over the
world. Their position depends on the regime. Under
a decent r6gime a minority can live in reasonable con-
tentment The world has no right to assume that Jew-
ish statesmanship is unable to create as decent a regime
as that created by English, Canadian or Swiss states-
manship. After all, it is from Jewish sources that the
world has learned how the '"stranger within thy gates"
should be treated.

There is only one circumstance in which it is a
tragedy to constitute a minority: it is the case of the
people which is only a minority, everywhere and always
a minority, dispersed among alien races, with no cor-
ner of the earth to call its own, and no home in which
to find refuge. Such is not the position of the Arabs,
with four Arabian countries on the east of the Suez
Canal, and five others west of Suez. Some of these
lands are already independent, others are not so as yet;
but in each of them there is no question of any but
an Arab majority; each of them is already an Arab
national homeland.

It would be an idle pastime, at this present stage,
to devise draft constitutions for the Jewish Palestine
of the future. But it may be that some people are
genuinely worried as to what would happen to the
rights of the Palestinian Arabs if the country became
a Jewish State. The author can at least give them
some idea of what Jews themselves intend to do in
this respect when they are in the majority and when
Palestine is a self-governing State. It may reassure such

214 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

persons to learn how not the moderate but precisely
the so-called "extremist" wing of Zionism visualizes
the constitution of the Palestine of the future. The
following extracts are quoted from a draft worked out
by the Revisionist Executive in 1934, so it might be
said that this tells us "the worst that can happen" to
the Palestinian Arabs. The draft is not an official pro-
gramme, and the writer is not prepared to defend it in
all its aspects. Still, it was the result of much careful
labour; a wide range of precedents had been studied,
and documents consulted which were regarded with
the utmost respect in the days when the intelligentsia
of East-Central Europe which then included Russia-
was infatuated with the theories of the Austrian So-
cialists' Natiorzalitaeten-Staat: Rudolf Springer's
books, the minutes of the Bruenn congress of the
Austrian Social Democratic Party, the excellent Hun-
garian law of 1868 on the use of minority languages
in civil service communications, and even the truly
remarkable old Turkish legislation as to the autonomy
of the various ethno-religious communities, whose offi-
cial title was Millet = "nations": Millet-i-Roum, Mil-
let-i-Ermeni, Millet-i-Moussevie (Greek, Armenian,
Mosaic). Only a few sections can be quoted here:
those dealing with civic equality, languages, so-called
"cultural autonomy," the Holy Places, and the land
laws. Only the broad issues will be touched upon.
These quotations will bear out the statement made by
this writer before the Palestine Royal Commission:
that the Jews are ready to guarantee to the Arab minor-

THE ARAB ANGLE UNDRAMATIZED 215

ity in a Jewish Palestine the maximum of the rights
which they claimed but never obtained for themselves
in other countries.

In reading this draft it should be remembered that
according to the principle which is the alpha and
omega of Zionist Revisionism, Palestine can be pro-
moted to independent Statehood only after the con-
stitution of a Jewish majority. On the other hand, the
Revisionists' idea of an independent Palestine was then
(1934) a Dominion within the British Empire, as it
still is to many among them.

1. CIVIC EQUALITY

1. Provided nothing be done to hinder any foreign
Jew from repatriating to Palestine, and, by doing so,
automatically becoming a Palestinian citizen, the prin-
ciple of equal rights for all citizens of any race, creed,
language or class shall be enacted without limitation
throughout all sectors of the country's public life.

2. In every Cabinet where the Prime Minister is a
Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab,
and vice-versa.

3. Proportional sharing by Jews and Arabs both in
the charges and in the benefits of the State shall be
the rule with regard to Parliamentary elections, civil and
military service, and budgetary grants.

4. The same rule shall apply to mixed municipalities
or county councils.

2. LANGUAGES

i. The Hebrew and the Arabic languages shall enjoy
equal rights and equal legal validity.

21 6 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

2. No State law, proclamation or ordinance; no coin,
banknote or stamp of the State; no publication or in-
scription produced at the State's expense shall be valid
unless executed identically in both Hebrew and Arabic.

3. Both Hebrew and Arabic shall be used with equal
legal effect in Parliament, in the Courts, in the schools
and in general before any office or organ of the State,
as well as in any school of whatever degree.

4. All offices of the State shall answer any applicant,
orally and in writing, in the language of his application,
whether Hebrew or Arabic.

3. CULTURAL AUTONOMY

1. The Jewish and the Arab ethno-communities*
shall be recognized as autonomous public bodies of
equal status before the law.

Should the Christian Arabs, or any other group of
citizens reasonably justified in claiming autonomy, also
demand a measure of independent recognition, Parlia-
ment shall be entitled to grant the request.

2. The following matters shall be delegated by the
State to each ethno-community with regard to its
members:

(a) religion and personal status;

(fa) education in all its branches and grades, es-
pecially in the compulsory elementary stages;

(c) public relief, including all forms of social assist-
ance;

* The word used in the original is the Hebrew equivalent of
"nationalities." As in English the term denotes State allegiance
rather than ethnical allegiance, the word is translated as above.

THE ARAB ANGLE UNDRAMATIZED 21 J

(d) settlement of ordinary law cases arising out of
the above-mentioned matters.

3. Each ethno-community shall elect its National
Diet with the right to issue ordinances and levy taxes
within the limits of its autonomy, and to appoint a
national executive responsible before the Diet.

4. A permanent Minister of Cabinet rank, independ-
ent of all parties, shall represent each ethno-com-
munity in the country's government.

4. THE HOLY PLACES

1. The relevant areas within the Old City of Jeru-
salem, to be delimited under the authority of the
League of Nations, shall enjoy the same measure of
extra-territoriality as that universally recognized in the
case of embassies.

2. Each of these areas shall constitute a municipality
under a council appointed by agreement between the
ecclesiastic authorities concerned.

3. A similar regime shall apply, mutatis mutandis, to
other holy sites within the country.

4. Except in war, pilgrim permits of sufficient dura-
tion shall be freely granted to nationals of any State:
subject only to genuine requirements of hygiene, traffic
and public safety, and provided any paupers among the
pilgrims shall be maintained, and in due course repatri-
ated, at the expense of the respective ecclesiastic
authority.

5. A delegate of the League of Nations, with the
status of Ambassador, shall be appointed to represent
the interests concerned.

21 8 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

5. LAND

1. A Palestine Land Court shall be formed including,
among other members, judges and agricultural experts
belonging to both ethno-communities.

2. All the waste lands, as well as all lands inade-
quately cultivated in the opinion of the Court, shall be
requisitioned (under fair compensation in the case of
the latter) to form the State's Land Reserve.

3. After improvement at the expense of the State,
reclaimed areas of the Land Reserve shall be divided
into allotments to be granted, at fair prices and easy
terms of credit, to individual applicants and groups.

4. Allotments shall be distributed under the Land
Court's supervision to Jewish and Arab applicants and
groups indiscriminately.

5. Each applicant shall have to satisfy the Land
Court:

(a) that he owns no other land;

(b) that he possesses a reasonable minimum of capi-

tal or equipment for working that land, no
matter whether his own or supplied by sup-
porters;

(c) that he will work the land personally.

Whether the Arabs would find all this a sufficient
inducement to remain in a Jewish country is another
question. Even if they did not, the author would refuse
to see a tragedy or a disaster in their willingness to
emigrate. The Palestine Royal Commission did not
shrink from the suggestion. Courage is infectious.
Since we have this great moral authority for calmly

THE ARAB ANGLE UNDRAMATIZED 21 9

envisaging the exodus of 350,000 Arabs from one
corner of Palestine, we need not regard the possible
departure of 900,000 with dismay. The writer, as he
has already said, cannot see any necessity for this
exodus: it would even be undesirable from many
points of view; but if it should appear that the Arabs
would prefer to migrate, the prospect can be discussed
without any pretence of concern.

Since 1923, when within a few months at least 700,-
ooo Greeks were moved to Macedonia, and 350,000
Turks to Thrace and Anatolia, the idea of such migra-
tions has been familiar and almost popular. Herr
Hitler, detested as he is, has recently been enhancing
its popularity. Of course, his critics very strongly dis-
approve of his policy in removing Germans from the
Trentino and the Balticum and planting them in fields
and houses robbed from the Poles: but it is the rob-
bing of the Poles, not the moving of the Germans,
which really elicits the censure. One cannot help
feeling that if only Germans, on the one hand, and
Italians and Baits on the other were concerned, the
operation might in the end prove not so bad for their
common welfare. When Mr. Roosevelt foresees the
existence of 20 million potential refugees after the
war, he is doubtless considering that the position of
all minorities may have become untenable in many
countries, so that some radical solution may have to
be found. Nuisantia, which, as we know, is situated
between Andivia and Hedulia, and populated by a
potpourri of both races, has a majority of the An-
divians, so in 1918 it was adjudged to Andivia, The

22O THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

result? Andivia has now a minority of 300,000 Hedu-
lians, who are causing trouble. Perhaps, then, we had
better annex the province to Hedulia? But then
Hedulia will have a minority of 500,000 Andivians,
with the same result. Majority rule is perhaps not such
a perfect panacea, even where political parties are
concerned, but in the case of nationalities the medi-
cine simply does not work except as an irritant; and
the alternative, minority rule, would be still worse.
One really radical remedy would be the Graeco-
Turkish precedent of 1923. The writer frankly doubts
whether that would be feasible; at all events, other
solutions which cannot be examined heremight be
given a trial. But theoretically the idea of redistributing
minorities en masse is becoming more popular among
''the best people/ 7 and there is no longer any taboo
on the discussion of the subject

There is, moreover, one great ethical difference be-
tween the case of Palestine and that of all the other
poly-ethnical areas with regard to this particular ques-
tion of allowing the minority to migrate. In all the
other areas friction is caused by ambition: one section
wishes to dominate, or so at least the weaker section
fears. Such an ambition may be, or seem, justifiable or
excusable, in the sense that it is an expression of in-
herited vitality, so strongly dynamic that only the
most angelic self-restraint could keep it always on the
leash: but even so it is, after all, only an ambition, not
a real need; a healthy 'appetite/' not a "hunger." In
Palestine any inconvenience to the native population
from the influx of immigrants arises from the tragic

THE ARAB ANGLE UNDRAMATIZED 221

necessity that these immigrants must find a home. It
has nothing to do with ambition, nothing to do with
the will to dominate over anyone; in many individual
cases it may have little to do even with a personal
desire to immigrate, for in any mass migration there
must be hundreds or thousands who would have pre-
ferred to remain in the old home if they could. The
cause is genuine hunger, the nostalgic passion of
people who have nowhere else where they can make
a home for themselves. Should the Arabs prefer to
migrate, the very fact that they can do so would prove
that they, on the contrary, have a "somewhere else"
where they can build a new home. This contest be-
tween "nowhere else" and "somewhere else" would
only be an echo of a universal feature of our modern
age, the inevitable settlement between the "have nots"
and the "haves." No "have not" need feel guilty be-
cause the scales have been levelled as they ought to
have been long ago.

One thing seems certain: any Arab country which
should find the courage and the acreage for inviting
such an immigration of trekkers would reap enormous
material advantages. It would immediately have un-
limited sums of capital and the world's best experts
at its disposal for the most ambitious schemes of land
reclamation and irrigation. The Arab trekkers, more-
over, would probably migrate with donkeyloads of pelf.
All the problems connected with the evacuation of the
European "zone" would become incomparably easier.
Who knows?

222 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

But this is an aside; it has nothing to do with war
aims. Palestine, astride the Jordan, has room enough
for the million of Arabs, room for another million of
their eventual progeny, for several million Jews, and
for peace; for so much peace that there would then
be peace also in Europe.

CHAP TER XIX

"SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM"

SA matter of cold and objective justice, the
_ first of all Jewish war demands ought to be ad-
dressed to the Jews themselves: the demand for a
united front. This they ought to have formed or at
least, they ought to have set about forming it long
ago; but now, since the war, the eleventh hour has
really struck.

A united front means, above all, one single agreed
formula of demands to be presented to the future
Peace Conference: this is even more essential than
one single national authority. In theory it might even
be more impressive if a dozen different Jewish dele-
gations, appearing one after another before the Peace
Conference, repeated exactly the same demands; or on
the contrary, it might prove to be much less impressive
than irritating. But that does not really matter, as the
theory is unreal: an agreed programme, if there is any
sanity in the people, would mean a united representa-
tion before the Peace Conference.

Yet even this a single Jewish delegation before the
conference tablefalls far short of our needs. The
historical hour demands a Jewish delegation at the
table of the Peace Conference. In the next chapter,

223

226 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

spokesmen of the Jewish Agency not only do not in-
tend to resist such loss of "face/' but will deliberately
invite it. Its chief spokesman's recent statement in
New Yorkobviously an agreed "programme" speech,
for its gist is being echoed by other spokesmen else-
whereis significant. His main point was: "Conserva-
tive estimates of the number of Jews that could be
absorbed annually would confine themselves to the
existing opportunities: they would not take into ac-
count larger territories, like the Negeb and other
regions, where tens of thousands will no doubt some
day live and prosper, or the new horizon that may be
opened up by soil research and new discoveries of
water. But even within the limits of such a purely
pragmatic point of view, Palestine is capable of absorb-
ing approximately 50,000 new immigrants a year for
years to come."

This means bidding for certain failure. 50,000 a year
(even to those who believe in the "pragmatic" reality
of this figure) is, under the present circumstances, a
candid admission that Zionism raises no claim to solve
the tragedy. Arithmetically, at this rate it would take
twenty years to save from hell even one single million;
actually, there would be hardly any evacuation at all,
for under the "selective" system of the Jewish Agency,
the bulk of the emigrants would be green youths, so
that the age classes of maximum fertility (approxi-
mately, in the "Zone," twenty-three to thirty-nine)
would be left behind to replace the losses. Before a
Peace Conference concerned if at allonly with what
can be done to evacuate the ruined Zone, this is an

"SENATUS POPULUSgUE JUDAEORUM" 22J

attitude calculated to make a Zionist Palestine just
one of the partial and inadequate remedies that may
be proposed.

One of the most inadequate, in fact. Taken even as
"group settlementsin the sense of a settlement cer-
tified as capable of becoming an all-Jewish territory if
it is successfulthis programme is obviously insuffi-
cient. British Guiana and the Kimberleys are a mirage,
but there at least the first five thousand settlers, if
they managed to remain, would build up a purely
Jewish province, with no neighbours to cause trouble.
But it would take a long generation to transform even
Western Palestine alone into a country with a Jewish
majority at the rate of 50,000 immigrants a year; and
in the meantime well, every member of the Peace
Conference will know what would have to be faced in
the meantime. Given only such a patchwork remedy,
admittedly one of the several on the market, Palestine
is really not an attractive business proposition.

Especially as no one at the Peace Conference is
likely to accept the figure of "50,000 a year/' The
statesmen around the conference table are not likely
to forget that there has been prolonged and conspic-
uous disagreement on this point, to say nothing of a
statement of policy by the Mandatory, making 50,000
the final total of all the immigrants whom Palestine
will ever accept. In order to transform "50,000 in all"
into "50,000 a year," the British, and especially the
Arab opposition, would 1 have to be beaten down;
otherwise a "conservative estimate" of all that Pales-
tine can offer is very little immigration, and the ever-

228 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

present threat of trooble. But British Guiana, San
Domingo, the Kimberleys, Mindanao and all the rest,
whether promising success or doubtfulwhether fu-
ture "territories" or areas of "infiltration," whether
examples of big patchwork or small patchwork have
at least this one advantage: the good will of the re-
spective governments, no immediate prospect of fric-
tion with the people of the country, and in some cases
no such people at all. . . .

Palestine as one of many palliatives has no chance
at all of being preferred, or even of being seriously
considered by the future Peace Conference. Of all
possible stopgap propositions Palestine is, politically,
the most difficult, hampered by obstacles which can
be surmounted only at the cost of considerable daring.
Of course, it is not impossible to overcome the Arab
obstruction and Great Britain's reluctance, bufr'to do
so a decisive effort .will be required. Efforts are made
only when it is worth while making them: when the
prize is great and unique, and not a mere pittance
which can more easily be secured elsewhere.

Palestine as a war aims problem has no locus standi
unless it can be presented as the full solution of the
Jewish problem, the only practicable theatre for a
Max Nordau plan, the only complete remedy for the
European cancer. Only as such can the Palestine claim
be defended before the councils of such a world as
we shall find on the morrow of a great cataclysm,
facing the necessity of tremendous solutions, with
neither time nor patience for trifles and trimmings:
only if it is urged as a scheme unique in its material

"SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM" 229

and humanitarian range, exclusive and intolerant of all
rival schemes, and indeed dwarfing all its competitors,
and making their promise valueless in comparison.

The Jewish demand at the future Peace Conference
should be an amalgam of the two dominating ideas of
our people's modern history: the Jewish State for
those who want it, and real equality for those whom
Eastern Europe will not release. The amalgam is indis-
soluble, for without the Jewish State the second de-
mand is unreal. It is, in fact, not an amalgam but a
bi-atomic entity. This oneness of the Jewish war de-
mand must be recognized by the entire collective
authority of world Jewry, and it must be presented at
the world's board of settlement by a single Jewish
embassy in the name of a single world-Jewish leader-
ship.

The writer is not quite sure if the old debate, as
to whether the Jews are a nation or just a religious
community, is still proceeding, or whether it has been
dropped. But even if there still are people who "feel"
about it one way or another, that should have no bear-
ing on the question of a headquarters. One may
favour a world-organization for the whole of scattered
Jewry without committing oneself to the view that
Jewry is a nation in dispersion. Churches in dispersion
can also unite oecumenically. The late Nathan Birn-
baum, a very fertile and penetrating thinker, who-
after many ideological peregrinations finally became
converted to the view that the core of Israel's identity
was not nationhood but religion, fervently advocated

230 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR' PALESTINE

the creation of a 'Vorld-Kehillah" a universal con-
gregation or synagogue, democratically elected
throughout the globe, and ''governing" in all matters
of mutual assistance and mutual defence. This is not
the author's conception, but it would be waste of time
to argue the matter here. What is needed is the recog-
nition of a paramount common interest and a single
headquarters to defend it: "Senatus Populusque
Judaeoruni."

This is perhaps the hardest of all points of resistance
on the road to Jewish redemption. The last few dec-
ades have produced in our scattered people a rich
growth of organized efforts for self-help, and some
of them have attained a really remarkable degree of
moral and material power. They are vividly conscious
of their excellent records of social service, justifiably
proud and jealous of their personality and independ-
ence. In addition, they mostly have an ideology of
their own, or at least one whose wording is quite
different from that in which the same ideas are ex-
pressed by their rivals, so that any proposal to accept
even one single new phrase may sound to them like
an invitation to apostasy. An amalgamated pro-
gramme, plus a supreme 'headquarters, which would
supersede all these sectional sovereignties, is a plan
certain to be resisted tooth and nail. The writer has
no illusions on the point The formula "a united front
of all Jewry" is not unpopular in itself; it can even
be heard not infrequently in some of these very

SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM 23!

sovereign quarters; but somehow (and the writer
means no offence) it is like the outcry for a pan-Arab
Federation, to which all the Arab kings render courte-
ous lip-service, while not one of them would listen
for a moment to a concrete scheme involving a limita-
tion of his prerogatives. The writer frankly doubts if
a supreme headquarters of world Jewry can ever be
formed by agreement between the existing organiza-
tions, the Big Four or the Big Five. It is equally
doubtful whether the amalgamation of programmes
can be accomplished by consent between the parties.
Some of them (not all) may agree to the construction
of a joint platform by the mechanical process of join-
ing "plank" to "plank" until everybody's favourite
plank has been included: provided none is allowed to
claim priority, so that the same weight is attached
to say lifting the ban on Jewish doctors in Tristan
da Cunha, and the colonization of Palestine; and pro-
vided, of course, that no such terms are used as "Jew-
ish State" or "mass-exodus," nor any such heresies
proclaimed, or even hinted at, as the alleged connec-
tion between the reality of equal rights in the new
Poland and the proportion of Jews that can be as-
sisted to migrate from the new Poland. In other words,
we should have the old prescription, but no effective
remedy for the cancer, no message likely to stir the
imagination. But a really united formula of Jewish
restoration, short and sharp and clear and single-
minded as Chanteclair's morning call, to which sunrise
is the answer, seems as unlikely to emerge from the

THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

self-sacrifice of the parties as a really united leadership
is likely to result from the voluntary submission of the
Central Committees.

This book is not the place for a consideration of the
ways and means by which the united front will have
to be achieved; but as surely as our people must be
saved, so surely the united front of world Jewry must
be achieved. Life presses in this direction: public
opinion is slow, but in the end it also will follow in
this direction. Then it will also "discover" the ways
and means or rather realize that there is nothing to
"discover/' since there are hundreds of instructive
precedents, sound, simple and effective. When unity
cannot be established by the abdication of sectional
majesties and highnesses, democracyif still alive and
resolved to live onmust intervene and set up its own
authority, superseding all other powers. A World-
Jewish Elected Assembly is years overdue: it should
have been called into being when Polish Jewry was
still free to act. Just as Canada holds an election in
March 1940, there is no reason why a Jewish refer-
endum cannot be organized in most of the countries
concerned. This war-time Assembly would, of course,
be a truncated body, but it would none the less be
an expression of some among the most powerful forces
of the race; and its generation by a plebiscite held
under universal suffrage might well constitute an
impressive manifestation in all the free and civilized
countries which still exist on earth.

This short paragraph is quite inadequate for the
exposition of so vast a subject. The problem will prob-

"SENATUS POPULUSQUE JUDAEORUM" 233

ably have to be solved by long and heated internal
debate; but it is an internal problem and does not
properly "belong" in a book which attempts to state
the Jewish claim vis-a-vis the Gentile world. We shall
leave it at that, only remembering that there will be
no chance even of voicing such a claim unless a single
world-Jewish "government' ' be elected to voice it.

CHAPTER XX

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS

f 1 1HE Jewish war demands are:
JJ_ (a) A Jewish army on the Allied fronts.

(b) Recognition of a world-Jewish civil Authority,
with a seat on all international organs dealing with
migration or reconstruction problems, and on the
future Peace Conference.

(c) A Covenant on civic equality as a war aim of
the Allies.

(d) The Jewish State as a war aim of the Allies.

(a) THE AKMY

The Jewish Regiment was formed by the War
Office in August 1917. It was at first officially known
as the 38th to 41 st Royal Fusiliers, but was afterwards
granted the name of "Judaeans" and a special badge
(the seven-branched candlestick, familiarly described
under canvas as the toasting-fork). Its full strength
on the register at Hounslow was probably over 10,000,
but only half that number could be trained in time to
reach Palestine. Of these, about 1,300 came from the
United Kingdom, 1,000 from the southern part of
Palestine which Allenby had liberated a year before
the final conquest, about 2,500 from the United States,

2 34

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 235

and the balance from Canada, the Argentine, and
from among the Jewish prisoners of war at Alexandria,
Egypt, who volunteered for such service and succeeded
after several refusals from the War Office. The com-
manding officers of battalions in the field were J. H.
Patterson, a Protestant Irishman; Eliezer Margolin,
an Australian Jew, in his early youth a Palestinian
pioneer; F. Samuel, a British Jew; F. Scott, a British
Christian. The officers were Jewish and Christian, the
N.C.O/s mostly Jewish, the rank and file all Jews.
During the final offensive, in September 1918, Jewish
troops in the Jordan Valley formed a "Patterson Col-
umn/' and had the distinction of capturing the
Umm-esh-Shert ford on the Jordan, a few miles north
of Jericho a deed mentioned in Allenby's dispatches.
This was the first Jordan ford taken by the Allies; a
couple of hours after the capture, Anzac cavalry
crossed it and invaded Transjordan. "Patterson's Col-
umn" was the first British infantry force in Trans-
Jordan; Colonel Margolin, at the head of his battalion,
was the first British commander of captured Es-Salt.
(Today Jews are prohibited from even entering Trans-
Jordan.) After the Armistice, the Judaeans did garrison
duty in Western Palestine. In 1919, during the trouble
in Egypt, when the bulk of the British troops left for
Cairo, the whole of the railway line from Romani in
the Sinai desert up to Haifa was under their guard.
At the military cemetery on the Mount of Olives there
is a section of Jewish graves. They are not many: the
Jewish battalions had not been given a real chance of
battle, perhaps simply because there happened to be

236 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

no serious engagement where they happened to be
stationed. What they were told to do they did well.
There was no reason why the precedent should not
have been followed when the present war broke out,
and there still is no reason.

But this time the precedent will have to be extended
both in scope and in character. It must be, formally,
a Jewish army, not a regiment within the British army;
it must be given a chance to attain a strength of at
least 100,000; and it must fight on all the Allied fronts
to prove just what some people would prefer to for-
getthat this is the Jews' war as much as Britain's,
France's and Poland's.

There is no need to remind the writer of the thou-
sand and one excellent reasons why it is both unusual
and "impossible" to have a Jewish army so long as
there is no Jewish State, nor a Jewish treasury to
maintain it. All the reasons are valueless. Unusual,
yes; "impossible?" nonsense! Any child knows that
there are not enough Jewish generals, or even officers,
and especially noncommissioned officers, to staff an
army; at the outset a Jewish army will be fully Jewish
only as to the rank and file. But that alone will be
enough to bring in very large numbers and to inspire
a great and high spirit. The only question is whether
an additional 100,000 men (or probably many more)
are needed in the field; and, if so, what will be the
best way of obtaining the maximum number of re-
cruits, and securing from them the maximum effort.
And this settles the problem of the treasury. If 100,000
men, or more than that, are needed, they will have to

THE JEWISH ' WAR DEMANDS 237

be equipped, fed and trained just as in the case of
Poles and Czechsat the Allies' expense, and it will
make very little difference in the cost if they are styled
an army. Secondly, while it is true that there is no
Jewish State as yet, it is not quite exact to say that
there is no Jewish treasury. It certainly exists as a
spiritual but by no means negligible power, serving
myriads of people in a score of countries, feeding a
rather magnificent galaxy of social, educational and
colonizing enterprises throughout all the continents.
The formation of a Jewish army will mobilize its re-
sources to limits never before suspected. It may yet
prove extremely helpful in other connections also,
especially if, simultaneously with the raising of the
Jewish army, an all-Jewish civilian authority is recog-
nized.

Outside the Allied countries, and the countries held
or paralyzed by the enemy (U.S.S.R. included), there
are more than six million Jews today whose dominat-
ing preoccupation, without any fear of overstatement,
can be described as looking for some way to help in
the destruction of the common enemy. About 1,200,-
ooo of these Jews are males between the ages of eight-
een and thirty-five. An especially interesting corner of
the Jewish world is Palestine, whose male Jewish
population of army age could of itself provide 100,000
men, a large proportion of whom are not only trained
but fairly experienced in that old-fashioned kind of
warfare which in the Middle East is not yet quite out
of fashion. These are potential resources which it
would be unwise to neglect, merely on numerical

238 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

grounds, quite apart from their value as a moral factor
in the war.

True, there is a widespread opinion (this is written
in February 1940, and may no longer fit the case when
the book is printed) that man-power is of no value
in the sort of war which the Allies are facing. Here
is a jesting remark which was recently overheard in
fairly exalted quarters: "If the biggest neutral were
to offer to come in we should be terribly embarrassed,
for where could one find Lebensraum for him on the
Western front?" But, joking apart, we must all realize
that if the war is ever to develop in a direction leading
up to real victory, it will have to follow a different line
of development. This is not only a pragmatic neces-
sity; it is also, and even more conspicuously, a moral
necessity. Neutrals (and that still means three-quarters
of the anti-Nazi world) are beginning to lose immedi-
ate interest in the scanty news from the front. The
daily budget of events on the seas and in the air, epic
as it is in quality, lacks that grandeur of mass-effort
without which there is no "war," but only a kind of
exceedingly cruel and highly motorized guerilla con-
flict. This may become embarrassing. Neutrality today
is an expensive business; it entails considerable losses
and enormous inconvenience: if counterbalanced by
a passionate, breathless excitement over what is hap-
pening every minute in the great arena, all these draw-
backs will be borne not only with patience, but even
with a sort of grim satisfaction, for at heart every
neutral is a sympathizer. But no sympathy can thrive
on a diet of arid monotony. This explains why there

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 239

are such obstinate relapses into peace talk, even from
those neutrals whose wish to see Nazism crushed is
every whit as ardent as our own: the quantitative
pettiness of the incidents of this war, so strikingly out
of keeping with the monstrous forces and the almost
cosmic issues involved, saps their morale. There are,
no doubt, very serious material reasons why this form
of warfare has been allowed to predominate in the
first stage of the conflict, and it certainly has been a
godsend as permitting the accumulation of greater
resources; but it cannot be permitted to continue
longer than is strictly necessary and profitable.

These are doubtless very cruel thoughts, but they
are consistent with human nature, and are probably
shared, at the moment, by most of the peoples in-
timately affected. But even while the need for such
monotonous warfare continues, its bromidic effect on
the morale of the non-belligerent nations could be
considerably counterbalanced if six million souls liv-
ing in their midst had a concrete stake in the arena,
instead of being concerned merely in the passive sense,
as victims.

The writer does not by any means forget the various
laws affecting neutrality. These laws exist, .and they
must be taken into account and treated with the
utmost discretion. Yet we know by experience that
the network of "don'ts" which these laws represent
is both extremely sensitive and extremely elastic.
Sweden and Italy are not belligerents, but a nucleus
of Swedes or Italians with an active interest in the
Mannerheim line can be imagined as existing in either

240 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

country without really clashing with public sentiment.
This example is of course not offered as a full analogy
of the case which we are examining in the present
paragraph: it is only an illustration of the feature just
referred to as elasticity. On the other hand, the net-
work of restrictions is very formidably sensitive; and
this is one of the reasons why a Jewish army is a
much more convenient entity than a Jewish legion in
another people's army. The difference ought to be
clear without further elucidation, but may be made
still clearer with the help of another illustration by
analogy (once again, only a very superficial analogy) :
the case of propaganda. Anti-Nazi propaganda by the
Allies would be resented even in pro-Ally countries;
but an anti-Nazi propaganda by Jews is regarded as
natural. An appeal to the Jews to play a part in the
conflict is bound to produce a great moral effect: it
would be resented if its source were British or French,
but as coming from a purely Jewish source it would
be weighed in a different balance. The tragedy of
Dispersion is, after all, not without a few redeeming
features; inadequate enough on the whole, yet some-
times effective.

But the most serious argument in favour of a Jewish
army as preferable to Jewish units under other flags
is that of numbers and elan. The author, for more
than twenty-five years, has been obstinately engaged
in fostering what some have been pleased to describe
as Jewish militarism, and has thus been in close con-
tact with the type of Jewish youth whose mentality
responds to the appeal of the bugle (and today this

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 241

covers practically the whole young manhood of the
race): and he can affirm, with the completest con-
fidence, that while a call to join Jewish regiments
under an Allied flag would attract thousands, whole
over-crowded streets would be emptied in the rush for
a Jewish army.

(b) THE "CIVIL HEADQUARTERS"

The writer avoids the term "Jewish Government' '
so as to avoid complicating his argument by offering
a pretext for misunderstandings; and from this ret-
icence arises the exasperating necessity of providing
some sort of Ersatz-terminology, which is apt to sound
rhetorical and artificial. As a matter of fact, there
should be no room for any misunderstanding. No
person in his senses could really imagine that a "gov-
ernment" of this kind implies, or would ever claim to
imply, the right to give compulsory orders to Jewish
citizens of the different countries over the heads of
parliaments, cabinets and police. Least of all can such
a fantasy be entertained when there already exists a
precedent: the Polish Government in exile. This gov-
ernment does not attempt to issue decrees to the Poles
in Poland, because they would be massacred if they
obeyed; it does not claim any compulsory powers over
Polish citizens who live outside Poland, even over
those in the Allied countries. Yet it bears the title of
"government," and is a government in a sense which
is as important as anything in this war. If the Allies
were to admit that a statehood destroyed de facto by
bestial violence is non-existent in law, the admission

242 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

would vitiate the very air we breathe. A statehood
recognized by the comity of civilized nations cannot
cease to be; it survives.

No analogy need be perfect in all details. Fortu-
nately for the Polish nation and the Czech, their lot
is lighter than that of the Jews: they inhabit the terri-
tory for whose freedom they are fighting while the
Jews are in dispersion. But the root of the analogy is
sound: it is the principle that a destroyed nation is
still a nation. And when a list of destroyed nations
waiting for restoration has been officially drawn up,
the homeless section of the Jewish people has a fair
claim to a place on that list

With regard to the Polish claim, its recognition is
expressed in the title "the Polish Government." With
regard to Czechoslovakia, the official title is "the
National Committee/' It does not matter what term
is selected to describe the idea of Senatus Populusque
/udaeorum. What does matter is the fact that there
is a problem of immense importance to the world's
health and peace, clearly distinct from all other prob-
lems, a problem which means literally life or death to
five or six million people, and affects the fate of sixteen
millions; that these men and women are:/ just as
anxious to help in solving their problem as any normal
nation can be; and that they possess a total sum of
moral and material power that can go a long way
towards that solution, and ought to be given a chance
to do so. All this constitutes, in its essential character
and its magnitude, exactly what the dictionary calls
a "nation/' with "national" tasks before it. If other

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 243

nations want to help, they must begin by Inviting that
Jewish entity to take a seat in the council chamber,
to discuss aims and ways and means. This is the only
meaning of "a Jewish government" with which we
are concerned at the moment: a "headquarters/ 7 a
"leadership," an "executive," a "presidency," an
"authority" entitled to negotiate and to co-operate,
not as petitioner but as partner.

The writer does not lose sight of an obstacle whose
obstructive force is as formidable as its moral value
is negligible: its name is snobbery. There is a certain
bureaucratic mentality which is sure to be shocked
and angered, as at an unheard-of impertinence, by the
suggestion that Jews are no longer content with the
role of petitioners and pretend to be fit for the dignity
of peers. The battle against this kind of snobbery will
have to be fought some day; and now, perhaps, better
than later. To begin with, it is extremely unfair to
forget who is the chief sufferer in the whole drama,
and the respect due to misfortune. But even apart
from this aspect of the matter, which the sort of men-
tality in question may fail to see, the snobbery itself
is overwhelmingly devoid of any shred of justification.
There is no need to engage in a contest of abstract
claims to superiority, to ask one's opponent "who
wrote the Bible?" only to be confounded by the ques-
tion "where is your Shakespeare?" There are peoples
innocent of either Bible or Shakespeare who are yet
eminently fitted for partnership in statecraft: the
Jews, then, are surely qualified for such partnership.
It would be strange if any nation were to claim, on

244 THE MAX NORDAU FLAN FOR PALESTINE

behalf of its upper strata, as compared with those of
the Jewish people, any marked superiority in brains,
learning, statesmanship and experience of statecraft,
or in colonizing genius, to say nothing of the readiness
and ability to back ideas with sound finance. There
is no harm in asserting superiority where it is real,
and it is proper to reject pretences that have no rea-
sonable basis; thus, it would only be right to reject a
claim to a "Jewish" seat on the Allies' General Staff
(if such were made at the present moment), for this
is a field in which we are learners. But on the political
plane, where we have not more to learn than to teach,
such obstruction would be an example of cheap and
empty snobbery, and a handicap to the success of the
common cause. It must be resisted with all the forces
of reason, and rejected with all the scorn which it
deserves. When overcome, it will probably be discov-
ered that it was the only serious obstacle to a step
which would be obviously sensible and useful: the
recognition of a supreme organ of world-Jewry as a
full partner in building up the world of peace.

(c) THE COVENANT OF EQUALITY

Should the Jewish problem, by some miracle, en-
tirely disappear from the face of Europe, it would
still probably require a couple of generations to estab-
lish real equality of rights between members of differ-
ent ethnical groups sharing the same territories.
There was a time when people believed that such
equality could be efficiently "guaranteed" anywhere,
simply by mention in a legal document. There still

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 245

are statesmen who pretend to believe this. Yet no sane
adult can really share such optimism so far as Eastern
or Central Europe is concerned. That zone is not
among the areas where the miracle can be performed,
unless it can be enforced by some ever-present and
tangible reminder of supreme compulsion.

The unlimited sovereignty of nations will have to
go by the board, at least in Europe, if civilization
hopes to survive. Statesmen seem to be realizing this
gradually, and there is much less opposition to the
theory than might have been expected; though it may
be a different matter when it comes to practice. Yet
there still lingers in most minds a schoolboy illusion
that only in international affairs need sovereignty be
qualified by certain concessions; "internal" sovereignty
can remain unrestricted without any danger to its
neighbours. Translated into the language of experi-
ence, this means that as long as Nazism was preached
and practised only in Germany, there was no real
danger to her neighbours. This is nonsense. The
sphere of any nation's "internal" interests which do
not in any way affect other nations is extremely re-
stricted, and it is becoming smaller day by day. No
one will suggest that the abstract and logical conclu-
sion should be enforced to the limit, so that everything
done or suffered in Greece should be everybody's
business in Portugal, and vice-versa. But the division
of affairs, from the standpoint of mutual safety, into
external and internal is a schoolboy's concept. If your
neighbour's drains are bad it is your concern, and you
must have the right to call in the police.

346 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

How the world will settle this delicate problem is
not the subject of this book: but as the main obsession
of us all will be to avoid another war, it is not unrea-
sonable to assume that some device will be found for
keeping under joint neighbourly control such, "in-
ternal" affairs as have a more or less direct and tangible
bearing on the danger of war. Nor is the world likely
to forget that supervision without a threat of coercion
does not work. There will be devices for supervision;
and there will be devices for immediate, quick and
probably very painful coercion in case of default. For
instance: if there should be demilitarized zones, and
if the owner of one of these should attempt to rearm
it unawares, his action will probably be treated as a
casus belli and answered by some kind of armed occu-
pation, or worse. This is not an attempt to guess at
the terms of the future covenant: it is only intended
to emphasize the assurance that the present storm will
not be allowed to subside without the provision of
some absolutely practical, efficient, and automatic ma-
chinery for knocking out anyone who begins to lay a
powder train before he has had time to carry it much
farther.

And the writer believes that among those "internal"
matters that have a direct and tangible bearing on the
danger of war, the treatment of ethnical or religious
minorities is among the most important A hundred
years of European history have proved this. No claim
of sovereignty can be allowed to protect a breach of
the covenant of equality; any step in that direction is
equivalent to laying a train of gunpowder; the machin-

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 247

ery of compulsion must be set in motion, and the
culprit knocked out

To have such eminent power, the covenant of
equality must fulfil two conditions among others: it
must be terribly solemn, and it must be fully and
carefully reasonable.

"Solemn" means that there should be no interpola-
tion of equal rights "clauses" or "paragraphs" in
treaties dealing with other matters. None of those
other matters can have one-tenth of the awful toxic
power of the minorities problem; no chapter dealing
with the former can possess one-tenth of the vast
prophylactic importance of provisions affecting the
latter. Nor is there, among all the problems of inter-
national or "internal" statecraft, any problem so com-
plicated, any that requires such attention to detail and
such penetrating foresight as this. A special session of
the Peace Conference should be entirely devoted to
this one problem: and there should be a separate
Covenant of Equality.

But the Covenant must also be "reasonable." A law
is unreasonable if it prescribes things which ordinary
human nature cannot tolerate, or disregards conditions
which, despite the best average will of the average
obedient citizen, will render it exceedingly difficult for
him to obey. Equality cannot be enforced where, by
the nature of things, it is bound to degenerate into its
opposite. Let us take an imaginary illustration: the
case of Ruritania. The country is inhabited by two
races. The Broadheads, the majority race, are decent
people, but slow-witted; the Longheads, in a 20%

248 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

minority, are equally decent, but very quick on the
uptake. The principle of equal rights is unimpeach-
ably respected throughout the country, in every walk
of public and of private life. Among its other applica-
tions, bi-lingual candidates are preferred for most gov-
ernment or municipal offices. The Broadheads are
painstaking and diligent, but are unable to speak any-
thing but Broadhead; the Longheads are excellent
linguists. On the strict basis of equal opportunity and
the principle of "the best man wins/' regardless of
craniometry, it is invariably the Longhead candidate
who takes the honours. The result, after twenty-five
years of this regime, is that 75% of the best jobs in
government or municipal employ has been captured
by the Longheads and it is practically the same in
trade and the professions. The Broadheads ask: is this
fair? Should people to whom God has refused the gift
of tongues be penalized? Should there not be some
kind of proportionality in the enjoyment of equal
rights?

A reasonable Covenant will take this into account
''Equal opportunity and the best man wins" does not
cover the whole problem of equal rights; it has per-
haps even very little to do with the real essence of
that problem. Jockeys, to be really equal to one an-
other in a race, are weighed and weighted; golfers are
given varying handicaps. A Covenant of equality must
ensure that, while the twenty Longheads get their full
twenty loaves and not nineteenthe eighty Broad-
heads get their eighty rations, and not seventy-nine.

Whether such a Covenant, however perfect, can

THE JEWISH WAR DEMANDS 249

work the miracle and produce such a state of affairs
as will effectually prevent friction, is a query which
only the future can answer. Some people doubt it,
and believe that the only real solution of the minorities
problem is a redistribution of the races over the surface
of the earth, i.e. the mass evacuation of all scattered
minorities. This may be an exaggeration. There are
minorities which, though cut off from their ethnical
mainland, still form mono-ethnical "islands" or en-
claves, or at least villages of their own, so that it is,
so to speak, only on market-day that they have to rub
shoulders with the majority people. Or there may be
cases where both races are more or less congenial, and
"good mixers" mutually, so that if left alone and given
time they might be encouraged to intermarry, or sim-
ply to forget the insignificant difference. The Covenant
must foresee all that can be foreseen: time alone will
show if the problem can be solved.

But the Covenant must be reasonable, and its
authors cannot expect the impossible to happen: in
particular, they cannot expect Jewish equality in East-
Central Europe to be anything but a lie unless their
colleagues, the other statesmen at the other session of
the Peace Conference, establish the Jewish State.

(d) THE STATE

The whole of this book has been devoted to this
subject; here it will suffice to recapitulate the main
points of the argument.

The Jewish State is a true and proper war aim.
Without it, the ulcer that poisons Europe's health

250 THE MAX NORDAU PLAN FOR PALESTINE

cannot be healed: for without it there can be no
adequate emigration of the millions whose old homes
are irretrievably condemned; without it there can be
no equality; and without this, no peace.

There must be an organ of international authority
to devote itself, from now on, to the study of this
problem, and the preparation of the scheme, or the
schemes, to be laid before the future Peace Confer-
ence. If that organ is the Intergovernmental Com-
mittee on Refugees, it must be rebuilt and reinforced
in agreement with Jewish authorities, and instructed
to abandon the prescription of partial remedies and
concentrate on the problem of the Jewish State.

There can be no preliminary limitations as to the
various geographical projects which this body may
have to examine before it makes its choice. It must
be instructed to investigate any plan which presents,
prima facie, the essential features of a serious solution:
if necessary, it must consider every province of what
we have called the Fata Morgana Land. But the first
item on its agenda must be the examination of the
Palestine plan. This is a fair proposal, which excludes
nothing except any attempt to steal a march in either
direction.

It will be for the Jews to prove what is, after all, not
difficult to prove: that the Palestine plan with all its
drawbacks, is apart from all other considerations the
only one that is practicable.

CONCLUSION
By COL. JOHN HENRY PATTERSON, D.S.O.

IT WAS my privilege to enjoy the friendship and
confidence of Vladimir Jabotinsky for a quarter
of a century. I watched him in the forefront of the
battle, valiantly helping to drive the Turks out of
Palestine. I listened to his powerful plea on behalf of
his people before the Peel Commission in the House
of Lords in London. I closely followed his heart-
breaking efforts during all the years when he worked
and gave every ounce of his strength in selfless, unre-
mitting toil for the emancipation of the Jewish masses
in Eastern Europe.

Throughout the whole of this period, in spite of
countless rebuffs and bitter disappointments, caused
by the failure of the anti-Jewish clique in the British
Government to carry out England's promises, Jabotin-
sky never lost confidence in the British people's sense
of righteousness and justice. Jabotinsky, great-hearted
and fair-minded, never doubted that, once the true
facts of the Jewish case were brought home to them,
the British people would resent any breach of faith
on the part of their Government, and would demand
that England's solemn pledge to the Jewish people be

fulfilled.

251

252 CONCLUSION

I always shared, and still share, Jabotinsky's belief
in the justice of the British people. It would be sheer
hypocrisy on the part of England to proclaim that she
is fighting a war to uphold liberty, democracy and the
sanctity of the pledged word, if at the same time she
repudiates her own solemn promise.

Any such betrayal by England would leave millions
of homeless and persecuted people shut out from
their rightful place in the brotherhood of nations.

The Jewish peopleand, for that matter, the true
Englandare under a heavy debt to Vladimir Jabotin-
sky, undaunted and gallant fighter for justice and
right. At this vital moment in Jewish history, when all
Jewry is tossing on a stormy sea, Jabotinsky's prophetic
courage is sadly missing. Much that he thought and
felt about the present situation is contained in this
book, The Jewish War Front, written in 1939, and yet
fully aware of the development and implications of
this world struggle.

Had he been spared, his steadfastness and political
acumen would have led his people in this supreme
opportunity to gain for themselves a strong nation-
hood in Palestine.

But it was not to be.

Let his prophetic words, speaking clearly through
the pages of this book, be read by many thousands.

May this book awaken the Jewish people, that they
may close their ranks and, uniting as one people, make
Jabotinsky's battle cry their own.

Eretz Israel for the Children of Israel/

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