With the Zionist Commission
(The following article is reprinted from the Zionist Review, the organ of the English Zionist Federation. Mr. Leon Simon, a prominent figure in English Zionist circles, and well known as a translator of Achad Ha'am's "Selected Essays" and as the author of many important pamphlets on Zionism, sent the following impressions from Palestine, where he had been sent as a member of the Zionist Commission.)
(1) FIRST IMPRESSIONS
IN the old days one’s first impressions of Palestine were derived from the landing at Jaffa. First of all you saw the town of Jaffa from the sea, set on a hill and looking very picturesque; then you descended into a small boat and were rowed a couple of miles or so to the landing-place, heartily glad to get safely through the dangerous rocks and to suffer nothing worse than the discomfort incidental to the tossing of the boat and its crowded condition; then you went through the Turkish Customs, lucky if you had somebody skilled in local ways to pilot you; then you went up into the town and discovered how much dirt and squalor could lurk behind a picturesque exterior. To-day it is very different. You enter Palestine by railway, and if you are not one of those who insist on having their full measure of sleep in all circumstances, you get your first glimpse of it at a very early hour in the morning, when the sun has begun to dispel the cold of the night, and while the wonders of a sunrise over the desert are still fresh in your mind. Of course, you do not know exactly when you come into Palestine in the merely geographical sense. The desert is not so clear-cut a boundary as the sea. But this is no matter. As the train goes on you see the welcome green displace the sand, first in patches, as it were tentatively and timidly, then more boldly in cultivated fields which drive the sand almost into the sea, until at last the victory is complete, and you are surrounded by rich vegetation as far as the eye can reach. Fig-trees and pomegranates and sycamores; hedges of cactus; acres upon acres of wheat and pasturage—these are some of the features that greet the eye of one who is privileged to enter this “desolate” country by the new route. And later on (after passing a few poor Arab villages) you come in sight of some of the Jewish colonies, with their red-tiled roofs and smiling fields and eucalyptus trees and orange groves. No doubt there are parts of Palestine which are less richly endowed by nature and less readily responsive to the labour of man; but these first impressions of fertility will not easily be effaced. And side by side with these physical impressions, memories of events and figures in Jewish history—of the exodus, of the revelations on Mount Sinai, of Samson and David, and Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai—crowding upon the mind, and eye and memory together create a vision of a new chapter of Jewish history which is yet to be written in this fertile land. You feel that you have not simply entered a territory called Palestine: you have entered Erez Israel, the land where the Jewish spirit lived once and will live again.