The Maccabaean

“ ND so to the end of history,” says the sardonic Caesar A of Mr. Shaw, “murder will breed murder, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.” With the recollection of the dreadful Jerusalem Pesach fresh in our minds, it is important to remember that if murder must indeed breed nothing but murder, an exasperated demiurge might well wish to wipe the slate clean with a destructive “pereant” and begin afresh. The Jerusalem pogrom has given the Arab problem more than a coloring of bitterness and blood, but it has not made it desperate; provided only that we are not tempted into that easiest and most futile of retaliations, hymns of hate and vociferant programs of vengeance.

The evil and perverse lust that vents itself in pogroms is not a new thing in human history. And it has often been found to be a concomitant of religious passions when these are complicated with emotions even more general and fundamental in human society. It would be comparatively easy for psychologists to analyze exhaustively the impulses at work in this instance as in others. But that would in no way lessen its horror or remove from it the special and peculiar sting that even Polish and Magyar outrages did not possess.

For it is quite useless to hide from ourselves the fact that a pogrom in Jerusalem, conducted by Muslim Arabs affects in a way very different from the way we are affected by massacres in Pinsk and wholesale executions in Buda. Throughout the Middle Ages when the Jew was not merely fundamentally an alien in Europe, but in legal theory as in recurrent practice, an outlaw, the countries under Muslim rule— particularly the Sunnite Muslims—were exceptions. Not that Almohade caliphs or other individual rulers failed to wreak gusts of murderous rage on their Jewish subjects individually and as groups. Nor was there ever a Mohammedan country in which in privileges and power, true believers were not sharply sundered from Giaours and Kaflırs, from mis- believers and unbelievers. But there was this difference. In Mohammedan polity the Jew was not a thing apart, cursed, monstrous, remote, whose slaughter was scarcely homicide and whose plunder was emphatically not robbery. Life in Mohammedan lands was notably more attractive for Jews than in Christian countries, and that immigration into southeastern Europe and Africa was not more general was due to a number of concrete physical impediments,—the difhculties of communications, the deliberate policy of Christian rulers in some cases, —the strange attraction of a familiar domicile, however desolated by suffering and oppression,— and probably most of all human inertia. What gave substance to Zionism, whether of Judah Halevi or of Herzl, was that Jews were to settle in lands where historically they could not be considered aliens and where in practice they had not been so considered.

There was, of course, an Arab problem from the first. Abdul Hamid was not a Zionist and the pashas and Kaima- kans of Palestine were equally not Zionists. And they had no special attachment toward Jews. It was apparent that when Zionism had to be taken seriously, it would meet with a determined resistance from the official and governing class in Palestine and every element that they could rouse or direct. For that form of the Arab problem, thinking Zionists were

preparing themselves and in a measure were ready, except for minor present occasions for friction,—a problem that was bound to solve itself on the economic side readily enough. Before the war, the growth of Palestine’s agriculture and industries was inevitably slow and would absorb the available labor supply in a perfectly natural way as well as any type of Jewish immigration that might come. The Arab laborer was specifically differentiated from the Jewish. He could be used where the Jewish laborer could not. If intemperate utterances were disregarded, if irresponsible rhetoric was treated with indulgent contempt, there was no reason to apprehend ultimate difficulties from the economic form of the Arab question—and at that time there was no other form.

Indeed, Zionists had an important strategic position in connection with it which they doubtless would not have neglected. Palestine was laboring under the curse of Ireland in the early. nineteenth century—absentee landlords and an impoverished peasantry. This was aggravated by the particular characteristics of that peasantry—docile, unimaginative, inured to suffering and without the opportunity of observing better conditions about him. Nor was the landlord class, the effendi, an ancient autocracy that had for centuries commanded or deserved the respect of their ten- antry. The latter was largely a group of speculators and usurers, felt to be of different blood, who had in relatively recent times acquired by manipulation of devious sorts, the possessions they were exploiting..

To hate the effendi was as natural to the fellah as breathing. And in the pre-war development of Jewish Palestine one fact was apparent. The fellah’s condition was improving and improving precisely in the measure of the Jewish occupation. Where Jewish colonies were, opportunities for the fellahin were being obviously enlarged. A number of specific improvements in the condition of the land generally were unmistakably of Jewish origin. And what inured to the benefit of the land was not likely to escape the notice of the fellah. Side by side with this, the control of the effendis was being imperilled by the obvious demonstration that the virtual peonage in which the landlord attempted to hold the peasantry, could be successfully shaken off—that better opportunities awaited the peasant if he chose to take them. The Zionist, then, was in a position in which he could place himself with the Palestine fellahin—the real people of the land—in a position of avowed antagonism to the effendis— the landlords, whether in Jerusalem, Beirut, Constantinople or Paris, whose bailiff collected rents and bribed officials.

Then came the war, and the Arab question became a wholly different one. One of the watchwords of the war was the protection of national feeling. In the interests of its military policy the English had taken the obvious course of rousing Arab nationalism against its enemy, the Ottoman Empire. In this, English statecraft was brilliantly successful. It may be that there are statesmen in Britain who feel that they were altogether too successful. At any rate the Arab question is now the profoundly difficult one of appearing to frustrate in part national aspirations while making national aspirations the foundation of their own program.

The Hedjaz created by Britain as a war measure against