The Maccabaean

THERE are public men in England who look with misgivings at the Mandate over Palestine which England has accepted from the hands of the League of Nations. Responsible newspapers have taken up the subject and some of them are not far from making a bugbear of it, by giving a gloomy picture of the complications which might arise through Zionist activities in Palestine, and of the dangers that threaten the British policy in the Near and Middle East on the score. Happily these cries of alarm do not seem, so far, to have impressed the Government. Nevertheless, it is perhaps not superfluous to examine if there is any reason for uneasiness from the point of view of British imperial policy and its permanent interests.

Before. the war, the statesmen at the helm of the Empire Veessel had a very hard task indeed in steering clear of the cliffs and shoals which beset their road through the waters of the Near and Farther East. There was the decaying Ottoman Empire, incapable of anything good and useful, but still strong enough to work mischief, which, since the revolution of 1907 and the coming into power of the Young Turks tried to gain new strength by means of a Pan-Turkish nationalist agitation moulded on the best models of Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism. Turkey still held nominal rule over Egypt and was in a position to create there constant difhculties to England, to whom the unhindered control of the Suez Canal was, and is, of vital importance. Behind Turkey there was Germany, which was’the real master at Constantinople and by means of the Bagdad Railway system began to lay its heavy hands on Mesopotamia and Arabia as well.. In Teheran England was faced with deep-digging German and Russian intrigues which were strenuously antagonistic to each other, but unifed in their determination of ousting English influence from Persia. In Central Asia Russia prepared in slow but incessant work its advance towards the frontiers of India, and neither the disaster of the war with Japan nor the new tendency of a friendly understanding between Lordon and the then Saint Petersburg put a stop to the perfidies of a secret diplomacy which tried hard to enlist Afghanistan, Turkestan, and even Kashmir in the ranks of the hosts drilled for a future assault on the British power in India. The momentous encounter, half a century ago, of Younghusband ‘and Prjevalsky in Central Asia was a dismal symbol foreshadowing a later fatal shock in the same regions between the two world powers represented by those two hardy travellers.

The triumph of the Allies in the World War has radically modified this situation to the immense advantage of Great Britain. The Ottoman Empire is a thing of the past; it is expelled from Egypt and all the Arab countries, and in spite of some turbulent movements in Anatolia has ceased to be a danger to peace and order in near Asia. Germany is out of the field; it can no longer stretch out its tentacles along the Bagdad line down to the shore of the Persian Gulf where its outposts had begun to survey, across the sea, the opposite coast of India. Soviet Russia continues to be a sinister threat, but not to Great Britain alone, to all states and societies of civilized mankind, and not by its military and naval power, but by its propaganda which is not limited to

Asia. Among the Arabs liberated by the Allies, and principally by England, from the Turkish yoke which has enslaved and crushed them for almost five centuries, new tendencies manifest themselves which certainly will have to be closely watched. They pretend to gather all Arabic speaking populations into one state, stretching from the northernmost limits of Syria all along the east and south coast of the Mediterranean, right up to the columns of Hercules, comprising, besides Syria, with the Lebanon and Palestine, Mesopotamia and Arabia, Egypt, Tripoli with the Cyrenaica, Tunesia, Algeria and Morocco right down to the Sudan, claiming perhaps even Malta, and trying to win a backing among the 60 millions of Muslim in India. This seems rather alarming, but happily it is not, or at least not yet, as grave as it looks. The Pan-Arabic idea is at present professed by a small number of intellectuals only who have lived in Europe or had access to European sources, and the masses are not yet converted to it. However, it shall not be denied that flattering formulas, insistently, ardently, fanatically repeated by eloquent demagogues, penetrate easily into untutored minds and take possession of them, particularly when fostered by im- provident and light-hearted European politicians who flatter themselves that it will always be easy for them to control the movement and make it subservient to their own special interests.

It is a truism to state that Great Britain is laden with a heavy burden in Asia. This is nothing new. This is the state of things since England has set her foot on India, developed her rule there, extended it to the boundaries of Afghanistan, englobed Burmah, and made of that immense part of the Asiatic Continent the strongest column of her world Empire. For us Jews, the important question is: Does the English acceptance of the Mandate over Palestine and the preparation of this country for its destiny of becoming: the National home for the Jewish people add to England’s burden and make it heavier?

A moment’s reflection suffices to convince an impartial judge of the contrary. What would Great Britain’s position in Near Asia be if it had not accepted the Mandate with a view to allowing us to establish our National Home in Palestine? England has by glorious fighting, aided in a certain measure by Allied and Jewish forces, conquered Palestine from Turkey. But the British Empire will not simply annex and retain this prize of its victory, as the Allied Powers have solemnly declared that they would not wage war for con- quest’s sake. Neither can it abandon the country, which would immediately become the bone of contention, between France claiming it on the strength of traditional influence exercised for centuries, and the new Arab Kingdom proclaimed recently at Damascus and pretending to imply, with Syria, the whole of Palestine and Mesopotamia. It would obviously be most imprudent for England to construct with her own hands a solid bridge between the Egyptian nationalists whose programme is disloyalty to the British protector, and the new-fangled Arabo-Syrian imperialism which would be bound to become rapidly a danger to the security of the Suez Canal, to the communication with India and to India itself. At this point Zionism comes in, offering itself as the