“like All the Nations?”

The discussion concerning the future political regime in Palestine is now happily beginning to take on a more or less objective character, and the searching question is being asked as to what we want here. What is our Zionism? What does Palestine mean for us?

As to what we should want here, I can answer for myself in almost the same terms that I have been in the habit of using many years:

Immigration;

Settlement on the land;

Hebrew life and culture.

If you can guarantee these for me, I should be willing to yield the Jewish “State,” and the Jewish “majority,” and on the other hand I would agree to a Legislative Assembly together with a democratic political regime so carefully planned and worked out that the above three fundamentals could not be infringed. Indeed I should be willing to pay almost any price for these three, especially since this price would in my opinion also secure tranquility and mutual understanding. If the Jews really have an historical connection with Palestine, and what student of history will deny it, and if the Jewish People is to be in Palestine not on sufferance (as during the days of the Turks) but as of right—a right solemnly recognized by most Governments and by the League of Nations, and also by thinking Arabs, then surely these three rights are elemental and hardly to be contested.

WORK OUT PROGRAM FOR A GENERATION

A former Administrator of Palestine reckoned that, with agriculture remaining the chief industry of Palestine, the land within its present political borders could accommodate roughly 3,000,000 people. Others give higher figures. But as for myself, if I could know that in the course of a long, long period a Jewish community of 1,000,000 souls—one-third of the population—was possible here, I should be well content. There are now 900,000 people in the country, of whom 160,000 are Jews. Let the colonizers and the students of vital statistics tell us how long a period it will take for Arabs to become 2,000,000 and Jews to become 1,000,000. Surely much longer than a full generation. Why not, therefore, let us try to work out a program for a generation, and let the generation after take care of its own problems? If we could do this, we should perhaps be talking less in abstractions, and even though we differed in our philosophies, all of us ought to be able to work together with a will.

DISCUSSION DEPENDS ON THREE FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS

All theory, therefore, all discussions, all programs should, it seems to me, start from such basis: How can immigration, settlement on the soil, a Hebrew life and culture, be secured? Such moot questions as democracy, self-determination, legislative assembly, the functions of the Mandatory and its international obligations, our relations with the Arabs of Palestine and the rest of the Arab world, should all be considered from the point of view that, taking into account the Arab increase, the Jews may become, let us say arbitrarily, one-third of the total population. This would require enormous efforts and large sums of money. Why talk of “majorities” and “state,” when even by the wildest stretch of the imagination we can hardly picture such a thing within an appreciable period, even if Britain and the Arabs and Jewish money-givers were helpfulness itself? Who knows?

Perhaps through some miracle in the future the Jews might become a majority. Drought in Palestine leading to emigration of Arabs?—or even the success of Jewish colonization in Palestine might be so striking that the Arab States or Federation of the future would want Jewish colonizing, financial, industrial and cultural aid, and would want to encourage a large Jewish concentration in Palestine for the sake of developing backward parts (and they are legion) of the Arab world? It is pleasing to have such dreams as to the future. But surely