What of its political foundations? Is Zionism a political fantasy? I assert most emphatically that it is. The present British mandate over Palestine is a recognition, by the great powers of the world, of the supreme political interest of Great Britain in that region. It was no mere accident that it was a British army which captured Jerusalem from the Turks in the late war. The life-and-death importance of the Suez Canal to the integrity of the British Empire has for more than half a century made the destiny of Palestine as well as of Egypt a vital concern of British statesmanship. So long as the Turk was in control, the British had no cause to fear what that impotent and backward neighbour might do to interrupt the life current that flows through this jugular vein connecting India with the British Isles. But now that the Turk is in process of being dispossessed of sovereignty, and the future disposition of his territories in doubt, British statesmen can hold but one opinion concerning either Egypt or Palestine, and this opinion is, that no matter what else may befall, British influence must be omnipotent on both sides of the Suez Canal. It may be politic for them for the moment to coddle the aspirations of a numerically negligible race like the Jews. But the notion that Great Britain would for one instant allow any form of government in Palestine, under any name whatever, that was not, in fact, an appanage of the British Crown, and subservient to the paramount interests of British world policy, is too fantastical for serious refutation.