those who remained in Palestine were men in the last stage of poverty.”
Experience, therefore, teaches us that men of capital, if they
understand no language except that of individual self-interest, will not
go to find in Palestine “what they want,” because they want more than
they will find there. Who is there, then, whom figures can persuade or
to whom self-interest can recommend Palestine, if those who could go
will not, and those who would cannot?
I asked in my article why the idea lost ground among our people from the
time when it began to take practical shape in the land. Our critic
answers with a sigh: “Our impatient people saw that a long time and a
great deal of money would be needed to put the colonies which had been
founded into a satisfactory condition, and their courage failed them.
For eighteen hundred years we found it possible to exist without moving
a finger for the colonisation of our land and the salvation of our
people; but now that we have not been able to make our colonies all that
they should be in six years, we lose heart. Are we not an impatient
people?” He does not realise that what he attributes to impatience is
simply an inevitable result of the appeal to self-interest. For eighteen
hundred years we did not move a finger for the colonisation of our land,
because we did not expect it to bring us advantage as individuals. In
recent years we have paid attention to the colonisation of our land,
because reports and statistics have led us to hope that it will bring us
advantage as individuals. But now, when we see that a long time and a
great deal of money will be needed to put the colonies already founded
into a satisfactory condition, it becomes clear that from the point of
view of individual self-interest the thing is not worth while; and so we
have quite justifiably lost heart, and the colonisation of our land has
become a charitable affair, which affords a scant subsistence to some
hundreds of people “in the last stage of poverty.”
* * * * *
Such, then, is the language of individual self-interest. Had our critic
really been able to adduce convincing arguments in support of his severe
judgment that there never was and never will be any national sentiment
among the Jews, and that individual Jews will never be able to rise
above “private advantage and individual self-interest,” then we might as
well throw up the sponge. We should have no right to be called a people
or to lay claim to a land. But, luckily for us, his arguments are not so
dangerous.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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