The Hadassah Medical Organization in Palestine, formerly called the American Medical Unit, now has three hospitals and a dispensary maintained at a cost said to be more than five hundred thousand dollars a year. Hadassah grew out of an American organization of Jewish women. Ten years ago it was a small society of one hundred and ninety-three members. To-day it is a national organization with a membership of fifteen thousand. It is especially active in health work among children, and in the care of mothers and infants, and it teaches Palestine girls to be nurses. There were twenty-two girls in the first class graduated from the nurses’ training school. Another thing the Zionists have done to help their brethren in Palestine is to organize a bank, with a capital of $800,000. They plan to make long-time loans to farmers who have had to depend in the past on loans from the Jewish organizations backing the colonies, or on private lenders in Palestine. The latter have charged interest at the rate of 10 per cent. and more. But the Moslems say that all these activities on the part of the Jew prove that political Zionism aims at nothing less than Jewish control of the Holy Land and everything and everybody in it. There is a story of an American who found a Jewish friend weeping at the “Wailing Place.” “What is the matter with you?” he asked. “Me? I’m wailing!” “What are you wailing for? Aren’t there plenty of Jews in Jerusalem? And haven’t you got a Jew for a governor?” “Yes, I know, but I want the Mosque of Omar.” There are also Jews who favour a more moderate Zionism, and fear that setting up a Jewish state will make trouble both in Palestine and in the countries where Jews are now citizens with a part in business and public affairs. CHAPTER XXV THE WORLD’S OLDEST CITY Stand with me on the slope of the Lebanon Mountains and take a look over Damascus. We have climbed the road cut out for Kaiser Wilhelm, the Emperor of Germany, when he visited this region, and are now on a bare lofty hill which the Mohammedans consider one of the holy spots of the world. It is where the prophet Mohammed stood and gazed at that magnificent town, the Damascus of his day. After staying here for hours, he turned away with a sigh, saying: “I dare not go in. Man can enter paradise but once, and if I go into Damascus, this paradise on earth, I shall not be able to enter the paradise of the hereafter.”