Here let me recall at the risk of repetition (for repetition is
necessary to lucidity in such arguments) the logical process with which
I opened this essay. I say that the vast majority, the fixed race
through which in fluid and nomadic form Israel goes moving from century
to century, is not free to discharge its responsibility by any one of
those attempted solutions which I have condemned. No man, I trust, will
have the cynicism to say that mere persecution, let alone its horrible
extreme, is or should be a solution. No man can predict the same of
exile either. No man can discharge our responsibility by pretending that
any solution arrived at must be for our good alone and may disregard
that of those who live among us.
It is a statement one hears frequently enough that the masters of house
have alone to decide what shall be done under their roof: that the
interloper, the alien element, has no standing and no right to complain
of whatever measures may be taken for the protection of the household.
The thing so put sounds plausible. It is essentially false. It is
comparable to the argument applied to private property--that because
private property is a right, and that because a man "may do what he
likes with his own," therefore he may use it to the manifest hurt of
others. Moreover, the analogy is false; for when a man is talking of
"the master of the house" having the right in his household to decide
its own way of living and of treating its guests, he is considering a
very small unit in a great community; his household in the whole nation:
a little body which, if it discharge or in any other way deal with
something alien to itself, will inflict no great injury upon that
foreign body, since there is all the world for it to turn to outside.
But in the relations between the Jew and Christendom, or the Jew and
Islam, the parallel fails. It is precisely because there is no "outside"
to which the exile can turn that a duty is imposed on us.
It is true indeed that when a small and alien minority assumes to
dictate the policy of the rest, to regard its own advantages alone and
subordinate to those advantages the life of all, the claim is grotesque
and must be disallowed. But we should remember upon the other side that
it is only by exaggerating its claim that a minority can live at all. It
is only by fierce insistence upon its right to survive that its survival
is guaranteed. We can arrive at justice in this matter by the process of
putting ourselves in the shoes of those in relation to whom we propose
to act.
Put yourself in the shoes of the Jew and ask how this doctrine of "doing
what one likes with one's own" and being "the master of one's own
household" would look to you.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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