You cannot continue, as so many modern men seem, from their
conversation, to wish, with political equality on the one side and a
living spirit of enmity upon the other. You cannot get peace by giving a
mere legal definition to the status of a minority, which is also
necessarily your neighbour, and refusing a social action consonant with
the legal definition. If you try to do that you are trying to do two
things, one of which will destroy the other. No one can doubt which
will be victorious in a conflict between a living sentient motive and a
mere definition in public law.
One attitude towards the question which I have heard fairly often in the
mouths of Jews and seen in their writings is something like this: "Our
affairs have nothing to do with people outside our nation. This
discussion of what you call 'the Jewish problem' is an impertinence upon
your part. There is a Jewish problem indeed, but it is a domestic
problem, and we request you (with some asperity) to mind your own
business."
If this attitude were sound, the search for what I have called a
solution, though it might satisfy the intelligence, would be a breach of
civic morals. In the same way it would be a breach of civic morals for
me to work out a solution for the quarrel between Mr. Jones and his
mother-in-law, neither of whom I have ever met and with whom I have no
relations, and then to press this solution upon the contending parties.
But the flaw in this attitude is that the problem is essentially one
involving two parties, the Jews and the non-Jews. The problem we are
attempting to solve is a problem expressed in terms of both. Some would
even say that there is hardly a domestic question within the Jewish
nation which does not have its reaction upon society outside it, and
which it is not the business of that society outside to inquire into.
That would be pressing things rather far. But the main problem is
intimately concerned with both parties and as much with the one as with
the other. It is true, indeed, that the consequences of a false
solution, or of shirking the solution altogether, would be more acute
for the Jew than for us; but we should both suffer, and even on our
side the suffering would be grievous.
Even if there were no question of suffering in the ordinary sense of the
term, there would still be the question of justice. The Jews who resent
a statement of the problem and an attempt at solving it are not doing
their own people any good and are at the same time denying us the right
of putting our own affairs in order, which denial is, of course,
intolerable: for the position of the Jews in our great States and in
Islamic society is something which those States and that society have to
determine. They cannot leave it in the air. To some conclusion they
_must_ come, and soon, and on the nature of that conclusion depends
their peace.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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