The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
But the case is yet more curious than that. These simple tribes
are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements
which Dr. Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got;
they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got.
They may be in error, at the first superficial glance,
in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark.
But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectable
professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect.
And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical
or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in
stating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews. They fear,
in exact terms, their knowledge and their experience and their money.
The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need.
Only the Arabs would call it a knowledge of financial trickery
and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given
by hoards of money not only of their own but of other peoples.
About Dr. Weizmann and the true Zionists this is self-evidently unjust;
but about Jewish influence of the more visible and vulgar kind
it has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the force
of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly
to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it.
But above all I implore them not to be content with assuring us again
and again of their knowledge and their experience and their money.
That is what people dread like a pestilence or an earthquake;
their knowledge and their experience and their money.
It is needless for Dr. Weizmann to tell us that he does not desire
to enter Palestine like a Junker or drive thousands of Arabs forcibly
out of the land; nobody supposes that Dr. Weizmann looks like a Junker;
and nobody among the enemies of the Jews says that they have driven
their foes in that fashion since the wars with the Canaanites.
But for the Jews to reassure us by insisting on their own economic
culture or commercial education is exactly like the Junkers
reassuring us by insisting on the unquestioned supremacy of
their Kaiser or the unquestioned obedience of their soldiers.
Men bar themselves in their houses, or even hide themselves
in their cellars, when such virtues are abroad in the land.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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