But where is Sir Herbert Samuel’s national home?  If it is in Palestine he cannot go there as a representative of England.  If it is in England, he is so far a living proof that a Jew does not need a national home in Palestine.  If there is any point in the Zionist argument at all, you have chosen precisely the wrong man and sent him to precisely the wrong country.  You have asserted not the independence but the dependence of Israel, and yet you have ratified the worst insinuations about the dependence of Christendom.  In reason you could not more strongly state that Palestine does not belong to the Jews, than by sending a Jew to claim it for the English.  And yet in practice, of course, all the Anti-Semites will say he is claiming it for the Jews.  You combine all possible disadvantages of all possible courses of action; you run all the risks of the hard Zionist adventure, while actually denying the high Zionist ideal.  You make a Jew admit he is not a Jew but an Englishman; even while you allow all his enemies to revile him because he is not an Englishman but a Jew.

Now this sort of confusion or compromise is as local as a London fog.  A London fog is tolerable in London, indeed I think it is very enjoyable in London.  There is a beauty in that brown twilight as well as in the clear skies of the Orient and the South.  But it is simply horribly dangerous for a Londoner to carry his cloud of fog about with him, in the crystalline air about the crags of Zion, or under the terrible stars of the desert.  There men see differences with almost unnatural clearness, and call things by savagely simple names.  We in England may consider all sorts of aspects of a man like Sir Herbert Samuel; we may consider him as a Liberal, or a friend of the Fabian Socialists, or a cadet of one of the great financial houses, or a Member of Parliament who is supposed to represent certain miners in Yorkshire, or in twenty other more or less impersonal ways.  But the people in Palestine will see only one aspect, and it will be a very personal aspect indeed.  For the enthusiastic Moslems he will simply be a Jew; for the enthusiastic Zionists he will not really be a Zionist.  For them he will always be the type of Jew who would be willing to remain in London, and who is ready to represent Westminster.  Meanwhile, for the masses of Moslems and Christians, he will only be the aggravation in practice of the very thing of which he is the denial in theory.  He will not mean that Palestine is not surrendered to the Jews, but only that England is.  Now I have nothing as yet to do with the truth of that suggestion; I merely give it as an example of the violent and unexpected reactions we shall produce if we thrust our own unrealities amid the red-hot realities of the Near East; it is like pushing a snow man into a furnace.  I have no objection to a snow man as a part of our own Christmas festivities; indeed, as has already been suggested, I think such festivities a great glory of English life.  But I have seen the snow melting in the steep places about Jerusalem; and I know what a cataract it could feed.