Now to make one single French protectorate over this very considerable territory seems at first sight a large order, but the objections to any other course are many and insuperable.  Should the line of French influence be drawn farther north than the Hedjaz, under what protection is the intervening territory to be left?  At present it is Turkish, but inhabited by Arabs, and, unless the Allies revoke the fulness of their declaration not to leave alien peoples under the ‘murderous tyranny’ of the Turks, Turkish it cannot remain.  But both by geographical situation and by racial interest, it belongs to French-protected Syria, and there seems no answer to the question as to what sphere of influence it comes under if not under the French.  Just as properly, if we take this view of the question, the Sinaitic Peninsula, largely desert, would fall to Egypt, the French protectorate being defined westwards at Akabah.  That the Eastern side of the Gulf of Suez should not be under the same control as the Western has always been an anomaly, admitted even by the sternest opponents of the status of Egypt; and in the absence of any canal corresponding to that of Suez, and debouching into the Red Sea via the Gulf of Akabah, the most advanced champion of French influence in the Near East would see no objection to this rectified frontier.  There is no question of competition involved.  The proposed change is but a rational rectification of the present status.

This scheme of delimitation leaves Palestine inset into the French protectorate of Syria, and it is difficult to see to whom the protectorate of Palestine should be properly assigned except to France.  Italy has no expansive ambitions in that sector of the Mediterranean; England’s national sphere of influence in this partition of the districts now occupied by alien peoples in the Ottoman Empire lies obviously elsewhere; and since the Jews, who settled in ever-increasing numbers in Palestine before the war, and will assuredly continue to settle there again, come and will come as refugees from the Russian Pale, it would be clearly inadvisable to assign to Russia the protectorate of her own refugees.  The only other alternative would be to create an independent Palestine for the Jews, and the reasons against that are overwhelming.  It would be merely playing into the hands of Germany to make such an arrangement.  For the last thirty years Germany has watched with personal and special interest this immigration of Jews into Palestine, seeing in it not so much a Jewish but a German expansion.  Indeed, when, in the spring of this year, as we have noticed, a massacre and deportation of Jews was planned and begun by Jemal, Germany so far reversed her usual attitude towards massacres in general, and her expressed determination never to interfere in Turkey’s internal affairs, as to lodge a peremptory protest, and of course got the persecution instantly stopped.  Her reason was that Pan-Turkish ‘ideals’ (the equivalent