Zionism in a Nutshell

Jerusalem, April, 1921.

Little Mrs ___ (let us call her Rockenheimer) has turned up from the USA. She is bitten with Zionism. Dreamy, electric, and with that Semitic hardness which blinds while it sharpens, she is about to give a large sum of money to land experiments in Palestine: or, as she puts it, to 'demonstrate the truth of single tax.' Single tax is the bee in her bonnet, as it was in that of her magnetic millionaire husband...

Little Mrs Rockenheimer lunched with us and was, in acute American, charmingly naive and outspoken in her ideas. It is this sort of outspokenness in and out of season that so frightens the Moslem. And who would not be frightened? It makes even an English Gallio's flesh creep.

"It will come," she said prophetically, "I feel it in my bones that it will come!"

It is when a Jew feels things in his bones that the Moslem feels for his knife.

"What will come, Mrs Rockenheimer?"

"I feel it in my bones that this land - ALL of it - is going to belong to us."

Mark the simplicity of the feeling.

"But what are you going to do with the inhabitants, the 80% of the population who are not Jews?"

"What the Ay-rabs? They have Ay-raybia. Let them go there!"

How shall we deal with such reasoning?

Go home and read Josephus.

 A Palestine Notebook 1918-1923, C.R. Ashbee, 1923, pp 176-177