But would President Wilson say it?  It is as if the German Chancellor had said, “We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put under some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy.”  But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that?  Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure of sentence in which Dr. Weizmann has put it?  Would even the Turks say, “The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms.  If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will perhaps be in danger of massacres.”  I suspect that a Turk would see the joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves.  If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely the first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of.  And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin and the crescent of cruel teeth.  This may be a fairy-tale about a fabulous animal; but it is one which all sorts of races believe, and certainly one which these races believe.

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