The group standing nearest to the official is that of the Zionists; who are supposed to have a place at least in our official policy.  Among these also I am happy to have friends; and I may venture to call the official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remote from Zionism.  Dr. Eder, the President of the Zionist Commission, is a man for whom I conceived a respect long ago when he protested, as a professional physician, against the subjection of the poor to medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence.  He criticised with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnap anybody else’s child whom they chose to suspect of a feeblemindedness they were themselves too feeble-minded to define.  It was defended, very characteristically, by a combination of precedent and progress; and we were told that it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws.  That is to say, it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws to people whom no sane man would call lunatics.  It is as if they were to alter the terms of a quarantine law from “lepers” to “light-haired persons”; and then say blandly that the principle was the same.  The humour and human sympathy of a Jewish doctor was very welcome to us when we were accused of being Anti-Semites, and we afterwards asked Dr. Eder for his own views on the Jewish problem.  We found he was then a very strong Zionist; and this was long before he had the faintest chance of figuring as a leader of Zionism.  And this accident is important; for it stamps the sincerity of the small group of original Zionists, who were in favour of this nationalist ideal when all the international Jewish millionaires were against it.  To my mind the most serious point now against it is that the millionaires are for it.  But it is enough to note here the reality of the ideal in men like Dr. Eder and Dr. Weizmann, and doubtless many others.  The only defect that need be noted, as a mere detail of portraiture, is a certain excessive vigilance and jealousy and pertinacity in the wrong place, which sometimes makes the genuine Zionists unpopular with the English, who themselves suffer unpopularity for supporting them.  For though I am called an Anti-Semite, there were really periods of official impatience when I was almost the only Pro-Semite in the company.  I went about pointing out what was really to be said for Zionism, to people who were represented by the Arabs as the mere slaves of the Zionists.

This group of Arab Anti-Semites may be taken next, but very briefly; for the problem itself belongs to a later page; and the one thing to be said of it here is very simple.  I never expected it, and even now I do not fully understand it.  But it is the fact that the native Moslems are more Anti-Semitic than the native Christians.  Both are more or less so; and have formed a sort of alliance out of the fact.  The banner carried by the mob bore the Arabic inscription “Moslems and Christians are brothers.”  It is as if the little wedge of Zionism had closed up the cracks of the Crusades.