There is one small thing neglected in all our talk about self-determination; and that is determination.  There is a great deal more difference than there is between most motions and amendments between the things for which a democracy will vote and the things on which a democracy is determined.  You can take a vote among Jews and Christians and Moslems about whether lamp-posts should be painted green or portraits of politicians painted at all, and even their solid unanimity may be solid indifference.  Most of what is called self-determination is like that; but there is no self-determination about it.  The people are not determined.  You cannot take a vote when the people are determined.  You accept a vote, or something very much more obvious than a vote.

Now it may be that in Jerusalem there is not one people but rather three or four; but each is a real people, having its public opinion, its public policy, its flag and almost, as I have said, its frontier.  It is not a question of persuading weak and wavering voters, at a vague parliamentary election, to vote on the other side for a change, to choose afresh between two middle-class gentlemen, who look exactly alike and only differ on a question about which nobody knows or cares anything.  It is a question of contrasts that will almost certainly remain contrasts, except under the flood of some spiritual conversion which cannot be foreseen and certainly cannot be enforced.  We cannot enrol these people under our religion, because we have not got one.  We can enrol them under our government, and if we are obliged to do that, the obvious essential is that like Roman rule before Christianity, or the English rule in India it should profess to be impartial if only by being irreligious.  That is why I willingly set down for the moment only the first impressions of a stranger in a strange country.  It is because our first safety is in seeing that it is a strange country; and our present preliminary peril that we may fall into the habit of thinking it a familiar country.  It does no harm to put the facts in a fashion that seems disconnected; for the first fact of all is that they are disconnected.  And the first danger of all is that we may allow some international nonsense or newspaper cant to imply that they are connected when they are not.  It does no harm, at any rate to start with, to state the differences as irreconcilable.  For the first and most unfamiliar fact the English have to learn in this strange land is that differences can be irreconcilable.  And again the chief danger is that they may be persuaded that the wordy compromises of Western politics can reconcile them; that such abysses can be filled up with rubbish, or such chasms bridged with cobwebs.  For we have created in England a sort of compromise which may up to a certain point be workable in England; though there are signs that even in England that point is approaching or is past.  But in any case we could only do with that compromise as we could do without conscription; because an accident had made us insular and even provincial.  So in India where we have treated the peoples as different from ourselves and from each other we have at least partly succeeded.  So in Ireland, where we have tried to make them agree with us and each other, we have made one never-ending nightmare.