tions assume an importance as yet undreamed of. Yet even had they forseen this, could they have acted differently? Could they have exposed the embryonic Jewish settlements to the crushing vengeance of a brutal Turkish government, could they have risked a possible discontinuation of Jewish immigration, all to establish a relationship with the Arabs which might or might not have borne fruit at some future time? Could they, in short, have let go of the bird in hand for the two in the bush?

A thoroughly imaginative leadership, statesmen endowed with the political foresight of a Bismarck or a Lenin, might have risked such a course, trusting in the accuracy of their intuition or analysis. The Zionist leaders of the time were simply unprepared for such a role. They took the easiest and most obvious course.

* * *

In a less obvious way, the Arabs were faced with a similar dilemma. Should they resist the Jewish settlement by any available means, or should they try to make a pact with the Jews in order to gain their assistance in their fight against the Turks?

Several Arab leaders in Palestine, then and later, advocated the latter course. They tried to make contact with Jewish leaders to work out a basis for cooperation. (At that time it was not yet considered treason to the Arab cause.) A few months before Nordau made his speech to the Ninth Zionist Congress in 1909, setting a strictly proTurkish course, the Zionist delegate in Constantinople had had a series of conversations with the two Jerusalemite Arab deputies in the new Turkish Parliament. He had reported to the President of the Zionist organization that one of them had put great emphasis on the common interests of the Jews and Arabs, their common Semitic origin and their opposition to the Turks. Such views were by no means unusual at the time. In actuality, various

52