Now this is explicit enough; Germany clearly contemplated a protectorate over Palestine, and if the Jews who are German-speaking Jews are left independent, there is nothing more certain than that, after the war, her penetration of Palestine will instantly begin. These colonists are, and will be, in want of funds for the development and increase of their cultivated territories, and when we consider the names of the prominent financiers in the Central Empires, Mendelssohn, Hirsch, Goldsmid, Bleichroeder, Speyer, to name only a few, we cannot be in much doubt as to the quarter from which that financial assistance will be forthcoming, on extremely favourable terms. It is safe to prophesy that, if Palestine is given independence without protectorate, in three years from the end of the war it will be under not only a protectorate, but a despotism as complete as ever ruled either Turkey or Prussia. True it is that the Zionist movement will offer, even as it has offered in the past, a strenuous opposition to Germanisation, but it would be crediting it with an inconceivable vitality to imagine that it will be able to resist the blandishments that Germany is certainly prepared to shower on it. For great as is the progress the Jewish settlers made in Palestine during the twenty or twenty-five years before the war, and strong as is the spirit of Zionism, the emigrants do not as yet number more than about 120,000, nor have they under crops more than ten per cent. of the cultivated land of Palestine. They are as yet but settlers, and their work is before them. If left without a protectorate they will not be without a protectorate long, but not such an one as the Allies desire. A protectorate there must be, and no reason is really of weight against that protectorate being French. Let that, then, extend from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates, and from Alexandretta to where the Hedjaz already prospers in its self-proclaimed independence. It will be completely severed from Turkey by tracts under protection of one or other of the Allied Powers, any expedition through which would be an act of war.
The Euphrates, then, will form the eastern boundary of the French protectorate: it will also, it is hoped, form the western boundary of the English protectorate, which we know as Mesopotamia. Just as no other Power has any real claim to Armenia, except Russia, just as Syria can fall to no other than France, it seems equally clear that the proper sphere of English influence is in this plain that stretches southwards from the semicircle of hills where the two great rivers approach each other near Diarbekr to the head of the Persian Gulf. As Germany very well knows, it is intimately concerned with our safe tenure of India, and the hold the Germans hoped to gain over it, and have for ever lost, by their possession of the Bagdad Railway was vital to their dreams of world-conquest. Equally vital to England was it that Germany should never get it. But its importance to us as a land-route to India is by no means the only reason why an English sphere of influence is indicated here: it is the possibilities it harbours, which, as far as can be seen, England is the only Power capable of developing, that cause us to put in a claim for its protectorate which none of our Allies will dispute.