But I would conclude this chapter with one practical criticism which seems to me to follow directly from all that is said here of our legal fictions and local anomalies.
One thing at least has been done by our own Government, which is entirely according to the ritual or routine of our own Parliament.

It is a parliament of Pooh Bah, where anybody may be Lord High Everything Else.
It is a parliament of Alice in Wonderland, where the name of a thing is different from what it is called, and even from what its name is called.
It is death and destruction to send out these fictions into a foreign daylight, where they will be seen as things and not theories.
And knowing all this, I cannot conceive the reason, or even the meaning, of sending out Sir Herbert Samuel as the British representative in Palestine.
I have heard it supported as an interesting experiment in Zionism.
I have heard it denounced as a craven concession to Zionism.
I think it is quite obviously a flat and violent contradiction to Zionism.

Zionism, as I have always understood it, and indeed as I have always defended it, consists in maintaining that it would be better for all parties if Israel had the dignity and distinctive responsibility of a separate nation; and that this should be effected, if possible, or so far as possible, by giving the Jews a national home, preferably in Palestine.
But where is Sir Herbert Samuel's national home?
If it is in Palestine he cannot go there as a representative of England.
If it is in England, he is so far a living proof that a Jew does not need a national home in Palestine.

If there is any point in the Zionist argument at all, you have chosen precisely the wrong man and sent him to precisely the wrong country.

You have asserted not the independence but the dependence of Israel, and yet you have ratified the worst insinuations about the dependence of Christendom.
In reason you could not more strongly state that Palestine does not belong to the Jews, than by sending a Jew to claim it for the English.
And yet in practice, of course, all the Anti-Semites will say he is claiming it for the Jews.