FUTURE OF PALESTINE.

Otago Witness, Issue 3714, 19 May 1925, Page 4

FUTURE OF PALESTINE.

JERUSALEM UNIVERSITY. REGENERATION IN THE NEAR EAST. (From Oc«r Own Correspondent.) LONDON, March 24. There is a nill east of Jerusalem, forming part of the Mount of Olives, on which a wealthy Englishman once built himself a beautiful house. This house is the nucleus of tho buildings of the new University of Jerusalem which Lord Balfour is to open early next month. The design, of which only a part has been executed, is by Professor Geddes, and as the University grows in scope and importance the buildings can be extended without prejudice to the general plan. The site is a superb one, overlooking the City of Jerusalem on the one side asad on the other looking across the deep depression of the Dead Sea to the blue line of tho hills of Moab. The University has been built and will be maintained entirely by Jewish contributions. Its foundation was one of the ideals of Herzl. the first of modern Zionists, and in the year before the war began the site had been purchased and a license obtained from the Turkish Government In an article contributed to the Daily Chronicle, Mr Herbert Sidebotham draws an optimistic picture of Palestine in the not distant future. ‘‘lt may be,” he writes, “that the establishment of this university will bo remembered long after most of the other events of the last decade in the Near East have been forgotten. The Zionist hopes that the university will serve as a centre of Jewish consciousness all over the world. Among non-Jewish Kmpathisers Lord Balfour has spoken of it as ‘an addition to the forces of prgress’ in the world, ex-President Woodrow Wilson, as a ‘promise of spiritual rebirth,' and the representative of France at the laying of the foundation stone, as the expression of the ‘spirit of fraternity and idealism.’ ” VITAL PRINCIPLE OF PROGRESS. These are big words. One may. more modestly, be content to admire the Jewish enthusiasm for learning which, at the very outset of its colonising work, founds a university. Yet if he is to ensure himself the great place in the Near East to which he is entitled by his past hist.orv the Jew is right in recognising that it will be by the force of the mind. It is not merely its politics that have caused the Near East to lag behind. has happened to sterilise the mind of the Moslem and make his present a mere fossil of his past The great function of the Jew is to bring vital principle of progress, to the East. He mav do it bv the material development of Palestine. But a still more powerful instrument in the conversion of Eastern mind is the subtle infiltration of ideas from a university. This Jerusalem University may end by remaking the East. A GREAT EXPERIMENT. English pople have not yet got the hang of the great experiment that is going on in Palestine. It is a much bigger thing than they think, and even now, when they cast about for good result® of the war that are positive and not purely negative, many must sometimes suspect that this Palestine experiment may be the biggest and best. Mr Lloyd George and Lord Balfour, who have alw r ays been the warmest friends of the Jewish national ideal, are both men of imagination, and may it not be that their imagination has seen much further ahead than their cynical and shoulder-shrugging critics? Precisely the same things that are now said about the uselessness of Palestine and its dangerous entanglements have been said about every part of tho British Empire at one time or another, and if the- had been listened to there would now bo no British Empire. Cast your mind 30 years forward in the future. Imagine Palestine, which is about the size of Wales, may then have a population of two millions and a-half, more than half Jews, many second generation Jews, ideal colonists, and with a passionate attachment to the soil. Imagine the country drained, free from malaria, with no waste land, and everywhere intensive cultivation. Industries will have sprung up in the towns, the Dead Sea will be yielding its chemical fruits, and here and there will be mines. Tho whole land will be electrically driven. Everywhere modernity, cleanliness, and a decent level of health and education. MODEL STATE OF THE EAST. Palestine by that time will have become the great emporium cf the Near East, and the trade of all the back countries will drain down to the sea at the great new port at Haifa, which is destined to be tho chief port in the Eastern Mediterranean. The patriotic population will be an impassable barrier to anyone who should seek to attack the Suez Canal from that side. Meanwhile Jewish enterprise will have pushed beyond Palestine and be opening u,, tho whole of the back regions to trade. 'lhe artificial feud between Jews and Arabs will have been healed. The new university will have begun to do its work, 'and the drv bones of the East will have begun to live again. Jerusalem will be no longer a bare chapel floor, a museum of antiquities, sacred and profaned, and a battleground of rival creeds, but, thanks to its university, will have become a great clearing house of modem ideas in the East, a centre of a new Oriental culture that is still in most intimate touch with the West. Small as Palestine is, it is large enough to become tho intellectual capital of the Near East, the firs! and only model Stole in the East, nn inspiration and example to all the countries round.