Dr.Weizmann is a man of large mind and human sympathies; and it is difficult to believe that any one with so fine a sense of humanity can be entirely empty of anything like a sense of humour.

Yet, in the middle of a very temperate and magnanimous address on "Zionist Policy," he can actually say a thing like this, "The Arabs need us with our knowledge, and our experience and our money.

If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will fall among sharks." One is tempted for the moment to doubt whether any one else in the world could have said that, except the Jew with his strange mixture of brilliancy and blindness, of subtlety and simplicity.
It is much as if President Wilson were to say, "Unless America deals with Mexico, it will be dealt with by some modern commercial power, that has trust-magnates and hustling millionaires." But would President Wilson say it?
It is as if the German Chancellor had said, "We must rush to the rescue of the poor Belgians, or they may be put under some system with a rigid militarism and a bullying bureaucracy." But would even a German Chancellor put it exactly like that?
Would anybody put it in the exact order of words and structure of sentence in which Dr.Weizmann has put it?
Would even the Turks say, "The Armenians need us with our order and our discipline and our arms.
If they do not have us they will fall into the hands of others, they will perhaps be in danger of massacres." I suspect that a Turk would see the joke, even if it were as grim a joke as the massacres themselves.
If the Zionists wish to quiet the fears of the Arabs, surely the first thing to do is to discover what the Arabs are afraid of.
And very little investigation will reveal the simple truth that they are very much afraid of sharks; and that in their book of symbolic or heraldic zoology it is the Jew who is adorned with the dorsal fin and the crescent of cruel teeth.

This may be a fairy-tale about a fabulous animal; but it is one which all sorts of races believe, and certainly one which these races believe.
But the case is yet more curious than that.

These simple tribes are afraid, not only of the dorsal fin and dental arrangements which Dr.Weizmann may say (with some justice) that he has not got; they are also afraid of the other things which he says he has got.
They may be in error, at the first superficial glance, in mistaking a respectable professor for a shark.
But they can hardly be mistaken in attributing to the respectable professor what he himself considers as his claims to respect.
And as the imagery about the shark may be too metaphorical or almost mythological, there is not the smallest difficulty in stating in plain words what the Arabs fear in the Jews.