Explosive bullets and the brutal factory system numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess.
And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasure of the eye in the parti-coloured crowd before me, that brought back my mind to the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine, on which I touched earlier in this chapter; the peril which is largely at the back both of the just and of the unjust objections to Zionism.
It is the fear that the West, in its modern mercantile mood, will send not its best but its worst.

The artisan way of putting it, from the point of view of the Arab, is that it will mean not so much the English merchant as the Jewish money-lender.

I shall write elsewhere of better types of Jew and the truths they really represent; but the Jewish money-lender is in a curious and complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox.
He is not only unpopular both in the East and West, but he is unpopular in the West for being Eastern and in the East for being Western.
He is accused in Europe of Asiatic crookedness and secrecy, and in Asia of European vulgarity and bounce.

I have said _a propos_ of the Arab that the dignity of the oriental is in his long robe; the merely mercantile Jew is the oriental who has lost his long robe, which leads to a dangerous liveliness in the legs.

He bustles and hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity even of the better sort of Jew is simply due to his restlessness.
But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of the better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence.
The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling that the influence of modern civilisation will surround these ragged but coloured groups with something as dreary and discoloured, as unnatural and as desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which they were shivering as I watched them.