Page:The Truth about Palestine.djvu/23

 Jewish public bodies have so powerfully contributed has been materially accelerated by private enterprise. The revival of the building trade—the first sign of renewed economic vitality—is almost exclusively attributable to Jewish capital, which was invested in this industry last year to an estimated total of £E.140,000 in Jaffa alone. The only mortgage bank in the country—an institution which has long been in urgent demand—is that which has just been established under Zionist auspices. The orange-packing houses at Petach-Tikvah and Rehoboth, the silicate-bricks factory at Jaffa, the steam flour-mill, the cement-factory and the oil-factory at Haifa, the introduction of such industries as watch-making, furniture-making and weaving—all these enterprises, which are to the manifest advantage of the country as a whole, are due to the energy and zeal of the "mass of undesirable aliens who are a burden to the community."

For nearly fourteen millions of Jews throughout the world the rebuilding of Palestine is the translation of spiritual values into terms of economic reconstruction. The Bolshevik régime in Russia and the economic collapse of Eastern Europe have reduced to ruins half the Jewish world. The long, though unavoidable, delay in the formal approval of the Mandate, the instability which has so long obstructed peaceful progress in Palestine, the sinister suggestions of an impending repudiation of British pledges, which have been assiduously put about in interested quarters, have added to the difficulties of the interim period which is happily approaching its end. In face of all this, the Jews have already to their credit concrete achievements in Palestine which are an earnest of what may be expected of them immediately the situation becomes normal. Assailed by malice and calumny, obstructed by ignorance and misunderstanding, buffeted by the cross-currents of an unstable political situation, cut off, for the time being, from those great communities which would, in normal circumstances, have been in the forefront of the Zionist movement, they have already shown that, mindful of the sacred associations which have