a place where men can be crowned and crucified.

There is one small thing neglected in all our talk
about self-determination; and that is determination.
There is a great deal more difference than there is between most
motions and amendments between the things for which a democracy
will vote and the things on which a democracy is determined.
You can take a vote among Jews and Christians and Moslems about whether
lamp-posts should be painted green or portraits of politicians painted
at all, and even their solid unanimity may be solid indifference.
Most of what is called self-determination is like that; but there
is no self-determination about it. The people are not determined.
You cannot take a vote when the people are determined.
You accept a vote, or something very much more obvious than a vote.

Now it may be that in Jerusalem there is not one people but rather
three or four; but each is a real people, having its public opinion,
its public policy, its flag and almost, as I have said, its frontier.
It is not a question of persuading weak and wavering voters, at a vague
parliamentary election, to vote on the other side for a change, to choose
afresh between two middle-class gentlemen, who look exactly alike and
only differ on a question about which nobody knows or cares anything.
It is a question of contrasts that will almost certainly remain contrasts,
except under the flood of some spiritual conversion which cannot
be foreseen and certainly cannot be enforced. We cannot enrol
these people under our religion, because we have not got one.
We can enrol them under our government, and if we are obliged to do that,
the obvious essential is that like Roman rule before Christianity,
or the English rule in India it should profess to be impartial if only
by being irreligious. That is why I willingly set down for the moment
only the first impressions of a stranger in a strange country.
It is because our first safety is in seeing that it is a strange country;
and our present preliminary peril that we may fall into the habit
of thinking it a familiar country. It does no harm to put the facts
in a fashion that seems disconnected; for the first fact of all is
that they are disconnected. And the first danger of all is that we
may allow some international nonsense or newspaper cant to imply
that they are connected when they are not. It does no harm,
at any rate to start with, to state the differences as irreconcilable.
For the