I dare to address you, sir, with this open response characterized by simplicity and honesty, which are the qualities of my ill-fated nation. This is about your historic speech delivered at the banquet hosted by the Zionist Association in London. Your speech has a direct connection to the fate of my nation, the nation that laid the cornerstone for civilization, the nation that has done everything for the sake of progress.

Do you see, sir, that my response will be straightforward, free from the modern flattery required by your noble qualities? However, it is an answer that differs in its honour from the honour you mentioned that you bestowed in a straightforward manner at the banquet of the Zionist Association. I mean that it is genuine honour!

I do not know, sir, whether the banquet hosted by the Zionist Association was an honour for you or for them. In fact, I do not know if there was any honour in that banquet at all.

Certainly, I don't know. And it's not my fault if I don't know. Honour has taken on multiple colours in this era. As for me, I know only one honour, I neither know nor care about anything else. It is the uncoloured honour!

One of the fundamental principles known to office boys, not to mention the enlightened, is that it is not permissible to mix honour with politics or to mix politics with honour. You undoubtedly knew this principle before me. However, you disregarded this principle when you were the Prime Minister of Great Britain and approved the issuing of the infamous, detested "Balfour Declaration." You violated this principle again when you stood proudly at the Zionist Society banquet, boasting about your creation, which, if accomplished – and it will never be – would destroy the life of a nation. Among your commitments was to recognize its independence and respect it. You stood at that banquet, your countenance radiant, and your heart brimming with joy, as if you were proud of an honourable deed!

If you had stopped your boasting at the mention of your approval of the infamous "Balfour Declaration," the ill-fated document, there would have been no reason for you to blush in shame. If something like that had happened, it would have been considered a deviation from your Anglo-Saxon traditions, unforgivable. However, you did not stop your boasting at that point; rather, you went beyond it to take pride in that bloody operation you conducted in the body of my nation by dividing it into two parts in that beautiful city located on the western shores of the Mediterranean known as "San Remo”.

As you emerged from the conference where you conducted that operation, congratulating each other, you and your associates, without a trace of embarrassment or shame on your faces or foreheads, in the same manner, after eleven years had passed since that aberrant operation, you stood at the Zionist Society banquet, boasting of your success, without a hint of embarrassment or shame.

In light of this current reality, I must acknowledge your remarkable ability to uphold your Anglo-Saxon traditions to the utmost extent while engaging in the mixing of honour with politics and politics with honour.

You know, sir, more than I do, that knowledge is inherent to the Westerner, and philosophy is closer to the nature of the Easterner. Nevertheless, you did not heed this reality and, in your speech at the Zionist Society banquet, embraced philosophy when it would have been more appropriate for you to embrace knowledge. The result was that you committed a logical, scientific, and philosophical error when you stated in your mentioned speech, "Those lands (Palestine) were not a homeland for any people; rather, they were ruins, and the best thing about them is that they are suitable to become a homeland.

I do not need to point out your errors, as I am entirely confident that you know well, just as I know well, 'that those lands, Palestine, are a vital part of a complete and indivisible homeland for a single nation, which is the Syrian nation.'

You yourselves were among those who boasted greatly during the World War that you were carrying out that immense massacre not for any purpose other than the liberation of weak nations, including the Syrian nation. You and your French associates accepted volunteers from this nation who came to shed their blood for your victory and the victory of their nation.

And if you were to count, my lord, the casualties of the Allied forces in general, and specifically the casualties of the American army, you would find among them a considerable number from this nation that you now vehemently deny its existence in its homeland with unparalleled audacity!

If this nation had not shed a single drop of blood for your victory during your most challenging times, that alone should be sufficient to compel you to respect it, if you were fair.

You assert, sir, that the accomplishments of Zionism so far are sufficient evidence that the land, which was said to be flowing with milk and honey, was not just a legendary talk. You also forget that the milk and honey flowed from that land thanks to the strength of the nation that inhabited it before the arrival of the Jews, who fled there escaping slavery in Egypt, their first national homeland, where they still reside to this day. Instead, you vaguely allude to this fact in a different part of your speech. To this extent, political and diplomatic astuteness in selective memory, forgetting, and neglect of logic have reached in you!

However, this limit, in its scope, falls short of the limit you reached when you said, "The Jew residing in Tel Aviv has the right to protection just like the Muslim residing in Kanpur." You equated the foreign Jew in Palestine with the patriotic Muslim in India, and in that, you found no strange contradiction whatsoever.

The strangeness, which is beyond any strangeness, is that you egregiously mixed politics and honour. You introduced political interest into the duties of honour in a way unprecedented in the history of such mixing. You disregarded all the matters and covenants upon which the honour of the British flag depends, and you made it dependent on protecting the Jew in a land entered by a people who claim—perhaps falsely—that their ancestors entered it some 3,000 years ago in an illegitimate manner.

You speak about 'the success of Arabs and Christians' due to the success of the Zionist movement. As for success, I will return to it shortly. However, your statement 'Arabs and Christians' contains an error that may be criticized by newspaper vendors here, as it does not find in Palestine 'Arabs and Christians' but rather a people who are part of the Syrian nation, carrying a message that advocates the resurgence of the entire Arab world within its comprehensive articles.

The truth is that the Syrians of Palestine have succeeded tremendously, but not in the way you imply. It is the success you do not wish for, a success in striking against those coveting their homeland with blows that could have been decisive if not for the intervention of British soldiers. In the blood shed by the foreign Jews, in the pure blood they sacrificed, there is undeniable evidence that refutes your claim that there is no nation in Palestine!

You may find joy, sir, along with your Zionist colleagues, in the dispelling of doubts following the favourable White Paper. However, you cannot find joy in the current reality, a reality you are well aware of—that the presence or absence of any paper, be it white or black, does not change the steadfast conviction of a nation determined to uphold all its rights in its homeland, resisting those who seek to seize it, regardless of the cost.

While the Jews may assert a particular claim to their right in the land of Cana'an, it is a claim that we, as well as the entire world, know has no basis of truth.

You are trying to prove this claim by stating that the Jews did not find a homeland for themselves in Egypt and Babylon. Did the Jews find a homeland for themselves in Palestine? If you struggle to provide an answer that aligns with reality, the truth is found in the nine hundred years of exile. My lord, if duty compels me to criticize the error in your statement, justice also compels me to acknowledge your accurate words. One accurate statement deserving mention was found in your speech. I refer to your statement about Zionism: "Such an attempt has never occurred in the history of the world.

Certainly, my lord, history has never recorded such a sinful attempt before. If you consider sin to be a cause for pride, then I congratulate you on this wisdom that eludes the wise and the prudent, and is bestowed upon the ignorant.

Allow me, my lord, to conclude my response by agreeing with the conclusion of your historic speech, in which you stated, "...we have the right to expect great things from this experiment, not limited to Palestine but encompassing the entire world, not only for the children of Israel but for all the children of humanity." The truth, my lord, is as you have said. Indeed, tremendously significant, far-reaching consequences will follow this sinful attempt, unmatched in history by any other attempt of equal wrongdoing. I assure you that its results will not be confined to Palestine but will extend to the entire world, and its immense implication will not be exclusive to the children of Israel but will encompass all the children of humanity.

And whoever lives will see.

Damascus 18 May, 1931

Antun Sa'adeh

An-nada, Beirut, no. 99, 11L02L1938.

"Quoted from Alif Baa, Damascus, 1931"

 (Translated by Dr. Edmond Melhem)