"Judaism of Protection" and Legionnaires.

The Arab revolt is dangerous to us not because of its physical strength; this strength, I admit, is not great. The revolt of 1936 did not serve, in truth, but as a means of moral pressure on England; it was intended to take advantage of her disorders. However, it is very dangerous for us—because we are "Jews of Protection."

Of all our political mistakes, the most fatal was allowing the disbandment of the Jewish battalions in the Land of Israel. In the years 1918-1919, we had 5,000 Jewish soldiers; by the spring of 1920, only 400 remained; at the beginning of 1921, this remnant was also disbanded. Thanks to this, we became in the Land of Israel what is sometimes called in Germany "Jews of Protection" (Schutzjuden). The classic type of "Jew of Protection" was as follows: a duke or count, having invited a number of Jewish families to his capital, would pledge to protect them from the mob. But at the same time, "his" Jews were not left with even a shadow of those minimal, autonomous rights that their co-religionists could still hope for in other places. And this situation is very fragile. Given that any attempt by the mob to harm his Jewish protégés would have required the duke to declare (at least, in principle) the expulsion of the Landsknechts [mercenaries], and given the possibility of rebellions and internal wars, the duke therefore had a completely legitimate right to take from his Jews whatever he pleased or to forbid them anything he wanted—on the pretext that if they did not fulfill his will, the mob would rise up. If the duke was a cunning diplomat, he would simply invent the danger of popular unrest whenever it suited him. However, it was far worse in those cases where the duke was an honest man: then the mob truly became the sole ruler of the Jews. It was enough for some magnate to declare the danger of popular unrest, and the duke would make the very logical demand of his "protégés" to fully comply with whatever the crowd demanded.