“Of course we want Zionists to come into Palestine. We know what will happen — they will bring vast sums of American and other capital from abroad. They will bring the greatest scientists in the world: all the greatest scientists are Jewish. And the territory of Palestine — now so arid and so much of it a desert — will be transformed. It will become a garden; it will blossom like a rose. We shall borrow their experts; we shall work together. We shall do the same in all the countries which we Arabs turned into deserts. We shall make them flourish again as they used to in the past.”
- King of Greater Syria, Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi
at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
