Could the current State of Israel have been in Alaska, Uganda, even the Amazon rainforest of Mato Grosso, instead of occupying Palestine? Maybe so, point out some documents prior to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the first writing in which the British government supported creating in Palestine “a national home for the Jewish people.”
However, options such as Australia, Madagascar, British Guiana, Ecuador, the French colonial territories of New Caledonia, Venezuela, parts of Peru, Angola, Siberia, the New Hebrides (the name of the Vanuatu islands before their independence) were also discussed. ) or Canada.
For Carmen López Alonso, emeritus professor of History at the Complutense University of Madrid and an expert on the Middle East, in reality, “only Uganda had options to host the state of Israel.” On the other hand, other destinations, points out José Antonio Lisbona, a specialist in the history of contemporary Judaism and author of books such as Return to Sefarad (Riopiedras Ediciones) were “entelequias” arising from the need to find a safe refuge.
The outcome could have been different, López points out, if it had another context. At the end of the 19th century, many Jews did not believe it was essential to have their own state as long as their full rights (self-emancipation) were recognized in the countries where they lived. “It was later when people began to talk about Zion and the return to Palestine, since at the beginning the Zionists were a minority,” indicates the Hamas author. From the march towards power to the flight of Icarus (Cataract).
However, the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, the Russian pogroms (massacres of Jews accepted or promoted by those in power), the rise of nationalism, the interwar period, the expulsion of Jews from Germany in the 1930s , Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 and the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 motivated a persecution that ended in the extermination camps. “At this moment there was no other solution than Palestine, since the closure of the borders for refugees was decreed, both in the US and in other countries,” recalls López.
The idea of ??establishing “a home for the Jewish people” came from the First Zionist Congress held in 1897. At that time there were two positions: those who considered that what was really important, beyond the place, was to have their own State where the Jews would no longer be persecuted and those who defended the need to occupy the Holy Land.
The proclamation of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948 (the day before the date announced by the British government to end its mandate over Palestine) settled the debate and gave the green light to the occupation, but history could have resembled the proposal of some current series on uchronias (what would have happened if…) in case any of the following geographical destinations come to fruition.
For Lisbona, author of key books on Israel and a master’s degree in International Relations from the Sorbonne University in Paris, it was the “only serious plan” to establish a Jewish state in a territory other than Palestine. According to this historian, it was the government of the United Kingdom itself that offered in 1898 to grant a part of the East African Protectorate to the Hebrew people.
The proposition was formulated in 1903 by the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain to the Zionist group of Theodore Herlz (the Austro-Hungarian Jew born in 1860 who is credited with the fatherhood of modern Zionism). Despite being known as “the Uganda plan”, the offer included part of Kenya.
The idea was brought to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903 and sparked intense debate. A year after the motion was approved by 295 votes to 177, a delegation was sent to inspect. Informants reported a dangerous land, not only due to the presence of lions, but also due to the lack of receptiveness of the Maasai to welcoming hundreds of thousands of settlers, so the British proposal was politely rejected in 1905.
Theodor Herlz, the Jew who laid the doctrinal and organizational foundations of modern Israel, considered Argentina a possibility to consider in his founding essay Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews).
Under the heading “Palestine or Argentina?”, Herzl refers to the South American country as “one of the most fertile on Earth, with an immense surface area, a small population and a temperate climate.” Unapologetically assuming the colonialist mentality of the time, Herlz wrote that “Argentina would have the greatest interest in giving us a piece of its territory.”
Argentina, like Uganda, offered vast empty territories where it would not be necessary to expel any people, as would later happen in Palestine. Despite this evidence, Max Nordau, an eminent Zionist, became famous by presenting Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
According to Nordau, the Arabs who had lived in Palestine for thousands of years could only welcome the Jewish resettlement in their ancestral land, since it would bring them the moral and material benefits of “civilization.” A paternalistic posture that would only be possible to maintain during the subsequent occupation, armed in arm. However, Argentina was only an aspiration (“a fiction, illusion or fantasy”, in Lisbona’s words), since its government never considered giving up part of its territory.
Another option explored by the Jewish Territorial Organization (the Jewish political movement that emerged in 1903 with the aim of finding an alternative territory to Palestine) was Australia. Between 1939 and 1943 some members of this organization, also known as ITO, pushed for the creation of a Jewish colony in the East Kimberley district (a region of Western Australia roughly the size of Belgium).
The Yiddish writer Melech Ravitch had visited Australia in 1933 and his prose and reports inspired this alternative, which led to the development of a plan in 1938.
In late 1941, he contacted the Australian government. However, the lukewarm reception of the plan by the Australian Jewish community and the Government’s unwillingness to deviate from its established policy against collective settlements led Australia to scrap the plan in 1944.
To address the “Jewish problem,” Stalin considered creating a territory that would bring together the around 3 million Jews who resided throughout the Russian Empire. At first, Lisbona explains, he thought of regrouping them in Crimea, where there was a large Jewish population, but the pogroms led them to opt for the Hebrew Autonomous Region of Siberia, whose capital was set in Birobidzhan.
The idea was to concentrate the Jews 8,000 kilometers from Moscow, in an inhospitable place far from the centers of power. Although up to 200,000 Jews settled in this region near Manchuria in 1934, when the Yiddish language was allowed to coexist with Russian, the aforementioned autonomous region only provided a solution to the Soviet Jewish problem, since there was never the possibility of transferring Jews from other countries there. areas of the world.
Although different countries were considered until the 20th century, Cyrenaica (an ancient Roman province that also included Crete) became one of the most promising projects. In a letter written to Max Mandelstamm, a Lithuanian who would eventually become a prominent member of the Zionist movement, Cyrenaica was considered one of the best options to provide Israel with its own territory, “since all the good parts of the world are already occupied by other peoples.”
From the Hebrew perspective, the backwardness of the Ottoman Empire, to which the territory belonged, could allow the Jews to “rise on the ruins of a declining power.”
The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 raised hopes that the Ottomans would be willing to negotiate. For this reason, several informants went on site to this eastern region of Libya to analyze the situation, shortly before the departure of a scientific expedition led by the famous explorer J. W. Gregory. Finally, Cyrenaica was discarded due to lack of water, explains Laura Almagor in Jewish Territorialism as a movement of political action and ideology (1905-1965).
In 1912, the young General Richard Soussman, linked to the Consulate General of the Republic of Nicaragua in New Orleans, stated that he had obtained a concession to bring 10,000 immigrants to Honduras, as well as suggested the possibility of moving even larger contingents.
Those in charge of evaluating the proposal argued that the Central American governments were not trustworthy, although it was hoped that a deposit of cash as a “sign of good faith” could pave the way. However, the main obstacle was that the tracts of land would be geographically separated from each other, so interest in Honduras languished.
In the run-up to the Second World War, conversations took place with the French colonial minister, Marius Moutet, about the possibility of making use of the French overseas territories. Contributing to this interest was the ancient myth about the Jewish origins of the indigenous population of Madagascar, who were believed to have descended from one of the lost Hebrew tribes.
In January 1942, some members of the Nazi leadership propagated the idea of ??evacuating all German Jews to Madagascar, although in reality it was a smokescreen to hide the genocidal program known as the “final solution.” Be that as it may, Nazi involvement discredited any future Jewish plans to colonize the island.
