Uganda, Mexico, the US: just a few of the countries originally considered as sites for the Jewish state. By nicholas shakespeare |
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I don't think Israel will exist in 60 years." So a Jewish friend admitted this summer. It was midnight in Cumbria and we were scanning a disused railway track for glow-worms. Days before, Israeli tanks had trundled into Lebanon, bringing down on to their turrets the pillars of world opinion.
Glow-worms have died out in most places in England, surviving only on unimproved land. As my eyes strained to see a pulse of light, I was tempted into reflecting how the world might be had the Jewish people eschewed Palestine - and established their homeland in one of umpteen countries that were also considered.
In 1891, a Polish group, The Lovers of Zion, proposed an autonomous Jewish state in Argentina. Twelve years later, Theodore Hertzel, the father of Zionism, rejected the British Government's suggestion of Kenya,
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| Least known, but typical, was the attempt to establish a Promised Land in west Tasmania |
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but warmed to their offer of 15,500 square kilometres in the Ugandan bush. The Seventh Zionist Congress turned this down.
Hertzel also considered Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula and Madagascar. The 'Madagascar Plan' was endorsed by Goering in
1938 - although negotiations stalled with the French.
Inspired by Hertzel, the Jewish Territorial Organisation - and later the Freeland League - sponsored expeditions to sites as varied as Iraq, Canada, Ecuador, Angola, South Africa, Libya, Australia, Surinam and Mexico.
The most successful was the Galveston Scheme, attracting 9,300 Jews to Texas. In a 1937 plan supported by President Roosevelt, the US Interior Department proposed Alaska as a refuge for Jewish emigres. Least known, but typical, was the attempt to establish a Promised Land in west Tasmania.
The surveyor, Critchley Parker, died of starvation and exposure while mapping the remote site in 1938. "It is at Port Davey that I hope the Jewish settlement will begin", he wrote, his dream of a tranquil refuge as faint as the yellowish glimmer that I finally spotted that night in Cumbria. 
FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 10, 2006
 Israel's Genesis: that old chestnut
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