How Australia escaped becoming Apartheid Israel

Little known aspects of Jewish history are colonial era attempts to establish race-based Jewish colonies in 20 countries around the World and in particular in the Kimberley region of North West Australia, a venture that failed and accordingly prevented Australia becoming Apartheid Israel.

Polish Jewish-origin Australian journalist Leon Gettler has written a fascinating book entitled “An Unpromised Land” ( Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, Western Australia, 1993) about  the ultimately unsuccessful attempt by Russian Jewish Bolshevik Dr Isaac Nachman Steinberg to organize Jewish settlement of the North West Australian Kimberley region. While it managed to garner extensive Australian support (but notable not from Zionists), Dr Steinberg’s plan was finally vetoed by the Australia Government in 1944 in view of the dangers to Australia from having race-based colonization of a major slice of Australia (and possibly because the British under Churchill had finally decided in 1944 to partition Palestine between the 1/3 minority racist Zionist colonizers and the 2/3 majority Indigenous Palestinians).

Eminent Jewish British historian Professor Sir Martin Gilbert in his book “Jewish History Atlas” (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London) has noted about 20 places where such Jewish colonies were envisaged and in some case commenced, including (1) Curacao, Dutch West Indies (1652), (2) British-ruled Surinam (1654), (3) Cayenne, French West Indies, French Guiana ( 1659), (4) Jewish State of South America under King Hermann Moritz (circa 1730), (5) Upper Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, USA (1819), (6) Russian Jews for Asia Minor, Turkey (1820), (7) Grand Island, New York State, USA (1825), (8) British plan for Syria (1839), (9) Crimea, Ukraine, Russia (1841), (10) Cyprus Jewish National Home settlement (1880-1902),  (11) Saskatchewan Jewish Settlement, Canada (1894), (12) Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association, Argentina [and Canada, US and Brazil] (1892; 45,000 settlers in Argentina by 1914), (13) El Arish, Egypt (1903; British blocked water use from Nile), (14) Guas Ngishu plateau, Kenya and Uganda (UK offer by Joseph Chamberlain in 1903; 7th Zionist Conference rejected UK Uganda Plan,  1905; by 1906 12,000 Jews had violently settled Kampala, Uganda and New Akko in Kenya), (15) Jewish colony, Brazil (1904; 1,000 settlers), (16) Cyrenaica, Libya (1908-1909; Jewish Territorial Association  proposal), (17) Melbourne, Victoria Land Settlement Trust, Australia (1927; to encourage Jewish immigration to Victoria), (18) Jewish autonomous region , Birobidjan, Siberia, Russia (1928, 0.3 million population envisaged; 30,000 in 1965), (19) German Madagascar plan (4 million population colony planned; abandoned 1941);and (20) Ho Chi Minh offer of home in exile, Vietnam (1946).

Check here to see if your present-day country is on this list for proposed (and in some cases actual) Jewish colonization (in which case you have escaped the fate of the poor Palestinians) : (1) Netherlands Antilles,  (2) Suriname,  (3) French Guiana, (4) [Jewish Kingdom of South America] (5) USA, (6) Turkey, (7) USA, (8) Syria, (9) Ukraine, (10) Cyprus, (11) Canada, (12) Argentina, Canada,  US and Brazil, (13) Egypt, (14) Kenya and Uganda, (15) Brazil, (16) Libya, (17) Australia, (18) Russia, (19) Malagasy, (20) Vietnam.

Of course, while all these countries have escaped the fate of the poor Palestinians they haven’t got off scot free: thus Apartheid Israel has been a dirty tricks surrogate for the US in Africa, Asia and the Americas (most notably in the genocide of the Guatemalan Indians) (see 4 in the above lists).  The United States of America is horribly dominated by racist, pro-war racist Zionists to the extent that it is now described as the United States of Israel (see 5, 7 and 12) and ditto Canada (see 12) and Australia (see 17). Libya has been murderously attacked by  Israel (see 16), Egypt (see 13) has been repeatedly invaded and occupied by Israel, and Syria (see 8) has been repeatedly attacked and is still partly occupied by Israel. Kenya and Uganda were invaded in circa 1904 by armed Jewish settlers and Uganda was invaded by  Israel in 1976. Russians are still under threat of nuclear annihilation from racist Zionist USA and have recently been subject to Apartheid Israel-backed genocidal violence in South Ossetia.

ti is interesting to note that Professor Sir Martin Gilbert makes no comment about the rights of Indigenous People in these proposed or actually realized colonial era schemes.

Perhaps the best known present day Jewish scholar is Professor Jared Diamond, author of “Guns, Germs and Steel” (a superb biological history of Man) and “Collapse” ( an account of the collapse of a variety of societies and civilizations). Professor Jared Diamond, in his best-selling book "Collapse (Prologue, p10, Penguin edition) enunciated the "moral principle, namely that it is morally wrong for one people to dispossess, subjugate, or exterminate another people" – an injunction grossly violated by Apartheid Israel and its racist, genocidal Western backers (notably the Anglo colonization- and genocide-based countries of the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the same racist quartet that refused to sign the 2007  UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People).

Further, the ardent pro-Zionist Professor Sir Martin Gilbert makes no mention in his list of the Steinberg Plan to settle Jews in the Kimberley region of North West Australia (a scheme that was ardently opposed by the racist Zionists who wanted to steal Palestine from its Indigenous inhabitants) - just as in his authoritative biography of Winston Churchill (see Gilbert, M. (1991), “Churchill. A Life” (Heinemann, London)) he fails to mention the 1943-1945 Bengali Holocaust in which Churchill, Britain’s #1 war criminal, deliberately murdered 6-7 million Indians in the man-made WW2 Bengal Famine (for details of this “forgotten” atrocity see the 2008  BBC broadcast involving me, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others).  

Leon Gettler’s book “An Unpromised Land” is a very readable and well-documented account of the Kimberley Scheme. A brief chapter-by chapter summary follows [comments by me are in square brackets].

Chapter 1, “A Cattleman’s Paradise” describes European “discovery“ of the region from  the period of 1688 (William Dampier) onwards and the subsequent violent, genocidal European settlement of the Kimberley region from 1883 onwards by Patrick Durack and others between the huge Victoria and Ord Rivers near Wyndham, Western Australia. Pigeon (Jandamarra) of the Bunaba People fought the invasion but was defeated. Gettler quotes from a newspaper of the time:  “It would be a good time for the Western Australian Government to shut its eyes for say three months and let the settlers up here have a little time to teach the nigger the difference between thine and mine … it would only have to be done once and once done, could easily be forgotten about.” Gettler comments (p23): “Such was the pervasive atmosphere of frontier brutality, that neck-chains were still being used by police to bring in Aboriginal prisoners as late as 1958”

Chapter 2, “Refujews” is best summarized by a timeline: 1896, Theodor Herzl’s “The Jewish Sate” (opted for Argentina or Palestine) ; 1897, First Zionist Conference  wanted Palestine [then inhabited by 0.5 million Indigenous inhabitants and 25,000 Jews, half of them immigrants]; 1902 Joseph Chamberlain offered slabs of Uganda and Kenya to the Zionists; 1905 the 7th Zionist Conference rejected the UK “Uganda Plan” ; led by UK writer Israel Zangwill, the “Jewish Territorialist Organization” regarded Palestine as too small and under threat from Indigenous Arabs. They approached Australian PM Deakin who rejected the notion of a separate race-based settler group living in a separate “state” under their own laws within Australia; [1916 Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement dividing the Arab world between UK and France; 1917 Balfour Declaration “granting” Palestine as a Jewish Homeland in an unsuccessful attempt to keep Russia in the war through Russian Zionist activism – see Martin Gilbert’s book “First World War, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1994; p373]; 1925 JTO disbanded;  1938, Minister for the Interior John McEwan permitted 15,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism to come to Australia [my father and uncle were among  them].

The 1917 Balfour Declaration is reproduced below .