The remote but spectacular Kimberley region of Western Australia came close to becoming a Jewish homeland during the Holocaust – and more than a decade before Israel became a nation.
If history had unfolded differently, the Jewish people could have lived far from the troubled Middle East and established their homeland there. Australia.
The battles for sovereignty would have been of the indigenous legal rather than military variety, a far cry from the disputed holy city of Jerusalem, where Jews and Muslims claim a religious connection.
Just four months before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonists sent Russian-born socialist Isaac Steinberg – a former Soviet justice minister – to Western Australia to investigate the idea of purchase 2.8 million hectares of land in the state. northwest to accommodate 75,000 Jewish refugees.
The remote but spectacular Kimberley region of Western Australia came close to becoming a Jewish homeland during the Holocaust – and more than a decade before Israel became a nation.
This idea, known as the Kimberley Scheme, proposed to allow Jewish refugees to develop pastoral and agricultural industries in an isolated and sparsely populated area, stretching from Wyndham in Western Australia to the Victoria River in the Territory of North.
Michael Durack, managing director of the company Connor, Doherty and Durack Ltd, was prepared to sell the land at a “reasonable price”.
This followed discussions between the league and Australian government officials in London.
Although the Kimberley is remote, it is fertile and productive.
Israel, despite its hostile neighbors, has been a model of agricultural innovation, pioneering drip irrigation and vertical gardens to grow wheat and strawberries in the Negev desert.
The Kimberley is now home to the Ord River Project, which has flourished since the 1963 opening of the Kununurra Diversion Dam and the 1971 creation of Lake Argyle, the largest freshwater reservoir on mainland Australia.
Tropical fruits, chickpeas and sugar cane are grown there.
When Steinberg arrived in Perth in May 1939, the Holocaust had already been going on for six years.
Jews were murdered after Adolf Hitler’s Nazis spearheaded the boycott of Jewish businesses and seizure of property in Germany.
In 1940, the Western Australian state Labor government, led by the then premier John Willcock, fully supported the Kimberley project, as did the Australasian Council of Trade Unions, as it was then known. NEWS.
Dr Brian Wimborne, a visiting scholar at the Australian National University and a research assistant at the Australian Dictionary of Biography, noted that the Jewish people had been pleasantly surprised.
“Australia did not have a tradition of extreme anti-Semitism which, in much of Europe, was characterized by pogroms and massacres; and the delegation was pleasantly surprised by the sympathy and understanding it received from non-Jewish organizations and individuals,” he said.
The political left of the time supported the Jewish people and the Kimberley Project proposal was modeled on the kibbutz model, based on a model of collectivist agriculture practiced by Jewish farmers in the Middle East since the early 20th century.
But there was opposition from the popular tabloid Smith’s Weekly, founded by journalist Robert Clyde Packer, the great-grandfather of former media and casino mogul James Packer – a billionaire now an ardent supporter of Israel.
During the final war years, Labor Prime Minister John Curtin informed Steinberg in July 1944 that the Australian government would not “depart from long-established policy regarding the settlement of foreigners in Australia” and could not “accept the proposal for a group settlement of the territory”. exclusive type envisaged by the Freeland League”.
The Kimberley Project proposed to allow Jewish refugees to develop pastoral and agricultural industries in an isolated and sparsely populated area, stretching from Wyndham in Western Australia to the Victoria River in the Northern Territory.
Curtin’s Labor successor, Ben Chifley, also did not support the idea, even after Steinberg published the book Australia – The Unpromised Land.
On May 14, 1948, Israel became a nation with David Ben-Gurion of the Labor Party as its founding prime minister.
This occurred three decades after the signing of the 67-word Balfour Declaration committing the British to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” at the height of the First World War in November 1917.
This document was signed by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, a former Conservative Prime Minister, and Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a British banker and leader of the Zionist movement.
Instead of fighting the Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Jews around the world could have established their own version of Israel in Australia alongside the Aborigines (pictured is a strike on Jabalia in the northern Strip of Gaza, as Israel retaliates against Hamas militants)
