The Plan for a Jewish Homeland in Australia
December 17, 2010
Andrew Casey lifts the lid on a little-known campaign to establish a Jewish homeland in NW Australia.(Edited by Henry Makow)
*******************
Isaac Steinberg (1888-1957, left) was the first People's Commissar for Justice after the Russian Revolution - a close comrade of V.I.Lenin - but they fell out and he escaped the Soviet Union just as the secret police were about to arrest him.
Two decades later he was gazing over the landscape of the Kimberley region of Western Australia - and promoting a new utopia - a homeland for the Jews in these far distant and isolated lands.
I.N. Steinberg had also split from the Zionists and was promoting "Territorialism" - and for this vision he had the enthusiastic support of the Australian Council of Trade Unions and rank-and-file members of Perth unions and the Labor Party.
In the 1930s and early 40s, the London-based Steinberg was a regular visitor to Australia, trying to open the gates for refugees from the Nazis menace.
He lobbied unions, church groups and other community groups to back his vision of tens of thousands of Jews settling in an area just west of Wyndham in the Kimberley region - straddling the WA and NT border .Before Steinberg, a Yiddish poet and essayist Melech Ravitch visited the Northern Territory in the 1930s to investigate the region as a Jewish haven - collecting data on topography and climate. He promoted a bigger number than Steinberg, suggesting the area could accommodate a million Jewish refugees.
Jewish Territorialism had been a small, but competing, political ideology to Zionism since the end of the 19th century, led by Israel Zangwill - whose novels about the desperate lives of East-End London Jews was on a par with Charles Dickens's memorable novels.
Zangwill and the Territorialists had reservations about settling Jews in Palestine pointing out the disagreeable " facts of geography and history which Zionists have always refused to look in the face."
It is one of the great ' what ifs' of history - what would have happened if, instead of settling in Palestine, Australia had given the green light to this project and put aside a huge swathe of territory and created a Jewish state on our continent - much like the Mormon ' state' of Utah.
Today the campaign to create a Jewish territory in the north of WA is a forgotten footnote in history but in the late 30s and early 40s it was a much debated issue with editorials in newspapers, debates in union halls and state and federal parliament.
While The Canberra Time, The Age, Truth and the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised against Jewish migration and the settling of large populations of Jews in the Kimberley the Labor paper, the Australian Worker came out strongly behind the project.
In an editorial, the Australian Worker the project as " a generous working-class contribution toward the solution of the terrible refugee problem which Nazi persecution has created in Europe."
When Steinberg first arrived in Freemantle in 1939, his political pedigree was a source of fascination.
Letters of introduction from British Labour MPs Ernest Bevin and Clement Atlee meant he was quickly accepted, and invited to address Labor Party branch meetings and trade union members across Perth about his project for the Kimberleys.
The Labor newspaper the Westralian Worker hailed him as a man of strong Labor convictions.
" The presence of Dr Steinberg in Australia brings closer to us the persecutions now being suffered by the Jews in totalitarian countries and his mission is one to which it is impossible to remain indifferent," the Westralian Worker said.
The left-wing trade unions were quite enamored of Isaac Steinberg's revolutionary pedigree. Union leaders attacked anti-Semitism as a tool of class oppression and urged the Government to bring in more refugees.
Steinberg met with union and Labor Party members wherever he could - including the then leader of the Federal opposition, John Curtin (left) - and he wrote back to his supporters in Europe: 'I think we can now say with certainty that the workers of Perth are with us."The ACTU officially endorsed the scheme in 1940 and the TLCs around Australia passed resolutions approving it.
The then NSW Labor Council secretary, R.A. King, described the project as ' a haven for the victims of Fascist ferocity'
ACTU President Percy Clarey - in an early example of support for multiculturalism - wrote to Steinberg in London reassuring him that there would be no restrictions on the settlement's cultural autonomy, religious affairs or language - be it Yiddish or Hebrew.
But when he became Prime Minister in 1941, John Curtin changed his mind. On 15 July 1944, he informed Steinberg that the Australian government would not "depart from the long-established policy in regard to alien settlement in Australia" and could not "entertain the proposal for a group settlement of the exclusive type contemplated by the Freeland League".
However even after Israel was created, Steinberg tried once more - unsuccessfully - approaching the newly re-elected Robert Menzies in 1950.
Menzies replied that the idea ran contrary to his government's policy of assimilation aimed at achieving " the ideal of one Australian family of peoples, devoid of foreign communities."
A former industrial reporter for The Melbourne Age, Leon Gettler, wrote in 1993 a short history of this attempt to create a Jewish homeland in the Kimberleys.The Fremantle Arts Centre Press published An Unpromised Land.
When Gettler presented copies of his history to the then ACTU President, Martin Ferguson, and the then ACTU Secretary, Bill Kelty, they were taken by surprise at the role the ACTU and trade unions had played in this byway of Jewish history.
The source for most of this article is Leon Gettler's book.
--
Related- Jewish Autonomous Oblast
Steve said (December 18, 2010):
In 1828, there were only 100 Jews in Australia. That number increased to just over 1,000 in 1841 and, as a result of the Victorian gold rush, 5,486 in 1861. In 1933, the combined Australian Jewish communities numbered only 23,000 people, with most of them being from Anglo-Celtic backgrounds. Between 1933 and 1939, 8,000 Jews immigrated to the country; and between 1945 and 1955 another 27,000 immigrated, prominently Holocaust survivors of eastern Europe. The arriving migrants were helped to settle by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the Australian Jewish Welfare Societies and Australian Jewish Welfare and Relief Society. A majority of the migrants settled in Melbourne, particularly in Carlton, while others settled in Sydney in suburbs such as Kings Cross, Bondi and St. Ives. In recent years, significant numbers of Jews have immigrated from South Africa, the former Soviet Union and some Israelis. There has also been a large influx of Indian Jews, mostly from Bombay. The Jewish population of Australia was 88,834 in the 2006 census.