Gideon Polya, “Book review: “An Unpromised Land" by Leon Gettler” - How Australia escaped becoming Apartheid Israel”, MWC News, 8 July 2009.
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 .
Foreign Office,
November 2nd, 1917.
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet:
"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country".
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.
Yours sincerely
Arthur James Balfour
Chapter 3, “His own vine and fig tree” is again summarized as a timeline. 1935, neo-territorialists reconstituted as the Freeland League for Territorial Colonization that , unlike the Zionists, wanted sanctuary rather than an autonomous homeland; 1938, Australian journalist C.H. Chomley, worried by the so-called “yellow peril” to Australia’s north, wanted settlement of the Kimberley and, after communication from Dr Steinberg, stated “In these circumstances, I as an Australian, suggest that Australia could do nothing more eminently to her advantage than to make an offer to the Jews which might promote large-scale Jewish Settlement in the Kimberley”. Minister McEwan wrote to pastoralist Michael Durack stating that the Government was opposed to “undue aggregation of aliens” (p58).
Chapter 4, “Is known to be a clever propagandist”, describes the background of Dr Isaac Nachman Steinberg. a Latvian Jew (born 1888) who from 1906studied law in Moscow, Despite British attempts via the Balfour Declaration to keep Russia in the war via Zionist activism, in 1918 Russia signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Germany. Dr Steinberg resigned his position with Bolshevik leader Lenin and was subsequently imprisoned. In 1923 he arrived in London and later started activism with the neo-territorialist Freeland League for Territorial Colonization.
Chapter 5, “Are we going to have Jews or Japs?” summarizes the early debate in Australia over the proposed Jewish Homeland in Western Australia. Dr Steinberg arrived in Australia and embarked on a one-man propaganda campaign with mixed results. The State Government under Premier John Willcock (Australian Labor Party, ALP) accepted the proposition with qualifications. Edward Horton Angelo, State MP of the NW province, stated: “ In my opinion, the proposition can be boiled down to one question: “Are we going to have Jews or Japs?’ I say, let us have the Jews”. Dr Steiberg’s propgandizing secured many influentuial supporters in Australia.
Chapter 6, “Zionists and anglo-conformists” describes how the Zionists and the Jewish Welfare Society opposed the Kimberley Scheme. The Zionist Federation of Australia opposed the Kimberley Scheme, its president Alec Masel stated: :“it was not saving them [the Jews] to offer them stone instead of bread”. Gettler observes (p99): “ The Zionists also feared the Kimberley activists were playing into the hands of the British, who did not want to antagonize the Arabs by letting more Jewish refugees into Palestine. Zionists believed Britain would deny them a homeland in Palestine if Jewish refugees could find shelter in the Kimberley.” [In contrast, Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Jewish Governor General of Australia supported the UK 1939 White Paper that opposed Jewish immigration to Palestine on the basis that it would violate the rights of the Indigenous People; see Max Gordon, “Sir Isaac Isaacs”, Heinemann, London, 1963).
Chapter 7, “A long-term campaign of systematic propaganda” describes Australian reservations about having a race-based enclave within their country. Thus the Canberra Times (31 December 1943; quoted on pp117-110): “We must set our face against any duplication in this country of those conditions that have caused trouble in the old world. We should not and must not have people of any particular race, class or creed coming to this country and setting up settlements which are to continue to distinguish them from the rest of the community as they have been distinguished in their country of origin. Every immigrant coming to this country must be Australian.”
Chapter 8, “Little short of a national disaster” describes the final denouement of the Kimberley Scheme. On 28 October 1943 PM Curtin (Australian Labor Party) told Dr Steinberg that he had set up an interdepartmental committee to consider the scheme. In testimony to the Committee on 22 March 1944, a Security Services officer Captain Finzel opposed the project because of security concerns over existing colonies of Italians in Queensland and of Germans in South Australia. On 15 July 1944, PM Curtin wrote to Dr Steinberg telling him that the Government could not “see its way to depart from the long-established policy in regard to alien settlement in Australia” and would not “entertain the proposal for group settlement of the exclusive type contemplated by the Freeland League.” At the time a 1944 poll showed only 37% Australian support for a Jewish settlement. Steinberg retired to the US. Gettler comments (p134): “seeking a more conciliatory approach with the Arabs, he [Steinberg] increased his calls for a bi-national Jewsih-Arab state, a view he had advocate din the 1920s”. Steinberg died in New York in 1957.
In the Epilogue, Leon Gettler muses over the historical significance of the Kimberley Scheme. In 1972 The racist former Labor Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell [notorious for commenting “Two Wongs do not make a White” and race-based post-war immigration to Australia] revealed that the Kimberley Scheme was not an option for the Australian Government [his officers reportedly sought blond and blue-eyed “Aryan” inmates of post-war Displaced Persons (DP) Camps for immigrants to Apartheid Australia]. Nevertheless, this episode contributed to the public debate over the future constitution of Australia at a time when the racist White Australia Policy had been installed for 40 years.
Leon Gettler’s book “An Unpromised Land” is a well-researched, well-written and well-referenced book that certainly deserves re-visitation now as Apartheid Israel brutally confines 4 million Occupied Palestinians to about 8% of the former Palestine, including 1.5 million (half of them children and three quarters women and children) abusively confined to what the Catholic Church describes as the Gaza Concentration Camp.
Hundreds of millions of lucky people around the world in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia who escaped genocidal, racist Jewish colonization (including White Australians of Apartheid Australia) can say of the poor Palestinians (10 million in all now, 7 million of them refugees): “There but for the grace of God go I”.
However Apartheid Australia did not escape completely. The 2 major parties, the extreme right wing, conservative Liberal Party-National Party Coalition and the now extreme right wing Australian Labor Party (the ALP, pronounced ai-LP by its working class adherents and now well described as the Israel Labor Party or the Apartheid Labor Party), and collectively known as the Lib-Labs:
1. both are hugely supported financially by traitorous, dual citizen Zionists (including Australia’s most notorious, serially-offending billionaire corporate crook);
2. both backed Israel when it was bombing 25,000 Australian citizens in Lebanon in 2006;
3. both supported declaration of Hamas to be a “terrorist organization” and completely ignore its legitimacy after it won 76 out of 132 seats in the Occupied Palestinian election held in 2006 under racist Zionist guns;
4. both consistently supported nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israeli violence e.g. when in 2009 it murdered 1,400 Palestinians in the Gaza Concentration Camp (40% of the victims being children) in response to zero Israeli deaths from Gaza rockets in the previous year;
5. both support tax deductibility of financial support for Palestinian Genocide (post-invasion excess deaths 0.3 million; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 0.2 million; 7 million refugees) while making zakkat (the Muslim alms-giving obligation) for Gaza hospitals or Gaza orphans potentially liable to life imprisonment;
6. both support Zionist–backed US wars in Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan (post-invasion excess deaths 2.3 million and 3-7 million, respectively; post-invasion under-5 infant deaths 0.6 million and 2.3 million, respectively; 5-6 million and 3-4 million refugees, respectively with a further 2.5 million Pashtun refugees generated in NW Pakistan under Obama) – an Iraqi Genocide and Afghan Genocide as defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention;
7. both involved in mass murder of Muslim children – the annual death rate is 7% (for Occupied Afghanistan under-5 year old infants) as compared to 3% (for inmates of the Nazi Buchenwald Concentration Camp) and 10% (for Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese, for which crime Japanese generals were tried and hung);
8. both callously ignored pleas from anti-racist, humanitarian Jews and anti-racist humanitarian Australians (including the Australian Human Rights Commission) and supported race-based exclusion of Northern Territory Indigenous Australians from the provisions of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act;
9. both are complicit in outrageous, holocaust-ignoring, genocide-ignoring falsification of history taught in Australian schools and universities;
10. both are complicit in cowardly, Zionist-promoted Islamophobia and anti-Arab anti-Semitism;
11. both are variously complicit in highly offensive anti-Jewish anti-Semitism by identifying Apartheid Israel’s genocidal war crimes with ALL Jews; ignoring the heresy and blasphemy of Zionism in the context of traditional Orthodox Judaism; and ignoring false, defamatory labelling of anti-racist, humanitarian Jews as “anti-Semites”.
12. and both egregiously violate the sacred holocaust and genocide messages “never again to anyone”, “zero tolerance for racism”, “zero tolerance for lying” and “bear witness” - the core messages of the Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million dead, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation) and the WW2 Holocaust in general (30 million Slav, Jewish and Gypsy deaths in Europe, 35 million Chinese killed under the Japanese, and 6-7 million Indians starved to death by the British ).
Zionists have infected the other Western Murdochracies in a similar fashion, most notoriously the United States of America (aka the United States of Israel) where crimes against American citizens by racist Zionist-run Israel – e.g. the 1967 Israeli attack on the defenceless USS Liberty in international waters (killing 34 and wounding of 171) or the recent July 2009 Israeli piracy, kidnapping and imprisonment of a former African-American Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney and Irish Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire.
The Zionists must be sidelined from public life as have been other racist extremists such as the Nazis, neo-Nazis and KKK. There must be intra-national and international Sanctions and Boycotts applied to racist Zionist-run Apartheid Israel and its racist Western backers. Please tell everyone you can before it is too late and nuclear terrorist Apartheid Israel conventionally or nuclear bombs peaceful, remote Iran – a country that thanklessly defends Australia and the West from heroin from US-occupied Afghanistan and ecstasy from Israel.