Dr Isaac Nachman Steinberg (1882-1957) was a Latvian-born Russian lawyer, People’s Commissar (Narkom) for Justice in V.I. Lenin’s Bolshevik Government, and thence in the UK a leading member of the Freeland League that opposed Zionist colonisation of Palestine but advocated settlement of Jewish refugees in Australia (the Kimberley region of NW Australia), Suriname (Saramacca region) and the UK (all of these humane propositions being opposed by the Zionists). The Freeland League became a major advocate for retention of Yiddish language and culture. (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Nachman_Steinberg ; “An Unpromised Land” by Leon Gettler, Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 1993; Gideon Polya ““An Unpromised Land” by Leon Gettler, How Australia escaped becoming Apartheid Israel”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/31744/26/ ;
"The Age" newspaper, Melbourne, “Colonization of Jews”, 16 January 1946: “WASHINGTON. Jan. 15 (A.A.P.) Dr. Isaac Steinberg, secretary of the Free-land League, testifying before the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine, mentioned Australia as a possible area for Jewish colonisation” (see: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19460116&id=8QQTAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Q5cDAAAAIBAJ&pg=849,842636 ).
Dr Isaac Steinberg, on Zionism, 1948: “Yet believing in a state means also believing in all, its – be they even democratic instruments – army, police, diplomacy, censorship and loud patriotism. A people which for many years lived outside these state attributes, which has not absorbed into its system the ”sweet poison” of those state instruments of power and conquest, has, suddenly, in a day, become bewitched by state instincts. Instead of following that historical, political sense which kept them always at a distance from the state machine, Jews suddenly felt a lust for their own state responsibility in a world which is gorged and oversatiated with statehoods”. [1].
[1]. Dr Isaac Steinberg, “This is not the way (The Failure of Jewish Diplomacy)”, Australian Jewish Forum, April-May 1948, pp. 6-8; quoted in Cahpeter 8, p. 134, Leon Gettler, “An Unpromised Land”, Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 1993.