In a little-known episode in East Africa’s history, advocates of a Jewish homeland decided 112 years ago to authorise an expedition to today’s Kenya in response to a British proposal to establish a “Jewish territory” on the Uasin Gishu Plateau.
Meeting in Switzerland, the Sixth Zionist Congress voted 295-178 on August 26, 1903, to send this “investigatory commission” to an area bounded by Lake Nakuru, Kisumu, Mount Elgon and the equator.
Earlier that same year, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had suggested to Zionist leader Theodor Herzl that this roughly 16,300-square-km portion of the British East Africa Protectorate could be designated for Jewish settlement. Chamberlain, who had recently visited the area, said the plateau had “an excellent climate suitable for white people.”
The territory would be locally administered by a “Jewish official” and be given a “free hand” in religious and domestic matters, Sir Clement Hill, Superintendent of African Protectorates, wrote in the run-up to the August 26, 1903, vote. The Jews’ local autonomy would be conditioned on the British government “exercising general control,” Sir Clement added.
The subsequent history of East Africa, as well as that of the Jewish people, would have proved quite different from what actually transpired had a large number of Jews settled in today’s western Kenya.
Prof Adam Rovner, author of In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands Before Israel, speculates that a Jewish settlement may have been acceptable to the African inhabitants of the region. And it is likely, the US-based scholar adds, that many Jewish lives would have been saved if East Africa had offered a refuge from the Nazi Holocaust.
As it was, the idea of a Jewish settlement in East Africa was ultimately voted down by the Zionist Congress that met in 1905. The majority viewed Palestine as the only suitable site for Jews to settle en masse.
Jews felt “no emotional connection” to East Africa, comments Rabbi Berel Wein, head of a Jerusalem-based foundation focused on Jewish history. For that reason, he adds, East Africa was seen as no more acceptable as a home for Jews than were several sites suggested in the 19th and early 20th century, including Madagascar, parts of Argentina and Chile, and the island of Tasmania off the southern coast of Australia.
Arguing in favour of the East African option in 1903, Herzl made it clear that he viewed it as offering only a temporary safe haven for Jews. The ultimate aim, Herzl pledged, would still be to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, which was then under Turkish control.
And that did occur in 1948, with the declaration of the state of Israel in what Jews viewed as their ancient homeland.
The Zionist majority that did narrowly agree in 1903 to at least consider the British proposal for an East African haven believed that Jews urgently needed a place where they would be safe from the massacres, or “pogroms,” they regularly suffered in parts of Europe.
Dozens of Jews were killed by mobs in Russia three months prior to the vote to dispatch the exploratory expedition to today’s western Kenya.
The three-member commission that travelled to the Uasin Gishu Plateau split 2-1 against what was referred to at the time as the Uganda Plan.
Alfred Kaiser, a Swiss scholar who had converted to Islam, opposed the idea on the grounds that a more suitable site could be found elsewhere in the British Empire. Nahum Wilbush, a Jewish engineer, was wholly unsympathetic to the plan for an East African enclave. And British explorer Hill Gibbons suggested setting up an experimental settlement to gauge whether the region could actually accommodate a significant number of Jews.
The Zionist Congress that formally rejected the Uganda Plan in 1905 reaffirmed Palestine as the place where Jews should seek to establish a homeland.
MBISHA
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*This therefore means their claim of biblical Judea Samaria is all hog wash? It was nothing but a geopolitical arrangement