naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
The offer was first made by British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain to Theodore Herzl's Zionist group in 1903. He offered 5,000 square miles (13,000 km2) of the Mau Escarpment in what is today Kenya. The offer was a response to pogroms in the Russian Empire, and it was hoped the area could be a refuge from persecution for the Jewish people.
Its high elevation gave it a temperate climate, making it suitable for European settlement. However, the observers found a dangerous land filled with lions and other creatures. Moreover, it was populated by a large number of Maasai people, who did not seem at all amenable to an influx of people coming from Europe.
It's inexplicable what happened, and to me it seems it must have been deliberate negligence on party of Israeli military and security services.
After receiving this report, [World Zionist] Congress decided in 1905 to politely decline the British offer. Some Jews, who viewed this as a mistake, formed the Jewish Territorial Organization with the aim of establishing a Jewish state anywhere.
But the British seem to have rescinded their offer later because of opposition of white settlers?
The Zionists' proposal was met with equal controversy in the British colony.[6][7] The white British settlers were openly hostile toward the offer and formed the "Anti-Zionist Immigration Committee," which rejected the proposal through the African Standard. They believed that British poor people deserved the land more than the Jews and expressed concerns about how the black natives would react to the Jewish immigrants. Furthermore, there were worries about granting a special territory to an alien community after the troubles in Canada with the Doukhobors, and doubts about Jews' ability to engage in profitable farming. The British media also joined in the objection, amplifying these concerns.
In December 1904, the Zionist Organization dispatched a special commission to Guas Ngishu to assess if the conditions were suitable for Jewish settlement. The commission was composed of Major Alfred St Hill Gibbons, a British veteran of the Boer War and a well-known explorer; Alfred Kaiser, a Swiss orientalist and advisor for the Northwest Cameroon Company; and Nachum Wilbush, a Zionist engineer.[7][8] Although there were disparities in their final reports, with the climate used to argue for and against the Jewish settlement, the main reason for the rejection of the Plan in 1905 was partly due to the opposition by the former high commissioner of East Africa and the white settlers in the area. This led the British to withdraw the offer.
Edit:
The mentioned "Doukhobors" were a pacifist christian sect from Russia. They first tried to unsuccessfully settle in Cyprus:
… after Quaker supporters both made assurances of the Doukhobors' political inoffensiveness and provided financial guarantees against their potential indigency, officials permitted over 1,000 Doukhobors to establish farming settlements in several locations on the island beginning in the second half of 1898. However, the Cyprus experiment soon proved to be disastrous: beset by disease (made worse by insufficient food that met the Doukhobors' religious requirements) as well as internal disagreements over community organization, nearly ten percent of the colony died by early 1899.[citation needed]
In Canada their customs were peculiar (Google "Doukhobors nude protest march") and they were distrusted:
Verigin [the religious leader] persuaded his followers to free their animals, and pull their wagons and plows themselves. … Canadians, politicians, and the media were deeply suspicious of the Doukhobors. Their communal lifestyle seemed suspicious, their refusal to send children to school was considered deeply troubling, while pacifism caused anger during the First World War. … Due to the community's aversion to private ownership of land, Verigin had the land registered in the name of the community. By 1906, the Canadian Government's new Minister of the Interior Frank Oliver started requiring the registration of land in the name of individual owners. Many Doukhobors refused to comply, resulting in 1907 in the reverting of more than a third (258,880 acres (1,047.7 km2)) of Doukhobor lands back to the Crown. The loss of legal title to their land became a major grievance.
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Notes -
They say the Jews are smart:
It's inexplicable what happened, and to me it seems it must have been deliberate negligence on party of Israeli military and security services.
The past is a strange country. Not only did the Zionists reject the offer (but Herzl was for it!):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_a_Jewish_state
But the British seem to have rescinded their offer later because of opposition of white settlers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uganda_Scheme
Edit: The mentioned "Doukhobors" were a pacifist christian sect from Russia. They first tried to unsuccessfully settle in Cyprus:
In Canada their customs were peculiar (Google "Doukhobors nude protest march") and they were distrusted:
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