Israel Zangwill's project for Jewish colonization in Mesopotamia

Zionist aspirations, according to some Arab leaders, are not limited to the region between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan, but extend to the entire area between the Nile and the Euphrates.' The present paper does not propose to discuss the possible validity of that suspicion. It intends, rather, to indicate one possible historical basis for it. Admittedly, official Zionist attention has always been centred on Palestine itself. Yet, especially during the movement's early years, this preoccupation did not preclude occasional forays of Jewish interest into other, neighbouring, lands. Indeed Herzl, some time before he secured a tentative British offer of a Jewish land of refuge in East Africa, undertook protracted negotiations into the possibility of Jewish settlement in El-Arish, Cyprus and southern Syria.2 Soon after Herzl's death, the Zionist movement largely abandoned such schemes. In particular, during the emotional debates over the East African offer during the Sixth and Seventh Zionist Congresses (1903 and 1905), the vast majority of delegates proclaimed their unswerving adherence to Palestine. Nevertheless, several prominent leaders continued to advocate the establishment of an autonomous Jewish region elsewhere. Of these, one of the more articulate was Israel Zangwill, the Anglo-Jewish author. Despite his own initial wish to 'live in Palestine and make it his home',3 Zangwill had long maintained that 'Zion is not the only possible centre for a restored Jewish nationality.' Indeed, at the seventh Zionist Congress he had led the minority call for an alternative refuge. To this end, he established the Jewish Territorial Organisation (ITO) and thereby split the Zionist camp.5 Four years later, he suggested one method whereby that breach might be healed. In a series of speeches delivered to mass audiences during the summer of 1909, Zangwill proclaimed the virtues of Jewish colonisation in Mesopotamia. This, he claimed, was a project which warranted the attention of both the Zionists and their opponents. The land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, he argued, suffered from none of the defects which the Zionists had found in East Africa. It was, after all, the historic 'cradle of the Jewish race' and no further than 'across the river' from Palestine. Yet, it also presented a legitimate field of enterprise for those international Jewish relief organisations which feared the political and particularist implications of the Zionist movement. Ultimately, the anti-Zionists would acknowledge that a Hebrew settlement in Mesopotamia need not be identified with a restored Zion situated in the traditional focus of Jewish nationalistic hopes. Such a colony would not therefore arouse their fears that the 'universal' mission of their religion was being betrayed, or that their own loyalty to the countries of their birth was being challenged. On the contrary, the project presented a unique opportunity for a combined effort by both poles of opinion.' Zangwill's timing was auspicious. At the turn of the twentieth century, the

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