Extraordinary story of how a remote section of Australia’s Outback almost became a Jewish homeland – a decade before Israel’s creation

The remote but spectacular Kimberley region of Western Australia was almost turned into a Jewish homeland during the Holocaust – and more than a decade before Israel became a nation.

If history had turned out differently, the Jewish people might have lived away from the troubled Middle East and created their own homeland within Australia.

The battles for sovereignty would have been of the legal kind of native title rather than the military kind, a far cry from the disputed holy city of Jerusalem, where both Jews and Muslims claim a religious connection.

Just four months before World War II broke out in 1939, the Freeland League of Jewish Territorial Colonists sent Russian-raised socialist Isaac Steinberg—a former Soviet justice minister—to Western Australia to investigate the idea of ​​buying the 2.8 million acres of land in the northwest state to settle 75,000 Jewish refugees.

Western Australia’s remote but spectacular Kimberley region almost became a Jewish homeland during the Holocaust – and more than a decade before Israel became a nation

This idea, known as the Kimberley Scheme, proposed allowing Jewish refugees to develop pastoral and agricultural industries in a remote and sparsely populated area that stretched from Wyndham in Western Australia to the Victoria River in the Northern Territory.

Managing director of Connor, Doherty and Durack Ltd, Michael Durack, was willing to sell the land at a ‘reasonable price’.

This followed discussions between the league and Australian government representatives in London.

While the Kimberley is remote, it is fertile and productive.

Israel, despite having hostile neighbors, has been an example of agricultural innovation, pioneering drip irrigation and vertical gardens to grow wheat and strawberries in the Negev desert.

The Kimberley is now home to the Ord River scheme, which has flourished since the opening of the Kununurra Diversion Dam in 1963 and the creation of Lake Argyle in 1971, the largest freshwater reservoir in mainland Australia.

It grows tropical fruits, chickpeas and sugarcane.

When Steinberg landed in Perth in May 1939, the Holocaust had been going on for six years.

Jews were being killed as Adolf Hitler’s Nazis led the boycott of Jewish businesses and the seizure of property in Germany.

By 1940, the Western Australian state Labor government, led by then Prime Minister John Willcock, was fully supportive of the Kimberley Scheme, as was the Australasian Council of Trade Unions, as the ACTU was then known.

Australian National University visiting his friend Dr. Brian Wimborne, a research assistant with the Australian Dictionary of Biography, noted that the Jewish people were pleasantly surprised.

‘Australia did not have a tradition of extreme anti-Semitism which in much of Europe was characterized by carnage and slaughter; and the delegation was pleasantly surprised by the sympathy and understanding it received from non-Jewish organizations and individuals,” he said.

The political left at the time was supportive of the Jewish people, and the Kimberley Scheme proposal was modeled on the kibbutz, based on a collectivist model of agriculture that had been practiced by Jewish farmers in the Middle East since the early twentieth century.

But there was opposition from the popular tabloid Smith’s Weekly, founded by journalist Robert Clyde Packer, the great-grandfather of former media and casino magnate James Packer – a billionaire who is now an ardent supporter of Israel.

In the later years of the war, Labor Prime Minister John Curtin in July 1944 informed Steinberg that the Australian Government would not “depart from its long-established policy regarding the settlement of aliens in Australia” and could not “entertain the proposal for a exclusive group solution designed by the Freeland League.

The Kimberley Scheme proposed to allow Jewish refugees to develop pastoral and agricultural industries in a remote and sparsely populated area, stretching from Wyndham in Western Australia to the Victoria River of the Northern Territory.

Nor did Curtin’s Labor successor, Ben Chifley, support the idea, even after Steinberg published Australia – The Promised Land.

On May 14, 1948, Israel became a nation with David Ben-Gurion of the Labor Party as its founding prime minister.

This was three decades after the signing of the 67-word Balfour Declaration, which committed the British to “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” at the height of World War I in November 1917.

That document was signed by the United Kingdom’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, a former Conservative prime minister, and Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a British banker and leader of the Zionist movement.

Instead of fighting the Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip, the Jews of the world could have created their own version of Israel in Australia together with the Aboriginal people (pictured is an attack in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip as Israel retaliates against the militants of Hamas)