A homeland without statehood?
Laura Almagor in New Lines Magazine
In New Lines Magazine, Assistant Professor in Political History Laura Almagor, specialised in modern Jewish history, wrote an article about the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonization. This group embraced Jewish Territorialism and had finding places of settlement for Jews as its main goal. However, unlike the Zionist movement, the Freeland League was not interested in creating a Jewish nation-state.
Steinberg and the Freeland League
A state, the Freeland League felt, would entail serious moral and security risks. The movement’s leader Isaac Nachman Steinberg warned the young state of Israel back in 1955: “The change-over from a glorious spiritual path, albeit lacking political power, to a route strewn with the glittering symbols of state power and military prestige, appears to be a hazardous one.”
Steinberg and the Freeland League saw more in an autonomous Jewish region in, for example, Kimberley, a sparsely populated area of Australia, or in Suriname, which was still under Dutch colonial rule in the late 1940s. “Steinberg had come to believe that finding nonstatist territorial solutions for Jewish homelessness was one important way of achieving his idealistic ambition of improving the fate of all of mankind”, Almagor writes.
With the current impasse in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, perhaps territorialism can help demonstrate the breadth and depth of the Jewish political imagination, Almagor feels. In the article in New Lines Magazine, she explains why.