On historical reasons – Alice Kaplan in NYRB:

‘Theodor Herzl, the “founding dreamer” of a Jewish homeland, once wrote that if his conception of Zion were never translated into reality, at least it might inspire a novel with the title The Promised Land. The Broken Promised Land might be a more fitting title for Melting Point, Rachel Cockerell’s jigsaw puzzle of a family history and her discovery of its roots in the Zionist experiment.’

(…)

‘There is also, inevitably, a dodge. But what a relief, where such a complicated story is concerned, to have a break from the tyranny of opinion, to be transported into a world of sheer potential. Still, I couldn’t help but read Melting Point with burning questions. What does she think about what happened? What went right or wrong?’

(…)

‘That technique gives Melting Point its evocative powers: the author/director remains backstage, cutting and pasting, seeking the most vivid descriptions, restoring the grain of voices. The result is a book that sings with narrative energy. The World Zionist Congresses at Basel are recreated in dramatic detail, down to the top hats and morning suits, until the fateful gathering of 1903 when Herzl is booed off the stage for suggesting that there might be an alternative to resettlement in Palestine. He wins a Pyrrhic victory with a vote authorizing an exploration of Uganda (actually Kenya) as a transitional homeland. The Russian Jews, fervent opponents of the plan, roll on the floor to mourn the forgotten Holy Land. The passages on the search for a Zion that isn’t Palestine—in Angola and Libya, in Mexico and Paraguay—filled me with a strange kind of wishfulness: What if they had gone there instead? Michael Chabon explored this fantasy to great comic effect in his speculative fiction The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), about a temporary Jewish settlement in Alaska after the Jews are kicked out of Palestine in the war of 1948.’

(…)

‘Territorialism, the movement led by Zangwill and Jochelman after Herzl’s death, wanted Zionism without Zion. These leaders never gave up on the idea that Jews needed a homeland—in Zangwill’s words, “Just as plants cannot thrive unless they have water, so people cannot thrive unless they have land”—but they were willing to look beyond the small strip of land nestled between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. In the search for that other place, however, geopolitical reality rushed in with a vengeance. The scholar of Jewish history Derek Penslar’s formulation is helpful here: Zionism was both a colonial project of occupation and a liberation movement demanding a national home for an oppressed people who had no home of their own.’

(…)

‘Cockerell avoids the question that will likely occur to most of her readers today: What if Zion had been established somewhere else? And because it was established in Palestine, what next? Can the liberation movement be salvaged from the colonial project? With an ear for the absurd, Cockerell is drawn to sources scrambling to find the right analogy. For example, the Labour Party politician Henry Norman Smith wrote in the Nottingham Journal in September 1948, “It must, they say, be Palestine, ‘for historical reasons.’ Red Indians might, with equal energy, demand the title deeds of all Manhattan!” Was this an important point of view and a recurring analogy, or an eccentric one? When quotations are chosen for narrative excitement (Saunders’s “energy”) rather than for exemplarity, there’s no way of knowing. We delight in the story without fully understanding the history.’

(…)

‘Rachel Cockerell shows us that the creation of a Jewish homeland was never a foregone conclusion or a sure thing. And she makes us hear how the yearning for a homeland, an essential part of Jewish history, is mirrored in Palestinian suffering. “Where can we go? What can we do?” Even the words are the same.’

Read the review here.

What if? Alaska? Kenya? Sicily?

A friend of mine recently said, ‘the result would have been everywhere the same, because of antisemitism.’

Maybe.

The Nakba and the Holocaust, twin brothers. Perhaps we became addicted to dwelling on suffering. Not only the Jewish people, everybody. From there, aggression became inevitable. The perpetrator needs to believe he is a victim.

The othernquestion is: should yearning not remain yearning? Isn’t the fulfillment of yearning always Messianism, one way or the other.