Mesopotamia – ‘The Promised Land’: The Jewish Territorial Organization Project in the Bilād Al-Rāfidayn and the Question of Palestine, 1899–1917

At the beginning of the twentieth century attempts were made by the Zionist Organization and the Jewish Territorial Organization (JTO) to promote Jewish settlement in the region between the two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. The settlement plans never reached the practical stage, and the plan disappeared without a trace. One hundred thousand Jews from Russia were not sent as planned in the train from Odessa to Iraq, and Jewish settlements were not established in it. Nevertheless, although the settlement plan was never carried out, it had great import not on the practical level but on the ideological one. The article is divided into three parts. The first part is an attempt to gain an in-depth understanding of Territorialist ideology and of Zionist thinking; the second part traces the efforts of the Zionist Movement and of the JTO to promote a comprehensive settlement plan in Mesopotamia; the third and last part examines the arguments and explanations of the Territorialists against Palestine and for Mesopotamia and other territories in East and Southwest Africa, Canada and Australia.