In 1903, a bitter dispute wracked the Zionist movement over whether to accept a British proposal to create a Jewish homeland in East Africa. Although the proposal is known to posterity as the Uganda plan, the area in question lies in modern-day Kenya. The Zionist Congress rejected the plan, but nonetheless a small Jewish community sprang up in Kenya around this time, as Yoḥai Ben-Gedalyah writes. (Pictures can be found at the link below.)

[W]hen the Nazis took power in Germany, [a number of] German Jews found themselves seeking refuge in places they never would have expected. Granted, the influx of Jews to Kenya was small, but that didn’t stop them from having to go through the British Colonial Office that was in charge of immigration to Kenya. In order to gain immigration status in Kenya, one had to be registered as a farm manager—[a requirement that] limited Jews’ ability to settle on the land. The local Jewish community worked hard to encourage Jewish immigration but found much resistance from white European settlers and from the Indian community in East Africa [as well as from] from the British Colonial Office. Obviously, the opinion of the indigenous black population was not considered.

While the Jews of Nairobi were working hard on the local immigration initiative, British Jewry in England started their own widespread settlement campaign for thousands of Jews to relocate from Europe to Kenyan farmlands. They would settle in [an area known as] the White Highlands, which had already been designated for colonial farms.

In August 1938 the British initiative was registered as a private company . . . under the title Plough Settlements Association, which had an initial capital of 25,000 pounds. One of the partners for the British company was the Jewish Colonization Association (known as the ICA), an organization that sought to settle European Jews in agricultural areas.

The initiative was presented as a colonial and financial enterprise; the hidden [goal] of rescuing Jews from the European continent was kept under wraps. The immigration activists met with established farmers in Kenya, the British Colonial Office officials, and other officials in order to study and ready the ground, and gain traction and support for the immigration initiative.

In the end, not much came out of these efforts.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.