Uganda Scheme

In 1903, after the Kishinev pogrom, the British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered Theodor Herzl land for an autonomous Jewish settlement in British East Africa, on the Uasin Gishu plateau in what is now Kenya, then called the Uganda offer. A letter from the Foreign Office was read at the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1903. Herzl presented it as a temporary refuge, not a replacement for Zion, and the congress voted 295 to 178 to send a commission to examine the land. Many Russian delegates, among them those from Kishinev, walked out in protest. Herzl closed the congress raising his hand and quoting Psalm 137: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning."

The dispute nearly split the movement. The commission reported that the land was unsuitable, and in 1905 the Seventh Zionist Congress rejected the offer and any settlement outside the Land of Israel. Israel Zangwill and his followers left to found the Jewish Territorial Organization. The crisis confirmed that Zionism meant Zion.