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In the popular and historical imagination the year 1945 often serves as a watershed moment, ushering in a new humanitarian era. In reality, striking continuities in geopolitical trends challenge this romantic interpretation. Many of the very institutions that shaped the notion of a Western post-war reinvention were in fact only slightly altered reconstitutions of older bodies and organisations. Jewish political movements were also part of this tendency towards continuity, which becomes clear by focusing on the history of the Jewish Territorialist movement. A deeper exploration of the Territorialists’ connection to geopolitical trends contributes to a better understanding of the larger story of Jewish political behaviour. Moreover, recognising the continuities in Territorialism's social engineering project challenges the notion of 1945 as a turning point in twentieth century geopolitical thinking.
In 1944 a young American Jew named Lester Meyers wrote to the Freeland League for Jewish Territorial Colonisation in New York City, after having received some of the organisation's publication materials: ‘your idea sounds slightly crackpot, or visionary, depending on the point of view. However, I believe you are sincere, so send me literature.’1 Contrary to this assessment, the Jewish Territorialists who were active within the Freeland League from the mid-1930s onwards were neither crazy nor farsighted – neither ‘crackpot’ nor ‘visionary’ – but rather representative of contemporary geopolitical trends and discourses, especially those connected to prevailing approaches to peoplehood, territory and space. The Territorialists relied on accepted notions and practices like colonialism, ‘whiteness’, biopolitics, agro-industrial science, as well as ‘(empty) spaces’ and un(der)developed territories. Their attachment to a Realpolitik based on scientific discourse, expeditions and commissions ‘reveals how a scientific application of settlement ideas aimed to alter Jewish reality and geopolitics’.2
The case study of Territorialism helps to demonstrate the complexity of ‘geopolitics’. Ever since it was first coined at the end of the nineteenth century, ‘geopolitics’ has referred to a discourse that has been loosely shared and shaped by various geographers and politicians, and it served as a direct reaction to the looming fear of the loss of empire that defined the existing world order throughout the first half of the twentieth century.3 The US war involvement spurred a sudden and unprecedented mass interest in geography and global politics,4 and...