What if the Jews had taken the 1900 British offer as manna from heaven and made Uganda their homeland?

Bazukulu, the vast majority of our population would be destitute in refugee camps, fed by the UN. Some would have become members of a Ugandan version of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), Hamas, and Hezbollah, fighting the Israelis, kidnapping and taking civilian hostages, including children, as weapons of war. We would be using “human” shields to attack Israel.

Bazukulu, love or loathe the Jews, but first, listen to William Shakespeare’s succinct testimony in The Merchant of Venice:

“Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?...”

We shall return to this in a minute.

Meanwhile, Bazukulu, has any grandfather or grandmother told you that the Jews made a conscious decision, on humanitarian and religious grounds, to save generations of Ugandans from the unspeakable tragedy that has afflicted the Holy Land for the last 76 years, and counting?

Let me elaborate.

Under the 1900 British Uganda Scheme, conceived by the then Foreign and Colonial Secretary Neville Chamberlain, hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution and anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe were to be resettled in the north-eastern Uganda Protectorate, which then included part of western Kenya.

To our lucky escape, the Sixth Zionist Congress, led by a young journalist, Theodor Herzl, politely but firmly rejected the offer for two non-negotiable reasons:

First, Uganda was too far removed from Palestine, their biblical Promised Land. According to Genesis 15:18–2, “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said - to your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates – the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites, Perizzites, Rephaites, Amorites, Canaanites, Girgashites, and Jebusites.”

Secondly, and more importantly for Ugandans, the Jews did not want to displace us or any other people from their own God-given homeland.

Self-interest compels us to ask this $64,000 question:

What if the Zionist Congress had ignored their God-given land, as well as our interest, and taken the 1900 British offer as manna from heaven?

The answer is too terrifying to contemplate. After all, Uganda was the source of the much-valued River Nile, according to *The Whiteman’s Country* by Elspeth Huxley:

“Whoever rules Uganda, rules the Nile, whoever controls the Nile, dominates Egypt, whoever dominates Egypt holds the Suez Canal, and whoever holds the Suez Canal has his hands upon the throat of India’s trade.”

For that reason, the protracted Arab-Israeli war would be between the Israelis and Ugandans.

Bazukulu, the vast majority of our population would be destitute in refugee camps, fed by the UN. Some would have become members of a Ugandan version of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), Hamas, and Hezbollah, fighting the Israelis, kidnapping and taking civilian hostages, including children, as weapons of war. We would be using “human” shields to attack Israel.

Neighbouring countries - Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, the DRC, and Tanzania would have joined us with uprams against Israel. There would have been seven such Uganda-Israeli wars: the 1948 War of Israel’s Independence, the 1956 Suez Canal War, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973, 1982, 2006, and 2023–present wars.

Some UN humanitarian agencies and their local workers would have taken sides with us against Israel.

Threatened on all sides, the Israelis would have deployed the Mossad to liquidate any Ugandan “freedom” fighters, sending explosives through their mobile phones, bleepers, and walkie-talkies. Smart drones and bunker-busters would be taking out leading fighters hiding deep underground in Uganda, or in exile.

We, Ugandans, have had such a lucky escape, thanks to the refusal by the Jews to settle in Uganda.

That was not our only escape, thanks to Jewish benevolence.

The penultimate British colonial governor, Sir Andrew Benjamin Cohen, a Jew, gave a second dose of benevolence. Sent to consolidate British rule in Uganda in 1952, he did the exact opposite and hastened our independence, arguing that he could not oversee the continued colonisation of another people, having lost his family in the Holocaust. Read 'British Policy in Changing Africa' by Andrew Cohen.

But being twice lucky, thanks to Jews, is not a reason for Ugandans to passively sit back and watch the human suffering in the Holy Land.

Instead, we should be desperately calling on the United Nations Security Council to fulfil its Charter mandate to “take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace, and to bring about by peaceful means.”

Sadly, the Council is dead, and its epitaph reads: ‘Born in San Francisco in 1946, seriously wounded in Iraq in 2003, died in Libya in 2011, death certificate signed in Tigray, Ethiopia, in 2020, and buried in Ukraine in 2022 - RIP.’

That is why Israelis and Palestinians are today engaged in a vicious cycle of generational violence in search of peace and security for their respective people.

It is also thanks to UN failure that the Sudanese, DR Congolese, Ethiopians, Malians, Chadians, and Somalis are fighting each other to annihilation, or surrender.

Dr Sam A. Akaki is a Uganda citizen