In 1903, Theodore Herzl begins lobbying among his fellow Zionists in favor of an offer received in August from the British government to facilitate a substantial Jewish settlement in British East Africa. Herzl's effort at once provokes a split within the Zionist movement. Many reject the proposal outright, insisting that only the Holy Land, to which Zionist settlers had been emigrating since the 1880s, will do for a Jewish homeland. Others, however, see practical value in accepting the offer, since efforts to persuade either the British or the Ottoman Sultan to allow large-scale Jewish settlement of Palestine have failed. At a crucial meeting of the Zionist Congress in Basel in 1905, the proposal receives the approval of a bare majority of the organization.The Curse of Ham by Eric LippsOver the next decade, growing numbers of Jews choose to emigrate to British East Africa, where the British soon find themselves committed to protecting the settlers from attacks by Masai 'savages' who resent any sort of white occupation of their land. The cost of this effort leads the British government to reluctantly agree to allow the settlers to arm themselves, creating the nucleus of the Zionist Freedom Army.

The rise of Hitler gave renewed impetus to the Uganda Project as well as to Zionist dreams of settling in Palestine itself. Winston Churchill himself, anxious to foster a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis but unwilling to allow them to enter the Mandate of Palestine in large numbers, lends political support to efforts to create a full-fledged Ugandan Army, the Uganda Defense Force. UDL resistance will play a significant role in hindering the Wehrmacht's efforts in East Africa.

The end of the war and the revelation of the Holocaust produce a conundrum for the Zionist movement. By this time, the last Masai resistance has been defeated and Uganda has been developed into a successful Jewish-ruled state--but the 'Palestine faction,' including David Ben-Gurion, remains strong and committed to driving the British from what its members see as land belonging to the Jewish people by divine decree. Meanwhile, the Jewish colonizers of Uganda are no longer what they once were: shaped by decades of conflict with black Africans and trade with other white-ruled states in sub-Saharan Africa, they have evolved an apartheid state, borrowing the word itself from South Africa's Nationalist Party. Heavily outnumbered by the Masai and other native blacks, they have adopted a martial lifestyle involving universal military service, and tend to elevate top-ranking military officers to the prime minister ship and other key positions.

Meanwhile, in Palestine, a fierce guerrilla war drags on. Drained of men and resources which might otherwise have brought victory, Ben-Gurion's movement fights on. Leaders of this guerrilla force bitterly resent their Ugandan cousins' refusal to come to their aid. In fact, though, the Ugandans' aloofness from the Palestinian conflict is based on their fears that if they divert any significant portion of their military strength from their own defense, the black 'enemies' they see as encircling them on all sides with the crumbling of the old colonial empires will close in and destroy them.

Another factor also plays a role. The Ugandans have evolved a strongly right-wing political order, while the Zionists of Palestine are heavily influenced by socialism. With the coming of the Cold War, that ideological split has assumed political importance, trumping even the two factions? shared Jewish identity. It does not help that the Soviet Union, seeking influence and hoping to undermine British and American power in the region, has supported the Palestinian Zionists, supplying them with arms, food and other aid.

In 1957, aided by Gama Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the Palestinian Zionists finally succeed in taking control of most of the former British mandate, with the exception of a rump state on the opposing side of the Jordan River which will soon be taken over by a Hashemite Arab monarchy. The newly proclaimed 'State of Israel,' dependent upon support from Cairo as well as Moscow, will not expel its Arab residents. Instead, over the course of years, a system of subtle favoritism will evolve under which, despite the government's official commitment to 'socialist equality,' Jews will receive the best jobs, the best educations, and other advantages.

Despite the unfairness of this system, Israel's Arabs will be better off than Uganda's blacks, who will be subjected to far more stringent controls reflecting the fears of their much more heavily outnumbered rulers. Native Ugandans will be increasingly confined to menial labor, especially in the mineral-rich country's mines. Among the Jews of Uganda, some will object to this racial stratification of society; more, however, will accept it uncritically, aided by the Ugandan government's fostering of the 'curse of Ham' myth that God Himself had ordained black servitude.