GAWLER’S GAMBIT! The Secret Untold Story of Colonel George Gawler and Colonial Australia Paving The Path to Zionist Israel
In 1845, amidst the industrial growls of colonial thunder, one Colonel George Gawler – a visionary or a vassal of imperialism, depending on the tilt of your lens – emerged from the British Empire’s sinews with a parchment that reeked of providence and pragmatism in equal measure.
A retired governor now, his hands still painted with the red dust of South Australia and the blood of murdered Indigenous men, he inked ‘The Tranquillization of Syria and the East‘ and set forth a domino tumble that would rattle chains in Palestine, a land then cradled in Ottoman arms. Much like the present-day genocide in Palestine, religion was the excuse but economic power was the reason.
Serkan Öztürk with this in-depth historical investigation exploring the direct links between the colonisation of Australia and the Zionist foundations of Israel in Palestine.
“It has happened to me, under Divine providence, to have been the local founder of the finest colony in proportion to its duration, that has ever yet appeared in the world; and I may therefore soberly aspire to be, further, an adviser of the foundation of the most important colony, that the world will perhaps ever witness – the first Jewish colony in Palestine.”
From the Australian outback to the olive groves of Palestine, Colonel George Gawler’s shadow stretches – not merely as a colonial commander but as an unforeseen architect of political Zionism. His drumbeat echoed not just in the Judaean Hills but also in the halls where the sun never set on the British Empire. Here was a man, steeped in Protestant rectitude, envisioning Jews as sentinels on the frontiers of empire, warding off the “Muslim and Arab masses”, a convenient buffer for imperial breath against the Ottoman mirage.
His was a vision drenched in the sepia tones of British interest, a twin benevolence in saving souls and securing geopolitical chess squares. But scratch the surface, and the magnanimity bleeds out, leaving the stark bones of a scheme that would move the Jews out of England, using them as colonial pawns in a grander imperial gambit. The native populations of the Middle East? Merely scenery to this grand stage, their destinies footnotes to Gawler’s blueprint of emancipation and occupation.
This was a fervent fever dream that at once reached for the stars of a lofty ideal while being firmly rooted in the terrestrial designs of empire. It sought to transplant Jews to serve as a bulwark of the British presence against Ottoman decline, and by such means, to alleviate the ‘Jewish Question’ in England itself.
An Imperial Gesture or a Pioneering Spirit? Gawler’s Double-Edged Sword
Born on July 21, 1795, George Gawler was the son and only child of Samuel Gawler, a captain in the 73rd Regiment of Foot, and his wife Julia. Just before he was 10-years-old, in 1804, Gawler’s father would be killed in battle in colonial India. Gawler himself would come to prominence just over a decade later in 1815, where as a lieutenant he partook in the Battle of Waterloo that brought about the demise of French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte.
Remaining in France with the army of occupation until 1818, Gawler would in 1820 marry Maria Cox of Friar Gate, Derby who was the great-niece of the writer, Samuel Richardson. A master printer, Richardson had gained fame in the mid-18th century at the age of 50 after turning his hand to writing and is now viewed by some as the inventor of the modern novel. Gawler and his wife were devoted evangelical Protestants and spent most of their leisure time invested in religious and social works.
It was 1838 when Gawler was appointed Governor of South Australia. He succeeded Captain John Hindmarsh, who had been recalled, while he also had taken over the role of Resident Commissioner from the first incumbent, James Hurtle Fisher. Hindmarsh and Fisher had become engaged in open conflict over the respective powers of the roles of Governor and the Resident Commissioner. There had been such immense excitement of the “creation” of South Australia as the first “free colony” of Australia that the original plans for settlement did not include the building of a prison or gaol.
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Arriving in Adelaide on October 12, 1838, Gawler found the colony of South Australia had almost no public finances, a swathe of surly underpaid officials, as well as 4,000 immigrant-settlers living in makeshift accommodation. According to reports, at least one public servant had been granted rations from the colonial store to save him from starving.
A rapid increase in population in 1839 and 1840 largely due to immigration to the colony by new settlers greatly added to the unemployment problem. While droughts in other Australian colonies in 1840, before South Australia was self-sufficient in food production, drove up the cost of living rapidly. Gawler increased public expenditure to stave off collapse, which resulted in bankruptcy. Amongst his spending, Gawler had constructed a lavish “twelve-roomed official residence” which even his wife, Maria, believed to be “a pretty looking comfortable house … not at all suited for a Governor’s House”.
In 1841, Gawler was recalled to London and replaced by Captain George Grey. His replacement had promised to the British Parliament that they would “maintain the strictest economy”.
Gawler would however claim in 1850 that it had only been through his early efforts and work that South Australia was “the only cheap and brilliantly successful new colony in modern history”. It’s largely believed the real reason for the colony’s eventual economic flourishing was the discovery of copper at Burra in 1845.
It was Gawler’s experience in South Australia though that had led him to believe that it was possible to settle an ‘uninhabited land’ within just a few years, regardless of any Indigenous people actually already living there.
It was with this zeal that Colonel Gawler embarked on a pilgrimage of the pen, his scriptures being memorandums and pamphlets that spoke of Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine. ‘The Emancipation of the Jews‘ in 1847 was not a mere screed but a clarion call – the echoes of which would reach Theodore Herzl and beyond. It was in these fervent leaflets that Gawler’s true legacy was etched, painting him as a predecessor to Zionism’s later luminaries.
“First, it would be part payment of a heavy debt of retribution that England owes to the Hebrew race, for bye-gone centuries of cruelty and oppression. Westminster Abbey itself, was rebuilt by money extorted from the Jews,” Gawler wrote in the introductory remarks for ‘The Emancipation of the Jews’.
“And secondly, it would be taking a part, which is to the honour and interest of the British nation to perform, in assisting in the great movement of deliverance from oppression and bondage, that for many years past has been in operation throughout the whole civilized world, in behalf of the Ancient People of God.”
On its cover page, Gawler had defined the “The Emancipation of the Jews” as being “indispensable for the maintenance of the Protestant profession of the Empire”.
Gawler’s rationale had the tenor of a man who believed in the Gospel of Soil – that the redemption of the Jewish people would come through their toil in Eretz Israel. This was the alchemy he foresaw: the transmutation of supposed suffering under Turkish rule into the gold of self-sufficiency, cultivated in the cradle of their ancestors. Yet, the hand that penned this vision was draped in the Union Jack, the prose not just prophetic but politic, with a subtext that sought to steer clear Jewish presence from English shores while fortifying the Empire’s oriental flank.
The serpentine connection between Australia, that colonial offspring, and the birth of a Zionist ideal may seem tenuous until one realises that Gawler’s South Australian governance was but a prelude. Here was a man who transformed European desolation in Indigenous lands into a burgeoning colony, who perhaps saw in the Jewish plight a similar potential for monumental metamorphosis.
But let’s not wrap this narrative in the swaddling clothes of naivety. The underbelly of this endeavour was motivated by the darker hues of racial and imperialist calculus. The Arab populations and Palestinians, the existing custodians of the land, were not partners in this vision but impediments to a Judeo-Christian rapprochement under the British aegis.
Oil painting of George Gawler dated circa 1848-1850 (Image: Art Gallery of NSW / Supplied)
Gawler’s Controversial Colonial Legacy: From the Maria to the Middle East
In the shadows of his administration in South Australia, Lieutenant-Colonel George Gawler was confronted with the dire outcomes of cross-cultural misunderstandings and the tragic interface of colonial law and Indigenous customs. The calamitous events following the shipwreck of the Maria in 1840 stand as a stark instance.
The catastrophe unfolded as a series of grim misunderstandings – members of the local Tenkinyra tribe, having assisted the survivors of the shipwreck under expectations of just recompense, retaliated violently when their negotiated dues were withheld and young Indigenous women were sexually harassed and assaulted by some of the White men who survived the shipwreck.
It is believed sometime after the incident, a violent fight erupted, and the survivors of the Maria were all killed, with unproven claims at the time that all but one of the 26 crew and passengers onboard were killed in retribution after having survived the shipwreck. Only one man aboard the ship was said to have drowned.
In late 2003, an Ngarrindjeri elder spoke about the Maria tragedy, saying the story was well known among his elders, and that he was told the survivors had met up with their people, who offered them “fire, water and food”.
The elder told the ABC that the sailors were sternly warned at the time that the offence of sexual harassment and assault was punishable by death under their local laws.
“They would have had no idea of repercussions that were coming,” the elder added.
This tragic sequence of events culminated in Gawler’s grim authorisation: a punitive expedition resulting in the execution of two Aboriginal men on hearsay evidence, with others killed in attempted escape – a decision that was later criticised by newspapers in Australia and Britain and remains controversial to this day.
None of the murdered Indigenous men were given a chance to give their side of the story, either in a British court or according to the legal customs of local tribes. With the colonisation of South Australia in 1836 as the nation’s “first free colony”, Indigenous groups in South Australia had been declared as subjects of the British Empire, and under this assumption were protected under British law.
Two years previously, The Foundation Act was passed in the British Parliament. This Act made provision for 300,000 square miles to become the territory in which British settlers could begin the colony of South Australia. The territory was described as “waste and unoccupied”. However, the Letters Patent relating to the Act said that nothing could be done which would “affect the rights of any Aboriginal natives of the said Province to the actual occupation or enjoyment in their own persons or in the persons of their descendants of any lands therein now actually occupied or enjoyed by such natives”.
Despite the letter of the law, the directives were virtually ignored by the settlers and authorities.
Gawler’s experience in Australia, marked by these harsh confrontations and his broader dealings with Indigenous populations, deeply coloured his later vision for the colonisation of Palestine. Accustomed to the challenges of forging an imperial colony amongst Indigenous inhabitants, Gawler approached the prospect of Zionism not only with the foresight of a benefactor but with the stern resolve of an imperial administrator.
The complex dance of dominion and coexistence he had navigated in Australia – through interactions sometimes marred by violence and coercion – lent him a particular confidence that the Zionist settlement of Palestine could serve as an outpost of British influence, bringing, in his view, a civilising force to the region, and strategically, a community sympathetic to British interests amidst the diverse demographics of the Middle East.
In 1853, Gawler would tell a receptive audience of members of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA):
“Divine providence has placed Syria and Egypt in the very gap between England and the most important regions of her colonial and foreign trade, India, China, the Indian Archipelago and Australia. She does not require and wish for increase of territory – already has she (that dangerous boon), more direct dominion than she can easily maintain; but she does most urgently need the shortest and the safest lines of communication to the territories already possessed.”
“Egypt and Syria stand in intimate connection. A foreign hostile power mighty in either, would soon endanger British trade and communications through the other. Hence the loud providential call upon her, to exert herself energetically for the amelioration of the condition of both of these Provinces. Egypt has improved greatly by British influence, and it is now for England to set her hand to the renovation of Syria, through the only people whose energies will be extensively and permanently in the work – the real children of the soil, the sons of Israel.”
Yet, one must ponder whether this confidence, born of his perceived success in controlling Indigenous populations through a mixture of patronage and force, was not misplaced. In the deserts of Palestine, as in the bush of colonial Australia, the existing cultural tapestry was intricate and resilient.
The belief that the emplacement of a foreign population would pacify existing ones overlooked the essential complexities of human attachment to land and identity. The echoes of the Maria incident remind us that such strategies carry profound risks and can incite enduring cycles of conflict, a cautionary tale that resonates in the historical narrative of both Australia and Palestine.
“The Emancipation of the Jews” was defined by Colonel George Gawler as being “indispensable for the maintenance of the Protestant profession of the Empire.” (Image: Supplied)
Tilling the Empire’s Garden: Gawler, Montefiore, Churchill and the Seeds of Settlement
It is in 1849, where Gawler, the once colonial helmsman, tours Palestine with 19th century celebrity Zionist banker and financier, Moses Montefiore. One can only speculate the desert dust stirring underfoot, the very particles of ancient Judea clinging to the hems of these two men of empire and faith as they envisioned a land reborn through the sweat of Jewish brows.
It’s here, in the company of Montefiore, that Gawler’s musings on Zionism find fertile soil. Montefiore, the financier, becomes the unwitting disciple, drawn to Gawler’s prophetic if problematic visions of agrarian rebirth. Gawler whispers to Montefiore of agricultural settlements, of thriving Jewish homesteads that would not only alleviate the suffering of a diaspora but also serve as loyal vanguards against the Empire’s perceived enemies.
Moses’ cousin, Jacob Barrow Montefiore, was closely linked to Gawler through the colonisation of South Australia. He had been appointed by King William IV as one of eleven members of the South Australian Colonisation Commission and sat on the body between 1835-39. It was Moses who was responsible for his cousin getting the role to assist with the colonisation of South Australia. The King had owed Moses many favours, one of which included a loan of £15 million to compensate the owners of slaves following the abolition of slavery in 1833. The loan was only paid back by the British Government almost two centuries later, in 2015.
Though somewhat lax in religious observance in his early life, after his first visit to the Holy Land in 1827, Montefiore had became a strictly observant Jew. He was 43-years-old at the time. Montefiore’s firm had previously acted as stockbrokers for the wealthy Rothschild family, whom he was intimately involved with through his wife Judith, whose sister Henriette (or Hannah) had married Nathan Mayer Rothschild who headed the family’s banking business in Britain.
It was Montefiore’s grandfather Moses Vital, also known as Haim, who had first emigrated from the Italian town of Livorno to London in the 1740s. A Sephardic Jew, he retained close contact with Italy due to his involvement and flourishing business in the straw bonnet trade, laying the foundation for the wealth of this notable Italian family in London. Moses himself was born in Livorno.
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After retiring from business in the 1830s, Montefiore devoted the rest of his life to philanthropy and Zionist activism. He served as the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews from 1835 to 1874, a period of 39 years, the longest tenure ever. The Board is the largest and second oldest Jewish communal organisation in the United Kingdom, after the Initiation Society which was founded in 1745.
The conquest of Syria by Mehmet Ali Pasha (or “Muhammad Ali of Egpyt”) in 1832 as part of the Egyptian-Ottoman War (1831-33) was the proponent that had caused Jews like Montefiore and Gentiles like Gawler to turn their thoughts to Palestine. Mehmet Ali – considered the founder of modern Egpyt – was the Ottoman Albanian governor and de facto ruler of Egypt from 1805 to 1848. His goal in taking Palestine as part of his conquest of Syria was for Egypt to leave the Ottoman Empire and be ruled by his own hereditary dynasty.
After nine years, Mehmet Ali was ousted from Syria, and Palestine was restored to the “Sublime Porte” by 1842, largely owing to the armed intervention of Great Britain. The Sublime Porte was a metaphor for Ottoman Rule at the time. With the new “free” colonies like South Australia struggling economically as they could not wholly rely on convict or indentured labour, it was in British interests to allow the ailing Ottomans to sit on the Holy Land as the Empire did not have the funds to invest into the colonisation of Palestine.
Soon after Muhammad Ali’s initial conquest of Syria, it was reported decades later at the 1920 Zionist Peace Conference that “many Jews flocked thither, and we are told of 30,000 Polish Jews who petitioned Tsar Nicholas to he allowed ‘to proceed to Palestine in a body and await there during three years the coming of the Messiah'”. Before 1840, there were supposed to be only 40,000 Jews settled, especially in the four ‘holy’ cities, the same conference was told.
As president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Montefiore corresponded with the British consul in Damascus, Charles Henry Churchill, in 1841–42; a practice seen as pivotal to the development of Proto-Zionism. Churchill was the grandson of George Spencer-Churchill, the fifth Earl of Marlborough.
Churchill served as the British consul to Ottoman Syria, which included Palestine, today’s Israel. An evangelical Protestant, and ancestor of the future British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he was one of the first to suggest the political establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. His correspondence with Montefiore is believed to be the first “political plan” to create a Jewish State in Palestine.
It was while Lord Walter Rothschild – the eldest son of Montefiore’s good friend Nathan Mayer Rothschild – was President of the Board of Deputies, that the Balfour Declaration was addressed to him in 1917 and eventually led to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1947.
But what of the Arabs, those sons of the desert and daughters of the olive groves? In Gawler’s narrative, they are spectral figures, shadows cast long by the setting sun of the Ottoman Empire, hardly warranting a footnote in his grand design. It was a tale of two fates intertwined yet oblivious, one ordained by history, the other by imperial decree.
As Gawler returned to English shores, his mission continued unabated. In his 1853 publication, ‘Syria and its Near Prospects‘, he wove four arguments for the inevitability of Jewish resettlement, each a strand reinforcing the others, a tapestry that suggested divine providence and British pragmatism in a holy alliance.
Those views only strengthened over time. In 1860, in a missive to the Jewish Chronicle, Gawler exalts the establishment of “a strong guard of Jews” in Palestine, an aspiration as laden with colonial undertones as it was with messianic fervour. He dreams aloud of Jewish valour defending the “mountains of Israel,” a dreamscape dappled with the colours of imperial loyalty and the stark whites of religious redemption.
It is in these fervid years that the tendrils of Gawler’s Zionism wrap around the British psyche, enlisting the Jews as both the spear and shield of empire, while unintentionally scripting the opening act of a drama that would play out well into the next centuries.
Charles Henry Churchill: An ancestor of British PM Winston Churchill and early architect of Zionism (Image: Supplied / Wikipedia)
Zionist financier Moses Montefiore in his younger and later years (Images: Supplied / Wikipedia)
Across Continents and Cultures: The Quest for a Zionist Homeland
In the tempestuous climate of 19th-century England, the Jewish people found themselves caught between the poles of persecution and progress. The era was marked by a pervasive climate of anti-Semitism, one that resisted the integration of Jews into the broader tapestry of English society, culminating in a contentious debate over their right to political representation. This was a time when the shadow of ancient prejudice loomed large, and the ‘Jewish Question’ became a crucible for the nation’s conscience.
The legislative battleground over Jewish emancipation was a microcosm of this broader societal struggle. It wasn’t until after prolonged and fervent debate that England would finally open the doors of Parliament to Jewish members. Central to this discourse was the eloquent advocacy of figures like Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose 1830 maiden speech in the House of Commons was a robust endorsement of Jewish political rights. “On every principle of moral obligation,” he told Parliament, “the Jew has a right to political power.”
A year later, his famous essay on the ‘Civil Disabilities of the Jews’ appeared in the Edinburgh Review of January 1831. To Macaulay, the suggestion that the Jewish longing for restoration to Palestine made them alien to English interests was akin to religious persecution masked as political argument.
“But it is said, the Scriptures declare that the Jews are to be restored to their own country; and the whole nation looks forward to that restoration. They are therefore not so deeply interested as others in the prosperity of England. It is not their home, but merely the place of their sojourn, the house of their bondage. This argument, which first appeared in The Times newspaper … belongs to a class of sophisms by which the most hateful persecutions may easily be justified,” Macaulay wrote.
“To charge men with practical consequences which they themselves deny is disingenuous in controversy; it is atrocious in government … People are now reasoning about the Jews as our fathers reasoned about the Papists … The Christian believes, as well as the Jew, that at some future period the present order of things will come to an end. Nay, many Christians believe that the Messiah will shortly establish a kingdom on the earth … Now wherein does this doctrine differ, as far as its political tendency is concerned, from the doctrine of the Jew? If a Jew is unfit to legislate for us because he believes that he or his remote descendants will be removed to Palestine, can we safely open the House of Commons to a fifth monarchy man, who expects that before this generation shall pass away, all the kingdoms of the earth will be swallowed up in one divine empire?”
It took almost three decades later for the Jewish Relief Act to be passed, granting full civil and political rights to Jews in Britain.
Yet for all his public commentary against Jewish bigotry, Macaulay was a confirmed imperial racist himself, with his views in his book The History of England widely expressing his contentions of the superiority of Western European culture and of the inevitability of its sociopolitical progress over other cultures. He extensively wrote that Islam and Hinduism had very little to offer to the world, and falsely claimed that Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit literature had provided little contribution to humanity.
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Grandly spoke for the emancipation of Jewish people while racistly disparaging Muslims and Indians
(Image: Wikipedia / Supplied)
The journey towards Jewish emancipation and the crystallisation of Zionist aspirations in England was paralleled by intriguing endeavours across the Atlantic, where the prospect of establishing a Jewish colony in New York captured the imagination of certain visionaries.
Among them, Mordecai Noah, a figure of considerable prominence, embarked on an ambitious project that sought to offer Jews a sanctuary on American soil. Noah’s aspirations were rooted in a vision that extended beyond the confines of the Old World, proposing an alternative narrative for Jewish self-determination in the burgeoning landscapes of the United States. His efforts, though ultimately unrealised, underscored a longing for a homeland that transcended geographical boundaries – a quest for a place where Jewish people could thrive, unfettered by the chains of persecution and historical animosities.
Noah had become a warm advocate of the restoration of Israel to Palestine when in October 1844 he delivered an eloquent address in New York, in which he urged his countrymen that it was the duty of Christians to help the Jews to regain the land of their fathers.
He agreed with a ‘continental Jew’ who in 1844 wrote to The Voice of Jacob newspaper, “We would willingly emigrate, we would go to America, to Texas, but most willingly to Palestine under English protection”.
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This American chapter of the Jewish quest for a homeland, though often overshadowed by the focus on Palestine, reveals the global dimensions of the Zionist movement and the diverse strategies considered to achieve its ends.
Noah’s initiative, while distinct in its geographical focus, was emblematic of the broader Zionist ethos: a relentless pursuit of a safe haven for Jews, whether in the ancient lands of their ancestors or in the New World’s promise. It reflected the adaptability of the Zionist vision, capable of imagining a future for the Jewish people that was as varied as the diaspora itself.
There were also attempts to create the Jewish colony in East Africa under the ‘Uganda Plan’ at the turn of the 20th century, while four decades before the creation of Israel in 1947, Zionists also held hopes to colonise central Australia as their settlement of choice, known as the ‘Kimberley Plan’.
The Australian Government was even lobbied at its highest levels by the Zionist Freeland League about the plan during the Second World War, and it wasn’t until 1943 when it was finally torpedoed by the nation’s war-time leader, Prime Minister John Curtin.
“The Government is unable to see its way to depart from long-established policy in regard to alien settlement in Australia,” Curtin explained at the time, “And therefore cannot entertain the proposal for a group settlement of the exclusive type contemplated by the Freeland League.”
The emergence of the Zionist movement in the 19th century was, in part, predicated on a pervasive disillusionment – a sense that anti-Semitism was an indelible stain that could never be fully eradicated from the fabric of European society. This notion, as encapsulated in an entry for the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, suggested that Zionism was a direct descendant of the Jewish national spirit, yet one that was distinctly modern in its execution and devoid of Messianic overtones, while the “new race consciousness was fed by a glorious martyr history”.
Colonel George Gawler in his later years around 1865 (Image: Supplied / State Library of South Australia)
A Tale of Two Territories: Zion’s Architect and the Empire’s Echo
In the imperial waning of his life, Gawler, our colonel of colonial zeal, had little inkling that he was sketching the outlines of a future Zionist state that almost a century later would abound into reality. His narrative, a colonial opera, crescendos not in his lifetime but in the generations that followed, reverberating through the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the eventual establishment of Israel in 1947.
Gawler’s script, though, wasn’t without its critics; whispers of it being a front for racist imperialism gained volume over time. The Arab soul of Palestine, rich in history and struggle, was reduced to a mere backdrop for this geopolitical play, a note in the margins of an agenda that smacked of ethnocentric conceit.
By 1918, just a year after the Balfour Declaration was published by the British Government, Gawler was pinpointed by the American Jewish Historical Society as being “the most important” advocate within the British Empire’s movement of the mid-19th century for the restoration of Jews to Palestine.
“Gawler had the advantage over his fellow-writers of being both an administrator and a colonization expert and with these recommendations was able to acquire a wider and more attentive audience in Jewish as well as in non-Jewish circles,” Zionist historian, Albert Montefiore Hyamson, stated at the time.
Hyamson was a civil servant and member of the British Ministry of Information, and a relative of Gawler’s old friend, Moses Montefiore. He would go on to serve as the chief immigration officer in the British Mandate of Palestine from 1921 to 1934.
A century later, the echoes of Gawler’s legacy ring amidst the tumult of a region scarred by enduring conflict and a present-day genocide in Palestine committed by Zionists and backed by the West that has seen over 100,000 people murdered or wounded, the overwhelming majority of them children and civilians. His visions, once perceived as the “tranquilization” of a turbulent Middle East, now pulse in the heart of an often-heartbreaking narrative, where every olive branch seems woven with thorns of historical consequence and prejudice.
Meanwhile, in modern-day Australia, influential Zionists such as powerbroker and lawyer, Mark Liebler, have spent decades snuggling up to prominent Indigenous activists and academics in an attempt to hoodwink them and the entire nation that the colonies of Australia and Israel have not always been directly linked by the very same throbs of genocide and imperialist colonisation.
Among the Indigenous cohort to have fallen for these Zionist machinations through either naivety or perhaps greed and access to power include former Olympian Nova Peris, Liberal Party loudmouth Warren Mundine, and most sadly of all, anthropologist and academic Professor Marcia Langton.
It’s important to note that the British Empire, and the United States as its eventual successor as the patron of the colony of Israel, has always envisioned in its early plans for Zionism that the arriving colonists would act with “impunity” and do whatever necessary to control the enemies of empire. There were never going to be any red lines when it came to Palestine; as billions of people around the world in 2024 are witnessing for themselves thanks to the modern invention of social media.
A contemporary of Gawler’s, the Reverend Arthur George H Hollingsworth, made this very clear in his popular 1852 treatise, ‘Remarks Upon the Present Condition and Future Prospects of the Jews in Palestine‘.
In it, he wrote grandly:
“Who would dare to insult a Jew in any of the cities, where now the very rabble can hunt him with impunity, if his government existed, and was recognized at Jerusalem, among the nations of civilized communities?
“Who would venture to ill-treat and oppress the Jew, if he had his consuls, his national representatives, and his crown of authority and law in his nation?
“At present, where can a Jew appeal for redress but to the government of strangers?
“The Gentiles are called to extend an unwilling protection to him, who has the power and energy, if he had the will to protect himself.
“If the Jews as men and inheritors of great promises and greater designs, were but sufficiently awakened to their own condition and rights, and what they might be, they would no longer tamely submit to be insulted in so many continental cities, but at once arouse themselves to establish a Hebrew government and kingdom in Palestine.”
In light of this passage, the question must surely be asked today: And what would become of the Palestinian if they too were given “consuls, his national representatives, and his crown of authority and law in his nation” in the face of a genocide taking place in the present day of the 21st century?
Gawler’s last years were spent at Southsea, where he died of pneumonia on May 7, 1869. He lays buried at Portsmouth. Following his death, his son, Colonel John Cox Gawler, carried on his Zionist project with solemn duty. A year after his father’s death, Gawler’s son approached German-Jewish historian, Heinrich Graetz, with a “discreet project” involving 50 courageous armed Jewish men fortified with “a measure of Jewish patriotism”. Four years later, in 1874, he would write to his father’s old friend, Moses Montefiore, in a letter “on the Subject of the Promotion of Agriculture in the Holy Land and the Industrial Occupation of its Inhabitants”.
Another of Gawler’s son, Henry Gawler, would become a lawyer and although never an elected member of parliament served as South Australia’s Attorney-General on two occasions for a few days in 1861 and 1876.
As we pull away from the tapestry of Gawler’s life, one strewn with the dual threads of visionary Zionism and colonial expediency, we are left with a haunting tableau. A tableau where the strokes of a British colonel’s pen continue to ripple across the deserts and cities of Australia and Palestine, through the annals of history, and into the fraught reality of today.
In the relentless glare of the Australian sun, Gawler’s legacy is of a religiously motivated delusion that oscillates between a mirage of benevolent foresight and the stark contours of a colonial power play. His was a duality – a beacon for some, a warning for others, and for all, a chapter in the annals of history that has largely and conveniently been forgotten as yet another “secret story” of colonisation and empire.
Gawler’s Zion – envisaged through a lens tinged with a thoroughly racist imperial hue to ‘control’ Arabs and Muslims for trade power – remains an enduring testament to the powers and perils of a vision cast far beyond one’s own horizon, and a stark reminder that the seeds we sow in the soils of time may one day grow into a form of introduced species wilder and even more destructive than our deepest nightmares.
https://truenewsweekly.com/gawlers-gambit-the-secret-untold-story-of-colonel-george-gawler-and-colonial-australia-paving-the-path-to-zionist-israel/?fbclid=IwAR3mdU3JWnnBKGiUOHXqJSIPlXBS5G2XnnV_MHZGpBUm_Dt83MviEz_ZV7c_aem_AaD5ye0R9KirybRouaMuvia_mi0S0ZjO2smkSQsE3i1XeQ7WUy5Oiwf-ClxX-nbjghrmeKfKryJsmSo0QwvnVhz8
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