Early British-Jewish Zionism. The Suez Canal, The Role and Rule of Egypt,
The El Arish Plan.
The Suez Canal.
The Suez Canal is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea through the Isthmus of Suez and dividing Africa and Asia. Historically it linked India and the Far East to the Mediterranean and therefore also to Britain and Western Europe.
In Ancient times west-east canals had been built to facilitate travel from the Nile to the Red Sea. One smaller canal is believed to have been constructed under the auspices of Senusret II (1800s BCE conventional dating) or Ramesses II (1300s BCE). Another canal, probably incorporating a portion of the first, was constructed under the reign of Necho II (610-595 BCE), but the only fully functional canal was engineered and completed by Darius I (522-486 BCE) the King of Persia who ruled over Egypt. This waterway was eventually choked up with silt and disappeared. It had lasted less than 200 years.
A French diplomat, Ferdinand de Lesseps, had supervised construction of the Suez Canal as we now know it from 1859 to 1869. The canal officially opened on 17 November 1869.
At that time Egypt was ruled by a Khedive (Viceroy) of Albanian descent who was nominally subject to the Ottoman Empire but in practice acted independently.
The French Government had bought 52 % of the shares in the Canal; of the remainder, 44 percent was taken up by the Khedive of Egypt. In 1875, financial troubles compelled the Khedive to sell his holding was at once bought by PM Benjamin Disraeli on behalf of the British Government. Disraeli had initially acted on his own initiative using a loan from the Roshschild Bank and only later receiving a de facto affirmation from the British Government. In 1882 there were muntinies and riots in Egypt in which ca. 50 Europeans were killed. Consequently the British took effective control of the country which remaiend nominally part of the Ottoman Empire with its own native dynasty of Viceroys of Albanian descent.
El Arish.
Al- Arish, town and largest settlement of the Sinai Peninsula in the northeastern section, on the Mediterranean coast, the capital of Egypt Northern Sinai. It was under Israeli military administration from 1967 until 1979, when it returned to Egyptian rule. It is near the mouth of the Wadi al- Arish, which is the longest seasonal watercourse of the Sinai. Throughout the 1800s, Al- Arish delimited Egypt's eastern frontier with "Syria" which included the area of Palestine.
In 1902 the Zionist leader, Theodor Herzl met with Joseph Chamberlain who at that time was Secretary of State for the Colonies and always on the lookout for means of expanding the British Empire.
Herzl proposed that the El Aish area, including the nearby Pelusian Plain, become the site of an autonomous Jewish settlement sponsored by the British government.
Lord Cromer, then the British consul-general in Egypt, requested that a commission of experts explore the region on the prospects of settlement and its findings were positive. Nevertheless, the Egyptian government, on Cromer's insistence, rejected the report, declaring itself unable to allocate water from the Nile for the settlement's irrigation needs. Cromer's refusal came in spite of Herzl's efforts to rescue the scheme by reducing the project's scope to the El-Arish vicinity and renouncing appropriation of Nile waters for development.
The El Arish proposal had evidently been adopted by Herzl from DAVIS TRIETSCH, (1870-1935), at German-Jewish Zionist activist. He advocated the conception of a "Greater Palestine," comprising Palestine proper, Cyprus, and El-Arish.
The El Arish proposal came to nothing. Nevertheless, it is important because it shows the willingness of the British to help Jewish settlement plans in practical terms.
El Arish was in effect part of the Holy Land that just happened at that time to be officially under Egyptian control.
See:
El Arish Zionist Project impact on WWI?
https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/el-arish-zionist-project-impact-on-wwi.512504/
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/el-arish
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/trietsch-davis