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Bianca Nobilo and Tim Marshall are the hosts of History Uncensored.

Israel voted this week. Whatever government eventually emerges from the deadlock, the election gave us a reason to go back to a more fundamental question: why is Israel where it is?

That sounds obvious now. It wasn’t.

Before Israel was established in 1948, a remarkable range of places were discussed as possible refuges, settlements or homelands for persecuted Jews. They were not all equivalent, and not all were official Zionist proposals, but together they show how unsettled the question once was.

In 1825, the American Jewish leader Mordecai Manuel Noah attempted to establish a Jewish refuge on Grand Island, near Buffalo, New York. Decades later, Theodor Herzl explicitly considered Argentina as well as Palestine in The Jewish State.

Zionists also investigated El-Arish in the Sinai, close to Palestine, in the early 1900s. In 1903, Britain offered territory in East Africa — the famous “Uganda Scheme”, although the land was actually in what is now Kenya. The Zionist movement debated it seriously before rejecting it.

And in 1939, as European Jews desperately searched for escape from Nazi persecution, the Kimberley Scheme proposed settling around 75,000 Jewish refugees on seven million acres of north-western Australia. It came from the Freeland League rather than the mainstream Zionist movement, and Australia ultimately rejected it.

So Palestine was not simply the only place anyone ever imagined. But it was different. Jewish religion, history and collective memory had been centred on the land for centuries, Jewish communities already lived there, and by the First Zionist Congress in 1897 the modern Zionist movement had made Palestine its political objective. Palestine was also already overwhelmingly inhabited by Arabs. That collision is fundamental to understanding everything that followed.

All of this raises the temptation of the historical counterfactual: what if one of those other schemes had succeeded?