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Martyrmade-Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem.pdf (file not included in this release)

Episode 1

Summary

Chaim Weizmann’s Historical Context: The text discusses Chaim Weizmann’s unique historical moment, feeling the weight of 3,000 years of Jewish history and the hope of returning to Jerusalem after centuries of persecution and exile.
Complexity of Understanding the Conflict: The difficulty for the average person to fully grasp the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to its complexity and the time required to understand both sides.
Dreyfus Affair: The scandal in France in 1894 involving Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain wrongfully accused of treason, which highlighted anti-Semitism in Europe and influenced Zionist thought.
Political vs. Practical Zionism: The debate between political Zionists, who sought legal recognition and sovereignty, and practical Zionists, who focused on building infrastructure and relationships in Palestine.
Pogroms and Anti-Semitism: Descriptions of violent pogroms against Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia, highlighting the severe persecution faced by Jewish communities.
Balfour Declaration: The British government’s 1917 declaration supporting the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, while also promising to protect the rights of non-Jewish communities.
British Promises and Arab Revolt: The conflicting promises made by the British to both the Arabs and the Zionists during World War I, leading to tensions and mistrust.
Early Zionist Immigration: The initial waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, driven by both idealism and the harsh realities of anti-Semitism in Europe.
Role of Mythology and Religion: The influence of religious and mythological narratives on both Zionist and Christian Zionist motivations.
Internal Jewish Opposition: The opposition from assimilated Jews in Europe and Britain who feared that Zionism would exacerbate anti-Semitism and undermine their status in their home countries.
Labor Zionism: The shift towards labor Zionism, emphasizing the importance of Jews working the land themselves rather than relying on local Arab labor.

Timeline

586 BC: Babylonian exile of the Jewish people.
70 AD: Destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans.
1881-1884: Series of pogroms in the Russian Empire.
1894: Dreyfus Affair begins in France.
1896: Theodor Herzl publishes “Der Judenstaat” (The Jewish State).
1897: First Zionist Congress held in Basel, Switzerland.
1901: Establishment of the Jewish National Fund.
1903: Kishinev pogrom in Bessarabia.
1915-1916: British negotiations with Sharif Husayn during World War I.
1917: Balfour Declaration issued by the British government.
1918: Chaim Weizmann enters Palestine as an envoy.
1920: Winston Churchill’s statement on the power of international Jewry.
1920s: Continued Jewish immigration to Palestine and development of labor Zionism.

Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, you’re listening to the Martyr Made Podcast. You’re about to hear episode one of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a six-part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoy this series, please consider subscribing to my Substack page where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available to subscribers for just five dollars a month or fifty dollars a year. To all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do what I do. So I hope you guys enjoy this show, let’s go. I’m content to die for my beliefs, so cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it, no, they will forget it. Hell does exist, God is a thought, God is an idea, it is a place, it is somewhere, hell does exist, but its reference is to something that transcends all thinking.

Why must we tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion? I want you to close your eyes, take a breath, and imagine you’re lying in your bed. It’s maybe 3 a.m., your wife’s sleeping next to you, you’ve had a long, exhausting day of work, and you’ve got another one ahead of you, but you’re a little anxious and having trouble sleeping. See, she’s pregnant, and you’re excited about it, but you’re also wondering how you’re going to feed a third child. Work’s been tough to come by lately because more and more employers aren’t looking for people like you. In fact, your family’s starting to get dirty looks in a neighborhood you’ve lived in for years. Your kids have begun to ask why people don’t seem to like us as much anymore, and your wife has to avoid certain streets because of the way some of the young men will shout at her and the other women. Just breathe, try to relax.

It was worse than this last year, and things calmed down then, and they’ll calm down now, right? You listen for your wife’s breathing, it’s deep and even, and she’s asleep. You’ve always been the worrier, but the truth is she’s got a better sense of these things than you do, and she’s sleeping like a baby, right? So just go to sleep. As you close your eyes and turn over, you hear some glass break in the distance outside. You feel your body tense up, but you take a deep breath, it could have been anything. Then you begin to hear the voices, shouting. Your wife reaches for your arm and pulls herself closer to you.

Shouting’s unmistakable now, and there are more crashes moving down the street in the direction of your house. Tell yourself this can’t be happening, not here, but even as the thoughts form, you’re already out of bed and moving to the window. That’s when you see them. Outside you see a group of people surrounding your neighbor and beating him with clubs. His children are in the street, he’s in his pajamas, their faces, they seem crazed. Your wife is out of bed and going to the kids’ room, they’re awake and asking what’s going on. They’ve noticed that things have been different, but you’ve tried to protect them, you haven’t told them what’s been happening to people like you all over the country. You get your family partly dressed, but you’re starting to hear people outside your front door and there’s no more time to lose.

You grab your 9-year-old son and your 6-year-old daughter. You hug your wife and the four of you are out the back door into an alley just as the mob smashes your door in. You make your way through the back alleys, and as you’re going through, occasionally you’re catching glimpses through the houses of your friends and their families being assaulted by people with clubs and torches and kitchen implements. People are screaming and you see blood and there’s fire and smoke. Houses are being burned. How is this happening? You recognize some of these attackers, they’re people you see every day, these aren’t strangers. People you buy groceries from, people you pass on the street who fix your roof and who you’ve done work for.

You look into your kids’ eyes and they’re confused and terrified. Your wife’s keeping it together, she believes you’re going to protect her, but you’re just trying to look strong. You have no idea where to go. You run around a corner and find yourself face to face with a big man in a police uniform. You begin to tell him about the commotion on the street, about the attacks and the fires and the looks in their eyes, and you keep talking to him as if he’s a policeman, even as you realize that he’s raising his club and bringing it down on your head and now everything is dark. You wake sometime later in the street, with your head ringing and lying in a pool of blood. The noise and pain wake you up. You squint through a film of blood and bleary eyes and you see four men raping your wife.

She’s covered with blood and she’s badly beaten and seems only half aware of what’s happening to her as she looks in your direction. Your daughters being held by the arms of two drunken men and your sons lying at their feet in a bloody heap. You begin to realize that there are bodies everywhere. Your neighbors. Two laughing teenagers step over a body as they come out of your house with the few valuables you had before setting fire to your home. When you went to bed a few hours ago, this was just another day. You can see in your wife’s eyes that some part of her still believes that you’re going to save her. You struggle to find your balance and you move toward her when a teacher from the local school steps behind you and crushes your skull with a hammer.

This isn’t a scene from a horror movie or some singularly horrific event that occurred that one time in humanity’s dark past. If you were a Jewish person living in Europe or Russia for most of the last thousand years, this scene would have been pretty familiar to you because it happened all the time. Now, I’m not trying to shock you, or maybe I am a bit, because I think sometimes we need to be shocked in order to take something we see in a newspaper or hear about from time to time in a history book and realize that it’s not just a story. I think we often have a natural bias to sort of privilege our own experiences and to imagine that our own feelings of joy or grief or terror or happiness or that they’re somehow deeper or more real than the experiences of anyone else. Intellectually, of course, we know that’s not true, but it’s one of those natural biases that kind of switches back to the default mode without an occasional reminder, at least for me, for some people. I spent a lot of time trying to decide whether or not to start with that story, whether to include anything like that, whether I was being just gratuitous or obscene. I’m still not sure what the answer to that is, but in the end, I asked you to imagine yourself in an unimaginable situation because this story has to begin there. I think it has to begin there.

What I just described happened to real people who felt and feared and loved and suffered and grieved every bit as deeply as you or me. So when we close our eyes and we imagine what it would be like to watch that happen to our families, I mean, you can’t even imagine it, but just try to force yourself to understand that real people weren’t imagining it. It happened to them and they felt those things. Think of the people you love more than anything, and I know it’s uncomfortable, but I’m asking you to do it because only by imagining yourself in an unimaginable situation can we make sense of why people might take unimaginable measures to save or to avenge the people they love. They were called pogroms, and this kind of anti-Jewish violence sort of came in waves throughout European and Russian history. Times of uncertainty and turmoil tended to be bad news for European Jews in general as the anxieties of the population always seemed to get taken out on people who had been designated either by the community or by themselves as set apart or different. Usually it’s a little bit of both. During the 14th century, for example, in addition to enduring the ravages of war and black plague like everyone else, Jews also had to deal with being accused by terrified Christians of being behind all the chaos, of spreading the plague through black magic or by poisoning wells.

Pogroms erupted across Europe. Despite declarations from Pope Clement VI that the Jews were innocent, this was an age when the Pope’s word was literally the law, it didn’t matter. He was threatening to excommunicate anyone who attacked a Jew over the blood libel. Didn’t matter. A lot’s been written about the nature and causes of anti-Semitism. We could do a whole three-hour conversation on that topic alone, but it’s not important to get into it right at this moment except to say that anti-Jewish feeling and anti-Jewish violence had been a fact of life in Europe for a long time. The late 1800s were a time of immense uncertainty as industrialization and advances in technology were causing upheaval at every level of society. This tumultuous time was no exception to the rule I just mentioned, and antiSemitism was rising all over the place, most of all in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Between 1881 and 1884, I’m going to repeat that for emphasis, just three years between 1881 and 1884, in just the Russian Empire, there were at least 200 pogroms. The thing to understand about a pogrom is that it’s not just mob violence, it’s not just a riot, it’s an attack of implicit or explicit sanction from the powers that be. To me, maybe the scariest part of the story that I just asked you to imagine was running into the police officer and realizing that moment when you realize that he’s not going to help you, that you’re on your own. It’s like the zombie apocalypse, but the zombies have bats and chains and knives and guns. There’s nowhere to run and nobody to turn to, and if you can’t protect yourself, nobody is going to protect you. In fact, very often when pogroms would happen, governments would respond by blaming the Jews for the disorder and passing anti-Jewish laws out of revenge and to placate their antiSemitic populations. Now, like I said, usually these things would come in waves, and after a while, these feelings tended to burn themselves out, but around the turn of the 19th century, things only seemed to be getting worse and worse. From 1903 to 1906, thousands and thousands would be killed in pogroms in Ukraine.

In one attack in Crimea, over 2,500 were murdered in a single night, many more raped and maimed. After the first Kishinev pogrom, in April 1903, the New York Times wrote, quote, The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit us to publish. There was a well-laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, kill the Jews, was taken up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead, number 120, and the injured, about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob.

The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset, the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews. End quote. Babies literally torn to pieces. And this was what the censors allowed to be published. The mind starts to naturally wonder what they were forced to leave out. I don’t want to know what’s worse than that.

After a series of riots and revolutions shook the Russian Empire in 1905, hundreds of pogroms followed. In terms of bloodbath in Odessa, Ukraine, Robert Weinberg has written extensively on the labor unrest leading up to the revolution and how it supercharged tensions between the Jews and other subjects of the Russian Empire. You see, the Jews, encountering so much discrimination without having any legal recourse, they did what most people would do. They were attracted in great numbers to revolutionary movements. Who can blame them, given what they were dealing with? But the problem was that this often gave fuel to the fires that were already burning, because when riots and strikes and revolutions began to disrupt society, people often blamed the Jews for being behind it all. And so on October 19th, 1905, after a few days of street fights between left-wing Jewish students and workers groups with Russian demonstrators, shots were fired at a crowd of Russians by a few Jewish revolutionaries. And then the city of Odessa went insane.

In his essay on the 1905 Odessa Pogrom, Weinberg writes, quote, The lurid details of the pogrom can be found in several eyewitness and secondary accounts. Although the list of atrocities perpetrated against the Jews is too long to recount here, suffice it to say that pogromists brutally and indiscriminately beat, mutilated and murdered defenseless Jewish men, women and children. They hurled Jews out of windows, raped and cut open the stomachs of pregnant women and slaughtered infants in front of their parents. In one particularly gruesome incident, pogromists hung a woman upside down by her legs and arranged the bodies of her six dead children on the floor below. The pogrom’s unrestrained, violent and destructive excesses were in large measure made possible by the failure of authorities to adopt any countermeasures. Low-ranking policemen and soldiers failed to interfere with the pogromists and in many instances participated in the looting and killing. For their part, soldiers, concluding from the actions of the police that the pogrom was sanctioned by higher authorities, stood idly by while pogromists looted stores and murdered unarmed Jews. Some policemen discharged their weapons into the air and told rioters that the shots had come from apartments inhabited by Jews, leaving the latter vulnerable to vicious beatings and murder.

Eyewitnesses also reported seeing policemen directing pogromists to Jewish-owned stores or Jews’ apartments while steering the rioters away from the property of non-Jews. As the correspondent for Colliers reported, icons and crosses were placed in windows and hung outside doors to mark the residences of Russians and in almost every case this was sufficient protection. Now that’s horrifying, but the point to be aware of here is that this kind of thing was not exceptional. Over just a few years in the Russian Empire, one modern study found pogroms in 64 towns and cities and 626 small towns and villages. I always have to fight the tendency to get just completely overwhelmed and numbed by the scale of it all. Because these pogroms, they’re not happening to cities and towns and villages, they’re happening to people. Those are real babies being torn to pieces, real mothers watching it happen, real fathers and brothers being killed in those dozens of towns and hundreds of villages. If you were a Jewish person living during these years, this was something that you lived with.

And again, maybe the unique plight of these people was that there was nowhere that they could go. There was nowhere to turn and nowhere to run. No one was going to help you. As Robert Weinberg just mentioned, the police and the military were often stepping aside at best, often actively participating. At the Odessa pogrom, some Jews formed self-defense units to protect themselves, but the police were ordered to fire on them and protect the rioters. It wasn’t burning itself out this time. Many Jews began to sense that something was changing. Maybe it wasn’t going to get better.

Things seemed to be building. Maybe it was time to stop hoping that government authorities were ever going to step in and save them. Maybe it was time to take matters into their own hands. What the best course of action was, that was a matter for debate, but many Jews all over Europe had had enough. They’d had it. They were done leaving their well-being and the safety of their families to the goodwill of others. And so between 1881 and 1914, two and a half million Jews would flee the Russian Empire, but they found greater or lesser degrees of anti-Semitism wherever they went. Many were fortunate enough to make it to the US or Britain or France, where things were certainly easier than they were in Eastern Europe or Russia, but they were still met with suspicion and discrimination that would qualify as rank racism and horror story stuff today.

Back then it was relatively mild, but only in a relative sense. Many were embracing socialism and labor groups like the Bund. Others were finding hope, preventing their frustration in radical revolutionary movements. They’d had it. They were finished waiting around for change and they were embracing in great numbers, they were embracing movements of forceful, violent overthrow of existing orders. Jewish members formed an important part of Bolshevism and other communist groups. They played a prominent role in 19th and early 20th century anarchist movements. In addition to Bolshevism and anarchism, others began turning to an ideology of radical Jewish nationalism known as Zionism.

What would you do? You’re going to get tired of hearing me ask that question by the time I’m finished telling this story, but it’s the question we need to ask ourselves over and over if we are ever going to have any hope of understanding how the immigration of a few thousand Jews to a lightly developed area of the Eastern Mediterranean in the late 1800s has grown into the most bitter and intractable conflict in the world today. Any fight that goes on this long suffers from a lack of empathy, with the list of grievances so long on both sides that you’re going to find plenty of reasons to hate whoever you want to hate if that’s what you’re looking for. A lot of people have reached a point in the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians where they’ve just thrown their hands up. Egyptian writer Radwa Ashra summed it up pretty well, quote, Palestine. For most of us, the word brings to mind a series of confused images and disjointed associations. Massacres, refugee camps, UN resolutions, settlements, terrorist attacks, war, occupation, checkered keffiyehs, and suicide bombers, a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction, end quote. And a common thing you hear is that, oh, they’ve been fighting for thousands of years and there’s nothing anyone can say or do to overcome this kind of ancient ethnic and religious hatred.

Or another one is that both sides are equally at fault. And while this sounds like you’re just being fair and balanced and reasonable, people often use this to avoid having to come to any deeper understanding of the issue. For many people, the biggest impediment to understanding the history of the situation is that it just seems too complicated. Who has the time? When you come in fresh and wanting to learn, you find two sides in total opposition who both seem completely certain of their position and accuse the other side of the darkest, most evil, and disingenuous intentions. Most of us, once we get home from work, have dinner, take care of our kids, and take a breath, we just don’t have the time to read books by people on both sides of the issue, check out alternative websites, keep up with the latest news, especially since this isn’t the only crisis in the world. It would be a full-time job to understand the history and develop well-considered opinions on Palestine and Ukraine and Tibet and whatever happens to pop into the news tomorrow. Especially when the people who do spend all their time devoted to the issues, they can’t seem to agree on the most basic points.

It’s just too much, and so many of us just retreat. We figure that the experts must be dealing with these issues, and we go to work and try to take care of our families. If you’re listening to this, then it means that you’ve taken a different step. You’re already part of the tiny fraction of the population who at least cares enough to try to understand one of the most important issues in the world today. I’m going to do my best to respect that. This is important geopolitically as well as morally, but I’m not going to preach to you or try to convince you that one side is right or one side is wrong, there’s plenty of that in every bookstore and all over the internet. I looked at the situation we have today between the Israelis and the Palestinians and the rest of the Muslim world now, and I wanted to find out what happened, how something like this could happen. At one point, I only knew the broad outlines of the story, like most people, but the more I learned, the more astonished I became at how far removed the real history is from the impression I had received from the tidbits and news reports and a few one-sided documentaries and so forth over the years.

As you learn about the history of the conflict in Palestine, it’s natural to have a reaction of horror with regard to the behavior of many people involved on both sides, and that’s why I will continue to ask you over and over and over to stop and ask yourself what you would have done. The world of 1880 or 1914 or 1948 even is not our world. Things were different in ways that are difficult to even communicate to people today. As we go through, when you hit those moments of shock and moral outrage, take a breath and ask yourself exactly what you would have done. Not in theory, not after careful consideration, not your best self, but in real time with your family in danger right now and nowhere to escape. A moment ago I mentioned some of the other revolutionary movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We think of the Bolshevists of Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin executing Nazar and his family or communists fighting with sticks and knives in the streets against fascists in Germany or the good old bomb-throwing anarchists in Italy. What do you think of when you hear the word Zionist?

It probably depends on who you are and what your background is. We all hold stereotypes in our heads. It’s natural. When I say Englishman, a certain image is going to pop into your head based on your own experiences. It might be a character from Downton Abbey holding a cup of tea and eating crumpets and wearing a monocle. Or it might be a soccer hooligan if that’s what you’re into. But something’s going to pop in when I say that word. Same thing when I say Palestinian or Jew or Zionist.

Palestinian might cause you to think of a mother crying while she holds her young son who was just killed by an Israeli drone. It might make you think of a suicide bomber stepping onto a school bus full of innocent children. When I say Zionist, I find that a lot of Americans at least get this image of an elderly Orthodox Jew nodding his head and praying at the Wailing Wall. If that’s anything like the image you get, then the first thing you need to do is get that image right out of your head. When I say Zionist in this story, you need to think of mostly young, fierce, fiery radicals drawn from the same pool of revolutionaries that will soon be putting people against the wall in Communist Russia in just a few years. In fact, Zionism was competing for recruits with Bolshevism and these other radical movements. It’s a competition which Winston Churchill and maybe typical Churchillian hyperbole would later call, quote, little less than a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people. Leon Trotsky, who would found and command the Soviet Red Army in the Russian Revolution, he was at the 6th Zionist Congress and many other early meetings.

He eventually came to believe that Zionism was incompatible with the kind of revolution he had in mind. But he didn’t just walk away, he actively worked to undermine the Zionist movement and attack its leaders. Zionists were very aware that they were in competition with these other radical movements for the loyalty of young Jews. So forget the old doddering guy moving back and forth, forget about it. You can think of them as idealistic revolutionaries who dreamed of the liberation of their people because there is certainly truth in that image. But if you were a Palestinian living in the first half of the 20th century and I said the word Zionist, it would conjure an image of a person who had just thrown a grenade into a crowded theater, or set fire to a mosque full of people, or sprayed machine gun fire into a midday market. Now idealist or terrorist, these early Zionists were not just humble families looking for a place to rest their heads, but radical students and thinkers and pioneers and fighters cut from the same cloth as the people who were leading the charge to overthrow the Russian Empire and build the Soviet Union, people who were willing to do anything to create a new world on their own terms. So then this, this is the environment in the late 1800s, an environment of constant anti-Semitism and frequent violence, with a bunch of people who were just tired of feeling threatened and under siege. This was the feeling when in 1882, after a series of pogroms in the Russian Empire, a small group who called themselves the Biluim, Imz, plural, the group called itself Bilu, which is an acronym for a Hebrew passage, which is where most of the Zionist groups that we’re going to encounter in this story will get their names. The Biluim, they issued a manifesto and put out a call to the scattered Jews of Europe, starts out recounting some of the biblical mythology of the Hebrew people in the land of Israel. And it talks about the persecution through which the Jewish people had suffered for so many years. And then it addresses itself to the Jewish people, quote, this spark is again kindling and will shine for us a true pillar of fire going before us on the road to Zion. Zion, by the way, is a hill in the city of Jerusalem. While behind us is a pillar of cloud, the pillar of oppression, threatening to destroy us. Sleepest thou, O our nation? What hast thou been doing until 1882?

Sleeping and dreaming the false dream of assimilation. Now thank God thou are awakened from thy slothful slumber. The pogroms have awakened thee from thy charmed sleep. Thine eyes are open to recognize the cloudy, delusive hopes. Canst thou listen silently to the taunts and mockeries of thine enemies? And then it demands to know from them, quote, where is thy ancient pride, thine olden spirit? Remember that thou wast a nation possessing a wise law, a religion, a constitution, a celestial temple whose wall is still a silent witness to the glories of the past. That thy sons dwelt in palaces and towers and thy cities flourished in the splendor of civilization while these enemies of thine dwelt like beasts in the muddy marshes of their dark woods.

While thy children were clad in purple and fine linen, they wore the rough skins of the wolf and the bear. Art thou not ashamed? End quote. It goes on to explain that they intend to ask the permission of the Ottoman Empire to settle on a small strip of land on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean that the Romans had called Palestine. They intend, quote, to beg it of the Sultan himself and if it be impossible to obtain this, to beg that we may at least possess it as a state within a larger state. The internal administration to be ours, to have our civil and political rights, and to act within the Turkish Empire only in foreign affairs so as to help our brother Ishmael in his time of need. End quote. Now you may have noticed something very interesting and it’s a very important point.

Ignoring for the moment their somewhat confusing conflation of the Turks with the descendants of Ishmael, notice that the Arabs and the Muslims are not the enemy in 1882. The Europeans and the Russians are the enemy they’re talking about, clad in the rough skins of the wolf and the bear and running through the dark woods like savages. Our brother Ishmael is looked upon as a friend. This is important because, again, you’ll often hear people say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a fight that goes back thousands of years. The implication is that it has no beginning, has no end, has no discernible cause. It’s just ancient ethnic and religious hatred. These people just hate each other and that’s that. It’s very important to understand that this simply isn’t true. The world was a less tolerant and inclusive place over most of the last millennium, of course, but with that qualification, overall you could say that the Muslims and the Jews got on pretty well. Larry Collins in his book, O Jerusalem, about the birth of the State of Israel, he wrote, quote, with few exceptions, the Jewish people had dwelt in relative security among the Arabs over the centuries. The golden age of the Diaspora had come in the Spain of the Caliphs and the Ottoman Turks had welcomed the Jews when the doors of much of Europe were closed to them. The ghastly chain of crimes perpetrated on the Jewish people culminating in the crematoriums of Germany had been inflicted on them by the Christian nations of Europe, not those of the Islamic East, end quote. You can see that in the Bilu Manifesto and in the writings of a lot of the early Zionists. To them, the Christians were the threat, the Europeans, the Muslims were all right. To a lot of people, writing this off as some intractable ancient feud is also pretty convenient. It saves us from having to learn too much about it.

When you see violence on the news, you can just throw your hands in the air and say, ugh, they’re at it again, as if it just can’t be explained. It just kind of comes and goes like a hurricane or an earthquake. It’s also a convenient narrative for some of the parties involved. It’s convenient because it saves them from having to take any responsibility for anything. If I walk up to you on the street and just punch you out of nowhere, and they’ve got me on tape, dead to rights, just walking up and hitting you, it might not be a bad strategy in court for me to just try and convince the jury that this is a fight that’s always been going on, ever since we were kids, and my punch was just the latest response in a series of reprisals that go back to childhood, even our parents. If that’s the case, I can’t really be the one responsible, at least not solely responsible, can I? I might even say I was just proactively defending myself. But what if that’s not true?

To properly frame what happened today, we’ve got to understand what happened yesterday, and the day before that, and all the days before, until we reach the beginning of a story. The early Zionists had no beef with the Arabs native to the place we now call Israel. And the Arabs didn’t concern themselves too much when the Zionists first started moving to Palestine. When you turn on the news, remember that this conflict has a beginning. It has a cause. And the cause is relatively recent. I bring this up for two reasons. First to point out that whatever dimensions the conflict has taken on today, or is increasingly taking on today, its roots are political, not ethnic, not religious.

We’re always hearing about religions causing wars throughout history, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict sits in the popular consciousness, in large segments of the United States at least, as a perfect example of that. No matter how many people die, whatever peace conferences propose, it just can’t overcome the hatred Muslims and Jews have for each other. While the early Zionists are talking about their brother Ishmael, and soon after the most prominent Arab leader is going to welcome the Jews as cousins, this is and always was a political conflict, with definite causes and specific grievances. In 1896, Theodor Herzl, a Jewish-Austrian writer, called the father of modern political Zionism, earned that title by publishing a pamphlet that would become the founding document of the movement. It’s a remarkable document for its insight and clarity, for Herzl’s clear understanding of the deep forces at work in Europe and within the disparate communities of European Jews. It’s one of the two or three most important documents in this story, and one of the most fascinating documents in history, so forgive me for quoting it at length, but I prefer to let it speak for itself, because it really does a better job than I could do myself of giving you a sense of what someone like Herzl was feeling as the 19th century came to an end. First, Herzl gives the lay of the land, pointing out the persistent suffering the Jews had faced during their years of homelessness in Europe. The Jewish question exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers.

Where it does not exist, it is carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution. This is the case in every country, and will remain so, even in those highly civilized, for instance France, until the Jewish question finds a solution on a political basis. The unfortunate Jews are now carrying the seeds of anti-Semitism into England, they have already introduced it. Into America. I believe that I understand anti-Semitism, which is really a highly complex movement. I consider it from a Jewish standpoint, yet without fear or hatred. I believe that I can see what elements there are in it of vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense.” And Herzl asks why, in an age when technology has made it possible to travel around the world and communicate over vast distances and create wealth in previously poor lands, why have the Jews remained stranded in places that don’t want them?

He goes on, quote, We have honestly endeavored everywhere to merge ourselves in the social life of surrounding communities and to preserve the faith of our fathers. We are not permitted to do so. In vain are we loyal patriots, our loyalty in some places running to extremes. In vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow citizens. In vain do we strive to increase the fame of our native land in science and art or her wealth by trade and commerce. In countries where we have lived for centuries we are still cried down as strangers. The majority may decide which are the strangers, for this, as indeed every point which arises in the relations between nations is a question of might. I do not here surrender any portion of our prescriptive right when I make this statement merely in my own name as an individual.

In the world as it now stands, and for an indefinite period will probably remain, might precedes right. It is useless, therefore, for us to be loyal patriots, as were the Huguenots who were forced to emigrate, if only we could be left in peace. But I think we shall not be left in peace. For old prejudices against us still lie deep in the hearts of the people. He who would have proof of this need only listen to the people when they speak with frankness and simplicity. Proverb and fairy tale are both anti-Semitic. The nation is everywhere a great child, which can certainly be educated, but its education would even in the most favorable circumstances occupy such a vast amount of time that we could, as already mentioned, remove our own difficulties by other means long before the process was accomplished.” Herzl knew that the biggest impediment to getting Zionism off the ground would not come from enemies of the Jews, but from fellow Jews in more comfortable nations like France and Britain who simply wished to be French or British. And so Herzl reminds his readers of the reality of their situation in Europe. No one can deny the gravity of the situation of the Jews. Attacks in parliaments, in assemblies, in the press, in the pulpit, in the street, on journeys, for example, their exclusion from certain hotels, even in places of recreation, become daily more numerous. The forms of persecution varying according to the countries and social circles in which they occur. In Russia, imposters are levying on Jewish villages. In Romania, a few persons are put to death. In Germany, they get a good beating occasionally. In Austria, anti-Semites exercise terrorism over all public life. In Algeria, there are traveling agitators.

In Paris, the Jews are shut out of the so-called best social circles and excluded from clubs. Shades of antiJewish feeling are innumerable, but this is not to be an attempt to make out a doleful category of Jewish hardships. The nation in whose midst the Jews live are all either covertly or openly anti-Semitic.” He then says that the causes of modern anti-Semitism are different than they have ever been in the past. In the past, he says, their persecution wore religious garb. But in the modern plight, Herzl says, it has causes which are economic and political in nature, and that in those places where Jews’ legal status had improved, their rights would not be officially withdrawn, quote, not only because their withdrawal would be opposed to the spirit of our age, but also because it would immediately drive all Jews, rich and poor alike, into the ranks of subversive parties. Nothing effectual can really be done to our injury. In olden days, our jewels were seized. How is our movable property to be got hold of now?

It consists of printed papers, which are locked up somewhere or other in the world, perhaps in the coffers of Christians. Anti-Semitism increases day by day and hour by hour among the nations. Indeed, it is bound to increase, because the causes of its growth continue to exist and cannot be removed. When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties. At the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.” See over the centuries, Jews were forbidden from making a living in many vocations, from owning land. They were restricted to urban occupations, and especially into services that were considered by Christians to be discreditable or immoral, like money lending. Well, times had changed in many places, and many of those occupations where Jews were disproportionately represented, like banking and law, weren’t such bad places to be anymore. This led to everything from resentment and envy to wild conspiracy theories, which we’ll get to in just a little bit.

On the other side of the spectrum, Herzl points out that those Jews that didn’t float to the top often sunk all the way to the bottom. Frustrated and disaffected Jews often filled the ranks of revolutionary parties, another fact which was hardly lost on the host population, as we mentioned before. Herzl recognized this reality. He believed that Jews would always be persecuted, in times of plenty because of their success, in times of trouble because of their revolutionary activities. It was time, Herzl told the Jews of Europe, to escape. Agreeing with the proposal laid down by the Billuim, he suggested simply asking the relevant powers to permit Jewish people from around the world to settle and build up the land of Palestine. It couldn’t hurt to ask, and the Zionists would offer to be a useful ally to anyone who helped them. So he called on all Jews to devote themselves to this quest, for the rich to use their money and influence to support it, and for the poor to immigrate to the land itself to make their homes. Herzl’s pamphlet was published in the midst of a scandal in France that had shaken the faith of many Jews who had begun to feel pretty safe in the more cosmopolitan Western European nations. Libraries full of books have been written on this, and so I won’t get detained here for too long, and you’ll have to forgive me many times for giving short shrift to a lot of the episodes of this story that are interesting in their own right and deserve more attention, so I apologize in advance. There are great 500-page books written on details I pass over in a sentence or two, and I certainly don’t mean to do injustice to any of them, and this is one of those situations. So this particular event is hugely important to France, to many Jews, to the Zionist movement certainly. I’m not going to do it justice, but I encourage you to look into it because it’s fascinating. It all started in 1894, when a maid in the German embassy in Paris found a letter revealing that a French trader had been passing secrets to the Germans. The letter’s name was cast on an army captain named Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jew on the French General Staff, but he vehemently denied any involvement. Now this might have been a minor legal and political controversy, just another forgotten tale of injustice, except for what happened next.

See, Dreyfus was court-martialed in a humiliating manner. He was dressed down, and his officer’s cutlass was broken in half. He was sent off to a penal colony known as Devil’s Island. Now French generals soon realized that they had convicted the wrong man, but rather than admit it, they manufactured evidence to cover up the mistake. Even as evidence started piling up and more people began to look into the case, they held their ground, dug in their heels. When a lieutenant colonel, who had become interested in the case, presented iron-clad evidence that Dreyfus was innocent, he was told, What does it matter to you if this Jew remains on Devil’s Island? But soon, it was no longer just an army matter, it spilled out into the public forum. It was so contentious that people in France became known as Dreyfussards and AntiDreyfussards, depending on their opinion, and everyone had an opinion.

Marcel Proust even features it in the background of his novel In Search of Lost Time. In 1898, the novelist Emile Zola published an open letter to the French president on the front page of a newspaper detailing the evidence, as well as the lies and the cover-up by the military, and this swung public opinion in Dreyfus’ favor. The civilian High Court of Appeals threw out his conviction, but still the army wouldn’t budge. They simply tried and convicted him again. The Dreyfussards and the Anti-Dreyfussards both dug into their positions, and the debate shifted and became more acrimonious. The controversy divided France right down the middle, and brought out a sleeping anti-Semitism many worse Western European Jews had convinced themselves was history, or at least on its way to being history in places like France. That kind of thing was supposed to be reserved for the backwaters of Ukraine and Russia with their pious ignorant peasants and where Jews were involved with revolutionary activities. The scandal lasted over a decade as Dreyfus was shoved in and out of French courts and prisons and anti-Semitic demonstrations and attacks erupted all over France and Algeria.

Theodor Herzl was a press correspondent in Paris during the Dreyfus affair, and he saw demonstrations by anti-Dreyfussards chanting, Death to the Jews! Death to the Jews! Death to the Jews in the secular, tolerant, enlightened French Republic. The hope of the Jews, many people thought back then. There was some debate over Herzl’s position on whether Dreyfus was guilty, but what’s certain is that the demonstrations and riots and rhetoric that it brought out, it proved to him that the Jews would never be safe in Europe. Herzl was an assimilated, upper-class, cosmopolitan Jew who didn’t speak Hebrew or Yiddish and who’d had very little contact with the general run of Jewish cultural life in Europe. This background, at first, it predisposed him toward assimilation. He thought that was the best way to help the problem of anti-Semitism.

He wanted to appeal to the reason of the host nations as solutions to the problem. The Dreyfus affair changed all that. If they couldn’t be safe in France, they wouldn’t be safe anywhere. Herzl would later say, quote, in Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward anti-Semitism. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to combat anti-Semitism, end quote. He came to believe that the Europeans would never and could never be cured of their hatred of the Jews. It was time to get out. Dreyfus had been arrested in 1894.

Herzl wrote his manifesto in 1896, calling on the Jews scattered around Europe to recognize themselves as one people, one national entity, and to join him in reclaiming their ancient home in Palestine. In his document, he doesn’t mention the local population really at all. One of the things you notice when you read it, and really when you go through almost all of these early documents and diary entries and speeches, is that the people, the hundreds of thousands of people currently living in the land in question are almost literally not mentioned. Herzl had never actually been to Palestine when he wrote his pamphlet, and he refers to it as, quote, a neutral territory. He vaguely recognizes the fact that there are natives, his word. His manifesto is 24,000 or so words long, and the word Arab doesn’t appear once. And he recognizes that they may resist Zionist colonization, that’s another word he uses, but that’s as far as it goes. His solution to the problem is to cut a deal with the Turkish government to enforce and protect Zionist settlement from any restless natives who don’t like it.

Partially this reflects just an orientalist, colonialist view of the world, where people who live on a piece of land aren’t citizens, they’re not a culture or a society, they’re just natives. Part of the background, along with the hills and the trees and the animals, and certainly not a meaningful political entity to be consulted about the grand decisions of civilized men. No matter where you go, the Americas, Africa, even places with built up civilizations, Europeans of this time usually just sort of had an attitude of, you know, what, who lives there? Um, just natives, natives live there. What the Chinese? Yeah, just natives. And you have to remember that in the late 1800s, early 1900s, colonial power was still completely taken for granted as a legitimate pursuit, and people still use words like empire to describe their country, and they didn’t think that was strange at all. This kind of dismissive attitude that Herzl and many of the early Zionists showed toward the Palestinians who were there, it sounds bad, and it is, but it’s not something that was unique to him or to the Zionists. It was pretty much universal across Europe at the time. The whole idea of creating a new country from scratch, even that just sounds strange to our modern ears. But this is another thing that wasn’t so strange in the time period. The idea of carving out a new nation from the carcass of one of the dying empires of the day was all the rage, and in fact, this awakened ethnic nationalism was one of the reasons those empires were dying. A few years down the road, a Serbian nationalist will shoot an Austrian archduke and his wife to express his desire for an ethnic Serbian state free from Austrian rule, and that’ll kick off the war that’ll finish off three empires and give birth to several new ethnic nations. In the Middle East, it wasn’t the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the Ottoman Empire that was decaying. With Turkey losing its grip, the idea that it might be kind of nice to have our own country was gaining traction among the Kurds, the Armenians, and the Arabs, including the ones that lived in the quote neutral country of Palestine. And so as crazy as it seems, and it was a crazy idea even to the vast majority of Jews when Herzl published his pamphlet, looking back, it wasn’t that strange of an idea, at least not as crazy as it might sound today.

Zionism was just the Jewish version of a nationalistic fever that was spreading among people all over Europe. The difference was that those other people already had a home. The Serbs already lived in Serbia. They just wanted to run their own affairs and have recognition as a separate country. Same with all the rest. The Jews didn’t have a home. They hadn’t had one since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and sent them packing 2,000 years ago. Now you would think that not having a home would present a pretty big obstacle to any group of nationalists, but the Zionists were bringing wealth and energy and intelligence to the table that really set them apart.

This was an age when people were thinking big. Things like overturning economic systems and destroying empires was on the menu, and so the Zionists weren’t going to let something like not having any land stop them from building a nation. They said, no problem, we’ve got just the place. We’ll just gather up all the Jews from around the world and we’ll just all move to a small piece of land on the Eastern Med. It’s out of the way, no one’s really using it, you won’t even know we’re there. The problem was that there were people living there, and they’d been living there for centuries. The refrain from the Zionists then and now was, come on, Arabs have plenty of land, just go across the river to Jordan. All we want is a little piece, and they were saying to Palestinians, you’re Arab, go live where Arabs live.

Go live in Egypt or Jordan or Arabia or somewhere. Just give us this one little piece of land. What’s the big deal? Why are you being so unreasonable? To the typical European back then, the Zionists were all Europeans by the way, an Arab was just an Arab. Think about it, the Ottoman Empire controlled the entire Middle East at this time, and so imagine you’re looking at a world map, and all these countries in the Middle East that are different colors on your map, erase all the lines and cover it all with one color, with Ottoman Empire just written over the whole thing. Now if you’re a European, there’s a good chance that you’re not going to have it. You’re not going to have any real granular understanding of all the differences within that big block. You might just have kind of a general idea that the Arabs live in this big area south of Turkey and west of Iran, but you’re not going to get too detailed with it. If all of Europe had been under one big empire for centuries and centuries, in an age before the internet or anything like that, you looked at a map, and it was just all one state. People might know the differences between Austrians and French, but are they going to be aware of the deep cultural and linguistic traditions that make French-speaking Walloon Belgians a distinct entity apart from France? Probably not. They’re both of Frankish descent, they both speak French, what’s the difference? Well, the Belgians and the French would tell you there’s a big difference. In a similar way to the Zionists, the nuance was either lost or ignored in the lands of the Levant. An Arab was just an Arab, but of course the locals didn’t see it that way.

They would be saying, hey, besides the fact that this is my home and my great-great-grandfather built this house and planted these olive trees, I’m not just an Arab, I’m a Palestinian. A Palestinian is not an Egyptian. That’s like telling a Frenchman, give up your home and go live in England. You’re all Eurosomething or other. What’s the difference? The inability to see individual people as people plagues this issue today on both sides, by the way. Throughout this story, the Western powers will treat the Arabs and the Jews differently, and mostly, honestly, it was just because of basic familiarity. The Zionists they’re going to be talking to are urban Europeans, wearing suits and speaking English or French with maybe no accent, with names like Jacob or David, something that people will recognize from the Bible.

The Arabs send delegations of men whose names contain letters that they can’t pronounce. The original subtitle of Herzl’s pamphlet was addressed to the Rothschilds, referring to the Jewish banking family whose wealth and power were, well, almost mythical. Just go Google the name along with conspiracy or Illuminati or something and you’ll find yourself very quickly in the dark closets of the Internet. In fact, don’t do that. At the height of the Rothschilds’ power in the 19th century, the family played a pivotal role in world events. Rothschilds financed the British against Napoleon, they helped finance Brazilian independence, and they were instrumental in financing railways and other infrastructure in the world, including the Suez Canal, which is another important part of this story we’ll get to in a bit. The Rothschild family was large, though, and it had varied interests and ideas. Some strongly favored Jewish identity, while others had no time for that nonsense, and they just favored assimilation.

A few were avid Zionists and even supported religious settlers in Jerusalem for decades, and to these ones, the early Zionists were reaching out and finding support. Word starts to spread, and the first Zionist Congress is called a year after Herzl releases his pamphlet in 1897. The minutes of the Congress tell us a few things that will lay some important groundwork and run as common themes from here on out. The official position of the Congress was that the Zionists would only seek to establish a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine. The Congress publicly disavowed any idea of desiring an ethnic Jewish state. The distinction between a Jewish home and a Jewish state was absolutely crucial, and they knew it. A struggle over the distinction would determine the character of the Zionist project in the course of history in the Middle East. Herzl was what became known as a political Zionist. In opposition to the official declaration of the Zionist organization that it would only seek a home in Palestine among the Palestinians rather than an ethnic Jewish state, his pamphlet that had led to the Zionist Congress being called in the first place was called Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State. Actually, the literal translation is The Jew State, but that just sounds weird. His pamphlet makes clear that he believed it was imperative to focus their efforts on getting the powers with influence in the region to grant them legal authority over Palestine, thus obtained they would then be able to induce Jews from all over the world to immigrate to Palestine, assured that the Ottoman or the British Empire or whoever guaranteed their sovereignty and security. This is political Zionism. The state is the thing. Borders, a government, a military, recognition in the international community. Then we can worry about other things. In opposition to this perspective were the practical Zionists.

Practical Zionists believed that a declaration of a Jewish state, even if it was agreed to by all the powers in the world, was a meaningless gesture on its own and would only provoke the local population to oppose Jewish immigration from the start. The practical Zionists said, who cares about some lines on a map or paper agreements with governments? They took a different approach. Get in there, create an economy, build relationships with people, pave roads, build schools and universities that benefit everybody, create industry, bring investment, build the Jewish homeland from the inside out, and eventually it won’t have to be declared, for it will simply be a fact. Why provoke the local population over an empty declaration? Eventually, Herzl and the political Zionists were forced to admit that the practical Zionists had a point there. It was too early in the game to start arguing with the Arabs over ownership and sovereignty when the Jews still only made up 3, maybe 4 percent of the population of Palestine. But while they accepted the strategic necessity of adopting the practical Zionist public stance, the political Zionists remained convinced that a sovereign, ethnically Jewish state had to be the goal.

Herzl, writing in his diary after the Congress, explained this realpolitik. Quote, If I were to sum the Congress up in a word, which I shall take care not to publish, it would be this. At Basel I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, it would be greeted by universal laughter. In 5 years, perhaps, and certainly in 15, everyone will perceive it. End quote. The Jewish state. This is a distinction that means everything, and the Zionists knew it.

The United States lets in a lot of immigrants from Mexico, right? How differently would people feel about it if they came in openly expressing their goal of shearing off the Southwest to create their own country? Even most people in favor of full, open immigration are going to pump the brakes and say, Look, you can come over, make yourself at home, my house is your house, but if you start demanding that I sign over the deed, I’m going to have a couple questions. Political Zionists accepted that it was necessary to hide these intentions, not only from the population they would be moving in on, but from the powers whose help or permission they would need, because no one was ready to waste their time and resources enforcing a coerced displacement of a local population to make room for a new Jewish state that may or may not even happen. It’s a tough sell to convince one of the great powers to permanently piss off the Arabs by giving an important piece of land to a bunch of European Jews for all you knew might get bored with this whole thing once they spend a summer in the Negev Desert. And so the narrative had to be crafted in a way that was non-threatening to both the Arabs and the imperial powers the Zionists were asking for help. And so the Zionists pushed the idea that Palestine was an empty, neutral territory. Again, as Herzl called it in his manifesto, but as early as the first Congress, and even before that, there were plenty of people calling attention to the fact that that wasn’t exactly true.

In his book, Righteous Victims, iconoclastic Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that in Palestine, quote, the Zionists sought radically to change the status quo, buy as much land as possible, settle on it, and then eventually turn an Arab populated country into a Jewish homeland. For decades, the Zionists tried to camouflage their real aspirations for fear of angering the authorities and the Arabs. They were, however, certain of their aims and of the means needed to achieve them. Internal correspondence amongst the Jewish immigrants to Palestine from the very beginning of the Zionist enterprise leaves little room for doubt, end quote. He quotes several pieces of that internal correspondence, including this letter from two prominent early Zionists to a colleague in Lithuania, quote, We have made it a rule not to say too much, except to those we trust. There are now only 500,000 Arabs who are not very strong and from whom we shall easily take away the country if we only do it through stratagems and without drawing upon us their hostility before we become the strong and populous ones, end quote. Asher Ginsberg represented another strain of Zionism that you might call cultural or religious Zionism. He believed that Jews were tied to Palestine by spiritual bonds and that the important thing was to bring about a revival of Judaism, the religion in their ancient homeland.

He was an early opponent of both the practical and the political Zionists, and he sounded a warning that Palestine was in fact full of people and that these people were not likely to simply leave or consent to being ruled by Jewish immigrants. Under a pseudonym he’d written in 1891, quote, We abroad are used to believing that Palestine is now almost totally desolate, a desert that is not sowed, and that anyone who wishes to purchase land there may come and do so to his heart’s content. But in truth this is not the case. Throughout the country it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed, only sand dunes and stony mountains that are not fit to grow anything but fruit trees are not cultivated, end quote. Later he goes on, quote, We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like nation that neither sees nor understands what is going on around it. But this is a great error. The Arab, like all the sons of Shem, has a sharp and crafty mind. Should the time come when the life of our people in Palestine imposes to a smaller or greater extent on the natives, they will not easily step aside.

Voices like Ginsburg’s are mostly ignored, maybe because they were saying something that nobody wanted to hear, maybe for strategic reasons, maybe out of ignorance. I mentioned that Herzl had never even been to Palestine when he published his pamphlet calling for the Jews to move there, or maybe because at this stage most of them simply weren’t taking the realization of the project that seriously. That’s something I wonder about sometimes. I try to imagine being in a meeting with a bunch of my friends, right, where we’re discussing our plan to convince people we don’t know from all over the world to join us in moving to another continent and start our own country. It’s a good reason to get together and making plans is fun and we’re playing clubhouse, right, but I wonder sometimes if anyone but the hardcore in those very early days really imagined it as a real possibility. Or if you think of how people often talk about, you know, you have a friend, everybody’s got that friend, and they’re always talking about some kind of business or non-profit or some other venture they’re going to start. A lot of times you’ll hear people talk like, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start a non-profit that’s going to get celebrities to deliver food and medicine to children in the developing world.

And they’ll start going on about which celebrities would be best to get and what kind of food would be delivered. And if someone asks, hey, so how are you guys going to source the food? And how will using food from the developed world affect local production? Also, have you procured legal and financial and security services? Do you even know how to get a hold of any of the celebrities? Those are the more important questions than whether you should get Bono or Angelina Jolie to deliver your stuff, but usually people just look at you like you’re a party pooper. Because they’re not really serious about it. And even if they say they are, it eventually fizzles out in the wouldn’t-it-be-cool phase, because deep down they don’t really believe they’re going to see it through and take on this ridiculously ambitious project.

And maybe it was the case for some of the early Zionists, but for sure plenty of the people at this first Zionist Congress were dead serious about it. They needed to be. Because the violence and persecution Jews were facing in Europe was accelerating. As the Zionist project launched out of Basel, the rich donors began to be joined by a lot of young revolutionaries and pioneers, prepared to do the hard work on the ground. They were animated by the same zeal that animated many other revolutionaries, but added to that was the Hebrew mythology. The Jewish tradition is one of the richest troves of literature, poetry, and wisdom in man’s possession. It gave birth to Christianity and Islam, whose adherents alone make up over half the world’s population today. The dialogue of the Hebrew people and its journey from slavery to liberation and triumph and back down through defeat and exile and destruction is the basis for many of man’s most profound meditations.

Early in the story, historical circumstances led to the Jewish people finding themselves oppressed and persecuted in a foreign land. They were scattered, living for themselves and their families in the oppressor’s land with hardly any memory or sense of themselves as a distinct nation at all. And then, one day, they were called by a prophet in the name of a deity who claimed to be the god of their fathers. The prophet called on them to remember that they were a people, one people, bound by a covenant with one god and said that he would lead them to a land that god had chosen for them. They wandered around for decades, facing hunger and hardship, but their identity was forged during the trials of their journey. Finally, when they were ready, they arrived at the outskirts of the promised land, and they sent in spies to get the lay of the land, but there was a problem. The land was already full of people. But the place had been promised to them, and so through a combination of courage, deception, and divine intervention, the ancient descendants of the Jews obeyed their god’s command to conquer the land, cleansing it of any trace of its native population, killing everyone and everything, right down to the cattle, sheep, and donkeys. They laid heavy curses on the land, They laid heavy curses on anyone who dared to rebuild what they had destroyed, forbade mixing with any of the surviving remnant of the native inhabitants, and constantly fought to keep their society free from any of the impurities picked up from the surrounding culture. They built a temple and formed a kingdom, and after fleeing foreign captivity and persecution, the mass of homeless wanderers finally had a place to call their own, and had truly become one people. No scholar today would tell you that the events described in that story actually happened, any more than the events described in any other Near Eastern Iron Age myth actually happened, but this is the kind of thing you need if you’re going to really fire up a revolutionary. All revolutionaries live on mythology. Reason can justify and rationalize, but emotion motivates. No revolution has ever been sparked, or at least sustained, through reason and argument. Mythology is like oxygen to a revolutionary, and that’s whether you’re talking about Marx’s dialectic of history, or God’s chosen people, or the return to the promised land, these ideas have power to drive people like no other force. Even rage and desperation burn themselves out pretty quickly and can be bought off.

They can start riots, but they can’t sustain people through years of hardship, against the odds, and against greater force. Only a story can do that, only a story that relates each outer context to an inner center, and gives everyone a role to play, that gives meaning to their victories, and their sufferings can do that. The Zionists would have to draw on the same spirit that drove their ancient forebears, because like them they were seeking to carve out a new nation in a land already occupied by other people. They would have to be guided by the same God who had told their conquering ancestors, quote, I gave you a land on which you did not toil, in cities you did not build, and you live in them and eat from vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant, end quote. Mythology also played a role, a major role, in how the Europeans approached this situation. You can imagine the Zionists making their case to European Christians, who had grown up hearing stories about how God had given this land to the Jews from its native inhabitants. The sacred text of the Jews is the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, so, since childhood, these Europeans had been memorizing stories about how the ancient ancestors of the Jewish people were commanded by God, the same God, by the way, that the Christians worshipped, to enter that land and clear it of its native population and take possession of it, and how that land was supposed to belong to the Jews until the end of the world, because of a covenant made with Abraham. All their lives they’d been hearing that story, and Christian prophecies spoke the importance of the Jews one day returning to that land and rebuilding the nation of Israel.

Some British officials who had become involved in the Zionist effort, they were very specific that their reasons for supporting the clause had a lot to do with all this. And to this day, tens of millions of Americans, which is where this is mostly situated today, believe that they’re required to support Israel in all circumstances, no matter what. Celebrity televangelist Pat Robertson said it this way, quote, Ladies and gentlemen, Evangelical Christians support Israel because we believe that the words of Moses and the ancient prophets of Israel were inspired by God. We believe that the emergence of a Jewish state in a land promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was ordained by God. Of course we, like all right-thinking people, support Israel because Israel is an island of democracy, an island of individual freedom, an island of the rule of law, and an island of modernity in the midst of a sea of dictatorial regimes, the suppression of individual liberty, and a fanatical religion intent on returning to the feudalism of 8th century Arabia. These facts about modern-day Israel are all true. But mere political rhetoric does not account for the profound devotion to Israel that exists in the hearts of tens of millions of Evangelical Christians. You must realize that the God who spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai is our God.

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are our spiritual patriarchs. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are our prophets. King David, a man after God’s own heart, is our hero. The holy city of Jerusalem is our spiritual capital. And the continuation of Jewish sovereignty over the Holy Land is a further bulwark to us that the God of the Bible exists and that His word is true.” Mere political rhetoric does not account for it. The early decisions of Europeans in support of Zionism often sprang from the perspective that Robertson just described. That’s where someone’s coming from. There’s really no argument to be made about the rights of the Arabs or about our foreign policy interests or any of that nonsense.

The land of Palestine belongs to the Jews because God says it does. And no matter what happens, we’re required to support Israel and the Jews unconditionally. To these folks, it’s a religious duty in a very, very real sense to help bring about and then support the Jewish state. If you’re a Palestinian Arab trying to make a case to people who believe that, well, good luck with it. And so the mythological angle is a big part of what makes this situation so unique. Because I have to imagine, if it was just a random group of strangers that came around claiming to have lived in a spot thousands of years ago and they were looking for people to help them get it back, they wouldn’t get very far. We’re aware every day today that North America very recently belonged to the Native Americans and nobody’s in any hurry to justify that claim or to help them get it back and reconquer the United States, even though that claim is certain and much more recent. The religious angle makes this different.

Israeli historian Anita Shapira, she suggests that Christian Zionists, as they would later come to be called, that they were actually the ones who passed the idea on to certain Jewish circles in the 1840s. Their familiarity with old stories and ancient prophecies, it captured the imagination of many British Christians almost as much as it did the Zionists themselves. In fact, a lot of the Zionists, they were secular socialists and didn’t really have a whole lot of time for the religious angle and their British patrons were often more motivated by the religious angle than they were. Something to point out is that just as there were disagreements within the Zionist community about what form and strategies the movement should take, Zionism itself was far from universal among the Jewish people in general in any part of Europe. You have to remember, Jews had lived in Europe for hundreds of years, centuries. A great number of Jews were happy in the countries that they lived in, especially in Britain. Britain had granted the Jews full civil and political rights back in 1858 and had followed through on it. The popular two-time prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, he was raised Anglican but he was of Jewish descent and he was born to the middle class, raised to the head of government.

Many other Jews were appointed to important roles in government and were doing well in the business world. A lot of British Jews thought that things were moving in the right direction and a lot of them couldn’t stand the Zionists, they saw them as a threat. One of the most prominent early Zionists, Chaim Weizmann, he shows why. He was going around saying things like, quote, there are no English, French, German, or American Jews, but only Jews living in England, France, Germany, or America, end quote. Well, a lot of the people he was claiming to speak for were saying, wait a second here, we’re not just Jews living in Britain, we’re British Jews and we’re proud of it. Get out of here with that stuff. The accusation of the suspicious European anti-Semite was always that the Jew was not really loyal to the country he lived in, but he set himself apart and had an agenda, loyalty, different from the society in which he lived. Many Jews in places like Britain thought that the Zionists were throwing gas on a fire that was well on its way to going out.

One of the leading British Jews who opposed the Zionists was a man named Lucian Wolfe. He was an assimilated Jew who considered himself fully British and who considered the Zionists’ claim that the Jews did not belong in Britain to be just another kind of anti-Semitism, just as if an Englishman had said that the Jews aren’t really British and don’t belong in Britain. The Zionists just scoffed at this as a kind of Stockholm Syndrome almost, saying that any Jews hoping for that false dream of assimilation were just in denial of the situation. See, they were trying to pull together a scattered people into a common identity. Now think about that. Think about what it means, about the scope of the challenges involved. Seeking out unknown people on several continents with no sense of identity or connection to each other other than a vague sense that they practice the same religion, really with very little in common at all, and getting them to think of themselves once again as members not only of a religion, but of a nation, as a people. And there’s no internet, there’s no Zionist Facebook groups or flash mobs or meetups.

This is tough, and so their reaction to fellow Jews who opposed them, tried to undermine what they were doing, was often swift and vicious. There were threats and insults, threats to slander anyone who spoke against Zionism and to destroy their position in the community. In their mind, they were trying to do an important thing, a great thing. Not only trying to save their people from the suffering that they were dealing with in Europe, but also trying to rekindle something beautiful that had existed for thousands of years. The great goal of the Zionists, all the Zionists, whatever their leaning, was to draw the Jews distributed around the world back into a common identity, a sense of Jewishness, wherever they currently made their home. But the reason that this needed to be accomplished, the reason it had to be manufactured, was that this kind of unanimity in their minds, this kind of unanimity in identity, it didn’t exist at the time. This was a process that was going on, this process of awakening national consciousness as something that was taking place all over Europe, and had been for the last century or so in various places. This is one aspect of it.

I mentioned the Rothschild family, for example, as being important early supporters of Zionism. The Rothschilds were a large family, and you had some members who were devoted Zionists, and others who were fully assimilated and didn’t have time for any of that. That was the Jewish community in Europe in a nutshell. There’s always a lot of discussion about what the Zionists accomplished in terms of raising money and building things and military operations, but to me the most important thing and the most impressive and fascinating thing, by far, that they were able to pull off was this creation and emergence of Jewish identity, pulling together a nation, a people with a sense of common identity and purpose, out of a scattered people who had become culturally and linguistically foreign to one another. It’s an incredible achievement. You have to ask yourself, what’s the difference between a people, a nation, and just a mass of individuals doing their own thing? History tends to be the history of peoples, and so by the time they make it into our books, they’ve already emerged and come together, otherwise we just simply don’t take notice of them. So it’s already been done by the time we find them in our history books.

We don’t get too many opportunities to see how that process of emergence takes place. In Zionism, we get to see it take place at speed, right in front of our eyes, by people who kept detailed diaries of the process. The Zionist leadership was made up mostly of sophisticated European and British Jews, but to build up the land of Palestine they were going to need to convince mostly urban, middle, and working class Jews to move to another continent to be farmers in a desert. How does that sound to you? What everyone thinks of the moral and political aspects of this story, or how it turns out, I am always fascinated with how the people at these first Zionist meetings were talking about doing something that just seemed so big and so crazy, that you almost have to be crazy to even think about it or consider it or talk about it. I mean, I’ve said this already, but just imagine sitting down with a group of your friends and saying, you know, we’re going to convince a bunch of people we don’t know from all over the world to come with us to a place they’ve never been and start our own country. Now, we’re not sure who these people are or how we’re going to get them to come, but we start tomorrow. Break.

You talk about ambition. It almost seems like a naive, sort of childish idealism. Like kids getting together in a clubhouse and having meetings and making grand plans. Or maybe these are just the kinds of ideas that start to seem pretty damn reasonable. When your other option is to stay in Europe and Russia, where people are persecuting and attacking and murdering you more and more every year. Most of the early immigrants that made up the first push in the late 19th century, they eventually got tired of it and went back to Europe when nobody came to join them. But in the first dozen or so years of the 20th century, Jewish immigration to Palestine began to pick up. Its donations began to flow in and the Zionists started to gain converts from across Europe and Russia.

The Jewish National Fund had been established in 1901 at the 5th Zionist Congress in order to purchase land in Ottoman Palestine for settlement and development by Jewish immigrants. I love this part of the story, by the way. See, the fund wasn’t just endowed by the Rothschilds and the Dehershes of the world, the big financial dynasties across Europe, but it was also financed, it had huge support from small donors, individual families, and so on. For decades to come, it would be a common sight in Jewish homes all over the world to have this little blue tin box with a map of Israel drawn on it and white kind of, and change would be dropped in it and eventually it would fill up and it would be sent off to the Jewish National Fund to be put to work in Palestine. There was even a children’s song. I’m going to butcher the rhythm, but here are the lyrics. Each penny put inside redeems the land. Redeems the land.

That’s really the theme here. There really is an idealistic, romantic element underlying the entire thing at this stage of the game. You have people who are bringing together a community that had never died, but it had been sleeping for a thousand years and trying to bring that back together and return to the home of their ancestral fathers and reclaim it for their people, and not just that, but to revive the spirit of the Jewish nation. This animated these people. It wasn’t just about claiming territory and political power. Every one of these early meetings and every one of their writings, there’s something of this idealism, and you can just feel it as it comes through. But the Jewish National Fund began a new process, which would really help determine the character of Zionism and the direction that Zionism would take in Palestine. You see, Theodor Herzl had dreamed of a cosmopolitan, polyglot Jewish state where maybe the primary language was German, and the Jews would be sort of an aristocracy, really a colonial state, letting the locals do most of the manual labor and so forth, through trade and finance and industry and all the things that they sort of excelled at back in Europe.

But some of the Zionists worried about this approach, and it was for two reasons. First, many of them leaned to the political left, even towards socialism or communism. They didn’t like to think of themselves as the colonial masters sort of exploiting a native population. But there was also something deeper, and their approach became known as labor Zionism, where they really re-established the deep connection to the land of their fathers by getting on their knees and working it with their own hands, digging their fingernails into the dirt. Now, the earliest Zionists, they’d been happy to buy up land that had been inhabited by Arab farmers and just collect income by continuing to lease it to whoever lived there before, or at the very least, offering employment to the Arabs that they had displaced. But the labor Zionists, first they felt that this was exploitative, and they didn’t want to be another South Africa with a racial elite kind of sitting at the upper crust top of society using this vast underclass of laborers native to the place. They didn’t want to do that. That was something that they associated with old Europe and the colonial imperialism and the cultures that they were trying to get away from.

And anyway, the Jews, they needed to get down in the dirt themselves. That’s what these labor Zionists believed. And so when land was purchased by the Jewish National Fund, it was determined that that land could only be lived on, or worked on, by Jews. Now, whatever their intentions with that were, it’s not surprising that right at this time is when we start to see the first Palestinian Arabs start to take notice of what’s going on. Jews are still only a tiny fraction of the population, and it’s just a few Arab intellectuals and political activists for the most part, a couple angry farmers who have been pushed off their land, but this is when we start to first see the little signs of concern start to show up. As the fund began to accumulate land, the offer of resettlement became more and more appealing to some Jewish people for different reasons. Some were just revolutionary Zionists or religious true believers who were just caught up with the idea of returning to the Holy Land and so forth, but for the project to really take root and become a sustainable community, the Zionists were going to have to convince regular Jews who lived in Europe and just thought that a new start in Palestine sounded better than whatever they had going on now. As the fund built up, it was able to offer people an opportunity that they didn’t have in a lot of places.

I mean, look, all through the Russian Empire, Jews were forbidden from living outside the towns and villages that they already lived in, against them owning property, there was even a law forbidding them from conducting any kind of business at all on Sundays or the main Christian holidays. And now here you have the Zionists coming along and saying, look, come on down, we’ll help pay your way, we’ll give you a piece of land to work, a home, we’ll set you up with tools, we even have people there already who are going to help teach you whatever it is that you need to get started. And whoever you are, it doesn’t matter, we need farmers, builders, teachers, just laborers, security people, you name it, we need it, come on down. And then you add all that, that new sense of opportunity, and building a new life somewhere fresh, add to that the sense of purpose and adventure and romanticism, and then you start to get more and more people deciding the Zionist offer doesn’t sound too bad, and that’s what we’re starting to see. Because a project like this is something that’s definitely dependent on, I guess what we would call today a network effect. And a network effect just means that becoming involved with a project becomes more interesting and more appealing the more people there are already involved in it. It sort of gains its value through that. And so, like Facebook’s a good example, right?

It could be the best piece of software in history, but if I’m the only person who uses it, it doesn’t do me any good. And that’s why competitors to Facebook, like Google+, or whatever they are, they have such a tough time breaking its monopoly, because no matter how good your version might be, it could be a thousand times better than Facebook. And so if you’re a Zionist trying to convince the first couple of immigrants to move to Palestine, that’s a tough sell, right? But if you’re able to tell people that you already have a community of people ready to receive them, they’re already making it work, they’ll be there to provide help and services and company, it becomes easier and easier every day that passes. Projects dependent on a network effect are always hard to get off the ground, but once you start to get some momentum, they can just take off on their own. By the time we get up to around 1910 or so, a few communities have been established, and things seem to be going pretty well, and there are some people who, they might have been skeptical at first, they’re at least starting to perk their eyes up and take a look. The ultimate goal of the Zionists is still a far-off, pie-in-the-sky dream, and I don’t know how many people really took it seriously. There’s still a lot of opposition in Jewish communities, especially in places like Britain.

I mean, 1913, out of about 300,000 Jews living in Britain, only about 8,000 were members of a Zionist organization. And even of that 8,000, you have to imagine that only some fraction of those were actively interested in participating and working toward it, right? But even still, it’s starting to become apparent to Jews all over the world that these people are at least putting their money where their mouth is. It’s sort of at that stage where someone tells you, I don’t know, he tells you he’s going to swim from the United States to Japan. You don’t really think too much of it, just kind of wave him off, but then one day he shows up at the beach in Santa Monica with a snorkel and a pair of flippers and he jumps into the surf. It’s still a crazy idea, and you know he’ll probably get eaten by a shark or rescued by the Coast Guard before he makes it out of sight, but at least the guy’s not playing games. And so maybe you decide to stick around and watch and see what happens. Well, the Jewish diaspora’s starting to watch to see what happens. In Palestine, the Ottoman Turks are still in control. There are very few reports of any real problems between the locals and the new arrivals. Partially this is because the numbers are still relatively small, and because Zionist immigrants are mostly keeping to themselves, reducing any friction with the local population. You’ve got to remember, even the political Zionists, even the more extreme political Zionists, who had plans to eventually dominate the region politically and set up an exclusively ethnic Jewish state, they knew that it was important to keep a low profile for the time being. They had acquiesced that point to the practical Zionists. But then you get the sense that there’s another reason that we don’t see too much friction early on. And this is something that I could be exaggerating. I could be totally wrong about it.

This is just something that I’ve picked up. Over time, I’ve tried to do research to really specifically confirm or deny it, and I just really haven’t been able to find any books or articles that say a lot directly about it. It’s just a general sense that I get from the various anecdotes and accounts of the time. And it’s that the local Palestinians, and we’re talking up to say before the First World War, they’re just not very political at this stage. When you look at the age of ideology and nationalism, and the revolutions in Europe and the Americas, and even the Protestant Reformation, all these things came about after the printing press was invented, and you start to see pamphlets and letters being passed about spreading ideas like viruses. In his book, Reading Palestine, Tel Aviv professor Ami Ayalan, I’m so sorry professor for butchering your name, he quotes a source from 1912, estimating that the Arab literacy rate was only 2% in Palestine. Now even if it’s underestimated by several times, maybe we’re talking about 5 or 6% literacy. So I mentioned that there are a few intellectuals and nationalists, Arab-Palestinians who are kind of chafing under Ottoman rule, and are either talking about pan-Arabism and local self-rule, and those are very often the same ones starting to worry about the Zionists.

But in general, you get the sense that these people just mostly are trying to take care of their families and live their lives. The immigrants at this point weren’t interfering with that, at least from a distance. They didn’t seem to want to do anything other than take care of their own families and live their own lives, and just let them be. North of the Ottoman Empire was another empire on its last legs. The AustroHungarian Empire of Central and Southeastern Europe commanded a multi-ethnic society, and calls for national independence grew louder every year as the empire lost its grip. In late June 1914, the young Serb nationalist I mentioned earlier would assassinate the heir to the Austrian throne, set off a chain of events that would engulf the world in flames, knock over the creaking edifice of a world order whose foundation had been eaten away for years, and galvanize and traumatize an entire generation. The First World War put all of Europe to the torch, but by the time it was over, neither the Middle East in general, nor Palestine in particular, would be spared from the flames. When the war broke out, revolutionaries all over Europe saw opportunities.

Friedrich Engels, the communist thinker and partner of Karl Marx, he was one of the few people who saw a war coming in advance, and years before he had an idea of what a bloodbath and horrific thing it was going to be, but he was one of the people who saw opportunities in this upcoming carnage. He predicted that, quote, 8 to 10 million soldiers will slaughter each other and strip Europe bare as no swarm of locusts has ever done before. The devastations of the Thirty Years’ War condensed into 30 years of war. The devastations of the Thirty Years’ War condensed into three or four years and spread all over the continent. Famine, epidemics, general barbarization of armies and masses, provoked by sheer desperation, utter chaos in our trade, industry, and commerce, ending in general bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their traditional wisdom in such a way that the crowns will roll in the gutter by the dozens and there will be nobody to pick them up. Absolute impossibility to foresee how all this will end, or who will be the victors in that struggle. Only one result was absolutely certain. General exhaustion and the creation of circumstances for the final victory of the working class.” Never let a crisis go to waste, right?

When existing power structures are in the way of your goals, chaos is your friend. The ultra-nationalist Young Turks were rising to prominence in the Ottoman Empire and seemed to be stamping out any hope that the Zionists thought they might have had with their project. Meanwhile in Britain, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith thought the whole Zionist project was almost some kind of joke. He had no interest in committing Britain to such a harebrained scheme as he saw it. But obstacles like this were nothing new for the Zionists. Nationalist movements all over Europe used the opportunities created by the war to press their claims and the Zionists were looking for ways to leverage their influence. Austria’s retaliation against Serbia for the assassination was expected by everyone, and the conflict might have just been confined to that local dust-up. The First World War, you could say, I do say, really kicked off when the Russians began to mobilize in defense of Serbia and in preparation for war with Austria and Germany.

As Russia mobilizes, their historic enemy to the south, the Muslim Empire of the Ottoman Turks, orders a general mobilization and signs a secret defensive pact with Germany, agreeing to come to the other’s aid in case of attack. Only a few weeks ago, the world was at peace. Now almost overnight, a war of unimaginable proportion explodes in both eastern and western Europe in early August 1914. The Allies, France, the British Empire, and the Russian Empire, they slam headlong into the German and AustroHungarian empires. Within three months, millions of men are dead. Countrysides are devastated, civilians have been ruined, and many homes are wiped out. In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire enters the war against the Allies. The Ottoman Empire was falling apart, and it really brought very little to the table directly to help Germany and Europe.

The Central Powers were still happy to have them join the party for one simple reason. The Turks’ simple presence in the war applied pressure to Russia’s southern territories, and it applied pressure to the colonial possessions that Britain and France held in the Middle East. This forced those countries to divert manpower and resources from the European fronts to those other areas to defend them. The British in particular had possessions in the Middle East that were under the flag of the Ottoman Empire during its glory days, and the Turks knew that this was the best opportunity they might ever have to get them back. The British had occupied Egypt for decades, and so they controlled the vital Suez Canal connecting the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and tying together the two halves of the British Empire. The Ottoman Sultan, which was the closest thing Islam had to a leader of the faith, declares a jihad against the Allies, and calls on the Muslims of Egypt to rise in rebellion against the British. Now, I said that the Sultan was the closest thing that Islam has to a leader because there really isn’t anyone in the Islamic faith like the Pope is in Roman Catholicism, say. The Ottoman Sultan had a while back absorbed the title of Caliph, and he carried a lot of religious weight, but not everyone was comfortable with the arrangement.

Islam was born out of the Arabian Desert. The Quran is written in Arabic, and although Islam is a world religion, the Arabs have always had a special relationship to it, and they always will. The Ottoman Empire was run by Turks. It came from the Eurasian steppe. They were converts to Islam, who for centuries now had dominated the entire Muslim and Arab heartland. The Ottoman Sultan was a powerful man, he controlled a lot of armies, a lot of wealth, there were other Muslim leaders who still carried weight of their own. One of the most important of these was the Sharif and Amir of the Holy City of Mecca, Husayn bin Ali, a descendant of an Arabian clan called the Quraysh. If that sounds familiar, it should.

It’s the clan of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad. The war in Europe was a bloodbath, and it wasn’t letting up. Meanwhile, the British push against the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli was going terribly, it was a horrible disaster, and so in 1915, the British reach out to Husayn for help. Husayn was very cautious here. He, like many others, liked the idea of restoring Arab independence, but the Ottoman Empire wasn’t the worst thing in the world as far as foreign overlords went, at least if you were Muslim. The Ottomans were Muslim themselves, and they allowed their provinces a fair measure of self-government. Husayn was not eager to replace his people’s relatively agreeable subordination to the Ottoman Turks with the heavy hand of European colonialism, because everybody knew exactly what that meant. But Husayn also had reason to believe that his family had enemies high in the Ottoman government, and so he used the opportunity to secure promises from the British to support his rule over an independent Arab state after the war.

Of course, we know the outcome of the First World War today, but in 1915 and 1916, things weren’t clear at all. The Germans had the best army in the world. Britain was already getting exhausted, throwing every bit of metal and human flesh that it could muster as fast as it could muster it into the meat grinder against the Central Powers. Every side was desperate for any edge that they could get. And so while all the language and letters and diplomatic exchanges between the British and the Arabs are, of course, very formal, but when you take in the whole picture, you almost get this idea that Britain is just basically just barely listening to whatever the Arabs’ conditions are for jumping into the war and just kind of saying, yeah, yeah, sure, whatever you say, we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Just here, take this gun, point it at a Turk, and start shooting. And so, assured that the Arab lands from Syria to Yemen would once again be under Arab independent control, Sharif Husayn rallied his forces in revolt against the Ottoman Empire in June 1916. Now, none of the nations on either side were prepared for the sustained fury that came with the First World War.

They were stretching their resources and their people and their industrial capacity to the breaking point, hoping to outlast the other side. And this wasn’t a war that was going to be won in a single stroke. It was a war of attrition, and whichever society broke down first, that was the society that was going to lose. Already in the first months of the war, every army was rationing ammunition and artillery shells. Just in the first months. They had big stores of it, stores of ammunition and artillery shells built up, but already in the first couple months, every country was out and rationing them. By 1915, the first full year of the war, in addition to other shortages, Britain was having a lot of difficulty scraping together enough of a chemical called acetone. It’s the active ingredient in nail polish remover and paint thinner.

It was used in the manufacture of something called cordite. Cordite is the powder that Britain used in most of its shells, from rifle cartridges to artillery shells and tank rounds and even its heavy naval guns. I don’t know if you remember that old nursery rhyme about the horseshoe nail. It goes something like, For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. The kingdom is lost just because of a missing horseshoe nail. Acetone was playing the role of the horseshoe nail for the British Empire in the early part of the First World War.

They were expending rounds at a rate that no one imagined in their wildest dreams would ever happen for any sustainable period of time, and they ended up not being able to make new munitions quickly enough because they didn’t have enough of this acetone stuff. David Lloyd George, head of the munitions ministry in Britain, was scrambling for answers when Winston Churchill, at the time the first Lord of the Admiralty, the head of the British Navy, heard about a biochemistry lecturer at the University of Manchester who just might be able to help. We’ve mentioned his name before. It was Chaim Weizmann. He was born in Belarus in 1874 and had been educated in Europe before accepting a position at the University of Manchester and becoming a British subject. He was 22 years old when Theodor Herzl released his call to the Jewish people and to the leaders of Zionism in Britain. While lecturing in Manchester, he had developed a method of deriving acetone through a process of bacterial fermentation, a new process. When the British government came calling and asking about his synthetic process, he modified it for mass production and by 1916 Britain’s munitions problem was solved.

Weizmann was put in charge of the British Admiralty’s labs and suddenly an important Zionist leader found himself in regular conversations with Prime Ministers and members and generals. Weizmann was the best representative of this first generation of Zionists in many ways. Despite the statement we quoted earlier where he said there were no British Jews, only Jews living in Britain, Weizmann, he lived in other parts of Europe and he very much appreciated his adopted home. And yet his devotion to his Jewish identity and to Jewish nationalism, that was what drove him single-mindedly and what drew others to him. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian, with whom Weizmann would eventually become close friends, he spoke of Weizmann’s Like many Western European and British Zionists, he was a sophisticated, not very religious, high society type. He was more suited to meeting with diplomats and fundraisers than he was to sweating with a shovel in Palestine. He led a faction which sometimes opposed both the practical and the political Zionists and yet synthesized the two views. In fact, it’s usually called synthetic Zionism. The way he saw it, the political Zionists focused on lobbying some powerful nation to give the Jews a homeland and then to rely on that power to force the decree on an unwilling Arab population. That wasn’t good enough. The Jews couldn’t afford to wait around for Britain or someone else to give them what they wanted. Even if they got it, the decree would just be a piece of paper, not a real nation. The way to create a lasting state was not by mandate and then military enforcement, but by building roads and planting crops and establishing markets and schools and universities. Maybe even the indigenous population would eventually see the benefits and welcome the newcomers as neighbors. Or at least accept it. The way he put it to a Zionist congress was, A state cannot be created by decree, but by the forces of a people and in the course of generations.

Even if all the governments of the world gave us a country, it would only be a gift of words, but if the Jewish people will go build Palestine, the Jewish state will become a reality, a fact.” This makes him sound like a straight up practical Zionist. But he saw the importance of working both sides, on the ground and through diplomacy. A declaration is meaningless, sure, without the organic reality on the ground, but Weizmann also knew how important it was to have recognition in the international community. Around the world we have stateless groups like the Kurds who have thriving communities, but they’ll be the first to tell you how important it is to have a recognized place in the international community. Think about it. In 1991, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, another Arab state. Half the world shows up to drive him out. After that war ends, his forces go to the north and begin slaughtering Kurdish people who had risen up against his regime, but no international coalition shows up to stop him.

Why not? Why did half the world show up to push him out of a fellow Arab territory, but no one shows up when he kills maybe a quarter million Kurds? Well, the thinking goes that, you know, that’s an internal problem. That’s an Iraqi problem. The Kurds weren’t recognized as a nation-state separate from Iraq, and the Iraqi government, like any government, has the right to put down anyone within its territory it decides are acting like rebels. You know, it’s just lines on a map, but agreements by other nations that those lines mean something, that makes a lot of difference sometimes. But then, on the other hand, you still have, to this day, descendants of the old royal families of Europe carrying paper titles, like Maria Vladimirovna of the Romanov family, who, she lives in Spain and still calls herself Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess of Russia. Does anybody care?

In other words, you can have whatever long list of titles and rights and decrees and agreements and paperwork you want, but if nobody cares, then you really don’t have anything. Wiseman understood this, and he threw all his weight into exploiting his new relationships and influence over British officials in favor of a Jewish homeland. In 1917, war’s been going on for three years, and the stress and the exhaustion of war are taking their toll. Some of the country’s knees are starting to buckle. After another disastrous spring offensive on the Western Front, the French army had had enough. They’d had it. Over half their divisions had incidents of, quote, collective indiscipline, is what they called it, which covered anything from drunkenness and refusal of orders to just outright mutiny and rebellion. By the time the French leadership finally got things under control, they kept things together enough to stay in the war, but it was clear that the French army was finished going over the top on the offensive for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, in Russia, the situation was completely going bananas. The country was in the midst of a communist revolution and could leave the war at any moment. The Allies are barely holding it together with the Germans forced to fight on two major fronts. What would they do if the Russians fell out and the Germans only had to fight on one front? Either way, in a war where the whole thing is one big pressure cooker, and the only way to win is to keep the pressure on the other side so that the enemy cracks before you do, the British were now in a situation where their allies, the French and the Russians, aren’t in much of a condition to put pressure on anyone. The United States had joined the side of the Allies, but they were unprepared for the war. They couldn’t contribute more than a token force right away. David Lloyd George, by this point, the Munitions Minister, whom Chaim Weizmann had befriended before, had become the Prime Minister in 1916, and he, like a lot of other British and French officials, thought that attacking the deep defensive fortifications the Germans had built on the Western Front was just madness.

I mean, it just seemed impenetrable. You’re talking about miles and miles and miles of defensive fortifications that had been built up for years. And even with the Germans divided on two fronts, it just seemed crazy. And so Lloyd George and those who agreed with him, they believed that the best chance of breaking through the German interior was in the East, through Russia. But for that to even matter, Russia had to stay in the war. The British had spent their treasury, they were borrowing massive sums of money from the United States to keep the rest of the Allies afloat. The British were strained to the breaking point in a war where, if you lost, then it meant that you had sacrificed millions of lives and a huge amount of your wealth for nothing. They were desperate.

They were grasping at straws to gain any advantage they could. They had already promised to help liberate the Arabs from the clutches of the Ottoman Empire if the Arabs would rise up in rebellion, which they did. This was a risky bet for the Arabs. If the British changed their minds and hung them out to dry, the Turks would be coming back on the Arabs and looking for revenge. Well, the British continued to support the Arab revolt, but behind the scenes, they were keeping their options open. Many French and British officials just wanted to get the Ottomans out of the war, whatever it took. Germany was the real enemy. The Middle East was just a sideshow.

British forces had occupied Baghdad by this point, and they’d soon be on the march in the Levant. And to a lot of strategists, it just seemed prudent to make a separate peace with the Turks because British forces in the Middle East could be brought up to support the Western Front against the Germans. There were factions within the government of the Ottoman Empire who were seeking peace as well. When the Americans joined the war against Germany, Turkey broke off relations with the United States, but it didn’t declare war. President Wilson in particular, he wanted to get Turkey out of the war with a separate peace, and meetings were being held between Turkish and British diplomats to discuss the terms. The Arab rebels were still fighting alongside the British with no knowledge that the British were considering cutting a deal with the Ottoman Empire. But it wasn’t long before the Zionists got wind of it, and Chaim Weizmann sprang into action. He’d bet all his chips on a total British victory in the Middle East.

Throughout the rest of Europe, many Zionists were skeptical of working with Britain, whom they mistrusted for being allies with Russia and whom they suspected would only be interested in colonizing Palestine themselves. Weizmann had dissociated himself from the Continental Zionists, cutting off all contact with them in order to boost his credibility among the British elite, but he was really putting all his eggs in one basket by doing that. Luckily, as we said, the Zionist-skeptic Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was out, and Weizmann’s friend David Lloyd George from the Ministry of Munitions was in. Even as negotiators were being dispatched to speak with representatives of the Turkish government who favored peace, Weizmann and other Zionists were making arguments and calling in favors to make sure the British didn’t let up on the Ottoman Empire. The British diplomats left meetings with their Ottoman counterparts, believing that they were on the way to a separate peace, that they had made a lot of progress, and that that would isolate Germany and help finish the war. But by the time they got back to London, they found that the mood of the people who had sent them to discuss those terms had changed. They had new questions, and the negotiations were delayed, and so forth, and pretty soon the Ottomans lost patience and the moment was gone. Weizmann had been scrambling to keep the British in the fight against the Ottoman Empire, and he often played on a very interesting set of fears and prejudices that existed in the minds of many British officials.

I don’t know if interesting is the right word for it. Today it just seems crazy. You know how sometimes you’ll be studying a historical figure, and you’re reading about all the things he’s done, and you’ve seen pictures of him, and so forth, and it all kind of makes sense. You have a feel for this person. You’ve read his words, you kind of relate to him, and then all of a sudden you come across something that just makes you remember, okay, wait a second, I forgot that people used to be crazy. Like if you’re reading about Nikola Tesla, and all his great ideas and inventions, and so forth, and then you get to the part where he’s a huge supporter of eugenics and controlling reproduction to weed out, quote, undesirables. This is kind of like that. See, a lot of people today have this idea that all the crazy ideas about Jews in the first half of the 20th century were just thought up by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, right?

And that makes sense when you hear quotes like this, quote, In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the international Jews. This worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development of envious malevolence and impossible equality has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century, and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. Oh, wait a second. That wasn’t Adolf Hitler. That was Winston Churchill, the head of the British Navy and future prime minister we mentioned a second ago. He would write that just a few years later in 1920. Anyone who’s spent a little time in the dark pit of YouTube comments has probably heard all about the vast international Jewish conspiracy pulling the strings of global media, financial, and political systems.

Every once in a while, you’ll have someone like Mel Gibson will get drunk in Malibu and go on a rant about how the Jews run Hollywood. We’ve heard about people like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh speaking out about the danger of the international Jew, which Ford called the world’s foremost problem in one of his pamphlets on the subject. What a lot of us don’t realize is that this line of thinking was not uncommon in the first half of the 20th century. It certainly wasn’t uncommon in the halls of British power during the First World War. Many in the British political elite held theories, if you want to call them theories, about an international Jewish conspiracy working out their agenda all over the world. They conceived of the Jews as a single body, whether they lived in Ukrainian villages or New York apartments, and they imagined that they had vast powers working behind the scenes. Robert Cecil, the deputy foreign secretary, said, I do not think it is easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews. This is, you know, today the kind of statement that you expect to find in the dark anti-Semitic corners of the internet, right?

In 1917, you might hear it over tea at British cabinet meetings. Chaim Weizmann seized on these fantasies, though. He encouraged their belief in the Jews’ power. Harry Sacker, a close friend of Weizmann’s, he wrote that the leaders of the British government, have a residual belief in the power and unity of Jewry. We suffer for it, but it’s not holy without its compensations. To exploit it delicately and deftly belongs to the art of the Jewish diplomat.” Well, no one exploited it more delicately or deftly than Weizmann. He encouraged their suspicions of hidden Jewish power, and he began to convince the most powerful men in Britain that getting on the right side of the Zionists would be in Britain’s best interest. Mark Sykes was one of the most important British diplomats right at this moment, and he was another one who seemed to believe that the Jews had some kind of almost magical power.

He would later warn an Arab prince not to resist the Zionists, telling him, quote, Believe me when I say this race, despised and weak, is universal, is all-powerful, and cannot be put down, end quote. And he said that Jews had their hands, quote, in the councils of every state, in every bank, in every business, in every enterprise, end quote. The millions and millions of Jews around the world were not one monolithic body, but Weizmann had convinced some of the most important men in Britain that the Zionists could speak for them. And if Britain wanted the help of this powerful super-race of financial and political puppet masters, they would have to help the Zionists. If they believed that an international Jewish conspiracy controlled America’s financial markets and were pulling the strings of the Russian Revolution, Weizmann was happy to let them think that. The idea was, look, you want to get the United States more involved in the war more quickly? You want to keep Russia from bowing out? Awful lot of rich and powerful Jews in those two countries.

I might be able to make a few phone calls, see what I can do for you. The truth of this was, of course, questionable at best. Of the three million Jews in the United States, only 12,000 were members of a Zionist group. Nevertheless, Weizmann made an impression. And the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, made the case in a cabinet meeting, saying, If all this sounds a little crazy to you, congratulations. You’re in 2015, or whenever it is you’re listening to this, but you’re not an insane person. But believe it or not, this was a major factor driving British decision makers in 1917. Mark Sykes voiced the craziness of it all, maybe better than anyone else, when he wrote, I’m afraid this sounds rather odd and fantastic, but when we bump into a thing like Zionism, which is atmospheric, international, cosmopolitan, subconscious, and unwritten, nay, often unspoken, it is not possible to work and think on ordinary lines.

And in the same letter he wrote, The situation he’s talking about, by the way, is the First World War. So let it sink in that this high-ranking British official thinks that our tiny group of idealistic Jews are the key to victory in the titanic struggle of the First World War. The problem is how are they to be satisfied? With great Jewry against us, there is no possible chance of getting the thing through. Again, he means there’s no chance of winning the war, with great Jewry against us. It means optimism in Berlin, dumps in London, unease in Paris, resistance to the last ditch in Constantinople, dissension in Cairo, Arabs all squabbling amongst themselves. As Shakespeare says, It’s hard to get your mind around it, but there it is. At this crucial moment, Wiseman decided the time was right to make his play.

He warned Lord Balfour that Germany was about to offer to give Palestine to the Jews, and that the Zionists who had believed all along that Wiseman had been wrong to put his hopes in Britain, that they might have been right. He told them that Jewish people around the world were increasingly beginning to question, And so at cabinet meetings in October 1917, British ministers huddled together to discuss this possibility, and they came out with a decision. Afraid that the power of the international Jews would swing over to support Germany, they decided to seize the initiative and make a public declaration of support for the Zionist project. And so instructions were given to Wiseman to have his colleagues draft the wording of the declaration for issue by the British government. A short letter from the British Foreign Secretary to the British Zionist Baron Rothschild, that’s come down to us as the Balfour Declaration. This one-page document is a scrap of paper that gave birth to a nation if you’re a Zionist, or else it’s theft, betrayal, and injustice if you’re an Arab, especially a Palestinian. Either way, it was the document that would lock Britain into enforcing a contradictory policy and begin a cycle of violence and chaos and terror that’s still spinning as I speak to you now. Now look, it’s true, the British were desperate, okay?

Fighting for their lives in the greatest war in human history. And it’s also true that there was probably more than a little imperial hubris at play. When you’re the British Empire in 1917, you become accustomed to doing pretty much what you want to do. And the decision to support the Zionists was also sold as a strategic move to help protect the Suez Canal from the north. While this helped the cause, it was sort of a by-the-way. Icing on the cake to dress it up for British officials who needed a real politique justification. The British would have had a steadfast ally in the Arabs after supporting their bid for independence, so defense of the Suez probably wasn’t a primary factor. So why would they do this? Why would the British help build a hornet’s nest and then stick their own faces in it? Well, there were a few hardcore Zionist supporters in the British government. Christian Zionists, guys like Lloyd George and Balfour, who had supported the Zionists for a long time and were committed to the project ideologically. Churchill was another one. The Zionists also knew that most British officials, they only thought they were supporting Jewish immigration and settlement in Palestine and they would never commit themselves to what it would take to create and support a Jewish state. Weisman said as much when he told his friends who were writing the Balfour Declaration to practice quote, safe statesmanship, but not mentioning publicly that their final ideal was a Jewish state. His friend, Harry Socker, wasn’t as cautious and he wrote a draft that would have asked the British government to support, quote, the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish state and as the national home of the Jewish people, end quote. Weisman was out of the country, attempting to undermine efforts toward peace between Turkey and the United States at the time, but fortunately others were there to rein in Socker and word the declaration in less threatening terms.

In the end, they settled on a statement declaring that the British would support the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. To the extent that such efforts would not infringe in any way upon the rights of the local population. The full wording of the money line was this, quote, His Majesty’s government views with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and would use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing nonJewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country, end quote. Well it turned out that Weisman and many other Zionists thought the message was too cautious. Weisman himself objected to the inclusion of language about protecting the rights of existing non-Jewish communities. In reality though, whether I’m right or not about British intentions and how much they understood and knew, trust me, I’ve been beaten over the head for my opinion on this. While the nuances between a home and a state would become very important later on, they escaped most people at the time. British newspapers ran headlines like, Estate for the Jews and Palestine for the Jews.

Eager to use the propaganda advantage Lord Balfour spoke of a moment ago, the British began dropping leaflets intended for German Jews which read, quote, The allies are giving the land of Israel to the people of Israel, end quote. Well as you can imagine, the Ottoman Empire made sure the leaders of the Arab revolt got their hands on the Balfour Declaration as soon as possible. And as you can imagine, Hussein Ben Ali had some questions. At the exact same time that the Balfour Declaration was being drafted and published, Arab soldiers were engaged against the Ottomans liberating Sinai and Palestine. And they were more than a little concerned about the possibility that they had just been dying on the battlefield to conquer Palestine for a group of Jews who still lived in Europe. The British dispatched messengers to reassure the Arabs that nothing had changed with regard to our previous agreement, everything’s fine, nothing to worry about. But before they even had time to process the implications of the Balfour Declaration, the Arabs got hit with another surprise. A month after the declaration was published, the revolutionary government in Russia released a document which outlined a secret agreement between Britain, France, and the former Russian government to divide up the Middle East after the war was over. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, negotiated by Sir Mark Sykes, whom we heard from a moment ago, and French diplomat François-Georges Picot, they carved up the Ottoman Empire like a turkey. That’ll be my last attempt at humor, I promise. It was negotiated in 1916, around the same time that the British were making promises to the Arabs to get them to fight against the Turks. The idea was to leave a local Arab ruler in charge, nominally, but to ensure that he was merely a puppet. In correspondences leading up to the Arab Revolt, Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, had promised Hussein that the British would support, quote, the independence of the Arabs in all the regions within the limits demanded by Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca, end quote. Well, the Arabs didn’t think there was much ambiguity in that statement at all, but McMahon believed that he had left the specifics with enough ambiguity, quote, to tempt the Arab people in the right path, without binding them to their own beliefs. See, the British had promised France territories that included the majority of the Levant, including Lebanon, and what we could call either southern Syria or northern Palestine. In the chaos of war, it turned out that the British were willing to promise just about anything to just about anybody to hold the anti-German alliance together.

So far, they had promised Palestine to the Arabs, in return for their support against the Turks, and in return for their support against the Turks, So far, they had promised Palestine to the Arabs, in return for their support against the Turks, they had promised it to the Zionists, in return for the support of the great and powerful forces of the international Jew, and they had promised northern Palestine to the French, while committing the rest to an international administration, and finally, they had engaged in negotiations with the Ottoman Turks to explore the possibility of leaving the whole area back to them in exchange for a separate peace. Now, the question is who the British were lying to. Most people today tend to assume that the Sykes-Picot agreement made with the French showed Britain’s only real intentions, while everything else was just a deception. The truth is that the British were lying to everybody, including the French. A British politician wrote, to be selected by the Arabs in Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus, would seem utterly incompatible with our ideas of liberating the Arab nation, and of establishing a free and independent Arab state. The British government, in authorizing the letters dispatched to King Hussein Sharif of Mecca before the outbreak of the revolt by Sir Henry McMahon, would seem to raise a doubt as to whether our pledges to King Hussein as head of the Arab nation are consistent with French intentions to make not only Syria but Upper Mesopotamia another Tunis. If our support of King Hussein and the other Arabian leaders of less distinguished origin and prestige means anything, it means that we’re prepared to recognize the full sovereign independence of the Arabs of Arabia and Syria. It would seem time to acquaint the French government with our detailed pledges to King Hussein.” So the British were making promises to the French without telling them about the promises they had made to the Arabs.

Meanwhile, you’ve got the Arabs fighting against the Turks in exchange for the promise of independence, and then you’ve got wise men and others in Europe using Zionist money and influence to make sure they get what they want when the smoke clears. And what they want is a piece of the property the British had just promised to the people living in it. And on one hand, look, it’s hard to blame the British. When you’re fighting a world war, you say whatever you have to in order to win, I get it. You can explain and apologize later, but right now you do what you have to do to win a world war. But at the same time, you’ve got to remember that the war is going to end someday, and you’re going to have to answer these questions. Well, the war isn’t over as we roll into 1918, not yet, and the British aren’t ready to come clean. And so they just assure the Arabs that, look, Sykes-Picot was just, it was just a ruse to keep the French happy.

And that Balfour Declaration, it’s just a statement in support of Jewish settlement in Palestine, nothing to worry about. Neither the Zionists nor a, we don’t envision and we would never seek a separate Jewish state, come on. Well, the famous British advisor sent to help lead the Arab forces in revolt, T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, he wrote about his guilt, the guilt that he felt in supporting this duplicity later on. Quote, For my work on the Arab front, I had determined to accept nothing. The cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards. Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions. They saw in me a free agent of the British government and demanded for me an endorsement of its written promises.

So I had to join the conspiracy and for what my word was worth assured the men of their reward. In our two years partnership under fire, they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my government, like myself, sincere. In this hope, they performed some fine things, but of course, instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed. It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war, these promises would be dead paper. And had I been an honest advisor to the Arabs, I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff. But I salved myself with the hope that by leading these Arabs madly in the final victory, I would establish them with arms in their hands in a position so assured, if not dominant, that expediency would counsel to the great powers a fair settlement of their claims. In other words, I presumed, seeing no other leader with the will and power, that I would survive the campaigns and be able to defeat not merely the Turks on the battlefield, but my own country and its allies in the council chamber.” Lawrence had fought alongside the Arabs for years and they trusted him and the British to deliver on their promises. In 1918, the Arabs pushed up through the rest of Palestine and Syria, captured Damascus, and finally brought an end to centuries of Ottoman domination of Arab lands.

They celebrated in the streets the inauguration of Arab independence. As the war finally came to an end and the parties came to the table in Paris to discuss the terms of the peace, the French, the Zionists, and the Arabs all arrived expecting that the end of the war meant that they would finally get what they had been working and fighting for. For the British, the day of reckoning had arrived. Millions and millions of French soldiers and civilians had been killed or wounded in the war and they were not in the mood to make concessions. As far as they were concerned, whatever promises the British had made to others, the Sykes-Picot Agreement took precedent and the French claimed the right to Syria, Lebanon, and northern Iraq. And the Arabs were saying to the British, look, we took sides with you against a Muslim empire that really wasn’t that bad to live under to fight for our independence and independence is what we expect to get. And in any case, we’re talking about Arab lands, so how can the claims of the French or anyone else take precedence over us? And then there were the Zionists standing on a table and waving the Balfour Declaration in the air.

You might think the Arabs would have just rejected the Balfour Declaration out of hand, but in reality they had a more ambivalent reaction than you might expect, at least at first. Now some of them saw it immediately for what it ended up being, an outright betrayal of the promises the British had made to the Arabs for their help in the First World War. But these folks weren’t really concerned with the Jews per se. They saw Zionism at this point still as a fig leaf for British imperialism, and they were afraid that the British were just using the disguise of helping the Jews return home to establish the empire’s control of Palestine. And by the way, this was exactly the way many people in the British government did see it. Outside of the committed Christian Zionists like Balfour and Lloyd George, the British leaders who favored the Zionist project did so because it seemed like a clever Trojan horse for creating a presence in the region. Many Arab leaders were starting to worry about this, but others, including Sharif Hussein, accepted, for the most part, the part of the declaration that promised to respect the rights of the native population as a sufficient guarantee of British and Zionist intentions. Lawrence, whom I quoted a moment ago, had spent two years fighting alongside Hussein’s son Faisal.

Lawrence famously went about as native as a military officer can possibly go without switching sides, and he had a really good feel for how the Arabs felt about things. He told us that the Arabs were accustomed to building relationships and taking people at their word. In a modern Western country, in a developed country, if you make an agreement, we all know you better get it signed and notarized with a witness. But in places where institutions aren’t that strong and not that firmly established, your word is everything. Think of the stereotype of the Wild West, the frontier in America, where calling someone a liar is not just insulting, it’s a reason to start reaching for your gun. The Arabs of this time inhabited that kind of a world, a world where honor and shame were primary social lubricants, and where being known as a liar or as untrustworthy or disloyal was almost worse than death. For many of them, they might have thought that the British might try to renegotiate certain parts of the agreement around the edges, maybe, but the idea that they could just be getting play, and that all the conversations and promises made to them by the British government really didn’t mean anything at all, that was beyond the comprehension, almost, of many of the people involved. And sometimes you just believe what you want to believe, or what you have to believe.

Because regardless of how wary they might have been, the fact of the matter was that the Arabs simply didn’t have the power to stand up to the British. In 1918, the British are more than capable of sweeping any force Hussein can bring to the table off the field without breaking a sweat. And so what are you going to do? You try to prepare for what’s coming, but really you cross your fingers and hope that the British follow through. In any case, Jews still made up only about 8% of the population when the war ended. Zionism was gaining traction, sure, but overall the number of immigrants to this point was still small in absolute terms, and so the idea that the Declaration foreshadowed the enforced immigration of hundreds of thousands of European Jews who would push aside the Arab population to take over the country and create an ethnically based Jewish state simply wasn’t on most people’s radar or something to even think about. After the Armistice, Chaim Weizmann met and had a series of correspondences with the man who emerged as the leader of the Arabs in Greater Syria. This man was Amir Faisal I, leader of the Arab armies and son of Hussein bin Ali.

At the urging of the British government, Weizmann traveled to meet Faisal to assure him that the Zionists had no political intentions in Palestine. After a long and uncomfortable journey through bad seas and desert heat and broken down vehicles, Weizmann writes about his arrival. A century later, you still can’t help but be moved by his words. Because you see, for centuries Jews had been reciting psalms, swearing never to forget Jerusalem in their exile. Through centuries of persecution, when it might have been easier, certainly safer, to just convert to Christianity or Islam, they chose to endure incredible suffering for the sake of a memory and a dream. And who are they kidding? Countless cultures and peoples existed at some point in the past. They had their day of glory.

They made their offering to the world and then they were absorbed and passed on to the human stream. The Jewish people had been taken into exile by the Babylonians in 586 BC but they didn’t pass on. The experience only strengthened them, deepened their commitment to their homeland and their identity. The exile literature is among the most profound and beautiful achievements we, and by we I mean the human race as a whole, have managed to produce. After the Babylonians were defeated by the Achaemenid Persians, the Jews rejoiced at the opportunity to return but they found their land in ruins and their sacred city and temple burned to the ground. But the spirit of the people and their joy at their cries having been heard gave them the energy to rebuild Jerusalem and construct a second glorious temple on the same hill in precisely the same spot as the one that had been destroyed. In the following centuries, Jewish society was animated by a zeal that’s hard to overstate. That zeal eventually led them to resist the power of the Roman Empire which was about the worst idea imaginable at the time they did it.

While the Romans were stern masters, they usually tended to give their provinces quite a bit of leeway to do their thing as long as they bent the knee and followed some ground rules. But these Jewish zealots weren’t in the mood to kneel to anyone. The Romans could be patient with the idiosyncrasies of their constituents at times, but they had no patience at all for disobedience. Built into the Roman political consciousness was an aversion to half measures and the idea that when you end a problem, you end it for good. In 70 AD, they tore Jerusalem apart. They pulled down every stone of the second temple and killed or enslaved over half the population. The devastation of the Jewish community was so total that an Ottoman census 15 centuries later found that Jews made up less than 2% of the population of Palestine. It was over.

The survivors scattered to the winds, finding shelter wherever they could, usually meeting only suspicion and hostility. The time between the Babylonian captivity and the return to their home was about 70 years. It’s conceivable that a few of the old folks had vague childhood memories of their home The ones who had returned they probably remember hearing first-hand accounts of it from their parents, their old lives. But when wise men arrived in Palestine to meet Amir Faisal after the First World War, the Jews had been in exile for almost 2,000 years. Their wanderings had taken them to the corners of the world and the various groups of Jews had become culturally distinct from one another. The sense of Jewish consciousness as not just a religion but a people was almost completely lost. But while they struggled to survive and the memory of their home faded into history and then faded beyond that into the mists of ancient mythology, the Jewish people refused to forget. A wise man was a secular man, but his heart was full when he arrived in Palestine on that moonlit night.

He wrote, quote, I may have been a little light-headed from the sudden change in climate, but as I stood there I suddenly had the feeling that 3,000 years had vanished, had become as nothing. Here I was, on the identical ground, on the identical errand of my ancestors in the dawn of my people’s history when they came to negotiate with the ruler of the country for a right of way that they might return to their home. End quote. I can’t imagine the feeling. I can’t. I just have no frame of reference, no context for something like that. And I’ll be honest, I don’t know if anybody but Chaim Weizmann in that moment has ever known that same feeling. Most of us wake up each day and we’re lucky if the things we’re doing place us in a larger context that extends beyond deciding what we’re going to have for dinner that night.

Weizmann felt in the marrow of his bones what it was like to inhabit an historical moment with 3,000 years of context. Weizmann must have thought of all the generations and generations of homeless Jews making their way from place to place. He must have thought of the destruction of Jerusalem, of the religious persecution of all the hopeless years when a return seemed like any other story told by a broken and ridiculous people clinging to their defunct identity for no good reason at all. He must have thought of all those Jews born into a world which already hated them and murdered for their refusal to give up who they were. For their refusal to give up hope. For centuries Jews have ended their Passover Seder meal with a prayer and a hope saying next year in Jerusalem. After 2,000 years next year had finally arrived. The Babylonian Empire was buried.

The mighty Roman Empire was an amusement park in Italy. Medieval kingdoms who had chased the Jews all over Europe were footnotes in a history book. All of them forgotten. In June 1918 Chaim Weizmann entered Palestine as an envoy of his people. And his people had not forgotten. Last night I dreamed that I was a child Out where the pines grow Wild and tall I was trying to make it home through the forest Before the darkness falls I heard the wind rustling through the trees And ghostly voices rose from the fields I ran with my heart pounding down that broken path With the devil snapping at my heels I broke through the trees and there in the night My father’s house stood shining hard and bright The branches and brambles tore my clothes and stretched my arms But I ran till I fell shaking in his arms I awoke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart Will never again sir, tear us from each other’s hearts I got dressed and to that house I did ride From out on the road I could see its windows shining light I walked up the steps and stood on the porch A woman I didn’t recognize came and spoke to me through a chain door I told her my story and who I’d come for She said I’m sorry son but no one by that name lives here anymore … My father’s house shines hard and bright It stands like a beacon calling me in the night Calling and calling so cold and alone Shining across this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned

Episode 2

Summary

Joseph Trumpeldor’s Role: Joseph Trumpeldor was tasked with organizing the defense of frontier settlements in northern Palestine against Bedouin raiders.
Battle of Tel Hai (March 1, 1920): Arab militia demanded to search the settlement for French soldiers. A Zionist guard fired a warning shot, leading to a firefight. Trumpeldor and his militia tried to defend the settlement but were outnumbered. The incident resulted in multiple casualties and became a significant event in Zionist and Arab narratives.
Zionist and Arab Narratives: Both sides had different versions of the Tel Hai incident, each portraying the other as the aggressor.
British Mandate and Arab Nationalism: The British mandate over Palestine and the Balfour Declaration led to increased tensions. Arab nationalists were angered by British support for a Jewish homeland.
Husseini and Nashashibi Clans: The British manipulated local politics by playing the Husseini and Nashashibi clans against each other to maintain control.
Herbert Samuel’s Role: As High Commissioner, Samuel tried to balance British interests with Zionist aspirations and Arab concerns, often facing criticism from all sides.
Nebi Musa Riots (April 1920): A religious festival turned violent, leading to attacks on Jews by Arabs. The British response was criticized for being inadequate.
Jaffa Riots (May 1921): Clashes between Jewish communists and labor Zionists escalated into widespread violence, resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.
Zionist Militarization: In response to ongoing violence, Zionists began to organize paramilitary groups like the Haganah for self-defense.
Cultural and Political Zionism: There were internal divisions within the Zionist movement between those focused on cultural revival and those advocating for political statehood.
Impact of World War I: The war and subsequent famine devastated the Arab population in greater Syria, leading to significant loss of life and trauma.
French and British Colonial Strategies: Both powers used local divisions to maintain control, often at the expense of Arab nationalist aspirations.

Timeline

Early 20th Century: Jews begin purchasing land and setting up settlements in Palestine.
1917: Balfour Declaration issued, supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
March 1, 1920: Battle of Tel Hai occurs.
April 1920: Nebi Musa riots break out in Jerusalem.
April 19, 1920: San Remo Conference assigns the British mandate over Palestine.
May 1921: Jaffa riots result in significant violence between Jews and Arabs.
1921: Haj Amin al-Husseini becomes the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
1929: Arab riots in Safed result in the deaths of 20 Jews.

This summary and timeline provide an overview of the key events and themes discussed in the transcript.

Citations:
[1] https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/7742445/b196c5c6-5a9a-4839-aaa0-1d570dd673b0/paste.txt
[2] https://israelmyglory.org/article/the-arab-riots-of-the-1920s/
[3] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/arab-riots-of-the-1920-s
[4] https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/World-War-I-and-after
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_Nebi_Musa_riots
[6] https://uca.edu/politicalscience/home/research-projects/dadm-project/middle-eastnorth-africapersian-gulf-region/british-palestine-1917-1948/
[7] https://israeled.org/arab-raiders-attack-tel-hai/
[8] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ajs-review/article/abs/politics-of-interpretation-tel-hai-in-israels-collective-memory/73367999BCF5791DF5C13AE78F5C1E67
[9] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3kzc0y/ama_frontier_settlements_of_colonial_virginia/
[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-eYce_LyBc
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Trumpeldor
[12] http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/ENGL/2050/Driscoll/turner.pdf
[13] https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/israel-zionism/2020/03/the-long-shadow-of-joseph-trumpeldor/
[14] https://israeled.org/joseph-trumpeldor/
[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng2R2OJdApI
[16] https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-frontier
[17] https://aish.com/who-was-joseph-trumpeldor/
[18] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/joseph-trumpeldor-1880-1920
[19] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q16OZkgSXfM

Here’s a summary of the main ideas from the podcast episode “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, Episode 2” by Daryl Cooper, as presented in the transcript, focusing on the creation of Israel and the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The Question of Identity and Nationhood: The episode opens with a philosophical exploration of what it means to be a “people” or a nation, contrasting traditional kinship-based identities with modern symbolic national identities. Cooper uses this framework to set the stage for understanding the Zionist project and Arab nationalism, emphasizing the challenge of transitioning from tribal or familial loyalty to a broader, abstract national identity.
Post-WWI Chaos and the Collapse of Empires: The period after World War I is depicted as a time of upheaval, with the dissolution of the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires creating a vacuum in the Middle East. This led to competing national identity projects, including Arab nationalism and Zionism, as various groups sought to define themselves in the new geopolitical landscape.
Arab Trauma and Resilience: The Arab population, particularly in Greater Syria (including Palestine), suffered immense trauma during WWI—famine, disease, conscription, and colonial exploitation by European powers like Britain and France. Despite losing a third of their population and facing profound psychological scars, Arabs rallied around figures like Emir Faisal I for an independent Arab state, highlighting their resilience and desire for self-determination.
British and French Colonial Ambitions (Sykes-Picot and Balfour): The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) divided the Middle East between Britain and France, undermining Arab independence. The Balfour Declaration (1917) further complicated matters by promising a “national home” for Jews in Palestine, a region intended as part of Faisal’s Arab kingdom. These conflicting promises sowed distrust and set the stage for conflict.
Zionist Immigration and Assertiveness: Early Zionist settlers arrived in Palestine with varying intentions—some seeking coexistence, others aiming for dominance. After the Balfour Declaration, Zionist rhetoric and actions grew bolder, with figures like Menachem Usishkin and Joseph Trumpledore displaying confidence in Jewish control, despite Jews being a small minority (around 8-12% of the population in 1920).
The Battle of Tel Hai (1920): This clash between Zionist settlers and Arab militia marked a turning point, ending any ambiguity about mutual antagonism. Trumpledore’s death became a Zionist rallying cry, while Arabs saw it as evidence of Zionist aggression, solidifying opposing narratives and escalating tensions.
Nebi Musa Riots (1920): The riots during the Nebi Musa festival in Jerusalem, sparked by rumors of Jewish attacks, resulted in violence against Jews, with British forces struggling to maintain order. The event deepened mistrust, with Zionists accusing the British of negligence and Arabs viewing it as proof of British-Zionist collusion.
Jaffa Riots (1921): Triggered by a clash between communist and labor Zionist Jews, these riots spiraled into broader Arab-Jewish violence. British suppression and the discovery of Zionist weapons caches alarmed officials, revealing the depth of Zionist militancy and Arab fears of displacement.
British Mandate and Divide-and-Rule Tactics: Under Herbert Samuel’s administration, the British employed colonial strategies to manage Palestine, exploiting rivalries (e.g., between the Husseini and Nashashibi clans) to prevent unified Arab resistance. This approach inadvertently fostered radicalization, including the rise of Haj Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti.
Zionist Divisions and Unity: Zionism encompassed cultural (e.g., Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s Hebrew revival), political (Theodor Herzl’s state-focused vision), and labor (David Ben-Gurion’s socialist nationalism) strands. Despite internal differences, Zionists leveraged European experience and unity to advance their goals, contrasting with Arab disunity.
Arab Nationalism’s Challenges: Palestinian Arabs struggled to forge a national identity amidst trauma, low literacy, rural dispersion, and tribal divisions. The collapse of Faisal’s Syrian kingdom and British-French control left them isolated, facing a better-organized Zionist movement.
Escalation Toward Conflict: By 1921, both sides hardened their positions. Ben-Gurion and others rejected compromise, insisting Palestine must be exclusively Jewish, while Arabs, feeling betrayed and threatened, turned to violence. Samuel’s binational proposal was rejected by Zionists, signaling an inevitable clash.

In essence, the podcast portrays the creation of Israel as emerging from a volatile mix of Zionist ambition, Arab resistance, and British colonial maneuvering, with WWI’s aftermath providing the crucible. It highlights the profound human cost, irreconcilable aspirations, and the seeds of a conflict that would shape the region for decades.

Transcript

Hey, everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, you’re listening to the Martyr Maid Podcast. You’re about to hear episode two of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a six-part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoy this series, please do consider subscribing to my sub-stack page where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes that are available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 per year. It is at martyrmaid.substack.com, and to all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this. So I hope you guys enjoy the show. Here we go. I’m content to die for my beliefs, so cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it.

No, they will forget. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. God transcends all things. Why must we tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion? This episode took so much longer than I hoped it would. It took so much longer than I expected it would.

I’ve been probably 95% finished with it for at least a month, over a month, but I was stuck. In my effort to get unstuck, I read probably at least half a dozen whole books that ended up having no bearing on the episode at all. Good books, but they had nothing to do with this in the end. Often I’ll write to help myself kind of work through my thinking on certain subjects or issues and so I wrote probably 50 pages of essays and posts trying to clarify my thinking. Didn’t use any of it. The history of this period, the story of the period we’re about to cover, that part of this episode has been done. I wrapped that up ages ago. That’s not what was holding me up.

Sometimes when I study a topic or get ready to tell a story, there’ll be some idea or some question that I just find myself coming back to over and over and over. It starts out vaguely, but eventually it emerges enough that I can start to make out its shape. But what can happen if you’re not careful, and I’m almost never careful when it comes to this kind of thing, I’m going to have to get better at it, is that that foggy question can become a kind of obsession that ends up pulling you away from the story or topic that made you ask it in the first place. I kept trying to bring myself back to the history, just buckle down and tell the story. That’s why you’re here, right? That’s why you’re listening. Every time I would try to explain this thing that was eating at me in the context of the episode, to weave it in, it just never seemed to work. Maybe it wasn’t working because it’s always hard to explain something to someone who hasn’t been in your head, right?

They’re not privy to your inner monologue and so they don’t know how you arrived at that idea, and it makes perfect sense to you until you start to explain it to somebody else and you realize that they just don’t have the background of why you think this is so interesting or important. That’s part of it, but partly I think it wasn’t working because even right now, right now as I’m recording this, the idea and the precise ways that it’s important to this specific story still aren’t completely worked out and elucidated in my own mind. I finally decided to just hit record and start talking when I realized finally that I don’t have to figure it out and explain it to you. I’m not a philosopher or a priest and I’m not here to lecture anybody. You’re not here to have something explained to you. Once I reminded myself of that, I just hit the red button and started talking and here we are. I’m here because I have questions and because I hope that this might be a way to find other people interested in some of those same questions and who might help me work through some of them. That’s why I’m doing this.

And so that’s how I want to start out this part of our story. I want to start by asking you a question. You don’t have to answer it right now. In fact, even if you think you have a clear answer, I’m going to ask you to just hold on to it for now and let it float in your mind as we start to move into this part of our story. Because it seems like a simple question, maybe the simplest question, but many, many lives and destinies are going to be shaped by this question and by the struggle to answer it in this first part of the 20th century that we’re going to be talking about. I want to ask you what it means to be a people. What is the difference between just a crowd of individuals and an army? So what’s the difference, say, between the United States of America and just 300 million individual people living out their lives in relative proximity to each other in the middle of North America?

What’s the difference? And how do you get from one place to the other place? We’re all social mammals and human beings are ultra-social mammals, so all pre-civilized traditional human societies. Identity is determined by blood. The extended family is the social unit. The clan is what people mean when they say we. This is easy enough to understand from a biological evolutionary standpoint, but to make urban civilization possible, to make any of this that we see around us possible, at some point groups of people had to make this very complicated leap from identifying primarily with a kinship group, with a biological family, to instead identifying with a symbolic family, something that can scale. See, people don’t just say, I live in America, right?

It’s not just a place. They say, I’m an American, but what does that mean? America’s just a symbol. It’s just an idea, right? It’s not the mountains or the rivers or the fields or the lines on a map or the sum of those things even. It’s not even the people. If everyone woke up tomorrow morning and just forgot about it or decided that there’s no such thing as America, then there is no such thing as America. It’s gone.

It’s just an idea. It’s just in our heads. And yet somewhere between 1776 and today, America, that thing, it became something with a sustainable, independent existence in a way. Became something like a family, a symbolic family, an us, right? Not a blood family, a symbolic family, and an identity to which people gave their loyalty that superseded their identification with their family name. See, there are more people in the United States today, I think, who will say, I’m an American and get real emotional if anyone has a problem with that than there are people in the country who will go around saying, I’m a Smith or I’m a Cooper or I’m a Jackson or whatever. We just don’t really do that here anymore. And when people do, we kind of look at it as this sort of lower class throwback kind of thing. You know, there’s this movie, you probably have no idea what I’m talking about, and you shouldn’t. I commend you if you don’t. But there’s this Adam Sandler movie from the 90s. I don’t remember what it’s called, but there’s this big, dumb bully, right? And every time he would bully Adam Sandler, he would yell, O’Doyle rules! Because O’Doyle was his last name, right? And you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. Forget it.

The point is that most people today in a developed country like the United States see, when they see people clinging to a local, provincial, small identity like that, they look at it as if there’s something that maybe that person hasn’t quite figured out yet that the rest of us have. You know, that maybe they’re hanging on to something that the rest of us have kind of let go of and transcended. You know, I don’t mean that people aren’t loyal to their family members, and I’m not talking about being loyal to our family members, but to the family. The family is an entity in itself, a body with its own life, where the individual members are constituent cells whose interests are subordinate to the interests of the larger whole. That’s what I’m talking about. And that’s the state of natural man and traditional societies. But to anyone in a modern nation state, it’s a curiosity, it’s a throwback. We see it even romanticized in something like the Godfather movies, and it’s still hard for most of us to relate to.

It’s fascinating, but it’s hard to relate to. Part of the reason The Sopranos was so great was because of how it played with the fact that the kind of clan loyalty that’s romanticized in the Godfather movies, it just in reality has not been able to stick in the United States. It seems out of place and anachronistic and kind of ridiculous. But why? Why is that? When you look around the world today, you’ll find that civil society, strong institutions, state legitimacy, these things exist almost universally in inverse proportion to the extent that people identify with the clan and give their primary loyalty to the extended family or the tribe. And again, the Godfather movies are like graduate courses on this dynamic. I’ll use the book actually.

There’s a scene in the book, it’s in the movie too, but I’ll quote from the book. There’s a scene where Michael Corleone is explaining to his wife why he has to follow his father and be loyal and obedient no matter what. Now, she’s a regular person, you know, to whom the laws and norms of the larger society have been fully internalized. And so she doesn’t understand why Michael would follow his father, even if it means running afoul of those laws. And so he tells her, quote, I don’t trust society to protect us. I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they manage to con a block of people to vote for them, end quote. See in countries like the United States that enjoy strong legitimacy, whatever we think about politicians or judges or the police or whatever, the essential legitimacy of the system is usually never in question. If a terrible injustice occurs in the criminal justice system, say someone is wrongly convicted by a corrupt judge and evil cops, people will call for the injustice to be corrected, maybe for the judge and the cops themselves to be punished.

But no matter how egregious the injustice, you almost never hear someone claim that the system itself has no right to judge him, that our institutions have no right to expect his participation or his obedience. But to people like Michael Corleone, whose extended family is an entity with a separate existence and a primary claim on his loyalty, the national institutions of the United States are simply other entities with whom he and his family happen to have dealings. See patriotism and tribalism are natural enemies. And it’s not just a binary comparison of say the United States over here on one end with its nuclear families and strong institutions and all the way on the other end Afghanistan with its tribal identities and weak institutions. You can trace that relationship reliably up and down the whole spectrum of nations. Go down to the European Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy, Sicily, Greece, you find countries where the extended family plays a big role, much bigger than the United States or say Britain or Scandinavia, but you find states with notorious difficulties with tax evasion and nepotism, corruption and so forth. Go up to Northern Europe, go to Scandinavia, you’ll find strong institutions and families that well, you wouldn’t see a Swedish version of my big fat Greek wedding, right? You just wouldn’t.

In the last few years, those countries on the Mediterranean that I listed, they’ve all had huge debt and government finance problems that are directly related to their difficulties collecting taxes. Their tax collection problems can be directly traced to the cronyism and corruption resulting from this complex web of personal relationships and family connections that for many of the people in these countries are simply more real and more tangible and more important than the state institutions and have a greater claim to their loyalty. I’m not beating up on the Mediterranean societies, by the way, because there’s certainly something to be said for the deep family structures and the intense communitarian relationships you find in these places, but as we go forward in this story, something I want you to keep in mind is that it’s just important to understand that strong family identity is an obstacle to the construction of larger symbolic identity formations like the nation state. In America, we’re used to hearing a narrative that puts nationalistic patriotism and family values quote-unquote over on the same side of the ideological spectrum, but that’s only because the battle’s over in America. We’ve internalized the individualist ethos and the nuclear family structure so thoroughly that national identity and family identity are no longer in competition with each other. The competition’s over. You can keep sliding down that spectrum through regions where tribal loyalty and tribal identity are more and more prominent, and in just about every single case, you’ll find that that society has had a corresponding amount of difficulty establishing strong, sustainable, independent, legitimate civic institutions. Every nation, at some point, if it’s going to be a nation, at some point has to accomplish this gigantic task of somehow getting people to transcend their local ties of blood and instead identify with an idea.

Something they can’t see, can’t touch, and yet that idea has to earn their loyalty to the point that they’re willing to leave their home, leave their blood family behind to go off and fight and die for it. And again, if you live in a place like the United States, we do this all the time, it’s how we butter our bread, right? You probably take this totally for granted. You’re wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about it, but that’s only because this task has been so thoroughly accomplished. It was already mostly accomplished for us by the English and the Dutch and the rest before they ever even got to the New World. And today we hear about the difficulties that the U.S. is having with its nation-building adventure in Afghanistan and how, what’s the headline usually? Something like, Afghan tribalism impedes the formation of the state, right? And most people think of that as a sign of sort of primitive backwardness in Afghanistan, even if they’re polite enough not to say it that way, but what those people often fail to understand is that the tribalism of Afghanistan is normal, okay? That’s the default. What you see in the United States, that’s not normal. If anyone’s ever told you that this is normal, they’re lying to you. No matter how much we take it for granted, 320 million unrelated people living together in, you know, relative harmony with individual violent crime but no civil strife to speak of, that is not normal. Figuring out how to get non-kin to cooperate in a sustainable way is a basic human social equation that very few groups ever solve. Doing it on this level has only happened very recently and sustaining it is a balancing act, a very delicate one. In the U.S., right, we have, we all remember the story of the Hatfields and the McCoys in the U.S.

I think we hear it as kids. If you’re not from the U.S. you probably have no idea what I’m talking about. So the Hatfields and the McCoys were these two families in the southern United States who got embroiled in this decades-long blood feud back in the 19th century. It started over something small but revenge led to reprisal, a ton of people got killed and eventually, decades later, these two families are still calling in reinforcements and hiring mercenaries and having basically military engagements, small-scale military engagements, these two families. Now the very fact that most people in the U.S. today still know that story, I think there was a TV movie about it a couple of years ago, that tells you something important about it. It’s famous because the very social structures that would allow a generational family feud like that to happen have been pretty much eliminated, so it’s kind of fascinating to watch on TV.

That kind of tribal blood feud wouldn’t even make the gossip pages in Pashtun Waziristan in 2015. It’s just a part of life. So how do you get different people who don’t identify with each other at all, who may even be rivals or traditional long-term enemies, to start thinking of themselves, to start feeling themselves, to be part of a larger symbolic family? How do you get the Hatfields and the McCoys to put aside their differences and shake hands and say, well brother, we’re both Americans and there’s a war on in Germany so I guess we gotta end this fight of ours and get over there together. How do you do that? That sounds silly, but for millions of people in 1918, this was not a theoretical question. For many people living in the former territories of the empires that had just been shattered by the First World War, it was the only question. The Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires had just been wiped out and their constituent peoples had already begun the process of constructing, advocating, and fighting over the identities that were going to replace them.

The proximate cause of the whole war was rooted in this dynamic. The war was kicked off by the assassination of an Austrian Archduke by a young Bosnian Serb who wanted a Serbian national identity apart from the broader empire. The Russian empire had been burned to the ground by its revolution and right at this moment you’ve got a civil war raging between not only the revolutionaries and the remnant of the old regime, but between different groups of revolutionaries. You’ve got people fighting for their national independence and identity and then you’ve got hardcore communists who want to throw out national identity altogether and replace it with an economic class identity. They see national borders, national identities as just barriers to keep the workers apart from one another. They want only an identity based on economic class. In the Arab world, in the Arab territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire, it’s national identity projects and they’re starting up almost from scratch. The Ottomans had ruled Arab lands for hundreds of years and they had never been an Arab nation state, not in the modern sense of the word.

There were wide cultural differences between the various Arab regions though and so national identities began to take root along those lines. But it was not going to be easy. If the 20th century taught us anything at all, it taught us that there’s more to building a nation than just running a rag up a flagpole. The wars and the revolutions of the 20th century, they were about competing identity projects as much as they were about economic arrangements or competition for resources or any of those kinds of things. People can live for a long, long time in poverty. They’ve done it all through history. People will not tolerate living very long at all without a meaningful answer to the question of who they are. When the existing answers to that question fall into doubt and new answers begin to be offered up as replacements, the transitions bring turmoil and that turmoil very often turns into chaos.

But the Arabs, the Arabs had already seen more turmoil in the last few decades than most people had seen in the last few centuries. As the Ottoman Empire was falling into decline, European colonial powers had begun to move into the lands that the empire formerly controlled. All of North Africa had already come under the control of European empires by the early 20th century. These new colonialists were barely finished unloading their ships when the First World War broke out and they wasted no time pulling up locals and sending them off to fight in Europe. Most Arabs weren’t sure what to make of the whole thing or what any of it had to do with them. I mean, try to imagine. I’ll use the example of the French in Morocco. France had only been in Morocco for about two years when the war broke out.

The people in many of the outlying villages or in the hills hardly knew who the French were. Many of them didn’t know who the French were and yet after only two years, the French were loading up 45,000 Moroccan Arabs onto ships and sending them off to fight Germany in the trenches of the Western Front. Can you imagine how disorienting that must have been? Britain and France were both conscripting people from their new colonies and sending them off to die, very often in the front lines. Because why not, right? Remember, it’s the early 20th century and our thinking on many things is a little bit different so there’s no sense wasting nice young white boys if you can throw some Moroccan or Egyptian Arabs out there to absorb that first volley of German machine gun fire. So just imagine, just a couple weeks ago, or a couple months ago, you were in your village in Morocco, living your life, now you’re sitting in a European trench, covered in mud, being shot at by other Europeans in some other trench, they all look the same to you, for reasons that make no sense to you, because a European country showed up to your home in North Africa and told you that they were in charge and would be needing you to do your duty as a loyal subject. Conscript alone sent nearly a million men to go fight or work in other capacities for the British Empire during the war, hundreds of thousands of whom became casualties.

Meanwhile, on the other side, the Ottoman Empire had pressed some 300,000 Mesopotamian and Levantine Arabs into its own army and they didn’t have a choice either. Frequently, the Europeans would send their conscripted Arabs to fight the Ottoman Empire’s conscripted Arabs. As you can imagine, many units on both sides objected to being sent to kill each other because some Archduke was killed in Europe, and when they objected too vociferously, they were subjected to the same military discipline as French or British or Turkish troops, as if they had volunteered for this whole thing, or worse, actually, in most cases. Every First World War army executed some people for desertion, sedition, or even things like falling asleep on watch. Okay, fair enough, right? Militaries have been doing that since there have been militaries. But for their colonial troops, the French became notorious for this in particular. They brought back the old Roman practice of decimation.

If you refuse your orders or deserted, they weren’t just going to kill you, they were going to kill a bunch of other people from your unit, so you could carry that with you. And again, war is hell, and if you’re the French army trying to hold things together as the Germans march toward Paris, maybe you do whatever you have to do. But if you’re an Arab from North Africa or Syria being pulled off your farm because foreign powers on both sides of a war are pressing you into their armies to fight a war that you don’t understand or have anything to do with, and you’re being told to go kill other Arabs with all the gusto that you can muster or else be executed as a coward and a deserter, it was very disorienting for the people involved. The effect of the First World War on the Arab world is one of the most overlooked aspects of the entire era. So many pages have been written about the First World War, with so many authors looking for some unique angle to present that it’s really inexplicable that it’s not better known. And for somebody who’s kind of an amateur World War I junkie like I’ve been for a while, once you kind of start to learn about the effect of World War I on the Arab world and how it’s trickled down into the modern era, it really just blows your mind that you haven’t heard more about it. In the region of the Levant, for example, now the Levant, sometimes it’s called Greater Syria, this whole area is still under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire during this period. In the Levant, the war was a total catastrophe.

I know the First World War was a catastrophe everywhere, but in the Levant it was just a disaster. As soon as the war breaks out, Turkey installs just a brutal military dictator. They send him to govern the region of the Levant and to stave off the possibility of any Arab independence movements. Even before the war, there was a lot of this in the air and they wanted to make sure that they weren’t hit by anything from the inside while they were fighting the First World War. In Turkey, this man was called Cemal Pasha, but he earned the nicknames the Bloodshedder and the Butcher among the Levantine Arabs that he was sent to govern. He earned those nicknames. In addition to having a huge portion of the male population pulled up and pressed into the war by the Ottomans, the region was swept by diseases several times after the Allies brought in hundreds of thousands of colonial conscripts from India and other places. If that wasn’t enough, the Allied naval blockade, combined with the interruption of agriculture caused by the war itself, and then a poorly timed drought and locust infestation, a couple locust infestations actually, a few years in a row, led to a famine of apocalyptic proportions.

This part is controversial, but there is evidence that the Ottoman Empire, and Cemal Pasha specifically, imposed the famine on the area of Mount Lebanon, very similarly to the way that Joseph Stalin would later do in Ukraine, partly because they wanted to requisition all available food for the war, but also possibly to suppress any chance of Arab nationalist uprisings. It was a huge concern the Ottoman Empire had during this period, and it turned out rightfully so. This accusation was common for decades after the war, but again, it’s highly controversial along with everything else having to do with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire during this period, so I’m not telling you that it happened, I’m telling you that there is a controversy about it. If you’re interested, I encourage you to investigate it on your own. Okay, so we all know how terrible the war was for France and for Belgium, for Germany and Russia, but beyond the Arab rebellion, Lawrence of Arabia and all that, not a lot of people even know what the Arabs were up to during this period. Well, this famine, in greater Syria in particular, was devastating. And don’t mistake me, this was a famine, this was not a food shortage. There are pictures, and they’ve got everything you’re used to seeing, and all the most infamous horrific famines in history.

Weak and bony people lying in the streets, just waiting to die. Skeletal children with the big distended bellies, women and children digging in fields for insects and roots and everything they can find. I mean everything, it’s horrible. Edward Niccoli was an employee at what would later become the American University of Beirut. He kept a diary at the time, and in it he wrote, quote, Starving people lying about everywhere. At any time, children moaning and weeping. Women and children clawing over rubbish piles and ravenously eating anything that they can find. When the agonized cry of famishing people in the streets becomes too bitter to bear, people get up and close the windows tight in the hope of shutting out the sound.

Mere babies amuse themselves by imitating the cries that they hear in the streets or at the doors. End quote. Okay, now stop for a minute and try to put yourself in that place. Okay, actually stop. Take it out of his diary, pull it out of its literary context, and just imagine what must have been going on in that community, what it must have been like. Imagine being in your house and having to shut up the windows as tight as you can and close the gaps with towels, because all day and night there are people moaning and children crying in the streets because they are starving to death. They’re out there moaning. Imagine lying down to sleep every night with your belly empty, with your children hungry, and hearing non-stop moaning in the streets like it’s the zombie apocalypse out there.

A famine is a special kind of disaster. And not to downplay the horror or the tragedy of any loss, but say when an earthquake ruins a city and kills thousands, the shock is instantaneous. The suffering is acute. It happens, it’s horrifying, and then you try to process the loss. Maybe you’re successful, maybe you’re not. A famine is something else. It just drags on. Starvation gradually breaking people down, reducing human beings who previously had read poetry and worshipped God, turning them into mere creatures who hunger.

And no appalling tragedy or act of ultimate terrible depravity brings the whole thing to a big climax. No, no, no. It just goes on and on and on, breaking human beings down. There are reports of cannibalism. One Maronite Christian priest, he later admitted that a man had come to him to confess that he had killed and eaten his children. The psychological impact of going through a period like this, not only on individuals, but also on the society, is overwhelming. There’s a book called Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder about what Ukraine and Poland and Belarus and the other countries caught between Hitler and Stalin suffered through during that period. The first chapter of the book, on the famine imposed by Stalin on Ukraine, and about what people did and how they got through that insane, desperate time, that chapter is so devastating to read that you can’t imagine how it’s ever possible to come back from it.

You read the few pages on cannibalism that took place and you feel like you need a shower. It doesn’t leave you. And we weren’t there. We didn’t go through it. We all like to believe that we would have been the ones to hold out and keep our dignity and do the right things all the way to the end if we had to. But history tells us that hunger and desperation run deeper than human will. There’s a point beyond which something far more ancient than our ideals and our considerations of ourselves as moral creatures takes over. At least it takes over for moments, but a moment is all it needs.

The man who confessed to eating his children and his delirious, starved madness, when the madness passes, he doesn’t go back to being a man who has never eaten his children. You don’t get cured of that. Or even if you just did something relatively less horrible, like stole the last piece of bread that your neighbor had to feed his starving children because you needed to feed your own starving children. When the famine passes, you don’t go back to being a person who can pretend that you would never do such a thing. People like to say that shared pain can bring out the cooperative best in people, that trauma can bring people together, right? And it’s true, okay? We’ve all seen minor versions of it. We remember in the United States back to 9-11, right?

For several weeks after that. People talk about this still today, how people were nicer to each other in the streets and people came from all over the country to help out, everybody went to give blood. It’s true, right? Collective pain, trauma can bring people together, but only up to a point. And beyond that point, in a place that very few of us can even imagine, human beings are broken. The strong ride along with the weak. The Russian writer, Varlam Shalamov, he has a book called Kalima Tales. It’s about his time in Kalima, one of the Soviet Union’s most infamous gulags.

One of the worst places in history for a human being to find himself. And he wrote about this popular idea that suffering brings people closer together. He said, quote, If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Whoever thinks he can behave differently has never touched the true bottom of life. End quote. When you’ve been down to the bottom, that experience doesn’t leave you. It’s not a trauma that goes away. Shalamov had spent years in that darkest place.

In the same book, he talked about the trauma of having some of his illusions about himself and about his fellow men shattered. He said, quote, There is much that a man should not know, should not see. And if he does see it, it is better for him to die. End quote. There are things that we were never meant to see. There’s knowledge that we spend a great deal of energy as individuals and as societies finding ways to avoid. When our illusions and avoidances break down, society itself can break down with them. There are whole libraries of books that discuss how the trauma of the war in Europe affected the outlook and the development of France and Germany and Britain, even the United States for that matter.

But you’ll read dozens of books on the events in greater Syria after the war and they’ll talk about what the Zionists did and how the Arabs responded to that and what the British thought about all this and maybe how the French came in and influenced things. It’s very rare that they will even mention the fact that the native Arabs in the region had just lost more of their population than England and Germany lost during the Black Death of the 14th century. By the time the war was over and the horsemen had run their course, a third of the Arab population of greater Syria was dead. A third. If you know much about Stalin’s Ukrainian famine in the 1930s and how horrific it was and what it did to those people, that famine killed about a quarter of Ukraine’s peasant population. The region of greater Syria suffered more dead as a percentage of the population than any place on earth during the First World War. The survivors were profoundly damaged. I mean, what does it even mean to have killed and eaten your children?

What does it mean to have the knowledge that your neighbor did it or that someone in your community did it? None of us have any frame of reference for something like that. When the crisis passes, do you just go back to your life? Do you just go back to work and go buy fruit at the market? Trauma can make otherwise normal human relationships very difficult. We all know that. Doctors and counselors often talk about how female rape survivors will often struggle to feel safe around men or to trust them. Often, this is something that they have to work to overcome because it stays with them.

Well, Sholomov’s book about the Kalima Gulag, it talks about this same sort of lifelong trauma in the sense that it’s a sort of eulogy. It reads like he’s grieving for the loss of a certain kind of innocence. When he says that there are things that a man should not see and if he does see them, it’s better for him to die, he’s not talking about a gory mess or some awful scene of your friend getting blown up or something. No, no, no. He’s saying that once you’ve seen what men are in extremis, with everything stripped away, once you’ve seen what becomes of every ideal when men are dragged below a certain depth, that below that depth is not just a wolf, because a wolf can be romanticized, but a worm. You cannot erase that vision. Sholomov himself was broken by that vision. In Snyder’s book, Bloodlands, he talks about the damage that something like this does to a people and to a society, not just physically, but morally and psychologically.

His subject is the Ukrainian famine again, but this is standard for any famine of this severity. He writes, quote, The duties of parents could not be fulfilled. Marriages suffered as wives, sometimes with their husbands’ anguished consent, prostituted themselves with local party leaders in exchange for a bit of flour. Parents, even when alive and together and acting in the best of faith, could hardly care for children. The desperate peasants holding up infants to train windows were not necessarily begging for food. Often they were trying to give their children away to someone aboard a train. The good people died first. Those who refused to steal or prostitute themselves died.

Those who gave food to others died. Those who refused to eat corpses died. Those who refused to kill their fellow man died. Parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did. In the countryside, the healthier peasants formed brigades to collect the corpses and bury them. They rarely had the inclination or strength to bury them very deeply so that hands and feet could be seen above the earth. Burial crews were paid according to the number of bodies collected, which led to certain abuses. Crews would take the weak along with the dead and then bury them alive.

They would talk with such people along the way, explaining to the starving that they would die soon anyway, so what difference did it make? In a few cases, such victims managed to dig their way out of the shallow mass graves. In their turn, the gravediggers weakened and died, their corpses left where they lay. As an agronomist recalled, the bodies were then quote, devoured by those dogs that had escaped being eaten and had gone savage, end quote. So how do people who have lived through this, who have seen their neighbors behave as starving people in a famine behave, who have themselves behaved in such a manner, how do they smile at each other in the streets afterwards? How do they build the thousand little daily sinews of trust that it takes to create a civil society? I asked a moment ago how you get unrelated people to transcend local identities and pull together under a larger symbolic identity, as if that equation wasn’t already difficult enough to solve. How do you accomplish that task with a traumatized people who have seen first hand what people are capable of when everything is stripped away, who don’t have the benefit of illusions anymore?

It’s hard to imagine it being possible at all, and yet these were the people crowding the streets to cheer for Emir Faisal I as he installed himself in Damascus. The people of greater Syria were clamoring for the opportunity to be a part of the first independent Arab nation in centuries. Emir Faisal I, son of Hussein bin Ali and commander of the Hashemite Arab forces that led the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, he waved to the throngs of enthusiastic new patriots as he entered the city of Damascus. But he knew that their fight for independence hadn’t ended with the defeat of the Turks. Late in the war, it had been revealed that the British had made a secret deal with the French and Russians to divide up the Middle East along old school colonial lines. Today we call it the Sykes-Picot Agreement, after the British and French diplomats who negotiated its terms, and according to Sykes-Picot, the entire northern region of Faisal’s kingdom, all of Syria, Lebanon today, northern Iraq, and the northern part of Palestine, all that would belong to the French, either directly or as an exclusive sphere of influence. The British assured Faisal that the deal with the French was just a wartime expediency and that he was perfectly safe, but he knew the French weren’t going to take that lying down. And would the British really risk a conflict or even risk an argument with the French just to honor a deal with an Arab ally?

Faisal had other problems brewing as well. In late 1917, even as Faisal’s army began its second year of fighting and was pushing into Palestine with General Allenby to help liberate Jerusalem, Faisal learned that the British had published the Balfour Declaration, making sort of ambiguous promises to a group calling themselves Zionists and remember Faisal’s family came from the Western Arabian Peninsula so he had only really heard of the Zionists at this point. The Balfour Declaration was making these ambiguous promises about establishing a homeland in Palestine for the Jews. Now Palestine, again, was supposed to be the southern portion of Faisal’s kingdom. The British assured him that these Zionists were simply looking to immigrate and live alongside the native Arabs. There’s no political agenda at all, but many of the Jews who had begun to arrive, they hadn’t seemed to have gotten that message. He began to hear rumors that the Zionists believed that Palestine belonged to them, that they weren’t talking about a Jewish home, but about a Jewish state. When he demanded further clarification of British intentions, Britain sent Chaim Wiseman, who was now unquestionably the leader of the Zionist movement internationally.

They sent him to meet with Faisal to reassure him that the Zionists had no political agenda, no plans for a Jewish state. Wiseman knew that Faisal was in an insecure position. He promised that the Zionists had no political designs in Palestine and were only hoping to live and participate in a society alongside the native Arabs. He convinced Faisal that the Zionists might be able to use their influence to help make sure that Britain kept France out of Syria. If Faisal needed any more convincing, the British diplomat, Sir Mark Sykes, of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, this is a highly placed British diplomat, he was openly talking about this all-powerful international Jewish conspiracy and he warned Faisal personally, quote, Believe me when I say that this race is universal, all-powerful, and cannot be put down. End quote. And he warned Faisal to give the Zionists whatever they wanted because their agents were to be found, quote, in the councils of every state, in every bank, in every business, in every enterprise. End quote.

Now, Faisal had enough to worry about. This might have sounded ridiculous to him, but remember, Faisal’s from outside the European system. And this is coming from an insider’s insider that he’s hearing this. Again, he had enough to worry about. These Jews obviously had enough suction with the British government to get the Balfour Declaration out of them, so maybe cutting a deal with Wiseman would help keep him on the good side of the British Empire. It was worth a shot. The two men met as 1919 began and the Paris Peace Conference was about to open up to discuss the terms that were going to be imposed upon the defeated central powers. Faisal and Wiseman agreed that the Zionists would immigrate under British supervision to an area that would be now officially demarcated and defined as Palestine.

Up to this point, there were no borders in the region. They officially marked off where Palestine would be. In their agreement, Faisal would write, The countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of the civilized peoples of the world.” Faisal’s allies in Greater Syria started getting very restless at this point. Remember, Faisal’s Hashemite clan, they weren’t from the Levant. They came from the Arabian Peninsula. He was asking the independent tribes of Greater Syria to accept his leadership and submit to this new state. The Syrian nationalists had spent the war being tortured and hanged by the bloodshedder’s secret police and they didn’t like the compromises Faisal seemed to be making with people that they considered a threat to their independence. They were trying to tell Faisal that he couldn’t trust Wiseman’s promises.

The Zionists who were coming into Palestine were telling a very different story. Just after Faisal reached his agreement with Wiseman, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem at the time had a run-in with the head of the Zionist commission that kind of gives you an idea of what they were so worried about. The head of the Zionist commission, a man named Menachem Usishkin, he had come for a scheduled meeting with the mayor. After they exchanged greetings, Usishkin came right at him. Partly to get an answer to the question and partly to judge the mayor’s reaction, he came right out and demanded to know, quote, how is it that the streets are so full of potholes and thick with such awful dust? I’ll let historian Tom Segev tell the rest of the story. Quote, the mayor explained that the city engineers were unable to pave the streets with asphalt because the streets were not flat. Furthermore, asphalt is dangerous, he said, because people and animals could slip on it.

Usishkin would not let up. Certainly it must be possible to level the roadbed, he said. The mayor explained that there was no money. Then the mayor asked how things were going at the Paris peace conference. Usishkin said that there was still no treaty, but everything was pretty much settled. Syria would be put under French protection, and Palestine would remain with the British. The Arabs will not consent to that, the mayor responded. Look, I said everything is settled, Usishkin repeated, and mentioned that Prince Faisal had already agreed to the Jewish national home in Palestine.

As far as the mayor was concerned, the Arabs in Palestine had not authorized Faisal to make concessions in their name. He had nothing against the Jews, he said. Those who already lived in the country were welcome. But the Arabs opposed the immigration of more Jews. He tried to explain to Usishkin that style was important. The Zionists did not understand Arab culture, he said, and they spoke to the Arabs in a contemptuous and patronizing way. And now, this is me talking again. Keep in mind that this is only a few months after the end of the war, and Jews still only make up about 8% of the population of the country, so keep that in mind as you go forward.

This is back to Segev. Usishkin did not deny that Jews had injured Arabs. He said these things could be resolved, but on no account would the Jews concede their national demands. There was no room for compromise. We do not want war, he went on. In fact, we are doing everything to prevent war. Yet the Jews are not afraid of war, he said, if it is necessary. As His Excellency knew, Usishkin told the mayor, the Jews were currently equipped with everything needed for war.

A war would hurt both sides, but the Arabs would suffer more, end quote. Usishkin is a very interesting guy, who doesn’t pull punches, as we’ll see more of that in a moment. Remember, that just blows me away, that he’s coming into the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, when there’s still only 8% of the population of the country, and talking like that. He shocked the mayor, too. It kind of gives you an idea of how assertive the Zionists are becoming at this point. In the first decade or so of the 20th century, the Jews who were moving into Palestine, they were purchasing land and setting up their settlements mostly in out-of-the-way locations, to avoid arousing the suspicion of the Arabs. This was a strategy that the Zionists talked a lot about. But the announcement of the Balfour Declaration had changed things.

Chaim Weizmann was still calling for caution. He had the long-term vision in mind, but Weizmann wasn’t in Palestine, and he couldn’t keep a leash on everyone that was. He was in the West Bank. He couldn’t keep a leash on everyone that was. The way the Palestinian Zionists saw it, the big bad boot of the British Empire was going to come kick in the door of Palestine and let them in, so it didn’t matter what the Arabs thought anymore. An American commission that was charged with looking into the situation in the former Ottoman territories, it arrived right around this time, and it had a pretty standard experience. They write about how they went into their project predisposed toward the Zionist cause. Until arriving in Palestine, the American commissioners had only heard the curated version, the safe statesmanship of Chaim Weizmann, as he called it.

But in Palestine, they found something completely different. They found Zionists with very different expectations. The commission’s report is so interesting because it’s an official document for consumption by international panels and all that, but it registers their shock at finding that the Zionists in Palestine were looking forward to, well, as they put it, quote, they were looking forward to a complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, end quote. And so the report denounces the Balfour Declaration, calls on President Woodrow Wilson to oppose it, but before the report can be circulated to the wider American government and published, Wilson suffers a stroke, goes into seclusion for the rest of his presidency, and it never gets pushed. Whatever Weizmann was telling Faisal, his allies in Palestine were seeing what this American commission was seeing. They were seeing Zionists out in the streets, holding parades and rallies, celebrating the Balfour Declaration, and circulating pamphlets and giving speeches that were openly talking about Palestine being taken over altogether and made into a Jewish state. There were groups of Zionists conducting military drills in the streets of Jerusalem, and no surprise, the Arabs are starting to freak out. So Faisal’s allies are urging him to take this seriously, but he’s got a lot of plates up in the air.

Anyway, how seriously could he take it? Whatever Mark Sykes said about the Jews’ international power, they still only made up less than 10% of the population, right? What harm could it really do to throw Weizmann a bone? Faisal hadn’t committed to anything specific, and if the Jews really were up to something, they were still only 10% of the population. If they became a problem, he could cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now, he had more immediate problems. Right now, he had to deal with the French. See, it was becoming apparent that whatever the British said about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the French considered the deal binding, and the French were not about to back down.

In four years, the three richest countries in the world literally bankrupted themselves, producing munitions and launching them at each other as quickly as possible. More of that carnage rained down on French soil and on French people than anywhere else in the world. When the war started, there were about 8.7 million men aged 20 to 50 in France, about 8.7 million military-age males. By the war’s end, France had suffered about 6.2 million killed or wounded. So when the peace was settled, France expected to get something out of it. In the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the British had agreed that France would get Syria, and the French weren’t interested in whatever side deals Britain may have made with the leader of some desert tribes. In late 1919, the British told Faisal that they would be pulling their troops out of Syria, leaving him defenseless and ceding the territory to the French. During the war, the British had made these conflicting promises, openly conflicting promises, and they knew they were conflicting.

They made them to the French, the Zionists, and the Arabs. Well, if Faisal had been fooling himself into believing that the fact that the land in question was Arab land meant that the promise to the Arabs would matter more to the British than their promises to wealthy European Jews or to the Republic of France, well, as David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time, said, the friendship of France is worth ten Syrias. So of the three promises made, the French and the Zionists would both get their wish. When push came to shove, the Arabs were voted off the island. If they wanted to protest, but it’s our island, well, welcome to colonialism. Make yourself comfortable because you’re going to be here for a while. Faisal had been betrayed. There’s no other way to put it.

Now looking back, most of us think what he was probably finally thinking in that moment. Of course he was betrayed. Of course the British took sides with the French and the European Jews and threw the Arabs under the bus. What did he think was going to happen? He might have been upset about it, but he also knew that he had no choice but to take the advice of the British and try to deal with the French. Any force he could muster would stand no chance against just a few divisions of the French army. In January 1920, they agreed to terms which stated that Faisal would remain in power and even that the French would not station a large permanent military force in Syria as long as French advisers were the only ones influencing policy. Faisal’s allies weren’t having any of that.

Faisal agreed to it. They weren’t letting that go. Remember, Faisal’s Hashemite clan was, again, from the Arabian Peninsula. So he’s expecting the tribes and cities of the Levant to pledge their loyalty to him. And more than that, he’s asking them to give up a lot of autonomy and submit to a state government that he would be running. But they knew colonialism when they saw it, and they hadn’t just fought a war against the Muslim Ottoman Empire to just hand Palestine over to the Zionists while the rest of Syria became another French colony, with Faisal as their puppet. They would have been better off under the Turks. The French and British did try to soften the blow.

See, they knew that the world had changed in the last four years. Old-school, ass-kicking colonialism wasn’t as simple as it used to be. For one thing, you had the Americans, the annoying, self-righteous Americans who wouldn’t stop talking about it, and they didn’t like it. And the British owed the Americans a lot of money, so you kind of had to listen to them, at least a little bit. The French and the British also found that even their own populations had begun to sour on just straight-up dominating and exploiting other people. You couldn’t just go around kicking in doors and barking orders like the good old days. They had just spent four years pumping their own people full of propaganda about how that was the kind of behavior that only the evil Germans engaged in. Civilized nations like France and Britain just didn’t do that.

I mean, they’re still totally going to do that, obviously, but they just have to put some lipstick on it first. The lipstick that they came up with was called the Mandate System. In a nutshell, it went like this. The former territories of the Ottoman Empire aren’t ready for self-government yet. They have no natural leadership structures and no experience building institutions. And so the brand new League of Nations determines, well, the French and British decided that the League of Nations would determine, that the victorious allied nations would receive mandates to act as custodians of the various territories to shepherd the people along to eventual independence. Isn’t that nice of them? Man, those French and British are just such sweethearts.

They’re always looking out for the little guys around the world. With all the financial problems they’re having after the war, they’re just going to donate their time and resources to help the little Arabs learn the art of independent self-government. Wow. Okay, if you buy that, I recommend letting someone else handle your finances. The Arabs didn’t buy it. They knew how the game worked. It had been going on a long time by this point. When the Europeans established a colony, they didn’t just come in with a huge army and put a white guy in a powdered wig on the throne.

Come on now, that’s crude. They were much more sophisticated. Every good colonialist knows that you find some local who will play ball with you, leave them on the throne for appearances, and then control the country through him. In the late 1800s, the British controlled India, a nation at the time of about 300 million people. They controlled it as if they had owned it for a thousand years. You know how many administrators they had in-country pulling the strings of that nation of 300 million? About a thousand. The only way you conquer a whole country and then control it in a sustainable manner, at least reasonably sustainable manner, with a thousand administrators, is by not letting the people know that they’ve been conquered, or that they’re being controlled.

At the very least, you try to make it seem like it was their idea, or maybe that it’s in their best interest. Well, at the end of the First World War, we’re closer to the end of the age of colonialism than we are to the beginning. This kind of thing has been going on for a long time, and people are starting to catch on. And so when the French and British showed up with their mandates, the Arabs had no illusions about what was going on. I mean, the Sykes-Picot Agreement spelled it all out, in case there were any lingering doubts. France and Britain would retain all rights of development, exclusive financial interest, and control over resource exploitation, and you would keep an Arab chief around for appearances. It was all written down. Well, Faisal’s allies had had enough at this point. He was just too willing to compromise, when time and time again, the Arabs had been taken advantage of. First he trusted the British, then he compromised with the Zionists, and now he’s negotiated a deal with the French. And where was any of this flexibility getting them? The French couldn’t care less about their agreements with the British. They weren’t even bothering to pretend that this was an equal partnership. The post-war French were in a foul mood, to use the understatement of the century, and they hadn’t come to Syria to collaborate or take requests. They’d come to give orders. Faisal’s allies demanded that he renounce the agreement with the French immediately, and at this point he had no choice.

He was on the verge of facing open revolt in his own ranks. So he withdrew his agreement and demanded that the French leave Syria. That wasn’t going to happen, so confrontations began to take place between local Arabs and French troops. And when violence started to break out, this just reinforced the fact to the Arabs that all this talk, all these negotiations with the French, with the Zionists, they weren’t negotiations at all. They were just a fig leaf. They were basically just saying, look, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. As long as you do what we say, we’re negotiating. The minute you try to resist, well, we don’t recommend it.

With mounting alarm and resistance from the Arabs, Weizmann and other Zionist leaders tried to get out in front of the message. They don’t want the British government realizing that this might be more work than they thought it was going to be. The British Army’s chief political officer in Palestine was a Zionist sympathizer, and he was doing his best to kind of conceal what was going on at the time. He knew better than most people that the British might have expressed support for Jewish immigration, but the Empire had no intention of alienating the whole Arab world by smashing through Palestine to force the Zionists on them. The American Commission, coming through right around this time now, they were hearing from British military officers in Palestine that they were going to need at least 50,000 troops to even get the Zionist project off the ground. Most of the British government wanted nothing to do with that. Weizmann had been promising that there would be no problems, that the Arabs were happy with the arrangement. The majority of the British government thought of the Balfour Declaration as a commitment to facilitate an essentially peaceful process.

Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they didn’t want the kind of trouble that was already beginning to become associated with it. So the army political officer knew that it was important to keep that illusion up. To that end, he had been advising the British government to keep the Arabs in the dark about the plan to begin implementation of the declaration. He explained to London that there were unfounded rumors being circulated around Palestine among the Arabs about what exactly the Balfour Declaration meant. So there was no reason to arouse their opposition by making some big announcement about it. Just start it. There’s no reason to talk about it. But on February 27th, a British major general who was sympathetic to the Arab cause, he let the cat out of the bag. He published a proclamation in Palestine’s major Arab language newspaper that the Balfour Declaration would begin implementation immediately. What happened next is one of those situations, there’s a lot of these in history, that at the time probably seemed to happen as a result of several misunderstandings and bad breaks. But looking back on it today seems almost inevitable. In the months after the British handed Syria over to the French, it’s just chaos. Especially in the border region between the two zones. You know, northern Palestine and that border with Lebanon and southern Syria on the French side. It’s just chaos. To the point that it gets very difficult to even keep up with everything that’s going on and what game each individual group is running on the others and who’s on whose side.

And I always think that if anything in any historical story is confusing for me, if it’s hard for me to keep up with, with all the sources laid out in front of me on my desk and the work of a century’s worth of brilliant historians all pouring through it and giving me their best summaries of the whole situation. If it’s still confusing to me, then I can’t imagine how in the fog of the present moment it must have been for the people who were trying to sort out everything that was going on on the ground in real time back then. For starters, the French and the British are arguing over exactly where this new border between French Syria and British Palestine is going to be. As they move it north and south, the Zionists are moving with it and setting up border outposts. Every time they move the border north, that’s expanding the British zone of influence, expanding Palestine basically at the expense of Lebanon and Syria. The Zionists obviously want this for their own reasons, but the British want more territory to influence and control as well. So there’s probably a strategic alliance between the Zionists and the British here thinking that if the Zionists set up Jewish settlements as far north as possible, the French probably aren’t going to ask for that territory back because there are already Jewish villages there. The British are the ones who are in charge of this whole Balfour Declaration Jewish homeland thing, so it should probably just go to the British.

It was probably a strategic move between the British and the French having very little to do with the actual Arab communities in question, but it’s leading to a lot of friction with the Arab communities in that region. So you’ve got tension building from that. Then you’ve got Bedouin fighters and other Arab irregular fighters who are loyal to Faisal coming down out of the hills and out of the desert to harass the French army forces who have been coming into the country, starting to pile up. The French army forces for their part are barging into Arab villages and Jewish settlements, by the way, to bivouac and camp out and take supplies. To ration up the distrust even more, it’s starting to become very hard to tell which of these villages are helping the French willingly and which ones are being forced. The Arabs are already suspicious of the Jewish villages for obvious reasons, suspicious that they’re going to be helping the French. But that wasn’t all. Some Arab Christians, mostly in Lebanon, but also in other areas, but mostly focused in Lebanon, were siding with the French.

The French had a long history in Lebanon, and some of the people there, not all for sure, but some of the people there were not unhappy to see them, at least. So Arab patrols began to raid and search villages, Arab and Jewish villages, that were suspected of possibly providing support to the French. Meanwhile, you’ve got Zionist militias forming up in several towns. We mentioned this a moment ago. They’re collecting weapons and training, so that by this time, in Jerusalem alone, you’ve got some 600 Jewish fighters performing regular military drills and training routines in the streets of Jerusalem. The British military is supposed to be de-escalating the situation and keeping the peace, and this kind of thing drove them insane. I’m sure you can imagine how well it went over with the Arabs. The whole border region where control is disputed is just becoming confusing and chaotic again.

This is not the internet age or the age of the 24-hour news cycle. Rumors and word of mouth are the primary source of information for huge numbers of people. And rumors were rampant. It’s hard to tell who’s on whose side. Again, there are Arab villages supporting the French. French troops are using Arab villages and Jewish villages to camp and resupply. No one knows which of these villages are being compelled, and which ones are collaborating willingly. There’s even evidence that the British were helping to supply the Arabs and providing them with intelligence in order to undermine the French.

They were allies, but the war is over, so there’s a little healthy competition going on again. And although it was in defiance of the official policy of the British government, you’ve got British military officers on the ground in Palestine, many of whom fought alongside Faisal and his troops during the war and were sympathetic to the Arab cause, who were reportedly passing messages to him that if only he could hold on to a unified Syria for a little while, just for a little while against the French and the Zionists, maybe the French would get tired of this business and just cut an easier deal with the British, giving the British a larger zone of influence, and maybe the British would step in and recognize Syria’s nominal independence under loose British supervision. Now this is something that even Faisal’s allies probably would have accepted. They wanted total independence, they would have preferred that, but most indications we have today are that most of them would have settled for partial independence under the British. They at least had a good working relationship with the British, especially with the British military officers who were in-country. So for the average person on the ground, British, Jewish, Arab, the average person holding a rifle on watch or patrolling a road, it’s just hard to know what’s going on, who to trust. As you come upon somebody on the road, it’s hard to know whose side this person is on. Once the border between British Palestine and French Syria is finally settled, the Zionists have a Russian-Jewish military veteran named Joseph Trumpledore head on up there to take control of the settlements and reinforce the frontier defenses.

Trumpledore was a dentist by training, but he had more than a little experience with this kind of thing, so he gathers up some men and some supplies and he rides up to Galilee. Trumpledore is from the Caucasus region of Russia, down toward Chechnya, Dagestan, that whole region of southern Russia. If you know anything at all about that area, the people there are just hard as nails. They just make a different kind of white people down there. They might have the single highest concentration of stone-cold badasses of any place on the planet, honestly. Apparently they make their Jews pretty tough too, because Trumpledore was just as hard as they come. The guy was an animal. How do I even describe this guy? Trumpledore had been an officer in the Russian army before coming to Palestine. The army of the late Russian Empire was notorious for suffering from terrible morale because it consisted mostly of conscripted peasants who weren’t happy about being pulled off their farms and sent to fight for the Tsar. But when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in the first years of the 20th century, Joseph Trumpledore didn’t need to be conscripted. He didn’t need to be ordered or asked to do anything. He marched right in and volunteered for the front-line shock troops. He wanted to fight. He grew up just like a lot of Jews, not just in anti-Semitic southern Russia, but Jews had to deal with this all over Europe and in the United States as well, anywhere they were. He grew up listening to these stereotypes about Jews being these brittle little urban weaklings and unreliable cowards.

Basically, he just wanted to tell everybody exactly where they could stick that stereotype and what they could do with it. That’s what a huge part of Trumpledore’s life was about. A lot of what his character was about. That’s just who this guy was. During the Japanese siege of Port Arthur, during that same war, Trumpledore took a piece of shrapnel, lost his left arm. After a brief period of recovery, he goes in and tells his commanders he’s ready to be put back on the battle line. He’s not asking to remain in service. He wants to fight.

He doesn’t have a left arm, so initially he’s refused. They tell him to go home. They gave him a medal and, you know, thanks for your service, but go on home. If you’re going to be stubborn about it, at least take an admin position or a rear echelon role. We’ll put you in a training position or something. But his reply is famous. He’s supposed to have said, I still have another arm to give the motherland. That could be a total legend, but nobody challenges it, really, because honestly, it wouldn’t surprise anybody if it was true right down to the letter because it fits everything else we know about this guy.

You know, sometimes you hear a line like that coming out of somebody’s mouth in history and you’re kind of like, well, maybe, maybe not. Nobody would be surprised if that was exactly what he said, maybe with a few expletives thrown in there. It’s just who this guy was, okay? You can’t waste a guy like that. The Russian officers were at least smart enough to know that. And so with only one arm, they hand him a rifle and put him back out on the line. When Port Arthur finally falls to the Japanese, Trumpledore becomes a Japanese prisoner of war. Now, this isn’t like being a Japanese prisoner of war in the 30s or 40s, but it’s still not at the top of anyone’s list of desirable vacation destinations, okay?

I don’t know how you would handle Japanese captivity. I have doubts about how well I would fare, but you and I probably aren’t Joseph Trumpledore. While he was a prisoner, he goes around and seeks out and begins organizing other Jewish POWs. He finds about 500 of them. He creates an underground newspaper, starts circulating it around, and it talks about Zionist news and activities. He organizes classes for these Jewish groups on the geography of Palestine and starts preparing them for the possibility of moving into Palestine. He organizes other classes on Jewish history and literature. This is all while he’s still in Japanese captivity, okay, with only one arm. By the time the war ends, Joseph Trumpledore is the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russian history. He’s the first Jew to ever receive an officer’s commission in the Russian army. So he more than fulfilled that initial goal he had when he enlisted, and most anti-Semitic Russian military officers can’t say anything to him. They admired him. They treated him as an equal. So after the war, Trumpledore realizes that he’s not going to make much of a dentist with one arm. So he studies law for a while. That’s not really his speed.

Finally, he gathers up a group of Zionists and leaves for Palestine in 1911. And when he gets there, a few years later, the First World War erupts. No, no, no. Do you think his glory days were over just because he was the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russian history? Please. No, no. He’s just getting started. So the First World War erupts, and the Ottoman Empire is not feeling particularly charitable toward Russian nationals in their territory, especially decorated Russian military veterans.

So Trumpledore’s got to get out of there. He flees to Egypt. He sets up a unit called the Zion Mule Corps to fight for the British army. Now, the Zion Mule Corps is considered to be the first all-Jewish military force since the Roman exile almost 2,000 years ago. It was under the overall command of a British army officer, but this is Trumpledore’s unit. The unit took part in the Gallipoli campaign against the Ottoman Empire, that infamous Allied disaster. And when they arrived to the battle, it was just bananas. They’re forced to land under heavy artillery and small arms fire.

A guy like Trumpledore, I guess, doesn’t even bother interrupting his nap until the shells are a few yards away, because at Gallipoli we see the same guy that we saw in the Russo-Japanese War. He’s shot through the shoulder during the fighting, but I don’t know, apparently anything less than losing a limb is beneath his notice, because he refuses to leave the battlefield, even under direct orders. His commander was just blown away, the British commander who was overall in charge of the unit. Later on he wrote, quote, So this is… I should just stop the podcast and make a five-hour podcast about Joseph Trumpledore, but I won’t. Maybe later. So he’s more than up to the task of going up to the north of Palestine and organizing the defense of a few frontier settlements against sporadic Bedouin raiders. This is small potatoes for him.

Well, on March 1st, 1920, that’s going to be put to the test. A band of Arab militia approach the frontier settlement of Tell Hai. They’re demanding to search the premises for French soldiers. As soon as they demand entry, a Zionist guard fires a shot into the air to alert Trumpledore, who’s at a nearby settlement, telling him to bring reinforcements as quickly as possible. Trumpledore mounts up with several militia and rides to the scene. They try to deny the Arabs entry, but the Arabs outnumber them. So an Arab search party forces its way in. Now as they conducted their search, there’s some confusion and controversy over what happened next. One version is that a Jewish guard accidentally fired his weapon. Another is that a Jewish woman who was in a house, she didn’t know that any of this was going on and she was startled when she sees an armed Arab enter her home. So she grabs a gun and shoots at him. Whichever version is correct, the result’s the same. Everybody starts shooting. The Arab search party, believing that they’d come under attack, they’re running through the streets until they’re finally able to barricade themselves off in one section of the village. The leader of the Arab search party starts talking to all his people and he realizes that this has just been some kind of a mistake. So he calls out that there’s been a misunderstanding and he asks the Jews for a ceasefire.

The Zionists agreed, and as the Arabs are retreating out of the village, they’re making their way to the gates. One of the Jewish gunmen apparently hadn’t received word that there was a ceasefire. At least, that’s how the story goes, and so he begins shooting at the Arabs again. They return fire and they flee the town, eventually making it out to rejoin the main force. Well, now they think that they’ve been tricked and ambushed after an agreed-upon ceasefire, so they’re furious. They get together with the main force and they prepare a counterattack. They also think that maybe the reason that they got shot at twice is because this settlement actually is hiding something. So they launch an attack.

They assaulted the walls of the compound as the Zionists fight back from defensive positions and sniper nests. When finally the smoke clears and the Arabs pull back, they’re dead on both sides, although the numbers depend on who you read. The most common number is that 8 Jews and 5 Arabs were killed, with more wounded on both sides. But Israeli historian Benny Morris reports in his book Righteous Victims that 6 Jews and, quote, dozens of Arabs died and more were wounded. So you can take that for what it’s worth. Let’s just say at least a half a dozen on each side died and a few dozen were wounded. As the Arabs are regrouping and deciding how to proceed, the Zionists look at their position and they realize that it’s untenable, so they back out and abandon the outpost. As you can imagine, every single detail of this incident is controversial and emotionally charged.

In fact, I should probably just put a disclaimer at the beginning of this episode to say that this is the case for every single part of this entire story. But I would still say it here, because it’s important. This is a watershed moment in the relationship between the two groups. This is an important point where something changes for good. Zionist historiography insists that the supposed search party was only using that excuse to harass and rob the Jewish settlement. The Arab versions often say that the shots fired by the Zionists after the ceasefire were an attack, not a mistake. Why it all started and how it proceeded is murky. No one really knows exactly what happens, but in this part of the world, back then just as it is now, there seems to be like a force field around it that repels any kind of ambivalence or any gray areas at all.

Everything is black and white. So it wasn’t a week before the Battle of Tel Hai was being mythologized by both sides. Among the Jewish dead was the old warrior Joseph Trumpledore, shot in the hand and the belly. He had been evacuated with the rest and he wouldn’t die until later on that night. And as he was bleeding out, someone is supposed to have told him that his wound was likely fatal. There are a few versions of his reply, but the most common is, never mind, it is good to die for our country. Those words would stay on the lips of Zionists for decades. It would become a slogan almost.

Trumpledore was a hero, the first Jewish martyr in their fight for Palestine. And this was the first major engagement between the Arabs and the Zionists. So it sent shockwaves through both communities. Up until this point, many Zionists had been in a state of denial almost about the natural antagonism between their goals and the political rights of the Arabs. There were things they just did not want to face. There had been Zionist leaders who were trying to tell their fellow Jews that there was a conflict approaching, that the creation of the Jewish homeland was not compatible with the Arabs’ hopes for political independence, but a lot of people just didn’t want to hear that. The American Commission had said the same thing in its report, but that report was squashed. So up until this point, Arab opposition to Zionism, while it was ubiquitous and strongly felt, and everyone knew that, it wasn’t felt by most Zionists to be an imminent threat, requiring immediate direct action.

I mean, only a few months before this fight, some Arab militias were approaching these same Jewish settlements to offer them an alliance against the French. Remember, Chaim Weizmann had sold Zionism to Faisal in the first place by telling him that the Jews were hoping to work with their Arab neighbors to build up this independent country, so some of the Arabs tried to tell the Jews that maybe they both had a common enemy in the French. The French weren’t going to be any more interested in the Balfour Declaration than they were in Arab independence, so if you guys really want to help build a country with us, start right now, help us stand up to the French. Well, of course the Zionists wanted no part of that. The Arabs were out on their own, but the Jews knew that they were safe under the protection of the British. So there wasn’t this clear idea, among all of the Arabs at least, that the Jews were the enemy up until this point. So any ambiguity in their relationship evaporates after Tel Hai. This first battle, and it was really a gunfight between a couple of gangs, but we’ll call it by its mythological name, the Battle of Tel Hai, it’s really a microcosm of the entire history that follows right up to the present day.

I’m talking about the way the incident was understood and the way it was treated by each side after the actual event was over. After the battle, both sides go their separate ways, and their separate versions of what happened go with them. The Zionists brought back stories about how they were minding their own business after declaring neutrality regarding the dispute between the Arabs and the French, and then along comes this group of armed Bedouin and Shiite militia demanding to invade our homes, supposedly to search for French soldiers. And they forced their way in, barging into houses and shouting, and naturally they frightened someone into firing the shot which started the firefight. After we gave them a fair chance to retreat, they took advantage of an honest mistake by one of our defenders to regroup and attack our settlement and do what they wanted to do all along. Well, if I was a Zionist in Jerusalem and I wasn’t there, and I heard that story from ten different people, I’d be pretty upset. But while the story of Joseph Trumpledore’s heroic sacrifice in defense of the plucky pioneers of Tel Hai was spreading among the Jews, another version of the story was making its way through Arab villages and towns. They were saying that the Zionists, saying that they’re for an independent Palestine, refused to help us defend it from French domination.

When our fighters were searching one of their settlements for French soldiers, the Zionists fired upon them. When our warriors realized that the fight had been the result of a mistake, they called for a truce and asked to leave. The Zionists agreed, but once our men were out in the open again and defenseless, the Jews opened fire, and our men barely made it out before rejoining their comrades to mount a counterattack. Now here’s the thing. A participant in the fight on either side can probably tell their version of the story and not be lying at all. That’s probably exactly how it looked from their perspective. This was the final straw for Faisal’s allies in the Levant. They maintained their loyalty to him, but it was time to force the issue.

So they convened the Syrian General Congress once more and officially proclaimed the independent Arab kingdom of Syria, naming Faisal as their king. Now I’m not sure how exactly they were expecting the French to react to it, but if they were hoping the French might just pack up their gear and head home, they were going to be disappointed. Without yet declaring war, the French army ordered the new government of Syria to stand down, disband its troops, and submit to French rule. We’re not asking. Now Faisal was reluctant to enter into any kind of a conflict with the French. He knew how this would turn out, but he was being carried along by events at this point. You know, before and during the war, Faisal is described by everyone as sharp and energetic and as this inspirational leader. When you see old film of him, he has very quick, nervous movements, almost like bird-like movements.

But in every picture I’ve seen of Faisal, and I could be projecting all of this, of course, he almost looks like a tragic figure. You know, there’s this sadness in his eyes, and through all the various histories, you read about a guy who just seems to know the position that his people are in. He knows they can’t stand up to the French, but he also knows that his people are not going to let him back down. They’re not going to let him compromise anymore. They’re not going to accept any more compromises, and it’s hard to blame them. They’re saying, look, look, you’re our leader, okay? It was your family that made the deal to drive out the Ottoman Empire so that you could have your kingdom. Well, okay, great, we fought for you, we’re your people, you’ve got your kingdom, and we’ve got your back, but do something.

So once the kingdom is officially proclaimed, people are excited about it. I mean, there’s energy all through Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine right around this time. They’re out in the streets, not just with enthusiasm, but in defiance as well. Rallies and parades are being held from Aleppo all the way down to Gaza, and the whole region of Greater Syria, which is now called the Arab Kingdom of Syria. The Arab Kingdom of Syria exists now, and Faisal is the king of it. That’s how international politics works. You declare something like this, you have it, it exists, unless somebody can take it from you. Well, the Arab Kingdom of Syria exists, and people are excited. Now, Palestine is the southern province of this kingdom. This was something that the vast, vast, vast majority of Palestinian Arabs were totally in favor of. This is what they wanted. So they’re out in the streets, proclaiming their loyalty to their new king, Faisal, and also showing their excitement at being a part of this thing. You know, this is the first independent Arab state in centuries. This is the first independent Arab nation state ever. It’s an exciting thing. People are out showing that excitement, but the whole month of March is also marked by increasing tensions.

You thought it was bad before, it’s getting real bad now. Even sporadic violence is starting to happen. And as March turns over into April, it’s starting to spiral. Everybody can feel it. Countrywide demonstrations are scheduled for Easter Sunday, April 4th. This is also the traditional day for the Muslim festival of Nebi Musa. Every year for Nebi Musa, a parade would take place. And this year, the religious celebration is going to double as a political rally.

Which it always did to a certain extent. This was kind of wrapped up in Nebi Musa. This kind of thing isn’t uncommon in the Arab world even today. These things are very often tied together. You’ll often see public rituals like funerals and weddings and holiday festivals and so forth turn into sectarian or political demonstrations. The Nebi Musa festival was kind of born out of that tendency. It always had a political element to it. Christians would be pouring into the city of Jerusalem for Easter from all over the place.

And so Muslims from around the region would pour in to kind of match their numbers and make a show of force. It almost always went off without incident, but there’s always this tension in the atmosphere for Nebi Musa. Israeli author Tom Segev describes what it was like. He says, quote, They came in from all over the country as well as from neighboring countries. Tribe after tribe, caravan after caravan, with their flags and weapons as if they were going to war. End quote. So there was always this political element to it. It was always, you know, you could cut the tension with a knife at Nebi Musa, but now the dynamic had totally changed.

There had never been anything like this before. See, instead of Arab Muslims and Arab Christians pouring into the city in opposition to one another, now you had both Muslims and Christians united in their opposition to Zionism. So Zionist leaders are concerned. They’re terrified, actually. They’re imploring the British to ban the public gatherings altogether, using force if necessary. But the British know better than that. They probably understand that this will just make the situation infinitely worse, so they refuse. They’re still going around the country trying to convince the Arabs that they have nothing to worry about, that they shouldn’t feel threatened.

They start using the army to ban their traditional holiday festivals. How’s that going to look? The British are usually way more savvy than that. Unfortunately, they go all the way in the other direction. In the end, the British deploy 188 troops to keep order in Jerusalem. To put that in perspective, the Ottoman Empire would usually deploy thousands. They would keep artillery pieces trained on the route of the procession during the annual Nebi Musa parade. When the day arrived, there were up to 70,000 Arabs, by some counts, crammed into Jerusalem.

An article in the Times of London from 1920 describes what it was like. Quote, It must be admitted that trouble has been brewing for some time. The religious festivals seem to have brought matters to a head. The Muslims have shown no hostility to the Christians. When Christian and Muslim processions on April 2nd almost met, not a word of hostility was uttered. A number of Muslims came into Jerusalem from Hebron on April 4th when the procession was approaching the Jaffa Gate. The cry went up from outside the gate, The Jews are attacking us! It is not known whether there was any foundation for the cry, but it started the trouble.

The Jews seem to have been prepared for they were armed with knives. End quote. And so a riot breaks out. Mobs of young Arabs attack Jewish shops and homes and they’re fighting with Jewish gangs in the streets. Many of them head over to the Jewish parts of town and they’re breaking into homes and now attacking Jewish civilians. Lacking the manpower to break this thing up, British troops instead just focus on trying to contain it. Trying to block off certain areas of town, prevent movement and isolate people, just prevent anybody new from joining it. Well that sounds great in theory, right?

You don’t want armed Jewish gangs going in and joining a riot in progress, but the Zionists later complained that the only effect that this had was to prevent Jewish defense forces from going in and driving out the rioters, which the British just did not have the manpower to do. And so Jews in the old city found themselves shut into this area with a rampaging mob. The British weren’t letting people move around the city, so these people couldn’t get out and Jewish defense units weren’t allowed to go in to try to help them out. When finally the British gather enough soldiers to impose martial law, five Jews are dead, 200 are wounded, 18 critically wounded. Now to make matters worse, many Jewish men had formed themselves up into these defense units to go do battle with the rioters, right? So many women and children were left alone throughout the entire event. Because see, the British largely prevented any of these Jewish militias from actually joining or affecting the fighting at all. They identified them and bottled them up pretty quickly.

So the women and children were mostly defenseless and they suffered the brunt of the violence. Many of those 200 wounded were women and children. Many of those wounds were from sexual violence. They were raped all over the place. There was one report of a 15-year-old Jewish girl being gang raped along with her sister. This wasn’t uncommon. It was a nightmare. On the Arab side there were four dead, another two dozen critically wounded at least, mostly by British soldiers and Jewish militias who had managed to get into the fighting.

Now I don’t know about you, but whenever I think about these long-term enduring historical tragedies, like the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, it’s something my mind does. It’s always hard for me not to look back and wonder if it had to be that way. If there were conflicting interests and a collision course here that really probably couldn’t have been avoided. Or if it could have gone differently. And if it could have, if there ever was a chance, then where were those invisible Rubicons that got crossed? Those points of no return? Those moments of sadism or poor judgment when something was broken and now it couldn’t be put back. And now the system of violence sort of takes on a life of its own, has its own energy, its own momentum, and nobody even has to remember how the whole thing started anymore.

Now it’s just got its own energy of reciprocal grievances that doesn’t even require recourse from outside the system. I think it’s likely that the Nebi Musa riot of 1920 was that kind of an event. If peace had ever been an option, and it may not have been by the way, you had very important Zionists, guys who would go on to become the leaders of the movement in the next few decades. You had these leaders up to this point, before this point, telling their fellow Jews that they were the conquerors here. And that this was a situation where you had a conqueror and the people and land they intended to conquer. So I don’t know how you make peace out of that. But if there ever was a chance that some of the other people, some of the more moderate Zionists, might have won through and guided this process back onto the tracks, that possibility probably died in early April 1920. After the riots, the British have made this cake and it didn’t take long for them to start to eat it.

They’re going to get a little taste of what their life’s going to be like in Palestine for the next few decades. If they thought they were going to make friends here with anybody, they’re about to find out how wrong they were. Neither side is happy with the British. In fact, both sides are lobbing accusations against them. The Arabs are angry that the British seem to already be breaking every promise they ever made. And to the Jews, well, I mean, imagine, to them this just looks like an old-fashioned pogrom. At least that’s how many of them are going to characterize it. A few of them know the difference between a pogrom and a riot.

Maybe there’s a little bit of cynicism involved with characterizing it this way. But in their defense, there was some evidence that at least a few people in the community had foreknowledge of what was going to happen or had an idea that something might happen. There was even some evidence that maybe the local authorities or some elements of the local authorities either looked the other way or maybe failed to adequately prepare for it. But some people would go much further than that. Chaim Weizmann and several other Zionist leaders, they just straight up accused the British Army leadership of allowing the attack to go forward. And then once it started, of failing to contain it as quickly as possible just to make a point. And we’ll get into that point here in just a moment. But, well, to give you an idea of how the relationship between the British and the Zionists is starting to develop, I’ll give you one example.

After Nebi Musa, the head of the Zionist commission, Menachem Usishkin, we heard from him a moment ago. He had the run-in with that mayor of Jerusalem. He was involved in another confrontation. It really shows you the budding resentment and distrust on the part of the Zionists toward the British military leadership. Usishkin had been visited by the British military governor in Jerusalem. This is the guy that is in charge of keeping peace in the city. His name is Colonel Ronald Storrs. And so Storrs had come to express his condolences to the Zionist leader.

And he tells them when he gets there, he says, I’ve come to express my grief over the catastrophe that befell us. And Usishkin kind of gives him this sarcastic, confused look as if he’s not really sure what Colonel Storrs is talking about. He says, which catastrophe? And Storrs is a little bit puzzled by this. He says, well, I’m referring to the saddening events which took place here the last few days. And then Usishkin lights up with recognition. He says, oh, His Excellency is referring to the pogrom. And now again, remember, a pogrom implies that this was sanctioned or even abetted by and aided by the authorities.

In this case, the British, which means Storrs himself, because he was in charge of keeping peace in the city. So he’s outraged. Storrs is just shocked that he would say this. Storrs says, this was not a pogrom. It’s impossible to call these riots a pogrom. And Usishkin, on some level, you’ve got to love this guy. He’s very bold, if nothing else. He’s saying this to the British military governor in Jerusalem, remember.

He says, quote, You, Colonel, are an expert in administrative matters. I am an expert in pogroms, and I can assure you that there is no difference between the Jerusalem pogrom and the Kishinev pogrom. The organizers of the local pogrom didn’t show any originality. They followed step by step the ways of the perpetrators of the Russian pogrom. Tsar Nicholas also did not interfere with the pogrom. He has also oppressed us. Yet, perhaps Your Excellency is aware of what has befallen him? In his place sits Trotsky.

All our enemies in the world and in the land of Israel will also meet such an end, end quote. So you’ve got to give him credit for being bold, if you give him nothing else. You cannot take that away from Usishkin. He’s telling a British military commander, well, really, the military commander in Jerusalem, that the British maybe ought to take note of what happened to Tsar Nicholas II in the Russian Empire after that regime failed to protect its Jewish population. And just to remind everyone, Tsar Nicholas was executed in a dirty cellar with his whole family down to the little children by a couple Jewish communists. So, Usishkin’s got a mouth on him, and we shouldn’t take his words as being representative of the whole Zionist position. But he is the highest-ranking Zionist in Palestine at this time, so it should give you an idea of how quickly and dramatically the relationship between his people and the British military has started to deteriorate. And while it would be a stretch to say that the feeling was mutual from the British side, the patience of the British military for the Zionist antics was starting to wear thin already.

You know, they saw the Nebimusa riots and the behavior of the Zionists in general very, very differently. Very differently from the politicians back in London, even. You know, this is to put it coarsely, but really they saw the situation through soldiers’ eyes, the way you might expect a soldier to see it. What they saw were Zionists moving into Palestine, agitating the Arabs, pushing them off their land, making a big show of their intention to take over the country. And why? Because they’re going to come invade? Because they’re going to fight for it? No.

They’re doing it because they think that their groveling, bought-off politicians back in London are going to make the British army do their work for them. They think they can agitate the Arabs all they want because the British politicians are going to make the British army protect them. Well, this drove the British army crazy, right? They had just spent two years relying on the Arabs, fighting alongside them, watching them risk their lives for their independence. Meanwhile, many of the Zionist leaders had spent most of the war supporting the Germans and the Ottoman Empire. And now that the war was over, they’re just switching teams and streaming into Palestine, demanding that the British army do their dirty work for them? The Arabs had fought for their independence. The Zionists had bought it at cocktail parties with the British politicians.

That’s the way that a lot of the army leadership felt about it, and it pissed them off. After the riot, the British government sent a commission to investigate the causes of what happened. Its findings were far more ambivalent, I guess we could say, than the Zionists expected. The commission reported that the immediate cause of the disruption was, of course, the violent actions encouraged and engaged in by groups of Arabs at the festival. But it didn’t stop at immediate causes. In fact, most of the report isn’t taken up with those immediate causes. It also had a lot to say about the Zionists and about their behavior leading up to the incident. The report said that the immediate cause had, again, been the violent actions of these Arab gangs, but that, quote, and the official Zionists, by their impatience, indiscretion, and their attempts to force the hands of the administration, are largely responsible for the present crisis, end quote.

Now, this is a huge accusation, and it drove the Zionists berserk, as you can imagine. But see, it’s exactly what the military leadership had been going on about, what had been making them so angry. See, they believed that the Jews were being deliberately provocative, that they were being belligerent on purpose, thinking that if the Arabs could be incited to violence, that the British army, whatever they might have thought about what the Zionists were doing, at that point they would have no choice but to choose sides and crack down on the Arabs. The political leadership would make them do it. That was the Zionist calculation. Well, the army had called their bluff. The Zionists had been parading through the streets and performing military drills in Jerusalem and giving speeches about what they intended to do, but when the Arabs inevitably reacted to that, the British military was nowhere to be found. Not only was it not around to save the Zionists, they actually blocked and arrested armed Jewish militias who did try to save the Zionists.

Now, of course, the military leadership explained this as a simple tactical miscalculation, nothing on purpose, but the Zionists did not buy that at all. In fact, the commission didn’t really buy that either, at least not fully. They had plenty of criticism for the military’s actions, beyond just, you know, mistakes were made. Now, the British commission, though, it was experiencing this same cognitive dissonance that the American commission had the previous year. Before they arrived in Palestine, they expected to find something completely different from what they did find. You know, as far as they had been told by British Zionists like Chaim Wiseman, the Zionists were just looking to be good neighbors. They were looking for a place to live, a society to participate in, nothing more. But when they interviewed actual Zionists living in Palestine, that’s not what they found.

What they found was a lot of people who didn’t like Arabs and weren’t shy about telling anybody who wanted to listen, and also who weren’t shy about telling anyone who wanted to listen that they didn’t plan on being anyone’s friendly neighbor. Now, this is not what the commission expected to find. It’s not what they had been told. And they knew that it’s not what the wider British government thought it was getting itself into or thought it was supporting. So it generates a report to detail its findings and deliver them to the cabinet. But before it can make its way up there, the report is squashed. It never sees the light of day. Just as the American report had been suppressed a year earlier, this British report on the Nebi Musa riots is marked secret, put on the shelf, and never released to the wider British government.

This is the second time in a very short period of time after the First World War that a major commission has investigated this situation, been shocked by what they found, and for one reason or another fails to get that information to the British government in a way that might actually affect their policy and allow the British government to make an informed decision about what it’s doing. This is a pattern that’s going to repeat itself one way or another for the next two decades. Military and civilian administrators on the ground in Palestine are going to try again and again and again to alert the British government that things are not going as planned and that whatever information the British government has, the orders they’re passing down don’t make any sense, that they’re making things worse. But for the next two decades, the Zionists and their allies in the British government are going to continue to place themselves in those critical nodes in the information flow that allow them to curate and filter the information before it reaches the British political leadership in order to create a narrative that suits their goals, that downplays the resistance and makes it seem as if the British government is maybe not getting itself into something as troublesome as they really are. As a result, the British government is going to continue to just march forward blindly in pursuit of this contradictory policy, never really understanding until it’s too late that the goals of the Zionists and the rights of the Arabs cannot coexist when the goal of the Zionists is to eliminate the Arabs’ political rights altogether. But as much as the Nebimusa riots were an outrage and a tragedy for the Jews in Palestine, Zionist leaders also knew that it was an opportunity. This was their moment. The French had been waiting for an excuse to just take the gloves off and really knuckle down on Faisal and the Syrians, and so the Zionists make sure that they have one.

They spread word around Europe that innocent Jews are suffering pogroms in Jerusalem of all places, and this gives the French the international political cover that they need. Even the people who are sympathetic to the Arabs are having trouble getting a word in now. As stories about Nebimusa spread, the French were able to steer the narrative away from imperialism and towards the idea that they’re going to protect the Jews from persecution. And so the French cobbled together a League of Nations conference to make its mandate for Syria official. It hadn’t actually been put down on paper yet. Now it has been. And this gave France a free hand to declare war, because now Syria was in violation of a League of Nations mandate, and so France could say that it was merely enforcing the will of the international community. And so in the summer of 1920, France moves in force against Faisal.

Well, Faisal wants nothing to do with this. Probably at the urging of the British, he surrenders without a fight and orders his men to do the same. You really got to remember, we talked about this at the beginning when Wiseman met with Faisal. Faisal’s not even from the Levant. He’s not from the area. And his family still controls a kingdom that spans the whole western portion of the Arabian Peninsula and includes the two Muslim holy cities. So he and his Hashemite followers, whatever happens to Syria, they have a perfectly good home to go back to, in other words. For Faisal, Syrian nationalism had always been about personal and family ambition.

Most of the disillusioned Syrians who had rallied to Faisal’s banner just went back to their homes. What else were they going to do? Faisal’s Hashemite forces were by far the most capable and well-equipped Arab military force. They were the only ones who even might have dreamed about standing up to the French, and they were sitting in the capital preparing to surrender. A few of them took to the hills to try to carry on an insurgency. That went nowhere. One man did do his best to mount a symbolic defense. His name was Yusuf al-Azmah, and he had been Faisal’s own minister of war, actually.

He threw together a ragtag group of poorly-equipped civilian militia with a few veterans to try to get between the French and Damascus, but there’s no surprise ending here. He had about 3,000 Arab light infantry, and they were crushed by a French army that was about 9,000 strong, and it had cavalry, artillery, and aircraft support. It wasn’t a fight. It was a slaughter. But this is what’s called the Battle of Maysalan. It’s the only battle of the Franco-Syrian War, and it wasn’t much of a battle in a war that wasn’t much of a war. Yusuf al-Azmah had been a former Ottoman general, so he knew the score. He knew what he was getting himself into.

He harbored no illusions about what he was walking into. He knew that his chances of victory were subzero, but he decided to make a stand knowing what would happen so that no one would ever be able to say that the Syrians had welcomed the French into their country, because there were already people trying to push that narrative. But as far as he was concerned, no one was ever going to be able to say that the French had been welcomed in. If the French were going to take over, they were going to have to kill some Syrians to do it. Faisal might have rolled over, but al-Azmah made a stand so that the French would be forced to show their hand as conquerors. Al-Azmah himself was killed in the battle. He made the sacrifice himself, but to be honest, he probably didn’t have to. The French were not shy about looking like conquerors in 1920.

Just to give you one example, the commanding general of the French forces cleared up any lingering doubts future historians might have had as his army entered the city of Damascus. As his army moves in, he makes a detour to stop at the Grand Mosque. He enters the tomb of the great 12th century Muslim general Saladin. Now, Saladin is the ruler and commander who had finally driven the crusaders from the region eight centuries ago. He’s one of the most revered figures in the Muslim world to this day. I mean, he’s one of the greatest figures in history, period. And so as Faisal and his Hashemites are waiting around to welcome their new French masters, this victorious general first makes sure he has an audience, and then he walks up to Saladin’s tomb and kicks it. He calls out, quote, Awake Saladin!

We have returned! My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent, end quote. So you can’t get much clearer than that. The destruction of the short-lived Arab kingdom of Syria by the French threw any hopes for Arab national independence in the Levant into a blender. Up until this point, Arab nationalism in the region had been focused on this larger Syrian kingdom, and all their efforts had been dedicated to rallying support for a national identity on that basis. Palestinian Arab leaders had been selling their people on this idea of committing their loyalty to that larger state. That idea had just been strangled in the crib, and there was no recovery, and there’s nothing left to even fight back against, since Faisal had just given up and left. So the Arabs in Palestine who were still interested in building a national state, they were starting all over again from scratch.

With Syria out of the picture, Palestine is now isolated under the British mandate, and this is the point where the focus shifts to emphasize a specifically Palestinian national identity. From here on out, we’re done talking about Syria. The Palestinian Arab leaders now realize that they’re on their own, and they know that a bunch of divided tribes will never be able to stand up to the British or the Zionists who are now flooding into their country. Only a nation can do that. Their future will hinge on whether they can make that leap that we mentioned at the beginning, and awaken a unified national Palestinian identity before it’s too late. But they’ve got an uphill battle. When the French and British had carved up the Middle East, they broke up all the national projects that the Arabs had been pouring their efforts into. Convincing the tribal leaders to give up their autonomy, to subordinate their traditional tribal identities to this national project, that had been a huge step.

It had taken a huge leap of faith from all the people involved. And yet these people who were traumatized by war and oppression, disease and starvation, they’d allowed themselves to get excited about it, to get excited about this nation. During the war, Syrian nationalists had been tortured and executed by Jamal Pasha. They’d been killed in battle fighting for this independent country. And then right at the moment when they thought they’d achieved their goal, they’d been sold out by their allies, and by the very leader in whom they had placed their faith. So the Arabs now are playing catch up. They’re starting from scratch with a disillusioned people who have already been fooled once. And two other factors are making the nationalist job even more complicated.

First the literacy rate of Palestinian Arabs is maybe 10% in 1920. And a majority of the population is spread out over the countryside in farms and villages. Those may not seem like such a big deal, but if you’re a nationalist, these are huge obstacles for you to overcome. See generally speaking, nationalism, it’s historically been a phenomenon that arises in literate urban societies. The tools of the nationalist are the pamphlet and the flyer, the protest placard, the soil that a nationalist grows in is a dense urban population where ideas spread very quickly from person to person. The fluid and unstable masses that you find in cities, these people are unburdened usually by old loyalties to blood and place. And it’s usually a pretty simple thing for a skilled operator to get a young man with no family living in a modern city to adopt an identity that might include some strangers he’s never met. It’s pretty easy actually.

Let’s think about who this man is, what his life is like. Most likely he’s a wage laborer of one kind or another. He spends the majority of his time and energy working for someone else, exchanging his hours for a paycheck. He’s probably got a one year lease on his apartment maybe, and it probably means nothing to him to move to another city or even to another part of the country. His current crop of friends he probably met sometime in the last few years, and his old friends and his parents and his extended family, he sees them once or twice a year maybe on holidays. He has no inherited traditions, in fact the cosmopolitan city dweller usually develops a sort of contempt for inherited traditions, for anything old fashioned. The age of the urban bourgeois and the industrial city, that was also the age of ideology, that’s not some historical coincidence. The uprooted masses that unsteadily cohere in our great cities, they’re a feeding frenzy for anybody with a bit of charisma, with a bolt on identity to sell.

But now think of the people out in the country. It’s a much tougher sell out in the provinces. To begin with, the man out there is probably farming or grazing on a piece of land that has taken his family generations to build up. There are memories attached to the stones and trees, and he probably lives geographically very near a large extended family whom he wouldn’t even consider leaving. His large family is nested in a larger clan, and then a larger tribal structure on top of that, and there’s a long history of alliances and feuds and victories and defeats and betrayals with all the other groups. His tribe will have traditions that have been passed down faithfully from his grandfather’s grandfather, probably taught to him next to the same fire in the same house on the same piece of land. This is a much larger issue that, well, I’ll try not to let myself get too sidetracked by it, but I want to explore it for a moment. Earlier in the episode I mentioned the economic difficulties that some of the Mediterranean countries of Europe have had recently, and I talked about how partly this has to do with the various social implications of emphasizing large extended families instead of isolated little nuclear family units.

See, modern industrial capitalism functions best when people can be packed up and transported to wherever the great industrial machine happens to need them at any given time. It’s an obstacle to efficiency if people are too attached to a place. If your whole family going back three generations and stretching out to the second and third cousins all live in a 40 mile radius, and they’ve done so for years, you’re going to be much less likely to just pack up your little nuclear family and move across the country for another job. It’s a much bigger decision than it would be in a place like the United States, for example, where most likely you move to the other side of the country as soon as you left home for college, and you probably only see your grandparents at Christmas time. This plays into why those Mediterranean countries see so much nepotism in both the public and private sectors. If your nephew gets laid off from his job, and it’s no simple thing to move his wife and children away to look for another opportunity, you’re probably going to do whatever you have to do to make sure that he gets something nearby. See modern states and economies are at war with these attachments, these traditions, with any of the emotions that prevent people from becoming the portable little cogs that the machine wants them to be. The perfect worker-consumer in a capitalist state is basically one who’s in a nuclear family with no sentimental attachments to place, no prejudices segmenting his preferences or desires.

In fact, the more homogenous and predictable his preferences are, the easier he is to market to. I mean, can you imagine how annoying it must be to McDonald’s that so many people in India don’t eat beef? All that extra work printing up new signs, creating different product lines, if McDonald’s had its way, every Hindu in the world would convert tomorrow. Modern capitalism, as much as communism, although in a much less obvious and direct way, is a corrosive force. And I don’t even mean that in a bad way. I’m not attaching a value judgment to it necessarily. When I say corrosive, I’m referring to the way that it slowly works to dissolve differences into homogeneity, and the way that it works to create people who have tastes and fashions, but not identities. To many people in the developed urban world today, the simple question, the very simple question, who are you?

Can provoke a lot of anxious sputtering. At best, maybe you’ll get a few quotes from some existentialist philosopher about the fluidity of identity, but if you put that question to the man that I just described from the country, from the province, the peasant farmer, the tribal herder, you better pull up a chair. He knows exactly who he is. He knows exactly where he fits. If anything, he suffers from a surplus of identity. He’s burdened by its heaviness rather than gnawed at by its lack. No traditional agrarian society will ever give us an existentialist philosopher. It just will never happen.

They have no use for them. When the door-to-door identity salesman comes around the province offering a shiny new national consciousness, it’s a much tougher sell. That’s my point. And this is the difficulty that’s being faced by the Palestinian nationalists, and all of the Arab nationalists really, heading into 1921. The British acted more or less as a single will. So did the Zionists. To stand up to them, the Arab leadership would have to find a way to convince the traumatized and disillusioned Palestinian Arabs to come together. But now think about what a national project is asking these people to give up.

A tribe has freedom. The cost of that freedom is having to remain vigilant to protect your own interests. And so asking a tribe to submit to a state essentially means asking them to give up their autonomy in exchange for making their lives more predictable, more stable. It’s kind of like asking an entrepreneur to give that up to take a job in a cubicle and a more predictable, stable salary. It’s not a perfect comparison, but I’m going to go with it. It’s simply not an attractive offer to many people who have a choice. They listen to the offer and they say, okay, let me get this straight. You want me to sign up for a project where other people that I’ve never met can levy taxes on me. They can call up me or my sons to go to war, whether we agree with the war or not. They get to regulate how I use my land and how I buy and sell. They get to tell me where I can travel, where I can live, or anything else that they decide to vote and pass a law on. And best of all, if somebody harms me or my family, I have to go to you and trust that you’re going to make it right. And if I retaliate myself, then I’m a criminal. In exchange for what again? What am I getting out of this? Just so that we can have the resources for grand scale projects and an army and a political system to stand up to great nations?

Couldn’t those things just as easily be turned against me? This is the way a lot of them see it. This is why I quoted Michael Corleone from The Godfather earlier. He said, I don’t trust society to protect us. I’m not leaving our fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they con some people into voting for them. That’s exactly what he’s talking about here. Leaving aside the deep ties of loyalty and identity, forgetting all that for a moment, from a strictly practical standpoint, the tradeoff is just not that interesting to a lot of people who have a choice. And remember that on top of all this, the Palestinian Arabs have stumbling blocks that are unique to their historical moment as well.

Their recent history with states has been with the Ottoman Empire and the European colonialists. So their impression of what states are and how they relate to their people has been formed by recent experiences that were suboptimal, we’ll say. You gotta remember that for most of human history, the state meant something very different than it means to people living in Luxembourg in 2015. A state was basically what you had when a group of warriors established their dominance over a region and then claimed the right to tax that region’s peasantry, a tax farm basically. When two states went to war over a territory, you know, a king might say that he was defending his people, but he meant it in the way that he might have meant that he was defending his cattle or his crops. The idea of people belonging to a nation and that that nation’s will is embodied by the state, that is a very new idea. And the Arabs in 1920-1921 had no experience with it at all. Now the Zionists are in the early stages of their project as well, right?

But there’s a huge difference, okay? Huge difference. See, they’re coming from countries where the idea of state legitimacy is very familiar. They’ve got very recent experience with how this all works. And that is just, you can’t overstate it, it’s hugely important. I’m going to take a more familiar example, for many people listening at least. Think about it like this, when the American colonists came over and declared their national independence from England, they were creating a new national identity from scratch, right? But again, the people doing it, they were children of a culture whose family structures, whose ideas about government and about the relationship between the individual and his family and the larger social body were already well-developed in this direction.

They were deeply ingrained. There’s this great book, it’s called Albion Seed, and it’s about the stages of migration out of Britain into the New World. And it’s fascinating because it gets into all this. It talks about how the local cultures of various regions of the United States were determined to a large degree by which region of the British Isles the major waves of settlers came over from. The eastern seaboard was settled by English Puritans, right? And they came over with firm ideas about education and business and government. And the culture of New England is still influenced by those ideas, even today. But the southern, agrarian, and western ranching cultures of the United States, very different.

They were influenced by the influx of people from the northern borderlands, the Scotsmen and Irish and English borderers, who were much more independent, much more accustomed to relying on their local clans. Back in the British Isles, they lived far, far away from the centers of state power, so they got used to making decisions at the local level. And when state power did come around, you know, it was experienced as more of an unwanted intrusion rather than just a natural fact of life, the way it would have been for somebody in London, say. And so it’s no coincidence that these were the people that formed the bulk of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. They carried the same relationship to the national government, the same loyalty to the local rather than the general. And so all of this transferred over, all these cultural biases and structures transferred over into a people who had more loyalty to their state, wherever they lived, to the local rather than to the overall union. I mentioned earlier the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Well, the Hatfields were an English family from, I think, way up in Yorkshire.

The McCoys were Scots-Irish, and their American incarnations lived all the way down on the KentuckyWest Virginia border. That probably wouldn’t have happened in Boston. You can think of the Zionists kind of like the Massachusetts Puritans, in this sense, at least. They’re starting up a new identity project, but they’re doing it with people who are almost exclusively urban, highly literate, and who are coming at this with recent experience of living under state governments and institutions. So they have a huge head start, and they’re able to act with a unity of will and speak with a common voice that, you know, it’s far from complete at this early stage, and we’ll get into the divisions in a moment, but it’s light years ahead of where the Arabs are at. And after Nebimusa, that common voice of theirs, it is screaming at the British government about the conduct of the military in Palestine. Now the military had its defenders, and the Zionists certainly had their critics in the British government, but they also had powerful allies. David Lloyd George was still the Prime Minister in Britain, and he had been an ardent Zionist supporter for years.

And so the British government responded to Zionist pressure by replacing the military administration in Palestine with a civilian government. To serve as the High Commissioner of this new administration, the British appointed Herbert Samuel, an assimilated British Jew and a long-time committed Zionist. Now the Commanding General of the outgoing military administration thought this was madness. He warned London that this was a dangerous move that would only further confirm to the Arabs that the British were working with the Zionists actively to displace them, and he wasn’t wrong about that. The Arab response to the appointment of a Zionist as the High Commissioner in Palestine was basically what you would expect it to be. I mean, put yourself in their position and imagine how this move looked from their perspective. At every turn, the British seemed to say one thing and then do another. They would speak in soft and reassuring tones to convince the Arabs that they really had their best interests at heart and were still with you, but then they would just drop another surprise on them. And then they would speak to them reassuringly again and then another surprise. Well, the appointment of Samuel as High Commissioner just seemed like another one of these surprises. And Chaim Weizmann did actually brag to an American audience right after this time that he had been personally responsible for Samuel’s appointment, so the Arabs’ paranoia isn’t completely unfounded. You know, it’s that old cliche about, you know, you’re not being paranoid if they really are out to get you. That’s not the last time I’m going to say that about the Arabs. Now Samuel himself, though, is a very interesting guy. He’s one of my favorite characters in this story, actually, and I don’t think he’s probably the most obvious choice for that title if you ask most people. You know, his story isn’t as exciting as the story of many others that we’re going to talk about or that we have talked about, but he’s interesting to me because in him we sort of get a picture of the ambivalence of the whole Zionist movement.

Of a Zionist movement that will force people to make hard choices between their political aspirations and their commitment to certain moral principles, principles that they really do hold. These things are going to come into conflict and in Herbert Samuel we get to see him play this tug of war in one man. Samuel had become taken by Zionism at an early age. Someone once described him by saying, and this is a bit of a paraphrase, but it really encapsulates what he’s all about, they said that he was a guy who was completely average, completely unremarkable, but he caught people off guard because he was not either of those things when it came to Zionism. He was a principled man, but not outspoken about it, and he might have passed his entire career in the British bureaucracy just as a faceless, nameless man without ever making his way into our history books if not for his passionate commitment to Zionism. And again, he caught many people off guard because of this. He didn’t seem like a formidable man. People weren’t looking out for him.

But when it came to Zionism, and apparently only to Zionism, he was as single-minded and committed as anyone. But he wasn’t one of these radical, revolutionary Eastern European or Russian Zionists either. He was very circumspect and disciplined. He always kept the long view in mind. He was thinking a century ahead, not a year ahead. And this will end up putting him at odds, as we’ll see, with the Zionists in Palestine who don’t share his patience. Before the war, Samuel was often the one in the position of trying to push Weizmann to be more assertive, to demand more. But once he got to Palestine, and as he started to become more aware of what would be actually necessary to establish total Jewish control over Palestine, he began to moderate his message.

He understood, as a high-ranking member of the British power structure, that the British government was already beginning to reconsider the Balfour Declaration. After Nebby Moussa, the British military had become more convinced than ever that the Balfour policy was bad for Britain, just bad altogether for Britain, and some people in the British government were beginning to listen to what they had to say. One British military officer had written back to the Foreign Office, for example. He wrote, quote, The antagonism to Zionism of the majority of the population is deeply rooted, and it is fast leading to hatred of the British, and it will result, if the Zionist program is forced upon them, in an outbreak of very serious character, necessitating the employment of a much larger number of troops than is at present located in the country, end quote. The British hadn’t built the greatest empire in the world by being sentimental, and many people were already questioning the wisdom of alienating the Arab world over this minor issue, which is how a lot of people saw Zionism at this time. Most people, in fact. Back in the first episode, I quoted Chaim Weizmann saying that there was no such thing as a British, German, Russian, or American Jew. Only Jews who happened to be living in those countries, right?

Remember that? Well, Herbert Samuel did not agree with that at all. He was committed to Britain. He loved Britain. He was committed to doing his job as a British subject and as a British official. He was committed to looking after Britain’s interests in his capacity as High Commissioner, and this is something that some of his fellow Zionists who did agree with Weizmann’s statement saw as just basically as betraying his own, as treachery. As far as they were concerned, he had no obligation at all to the British Empire. Those are not his people.

We’re your people. But even besides his loyalty to Britain, again, Samuel, he’s very circumspect. He has the long view in mind. He understood that the Zionists needed the British Empire, and so once he arrives in Palestine, he immediately sets to work trying to do some damage control, trying to upgrade their image a little bit. But there are Zionists in Palestine who are going to make this very difficult. When he took office as High Commissioner, what he found were Zionists celebrating that one of their own was finally in charge and we got this now. They were expecting him to just come in and run a rough shot over the Arabs, like it’s the 1860s and you’re the British colonial empire, doing it old school style. A few of the rising Zionist leaders were already starting to call for the Arabs to be forcibly transferred out of Palestine at some point in the future.

Remember the Zionists are about 10-12% of the population right now. They’re already starting to call for this, some of them are. So Samuel would find himself conflicted as High Commissioner. Again, there’s that ambivalence, not only in his loyalties to Britain and to Zionism, but also because he was a man of liberal principles who would find himself under immense pressure to ignore those principles when it came to the Arabs and to Zionism. And again, it’s fascinating because in Samuel we get to see this ambivalence work itself out. Before he arrived, Samuel said in response to those people who were calling for forcible expulsion of the Arabs, he said, quote, any movement of that kind must be absolutely voluntary and conducted without any form of pressure. There will be the most equitable and sympathetic treatment of the Arab populations of that country. If we were to go to Palestine to oppress other people, it would be an unspeakable disgrace.

And later, after he had spent some time in the country, he wrote, quote, some thought that a national home for the Jews must mean subordination, possibly spoliation of the Arabs. I did not share that view. If I had, it would have been impossible for me to accept the office of High Commissioner. All my life, a convinced liberal, for 10 years a minister in a liberal government, steeped in British principles of administration, I was the last man to take a hand in any policy of oppression, end quote. Now just hold on for a minute because I can hear you out there, OK? Don’t be too cynical. All right? I would never tell you how to feel about somebody.

This is entirely up to you. But for me, of all the people in this story, Samuel is actually a guy that I believe when he says that. And I really do. As far as I can tell, he does mean what he says in that quote. Now but at the same time, those words don’t necessarily mean exactly the same thing they might mean to you or me in 2015 either. I do believe that he meant what he said. But today we’re working with completely different assumptions about liberalism, about things like what constitutes oppression. As he said, he was steeped in British principles of administration.

And now he meant that in a fully positive light, in the most progressive way possible in 1920. But in 1920, those principles had what most of us today would consider a dark side, I guess. There’s a technique to administering a colonial government among a foreign people who don’t necessarily want you there. And the British wrote the book on it. And so as the civilian administration under Samuel settles in, they start doing what the British did better than anybody, in history probably. Just getting a feel for the divisions and rivalries, learning everything they can about who’s allied to whom and which tribes don’t like each other, who can be bought and who can’t. You know, who’s nursing old grievances that they can take advantage of. And on the other side, Samuel immediately makes a point of touring Arab villages all over the countryside and going to different towns and speaking to leaders in local groups and listening to their concerns.

You know, he’s trying to change the image, both of the British and the Zionists here. And he’s making some headway, actually. See, Samuel understood the deep underlying truth about a nation being an entity that is united by a common enemy. That’s something that Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism, had said. We’ll get into that more in a moment. But Samuel understood it on some deep level. And the British Empire as a whole understood it on some level. You know, the whole strategy of the British Empire with regard to its colonies was to deprive them of this common enemy.

You know, just don’t give them that. Don’t give them that uniting factor. The strategy is to slide into the spaces between, exploiting divisions to make sure that the only enemies the Arabs saw when they looked around were their traditional enemies. Other Arabs, other tribes. And make sure that they don’t perceive the British as a threat to their little tribe and especially not as a common threat. And if you can get all the little tribes to see the British as a possible ally that they can use to get over on their local traditional enemies, even better. That’s the best thing possible. And the British were brilliant at it.

Well, the two most powerful families in Palestine were the Nashashibi clan and the Hussaini clan. They were both based in Jerusalem. And these two families hated each other’s guts, okay? They had for years. They hated each other. And when they weren’t fighting directly, you know, with violence, they were competing with each other for honor and reputation and influence in the country. Everybody in Palestine, every Arab at least in Palestine, if they weren’t directly beholden to one of these families or enemies with one of these families, they at least had a very strong opinion on the Hussaini-Nashashibi rivalry. Okay?

Everyone did. Well, this just makes things easy for the British. When they get in there and they see the Hussaini-Nashashibi hatred, I mean, they’re just licking their chops. This makes things very simple for them. And they set right to work. So you remember the mayor of Jerusalem earlier, the one that had the confrontation with the head of the Zionist commission, Menachem Usishkin? He was a member of the Hussaini clan. Well, he had also been the mayor when the Nebimusa riots broke out.

And so at the urging of the Zionists, the British pulled him out. They took him out of office and replaced him with a member of the Nashashibi clan, his most hated enemy. I’ll let you use your imagination for how this went over with the Hussainis. See colonial empires, by the way, they used to love this trick. Everywhere you look, it doesn’t matter, not just the British, everybody, they all used it. They love this trick. It’s very simple. You go into a territory, you find whoever is out of power at the time and not happy about it, and then you take them and put them in charge.

Now they won’t have the legitimacy to lead the population because everyone’s going to see them as your stooge. So they kind of become dependent on you to maintain their position. Often after you put them in power, they use the opportunity to start taking revenge for anything that happened to them when they were out of power. And the Nashashibis definitely started trying to do that. This only increases the animosity towards them and makes them even more dependent on your support, which makes them look even more like your stooge, which isolates them even more from the population, which makes them more dependent on you. See how this works? If the twists and turns of British strategy get confusing, don’t worry about it. The whole point was to tie up a society in so many confusing knots that it spends all its energy struggling against itself so that no one ever puts it all together and realizes that they’re being played off each other by a larger threat.

That’s the whole point. The British ran this play again and again all over the world to make sure that different groups in their colonies were directing their hatred at each other rather than coming together and directing it at the British. It works like a charm if you know what you’re doing. And the British sure as hell knew what they were doing. They were the best. They were the best. That’s one way to put it. And second place is not close.

Their intuitive understanding of how power and identity were linked was just light years beyond any of the other colonial empires of the day. It’s light years beyond where American counterinsurgency experts are today and we study the British in our war colleges. Now keeping up with all the moves that the British make in any of their colonies and in this story here, it can get extremely confusing and it would take all day if we started getting into the details so I’m only going to focus on the most important aspects. The two families that we already mentioned, the Husseinis and the Nashashibis, are central to what the British want to do in Palestine. There are other notable families that the British will deal with at times but none of them are as prominent as these two and most of the other moves that the British will make with these other families still has to do with the Husseinis and the Nashashibis in one way or another. So the Husseini clan is outraged at being ousted from the mayorship and replaced by a Nashashibi but Herbert Samuel is very savvy, he doesn’t stop there. Next he installs a Husseini as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. This is the most important Muslim office in Palestine, really the most important religious official in the country.

When that Grand Mufti dies just a few months later, Samuel calls his brother, Haj Amin al-Husseini, out of exile to take his brother’s position as Grand Mufti. Now Haj Amin al-Husseini, he had been in exile ever since he was accused, probably rightly, of helping to rile up the crowd during the Nebi Musa outburst. So now you’ve got the Nashashibis controlling the political side of the house and you’ve got the Husseinis controlling the religious domain and the British are going to encourage these two families to use their respective spheres of influence to hopefully neutralize each other, divide up the Palestinian Arab population and neutralize one another. And the Husseinis and Nashashibis don’t disappoint the British. After being given the mayorship, and partially in exchange for the mayorship really, it was part of the deal, the Nashashibis began to advocate for compromise with the Zionists. And once they do this, the new Grand Mufti, Haj Amin, tries to capitalize on it by taking a hard public stance against Zionism and he tries to portray the Nashashibis as Zionist collaborators. Now the British and the Zionists don’t discourage this perception, in fact they do everything they can to encourage it. For example, when the Husseinis set up a political party in December 1920, the British helped the Nashashibis set up a competing party.

And then the Zionists start pouring money into the Nashashibi party without even attempting to conceal it. They want everyone, in fact, to see where the money’s coming from. And again, this may seem counterintuitive at first, but you have to get into the British colonialist’s head a little bit. The way they saw it, since the Nashashibis controlled the political institutions, the British and Zionists were happy to undermine their credibility by allowing them to look like collaborators. If more people went over to the Husseini side, that was okay. The Husseinis didn’t have any actual institutional power outside of the bully pulpit of the religious institutions. Following this same line of thinking, the British often do some things that, you know, at first glance seem maybe a little counterintuitive from the outside, but you really have to get into their heads and understand how the British are looking at the situation. For example, they encourage Haj Amin to use his position as Grand Mufti to try and stimulate Muslim identity in Palestine.

Why would they do this? See up to this point, joint Muslim-Christian associations, Muslims and Christians working together, had been the most effective organizers of opposition to Zionism. And the British reasoned that if the Muslims could be radicalized, even just a bit, then the Christians might be alienated, and that alliance might be broken apart, and the Christians being isolated would have no choice but to reach out and depend on the British for support. So to this end, the British helped establish the Supreme Muslim Council under the leadership of the Grand Mufti. They diverted tax revenues to this council, helped it set up Sharia courts and set up offices in several villages and towns around Palestine to take charge of, you know, marriages and other Muslim legal matters, things that the British really didn’t think of as that important, but gave the Grand Mufti something to occupy himself with and a way of exercising a certain amount of authority. At the same time, the Zionists worked to undermine these Muslim-Christian associations by covertly funding groups that were only for Muslims. Now if you’re thinking to yourself that, I don’t know, this sounds like a plan that could backfire, you’re exactly right, and it backfires exactly like you think it’s going to. The plan works too well, basically.

They got what they wanted. The Arab Christians feel alienated by the increasingly insular Muslim majority, but they also awaken something else, something they didn’t intend and they didn’t expect. They had planted the seeds of a new kind of militant Islam, a new kind of political militant Islam that hadn’t really existed before in the country and that would prove more durable and far more dangerous than any of the problems that they thought they were solving. Now if this whole pattern seems eerily, uncomfortably familiar, it should. In our own day, the state of Israel has employed the exact same strategy to great effect, tolerating and at times encouraging Islamist groups as a counterweight to secular nationalists whom Israel, wittingly or not, helps paint as collaborators. The most recent assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 was launched just three months after the Islamist group Hamas and the nationalist party Fatah agreed to end their eight-year-long conflict and create a unity government. That was not a coincidence. The fact that this pattern is still repeating itself a century later is a little bit of a spoiler for this story.

It tells you that to this day the Palestinian Arabs have not been able to overcome the combination of internal divisions and external obstacles to form a united Palestinian national identity. Compare this to how the Zionists are doing at the same time. The Zionists, while they’re still in the early stages of building their own national identity, we mentioned before that they’re at least coming from a European culture that has a deep and recent history with this kind of thing. It makes all the difference in the world. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a simple matter. It’s not easy under the most favorable of circumstances, and the Jews are dealing with obstacles that most nationalists never have to deal with. The first and most obvious is that they don’t even have a national homeland to start. They started a nationalist movement before they even had a place to live.

Think about that. But believe it or not, that’s not the hard part. At least I would argue it’s not the hard part. Getting some territory always takes work, but at least there’s a long list of historical examples you can draw on if you’re trying to figure out what you’re supposed to do. We all know how to acquire territory, even if it’s difficult. The Zionists had very rich and very influential backers pushing the big bad British Empire, the greatest empire on the planet at the time, to get them a piece of land. So it was going to take some doing, but they at least had that part figured out. They knew where they were going with it. The second obstacle they faced is much more subtle. It’s so subtle, in fact, that not even all the Zionists see it, and not all the Rothschild money or British military strength in the world can help them with it. To understand the ambition of what the Zionists are trying to do, of the scale of the difficulties that they’re facing with this project, I always find myself coming back to one thing. I always come back to the fact that in the beginning, diaspora Jews who lived in different countries couldn’t even speak to each other. I don’t mean they weren’t on speaking terms, I mean they literally cannot speak to each other. An English Jew and a Ukrainian Jew, they can’t communicate with each other because they don’t speak the same language. This part of the story, what I’m about to talk about, it’s another one of those issues like the Dreyfus Affair in the last episode, where there are 10,000 books written on the couple paragraphs that I’m about to talk about, where it’s so fascinating, there are so many angles and connections that I have to ruthlessly force myself to keep it short, because I’ll get carried away. I’ll find myself ranting four hours from now, realizing that everybody’s turned me off and I haven’t made it out of 1920 yet.

I’ll try to keep it short, but please just bear with me, because I love this part of the story. The Zionists are trying to draw together this community. They’re trying to get people who have lived for generations in foreign cultures to identify with each other, to see that they are a culture unto themselves. This isn’t something that you can just impose from the top down. In the beginning of this episode, we talked about some of the difficulties inherent in this project. It has to be compelling enough for people to feel it. They can’t just think it. It has to hit them where they live.

They have to be willing to sacrifice for it, to subordinate their other identities to it. The Arab nationalists are engaged in this same project and facing some of the same obstacles, but at least all the people that the Arab nationalists are working with all speak Arabic. Enough of the Hebrew language had been preserved to allow rabbis to recite memorized passages from the Torah, but no one spoke it. Jews spoke the languages of the countries that they’d settled in. Hebrew was just a sacred language used in religious rituals, sort of like Latin is today in the Catholic Church. Except that at least with Latin, enough of it’s been preserved that you could speak it if you wanted to. You couldn’t do that with Hebrew. Only the memorized syllables of the sacred passages had been preserved, without any memory of the syntax or the linguistic structures which underlay the language and related the parts to the whole.

All this wasn’t particularly interesting to Theodor Herzl and the original political Zionists. They just weren’t that interested in it. I said that it was so subtle that many Zionists didn’t see it. The political Zionists didn’t see the importance of it. Now they weren’t against it, but their concern was, you know, their concern was finding a place to call their own to get the Jews out of Europe. That was the more immediate concern. That’s what the political Zionists were focused on. But there were others, you know, coming from slightly different places relative to one another but who were of one mind in being more interested in reviving Jewish culture than in just drawing borders around a piece of land and calling it Jewish. Now most of them still favored the creation of a Jewish political state eventually, but they were focused on the role that it might play as a spiritual center of the Jewish people around the world. The leader, sort of the guiding light of this brand of Zionism, Asher Ginsberg, he’s better known by his pseudonym Ahad Ham. Now Ham, he didn’t even wish to see the Diaspora Jews migrate to Palestine, not all of them at least. He felt that the Jewish people had been a moral and ethical beacon in the world, that they should remain out in the world, that they might be able to reclaim that position as a moral and ethical beacon if the Jewish people, wherever they lived in their various countries, were able to look to Jerusalem again. You know, sort of the way that Muslims look to Mecca, that this might spark a Jewish revival by being a center of scholarship and pilgrimage. He wanted to rebuild the Jewish presence in Palestine less to be a political home for ethnic Jews, than to be a spiritual home for Jews around the world. So these cultural Zionists, they saw nationalism as a sort of backdoor, you know, to reconnect Jews to their Jewish heritage, to Judaism and Jewish history. Of the same mind was another Russian and a friend of Ahad Ham’s, a man named Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and that’s who I want to talk about right now.

As a young man, Ben Yehuda was on track to become a rabbi, as his parents hoped, and he was pursuing his studies to that end when he was exposed to early Zionist writings. Now Ben Yehuda was a brilliant linguist. He was already speaking his native Yiddish, Russian, French, and German fluently, when in his early 20s he departed the rabbinical path and left to study in Paris. Now at one point during his stay in Paris, he met a Jewish man who was visiting from Jerusalem, had lived there for a long time, and he tried to engage him in conversation. See before the Zionist migrations to Palestine ever began, there had been a small religious community of Jews from all over the world who lived in Jerusalem and mostly survived on donations from abroad. It’s a little commune in Jerusalem of Jews from all over the place. Now since these pilgrims often spoke different languages, they would use scraps of rudimentary Hebrew to try to communicate with each other. But it was more of a really simple pidgin language and a functional language on its own.

It had scraps of other languages thrown in, and yet Ben Yehuda found that he was able to communicate basic ideas well enough to hold a conversation with this man from Jerusalem in Hebrew in a light way. A light went on that marked one of the milestones in modern Jewish history. At that moment Eliezer Ben Yehuda decided that any sustainable revival of Jewish culture and identity had to include a resurrection of the Jewish language, not Yiddish, but the real language of the Jews, Hebrew. He devoted his life to this project. There were many people in the early days who thought it would just be easier to teach everyone Russian or German or Yiddish, but he knew that they were not seeing the whole picture. Ben Yehuda knew that it couldn’t just be about drawing lines on a map and a few government buildings and an army. After the Roman Empire fell, the buildings still stood, and there were writings and people who could tell you how the whole thing ran, what the public offices were, and how to conduct various orders of business. People tried again and again and again to jumpstart the Roman Empire and get it working again, but there was just something missing.

All the buildings and uniforms and documents and offices and people were all still there, but it was like a corpse of a man who only just a moment ago had been walking around and talking but is now just laying there inanimate. There was something vital that had departed. You can keep a body on artificial life support for a while, but you cannot fake life once the spirit has gone out of it. Ben Yehuda somehow knew that a bunch of Jews walking around Jerusalem speaking German or Russian would never be an independent and vital organism. It could only ever be a Frankenstein monster just waiting to run out of juice. Now look, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Don’t mistake me. A lot of people contributed to the revival of modern Hebrew besides Ben Yehuda.

But he provided the motive and ideological drive and direction, insisting upon it, when many people did not see the point. If anyone is most responsible for the revival of the language, it’s Ben Yehuda. This is one of the most extraordinary parts of the story, if you ask me. Putting this part in here, I was looking for parts that I had to cut out because this thing is long enough as it is, and I just could not bring myself to get rid of this portion. I really do think it’s too important. With everything that’s about to happen, with everything that’s already happened leading up to this point, the revival of modern Hebrew gives you a taste of how committed some of these folks were and what was really going on. Not just in their heads, but in their hearts. A lot of people look back at the early part of the Zionist story and they see colonialist plotting and disregard for other people and violence and racism and deception.

All of those elements exist. They’re all there. You do the history a disservice if you ignore or downplay them. But you also do the story and everyone involved in it on all sides a disservice if you ignore the very real idealism and the romantic heart that was beating at the center of the Zionist movement in these early days. Here we have a group of people who set to work reviving a dead language. Why? Because it was important to them. That’s it.

They didn’t have to, but they did. And they didn’t just make it up either. They did their best to puzzle out the syntax and the structures of ancient spoken Hebrew to try and determine how they might have said words that didn’t exist in the days of the Roman Republic. That effort had about as much accuracy and success as you would expect from something like that, but the point is they took the time. They put the work in. They didn’t have to, but they did. And now a language that had literally zero native speakers left in the world. Zero.

It was a museum piece like 10,000 other dead languages that we’ll never hear of peoples whose names will remain forgotten. And this language became the language of the Jews in Palestine. I mean, this is going to take me off the tracks a little bit, but have you ever seen one of those action movies where, you know, a hero is getting beaten down by the bad guys? About two-thirds through the movie, he gets captured or something, and they have him tied up in a chair maybe, and the bad guys are beating him up and kicking him and punching him. And there’s always this cliché scene where they’re kicking him and beating him, and he’s holding onto a picture of his wife or his daughter or his sweetheart back home. And it keeps getting knocked out of his hand, and he isn’t even defending himself because he keeps just doing everything he can to get that picture back and trying to keep his eyes on it. And he gets it back and gets kicked again, and it flies out of his hand, and he crawls in the dirt after it, and just as he gets a hold of it, he’s kicked again. I know it’s kind of a silly picture, but it kind of reminds me of that.

It really does. For thousands of years, the Jews are just getting kicked around as they move from place to place to place. And the memory of how it all started, of why people are kicking them in the first place, of where they came from and who they are, it almost faded away. It was almost gone at the end of the 19th century. As everywhere they went, people were just trying to beat it out of them, but they held on. Barely, but they held on. And they get kicked again, so what? Let them kick you.

Just stay focused on that thing. Pick up the picture. And if they kick you again, and again, just stay focused on the image of that thing you love. Because if you lose that, it doesn’t matter if they stop kicking you. This is the only example in history of a language dying out, gone, to the point of having no one left in the world who spoke it. And then being reconstructed and revived so that today millions of people speak it as their first language. Language is a huge part of having a sustainable culture. Because we think and approach the world through language.

And so not only the vocabulary, but also the deep structures and arrangements carry implications for fundamental aspects of how we relate to the world. And to our society, and to ourselves. Some critics have pointed out that modern Hebrew is no replica of the ancient language. That it carries the natural biases and structures that an interpretation by European Jews who spoke European languages would be expected to impress upon it. Basically that it was influenced by the languages from which they were approaching it. But I don’t see how that’s a criticism at all. The centuries of wandering are a part of the Jewish heritage. An important part.

Erasing that memory in some vain attempt to turn back the clock 2000 years would just deny a very important and vital part of who they are. If the language we speak shapes how we perceive ourselves and construct reality, then you could say that the mind of the modern Hebrew-speaking Jewish person is built out of the materials picked up through his people’s years of wandering. Today’s Hebrew speakers carry the cultural memory of the prophets and the rabbis, yes. But also of the diaspora and their language. And that language creates the internal structures of the Hebrew speaker’s consciousness. Now this is cultural Zionism. And it provided the charge for that first wave of Zionism in the late 1800s. Before political Zionism had even been formulated.

Cultural Zionism was a revivalist movement at heart. It was forward looking. It was an idealistic movement that wanted to create something important. Even sacred. Early political Zionism was more reactionary. Instead of trying to get people motivated to sacrifice for this great thing, it instead took the tried and true path, the reliable path, of giving them something to fear. And reminding them that they all had a common enemy. As Theodore Herzl, we mentioned this earlier, told a British commission on immigration in 1902. Herzl said, quote, I will give you my definition of a nation and you can add the adjective Jewish. A nation is, in my mind, an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. Then, if you add to that the word Jewish, you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation, end quote. And his interviewer asked him, quote, What would be the common enemy in this case, end quote. And Herzl didn’t hesitate. The anti-Semite. His very definition of a nation was a group held together by a common enemy. The Jewish nation he was trying to rally was to be held together by antiSemitism.

If one were to ask him what then was left of Jewish identity, if you remove the anti-Semite, Herzl would have answered simply and quickly that there was no danger of that. Now, Ahad Ham, he saw the danger in this way of thinking and he took a stand against Herzl and the political Zionists from day one. He started a publication in opposition to the political Zionists the same year that Herzl called the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Now, don’t be mistaken, Ham was from Russia. He was well acquainted with the suffering of his people in Russia and Europe. He just saw that their movement had to stand for something, not just against something. He knew that if Jewish identity became all about getting away from suffering, getting away from darkness, rather than being drawn toward something positive, that their identity would just inevitably end up being shaped as a negative by the suffering and darkness that they were running from. If the Jewish nation needed the anti-Semite to stay alive, it would find ways to make sure that anti-Semites remained in steady supply.

You know, but there’s a reason that human societies throughout history have not been able to follow the path that Ham laid out and have come together around terror and rage. Theodor Herzl would have asked, well he did ask really, it was his central question, do you see the supply of anti-Semites running out any time soon? Because I don’t. Now, many of the political Zionists that were following Herzl were secular socialists and even atheists who cared very little for any of the religious and cultural considerations that Ham believed should be central to the Zionist program. Ham, on the other hand, listened to the political Zionists and to him they just sounded like European colonialists who wanted to shove their way into a territory, use money from rich European bankers like the Rothschilds to build it up, and then get one of the imperial powers to give them enough guns and soldiers to hold onto it. They didn’t seem to particularly care if the Jewish state was very Jewish at all. Well, Ham and his followers were saying that they wanted a Jewish state, not just a state full of Jews. He’d been traveling to Palestine since the first wave of Jewish immigration, years before the idea of Zionism had even entered Herzl’s mind.

And he knew that the political Zionists were in denial about the difficulties that they were going to face once they arrived. You’ve got to remember, Herzl had never been to Palestine when he wrote the pamphlet that got the whole movement started. Neither had most of them. Well, Ham had been going back and forth, trying to rally Jews around this idea of reclaiming their cultural and religious identity for years when the Dreyfus Affair happened and all of a sudden Zionism became cool and Herzl called the first Zionist congress and all that. He was an old veteran of this. He had watched the early Zionist settlements founder and eventually fall apart partially because the Jews that arrived were not respecting the people that already lived there. They were creating tension and helping to foster a situation where the settlements were inorganic, unnatural. They were like isolated space stations that were reliant on aid from elsewhere because they fostered no relationships with the people around them.

In an essay written way back in 1891, six years before Theodore Herzl called the first congress, another part of which I quoted in episode one, Ham tried to alert his fellow Jews to what he was seeing in Palestine. Ham wrote, quote, We must surely learn from both our past and present history how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong and how we should be cautious in our dealings with the foreign people among whom we return to live to handle these people with love and respect and needless to say with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite. They were slaves in their diasporas and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts as always happens to former slaves. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty. They trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason and then even boast about their actions.

There’s no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency. Our brothers indeed were right when they said that the Arab only respects he who exhibits bravery and courage but when these people feel that the law is on their rival’s side and even more so if they’re right to think that their rival’s actions are unjust and oppressive then even if they are silent and endlessly reserved they keep their anger in their hearts and these people will be revengeful like no other, end quote. Now when Ahad Ham wrote this there were still very few Jews living in Palestine so the incidents that he’s referring to were isolated but it was the approach that worried him. It was the carelessness and the aggression that the British as we just saw a few decades later would blame for helping to instigate the Nebi Musa riots. Well Chaim Wiseman was the man who helped bridge the gap between the two Zionist camps between the political and cultural Zionists. He was a great admirer and a follower of Ham. He passionately embraced the goals of the cultural Zionists as his own. At the same time he knew that Herzl was right about Europe.

He knew that Herzl was right about the world. The world didn’t want them and why would it? People said that Jews were foreigners, that they were interlopers and you know what? Wiseman would have said that they were right. We are foreigners. We don’t belong in their countries. We belong in our homeland and nowhere else. The cultural and political Zionists battled over the approach and the focus of the movement throughout the pre-war period with Wiseman often serving as the go-between and peacemaker.

After Theodor Herzl died in 1904, political Zionism moderated a bit as Wiseman pushed an approach that still retained the political Zionist emphasis on establishing political power but focused on creating an independent and sustainable Jewish culture in Palestine. Things like building a university were near and dear to Chaim Wiseman’s heart. At the same time another group began to gain prominence and this group would very soon come to dominate the entire movement. In the early days, I think we mentioned this once before, the Zionist community in Palestine was dominated by Jews from the Russian Empire and they carried the same emphasis on leftist economics and class unity that was creating chaos in the old empire. To a significant degree these were the same people. They moved back and forth sometimes between movements. For a while they all came in several flavors, these leftist Zionists, from full-on communists to agrarian socialists to something like what we would think of today as social democrats. But eventually all of those flavors would collapse into one as labor Zionism largely due to the will and power of a man who arrived in Palestine in 1906 at 20 years old.

If you fly into the state of Israel today, chances are you’ll be landing at the airport bearing his name, David Ben-Gurion. David Ben-Gurion was born David Green in the Polish city of Klontz, 200 miles from where Chaim Weizmann was currently growing up. He was 11 years old when Ben-Gurion was born. And he’s really the man who, for me and for most people, really captures what a Zionist in Palestine was. And I say specifically in Palestine because as we go on, there are going to be Jews all over Europe and in Britain and the United States who are Zionists, committed Zionists, who are actively supporting the movement, doing work for it, dedicating themselves to it, but they have a fundamentally different character than the Zionists that are in Palestine. The Zionist project never could have gotten off the ground with these people without their fundraising and lobbying in Britain and the United States, for sure. They were very important to the movement, but that was fundamentally different work than facing the daily realities of building the Jewish homeland in Palestine. For that you needed a different kind of Zionist, and Ben-Gurion fit the bill for it as if he’d been designed in a lab.

He’s a short guy, maybe about five feet tall, an inch or two taller, but kind of stocky. He’s pugnacious. He’s just an ornery guy, very sure of himself. He just does not let people get in his way, though. He seems to have unlimited energy. When he arrived in Palestine, he has a full head of hair, but very quickly he went bald. He’s rumored for having a shiny bald head with just two ridiculous white tufts of hair exploding out from each side above his ears. You just imagine a short, stocky guy scowling as much as you can possibly screw up your face with a shiny bald head and two giant tufts of white hair exploding above your ears.

That’s Ben-Gurion. Now Ben-Gurion’s social Zionism drew on the same kind of vulgar romantic ideas that were popular in Central Europe in the early part of the 20th century. He was a secular guy, but his ideas about the relationship of a people to a given spot of land were almost mystical. He was obsessed with making the Negev Desert bloom. It was just his big idea. He never really succeeded at it, but he believed that working the land was an act of fundamental value that was necessary for the drifting Jewish people to once again become rooted in their home. So while Theodor Herzl was interested in creating a sort of bourgeois industrial state and while Ahad Ham would have said that the diaspora should turn their hearts toward Jerusalem to pray, Ben-Gurion would have said that if they want to be a Zionist, they should move to Jerusalem, pick up a shovel, and get to work. Now while David Ben-Gurion was not driven by the spiritual motives of Ahad Ham, I don’t want to be mistaken. He didn’t settle for the reactionary political Zionism of Theodor Herzl necessarily either. In fact, antiSemitism didn’t really play much of a role in Ben-Gurion’s Zionism. In his memoirs he would later write, For many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our dedication to Zionism. I personally never suffered from anti-Semitic persecution. Plonsk was remarkably free of it. Nevertheless, and I think this is very significant, it was Plonsk that sent the highest proportion of Jews to Israel from any town in Poland of comparable size. We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape, but for the positive purpose of rebuilding a homeland. Life in Plonsk was peaceful enough.

There were three main communities, Russians, Jews, and Poles. The number of Jews and Poles in the city were roughly equal, about 5,000 each. The Jews, however, formed a compact centralized group occupying the innermost district, while the Poles were more scattered, living in outlying areas and shading off into the peasantry. Consequently, when a gang of Jewish boys met a Polish gang, the latter would almost inevitably represent just a single suburb and thus be poorer in fighting potential than the Jews, even if their numbers were initially fewer, could quickly call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. Far from being afraid of them, they were rather afraid of us. In general, however, relations were amicable, though distant.” So that’s David Ben-Gurion for you. He’s telling you about his hometown and he’s sizing up the various communities’ fighting potential. That’s what this guy is all about.

Before arriving in Palestine in 1906, he’d already been arrested twice for subversive activities during the 1905 Russian Revolution. That was as a 19-year-old. You get the idea when you read about him that if you decide to pick a fight with this guy, you better pack a lunch. That’s something that a lot of people, a lot of Arabs and British and even other Jews are going to learn, and it’s something that a lot of them are going to learn the hard way. Now Ben-Gurion’s politics and economics, while he was a leftist, it always took a backseat to his Jewish nationalism. A strict socialist preached class unity, but Ben-Gurion was, let’s say, a nationalist first and a socialist second. But in 1921, the Jewish left in Palestine was heterogeneous. There were still all types of leftists.

There were hardcore elements aligned with the Russian revolutionaries who sought to create a Soviet Palestine, and these often clashed with other Jewish groups as much as they clashed with the British or the Arabs. Back in the first episode, I mentioned that Trotsky had attended some of the early Zionist meetings, but that he eventually rejected Zionism because he rejected nationalism, period. The Bolshevists, especially back in 1921, they rejected all national identity. They thought that that was just a way to keep the workers of the world divided and at each other’s throats. It was something that the elites used to divide people up and make them think that they have enemies and other workers in other countries, but the Bolshevists rejected all that. There were Jewish communities in Palestine who had the same idea. They would often pass out flyers in Arabic telling poor Arabs not to be fooled by the false divisions of Arab, Jew, Christian, Muslim, and all that. Arab workers and Jewish workers should be united in opposition to their oppressors, whether they be Jewish, Arab, or British. Now, this is the kind of anti-nationalism that brought the communists into conflict with every nationalist movement in Europe, and it did the same thing here in Palestine. Despite often supporting more or less the same leftist economic policies, the Zionists saw the communists as a significant threat to their project. They were trying to build a national Jewish identity, and here were a group of Jews saying that all national identity should be thrown out. Ben-Gurion’s labor Zionists had begun to militarize after the Nebi Musa riots, but it wasn’t only the Arabs they were preparing to fight. Clashes began to occur between the communists and Ben-Gurion’s socialist but nationalist labor Zionists. It all came to a head about a year after the Nebi Musa riots. On May 1st, 1921, the communists had been distributing flyers in Yiddish and Arabic announcing their plans to establish a Soviet Palestine. They also announced their intention to hold a march from the city of Jaffa to Tel Aviv to commemorate May Day.

A group of labor Zionists led by David Ben-Gurion organized a countermarch to confront the communists in the streets. Now Ben-Gurion’s group was well organized, and when they saw the communists the next morning, they attacked. A huge fight ensues, and the British police rush in, but they’re very quickly overwhelmed. There just aren’t enough of them. Muslim and Christian Arabs from the nearby neighborhoods take up sticks and go to help the police against a group of communists who had been pushed to a sand dune. The fight goes into a huge riot, and just as it had during the Nebi Musa festival, the cry goes out that the Jews have come to attack the Arabs. Within a few hours, violence in the city becomes general and soon spreads to nearby towns and villages. Arabs took to the streets and attacked Jewish shops and homes, thinking that they were under attack.

Many innocent Jews were targeted, but the fact that there were actually organized Jewish militia units running the streets and retaliating against the Arabs gave rise to this idea that there was a planned attack by the Jews. You know, as always in times of chaos, the worst of the worst seemed to find room to operate. Jews who weren’t even involved in the protest marches were set upon and killed by Arab gangs. There’s a story of a 14-year-old Jewish girl being chased down and beaten to death with iron rods. Several women were raped and mutilated. Herbert Samuel called in reinforcements to attack the Arabs. They used British gunboats and bombers and armored vehicles against the mobs, and British soldiers used machine guns and aircraft to fire into Arab crowds, and this opened the way for Jewish militias to organize their own retaliations. Now these Zionist militias attacked Arab civilians, and the reports of each side’s attacks on the other can hardly be told apart.

Jews were shot and stabbed in the narrow lanes. Atrocities were committed by both sides, and some Arab women lying wounded in the fields seemed to have their breasts sliced off by Jewish colonists.” You know, there are vicious people in the world. They exist everywhere, but they tend to just collect like sewer water in conflict regions like this. The problem is that when people feel threatened, they lose interest in discerning the intentions of individuals on the other side. You know, how nuanced are you really going to get? Think about it. If a riot occurs and people from the other side beat a 14-year-old Jewish girl to death with rods, or if you’re an Arab who hears about Jewish colonists slicing off the breasts of Arab women, how likely are you to care that it was only a few psychos on the other side doing it? You’re just going to want them all to get out of here. These problems didn’t exist before they came. You know, again, the worst of the worst have a way of dragging conflicts down to their level. You see it in just about every single asymmetric and irregular war. The most ruthless and brutal elements do something that enrages the other side, and then the most brutal elements from the other side returns with an atrocity of their own, and that escalates the conflict even more. With every new outrage by the other side, the most aggressive, the most militant elements on your side gain more and more followers and seem to make more and more sense. The riots went on for a week. When it was over, 47 Jews had been killed and 48 Arabs were dead. Hundreds were wounded.

The Jaffa riots sent another shockwave through the British administration and the Zionist movement. Only this time, some of that shockwave started to be felt in the upper reaches of the British government. Since the Nebi Musa report had been suppressed, most of the British government continued to believe that things were going well in Palestine. When the Jaffa riots broke out, they seemed to come out of the blue for most British officials. They were shocked to hear that, in the wake of the disturbance, British police found hundreds of rifles, tons of explosives and fuses, and hundreds of bombs, which had been smuggled into the country by the Zionists. They didn’t know what to make of that. The government sent an investigative committee to go look into the incident, and the report it generated just shocked the British officials who received it. Just like the suppressed Nebi Musa report, the report on the Jaffa riots states that the immediate cause of the violence was the attack on Jews by groups of Arabs.

But also, just like the Nebi Musa report, the committee stated that the more general causes had to do with the Arabs’ very real fear that they were being pushed out of their country by the British at the behest of the Zionists. Now, most British officials just did not know what to make of this. You have to remember, this is a backwater at the time. It’s not the center of geopolitics the way it is today. Hadn’t the British repeatedly said that they had no intention of displacing the Arabs? Hadn’t the Zionists said all along that they only wished to make a home alongside the Arabs in Palestine? Why were the Arabs being so paranoid? Well, the committee said, if the Arabs thought Zionism meant losing their homes, it’s because that’s the message they were getting from the Zionists themselves.

Whatever the British government thought, the Zionists seemed to believe that the British had agreed to help them take Palestine from the Arabs and establish a Jewish state. Now, the High Commissioner Herbert Samuel, if he had any lingering doubts, became firm in his belief that it was madness to hope that the Arabs were ever going to agree to be ruled by European Jews in a Jewish state. Until now, he had kind of hoped, just like Chaim Weizmann had kind of hoped, and he would continue to hope it after this. He’s not in Palestine. He doesn’t have to deal with the reality the way Samuel and some others do. He hoped that the Arabs’ nationalism wasn’t really that deeply felt, and that maybe they would eventually give it up when they saw that the British and the Jews would be bringing a lot of money and wealth into the country. But after Jaffa, he realized that this was never going to happen. The Arabs’ desire for independence was just as strong as the Zionists’. So now he imposed limitations on Jewish immigration, announcing that the number of immigrants would be limited, determined by the ability of the country to socially and economically absorb them. He began to push measures for a binational state, one which would include and be jointly governed by both Jews and Arabs. He thought this was the only practical way forward. Samuel was speaking directly with other high-ranking British officials, and he knew that the inflexible insistence on an all-Jewish state was becoming a danger to the Zionist project as a whole. And his officers around Palestine were telling him that the Arabs were beginning to wake up. They were beginning to realize that they were facing an existential threat. And so, partly to alleviate the fears of the Arabs, but also partly to reassure the rest of the British government that no mixed messages were being sent, Samuel went out of his way to make the British position very clear. About a month after the Jaffa riots, on the occasion of the king’s birthday, Samuel gave a speech in which he stated plainly that, quote, the British government has never consented and will never consent to a Jewish government being set to rule over the Muslim and Christian majority, end quote.

He continued in that same speech, saying that the Balfour Declaration only meant, quote, that the Jews should be enabled to find here their home within the limits fixed by their number and the interests of the present population, end quote. Now this shocked the Zionists. Samuel had dedicated his life to Zionism for many, many years. He had done as much as anyone to this point to move the Zionist cause forward, but they abandoned him after this. Outside of Ahad Ham’s tiny and shrinking circle of idealistic cultural Zionists, no one shared Samuel’s concern for the welfare of the Arab population. What was he talking about? They weren’t interested in sharing the land, and they weren’t interested in sharing the government. They thought Samuel had lost his mind.

Didn’t he know that the world was filled with vicious anti-Semites? With hate lurking in the hearts of even those who professed to be tolerant? Didn’t he know that the only way that the Jews would ever be safe was when they had a state of their own? With their own government and their own army? Including the Arabs would defeat the entire point. I think it’s important probably at this point to remember that while Herbert Samuel was an assimilated upper-class British Jew with a comfortable life in Britain, who hadn’t really had to deal with the kind of anti-Semitism that some others had, most of the Jews in Palestine were from Russia and Eastern Europe where things had been much, much more difficult. And there’s a cultural divide here. Samuel’s probably never had to deal with what some of these Russian and Eastern European Jews have.

They had a more immediate sense of the threat and they lacked Samuel’s commitment to humanitarian and liberal principles. Arthur Ruppin, one of the founders of Tel Aviv, a day after the speech, he wrote, quote, Herbert Samuel, who was a sort of god to the Jews in Palestine only yesterday, has now become a traitor to the Jewish cause in their eyes, end quote. He was called a Judas by one member of the Zionist commission. I mean, can you imagine? He’s devoted his life to this cause. Almost universally, the Zionists in Palestine and abroad as well were uncompromising. They were completely dismissive of Samuel’s attempts to address the Arab’s concerns at all. They thought he had lost his mind.

The Jewish elected assembly in Palestine issued a declaration saying that, quote, the true contents of the promise of the British government do not allow for the incidental interests of the present population of the country to affect the life and historic aspirations of the Jewish people, end quote. You know, I told you we were gonna get to watch this ambivalence, these two forces play out in one man, and this is really where it happens. Samuel’s steadfast determination to hold on to his liberal principles is met with, not just with outrage, but with incredulity by the Zionists. They just have no idea what he’s trying to do. They don’t understand. You know, and I should say, by the way, that when I use the word liberal here, it’s not in the modern American connotation, associating it, you know, vaguely with the Democratic Party and whatever passes for leftist politics in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, liberal has a more general meaning. When people speak of Herbert Samuel’s liberalism, they’re talking about his commitment to principles like equal treatment under the law, individual liberty, participation in government, things like that.

And most Zionists were just dumbfounded that Samuel would extend these principles, which were fine in London or Paris or New York, that he would extend these principles to the Arabs. What was he talking about? You know, the way they saw it, betraying his own people in the name of a principle that the Arabs were manifestly incapable of even understanding made him a sentimental fool at best and a traitor at worst. The writer John B. Judas, in his book Genesis, about Harry Truman and the development of Zionism in the United States, he describes the dynamic of this period. He says, quote, The Jewish Zionists took a condescending view of Samuel’s efforts. Harry Satcher summed up the prevailing opinion. Quote, and this is Harry Satcher, One may guess that Samuel’s somewhat old-fashioned liberalism is peculiarly sensitive to the appeal of a majority.

There has probably always been within him something of a conflict between the Jew, desirous to help in the creation of his national home, and the liberal, haunted by the phrase self-determination. End quote. Now back to Judas. Satcher was, in effect, writing off Samuel’s attempt to adhere to the principles of democracy as old-fashioned. A Zionist publication in Britain, The Jewish Chronicle, puts Samuel’s efforts in an even starker context. And now quoting from The Jewish Chronicle, quote, Imagine the wild animals in a zoological garden springing out of their cages and killing a number of spectators. And the commission appointed to inquire into the causes of the disaster, reporting first and foremost that the animals were discontented with and hostile to the visitors who would come to see them, as if it were not the first business of the keepers to know the habits and dispositions of the animals and to be sure that their cages were secure. End quote.

For the second time in a year, Jews were dead at the hands of Arab rioters. That much was true. And for the second time in a year, a British investigation had found that the Jews had provoked the incident with their belligerence and hostility toward the Arabs. 47 Jews were dead, and the British responded by saying that the Zionists needed to dial back their rhetoric and moderate their expectations. With Samuel seeking reconciliation and compromise with the Arabs, the Zionist leadership decided that the British could no longer be relied upon to fight their battles for them. They would still use the British for whatever they could get out of them, but they couldn’t depend on them. Slowly and quietly, but surely, the Zionists began to prepare for war. After Jaffa, denial became a luxury that fewer and fewer of them could entertain, and those who had preached war all along began to take control of the movement.

While Chaim Wiseman would, you know, keep some of the goals of the cultural Zionists relevant, Ahad Ham and his followers were pushed to the margins in the 1920s. While Samuel worked pointlessly for compromises the Zionists would never agree to, and Wiseman continued to tell the British government that relations were improving, behind the scenes, Ben-Gurion ridiculed those who thought that there was any room at all for compromise between the Jews and the Arabs. He told one Jewish committee, quote, Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between the Jews and Arabs, but not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution. There is a gulf, and nothing can bridge it. I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews. We as a nation want this country to be ours. The Arabs as a nation want this country to be theirs.

End quote. There were others who were even more frank than that. Moshe Shurtok, who would be Ben-Gurion’s kind of right-hand man over the next several years, and who would eventually be Israel’s first foreign minister, he had an even sharper edge than Ben-Gurion. A bit earlier than this he had written, quote, We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture. Recently there have been appearing in our newspapers the clarification about, quote, the mutual misunderstanding between us and the Arabs, and, quote, common interests, and about, quote, the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples. But we must not allow ourselves to be deluded by such elusive hopes, for if we cease to look upon our land, the land of Israel, as ours alone, and we allow a partner into our state, all content and meaning will be lost to our enterprise. End quote. And when one of the most important Palestinian Zionist leaders is writing that, it becomes pretty clear that the Arabs probably aren’t being paranoid enough.

In the last seven years, the Arabs of Palestine have just been just, just smashed. Over and over and over, they’ve been smashed. Years of oppression, war, plague and starvation, with a third of their population dead after the war, and the rest traumatized beyond measure. They think they’ve outlasted the disaster, and they’re ready to move forward, only to have the French and the British come in and tear apart their hopes for independence. And now for three years since the first world war ended, they’ve watched the Zionists flood into their country, loudly announcing their intention to take it over. You know, there are people who will say, almost as a dogma, almost no matter what, that violence is never justified. That whoever throws the first punch in any fight is always in the wrong. But it’s hard for me to go through the history of the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs and pretend that things are that simple. You know, if you’re a father or a mother, and your children are in mortal danger, what would you do to get them to safety? Would you hurt someone else to protect the ones you love? I hope that you never have to make that decision, but that’s exactly the decision the Zionists were facing. If you were a Jewish person living in Europe or Russia, this danger was palpable. It was real. Dead children and raped wives and mothers were not just bad dreams, they were something real that you had to think about every time you locked your doors and went to sleep at night. How far would you go to keep your children from being murdered or your wife from being raped? The great tragedy of human life is that we sacrifice the people we could be to the people that we have to be.

What if keeping your child alive means becoming a child murderer yourself? Now, we can say that that’s a false choice, but what history has shown us again and again is that more often than not, this is what our choices are reduced to. Your soul for your child’s life. Or what about on the other hand? Is there ever a point when violence, brutal, irrational, terrifying violence, becomes the only reasonable course of action? You know, imagine you’re in your home, and you hear a knock at the door. And you open the door, and it’s a homeless man. And he explains that he’s hungry and cold and has nowhere to go.

He says that he once lived in this house long, long ago when he was young. And he knows that this is a strange request, but is it possible that you might have a corner where he can sleep and keep warm? And so you feel bad, and you agree, and you let this man into your house, and you let him make a bed. But now imagine you come home to find that he’s invited several of his friends to live with him in your house. And you’re a little concerned because you have kids in the house, and you try to talk to him about it, he just ignores you. And each day you come home, and you find that he’s invited more and more and more people. Imagine that his friends are treating you with contempt and beginning to talk about throwing you and your children out of the house altogether. When you confront the original man and ask him what he thinks he’s doing, he tells you simply, What?

I told you. I used to live in this house. This is my house. I told you that. And now you’re finding that his friends are changing the locks on doors and knocking down walls to remodel the place. You come home and find your children put out on the lawn, because they’ve been moved out of their bedrooms. And so you call the police. But the police seem to have some kind of relationship with these people, so they do nothing.

They tell you to relax, that you have nothing to worry about. Before long, you come home to find that you’ve been moved out of your bedroom into a closet. So you call the authorities, you call the FBI, the CIA, the U.S. Army, and they all tell you that there’s nothing to be done, since, you know, he did used to live here a long time ago. At what point do you put a body on this guy and throw him out of your house? Is it always wrong to be the first one to get physical? Is that it? Is that all there is to it? Or is there ever a point when the only option you have is to hurt somebody? These are all insane questions. Ridiculous, insane questions. They’re questions that, if you live in some place like Los Angeles in the United States, like I do, you can’t ever imagine having to contemplate. But these are the questions everyone in Palestine is about to have to contemplate for the next several decades. Everything up to this point has been nothing but a prelude. Just the early rumblings of something over the horizon that, well, when it comes, is going to give us one of those rare glimpses behind the curtain of the world. And it’s going to show us that insanity and murder and brutality and nihilism are not always mistakes.

They’re not always aberrations. Palestine’s about to show us that in the absence of better choices, these four things can serve as the foundation of the world. Only it’s a world where every value is turned upside down, where rape is called love, where every murderer is a hero, and every mangled corpse is lifted up as a martyr. bass, drums, & electric guitar play rock bass, drums, & electric guitar play rock bass, drums, & electric guitar play rock bass, drums, & electric guitar play rock Hey, I see you tug at yourself We’re the ones that can’t sleep at night Hey, I see you tug at yourself Hey, I see you tug at yourself We’re the ones that can’t sleep at night bass, drums, & electric guitar play rock Bad times, rolls and tears Bad times, rolls and tears Bad times, rolls and tears Bad times, rolls and tears Just staring at Just staring at Just staring at the sky Just staring at the sky These are the days that must happen to you These are the nights that you must live through These are the days that must happen to you These are the nights that you must live through These are the days These are the days Of bad times, frozen tears Bad times, frozen tears Just stare it out Just stare it out Just stare it out Just stare it out Oh, oh, oh… It’s the ice that you dug up yourself We’re the ones who can’t sleep at night It’s the ice that you dug up yourself It’s the ice that you dug up yourself We’re the ones who can’t sleep at night

Episode 3

Summary

Summary of the Transcript

Introduction to the Podcast: The podcast is part of a series called “Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem,” focusing on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Honor Culture: The speaker discusses the concept of honor culture, particularly in the context of Amir Faisal’s handwritten note during the Paris Peace Conference, emphasizing the importance of personal honor in Arab culture.
Contradictory Promises: The British made conflicting promises during WWI, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, which led to tensions and broken promises to the Arabs.
Paris Peace Conference: Amir Faisal attended the Paris Peace Conference to advocate for Arab independence but faced challenges due to the conflicting promises made by the British and French.
Cultural Misunderstandings: The speaker highlights the mutual incomprehension between Western and Arab cultures, particularly regarding the concept of honor and the nature of agreements.
T.E. Lawrence’s Role: T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) understood Arab culture and tried to mediate between the British and Arabs, but faced difficulties due to the differing cultural values.
Impact of Broken Promises: The Arabs felt betrayed by the British and French, leading to long-term consequences in the Middle East.
Tribal and Honor Systems: The podcast delves into the tribal and honor systems in Arab culture, explaining how these systems functioned in the absence of strong state institutions.
Modern Implications: The speaker draws parallels between historical events and modern-day misunderstandings and conflicts in the Middle East.

Timeline of Important Historical Events

1916: Sykes-Picot Agreement is signed, dividing the Middle East between British and French control.
1917: Balfour Declaration is issued, promising a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
1919: Paris Peace Conference takes place, where Amir Faisal advocates for Arab independence.
Post-WWI: The British and French fail to honor their promises to the Arabs, leading to tensions and conflicts in the region.

This summary and timeline provide an overview of the key points and historical context discussed in the transcript.

Citations:
[1] https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/7742445/f65e2633-7bd0-49b7-991e-8bf827764740/paste.txt

Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper and you’re listening to the Martyr Made Podcast. You’re about to hear episode three of Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem, a six-part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoy this series, please do consider subscribing to my Substack page where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 a year. It can be found at martyrmade.substack.com and to all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this. So I hope you guys enjoy the show. Here we go. I’m content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr.

The people will always remember it. No, they will forget. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist.

But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. I must go. Why must we tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion? In the first two episodes of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, I started to talk about some of the cultural differences between the main groups in play. The Zionists, the Arabs, and the European imperial powers. And I touched on how these cultural differences presented the Zionists and the Arabs with their own unique advantages and obstacles as they tried to construct national identities for themselves in the years immediately following the First World War. We also began to get into how there’s this sort of mutual incomprehension between the various parties and that that mutual incomprehension really contributed to the direction that events ended up taking. Now originally I had just cut out a ton of material and commentary on some of the cultural issues at play, but recently I was listening to another podcast that made me decide that I just had to address some of these issues.

It was a BBC podcast, a really great series they’ve been doing for the last year or so on the effects of the First World War on several countries from around the world, not just Germany and France and the usual suspects, but other off-the-beaten-path countries like Tanzania, they did one on India, and the episode that I was listening to at the time that led me to do this was on Jordan. So what the BBC is doing is they’re actually going around to each of these countries. This one took place in the capital of Jordan, Amman, and they were inviting people from the community to attend a lecture and a panel of several experts on the war’s effects on the region and so forth. They would have a discussion, a little debate, some readings of poetry and essays. They’re great. You should check them out. So the panel portion was really good, but it was an interaction that I found to be a So the panel portion was really good, but it was an interaction that I found to be a during the audience Q&A portion that got my attention. Now the panel featured several British and Arab scholars who outlined the origins of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, did some readings, like I said, and debated a few things about the conduct of the war and the immediate aftermath.

In the second half, the floor was opened up for audience questions, and when that happened, many of the questions that the largely Arab audience, mostly Jordanians and Palestinians, many of the questions that they wanted to ask the British scholars had to do with the double dealing and broken promises made to the Arabs by the British Empire during the war. The presenter, she did a good job, but it was interesting because I would have expected her to be more prepared for the line of questioning that she faced, but she squirmed a little bit when one of the audience members complained at the end of his question that it seemed like the Arabs had been used by the British. Now, before this, one of the panelists, a British scholar, during the discussion portion in the first half of the presentation had given answers that had established him as the guy on the panel who tended to exonerate or excuse the decisions that the British made during the war. And so after the audience member asked that question, the presenter very quickly redirected that question over to this panelist. And the panelist’s specific answer kind of meandered a little bit before finally arriving at the money line, and it’s a line often repeated by Zionists and Western commentators today. Certainly, he said, the British used the Arabs a bit, just as everyone was using everyone else back then, although, you know, some people happened to be better at that game than others. I’m paraphrasing, but that’s what he said. Now, I couldn’t see the audience member’s face when his concerns over honesty and fairness were just waved off by this panelist as some kind of childish, naive, silly question, not worth asking, but I’ve seen the look often enough in situations like this that I feel comfortable imagining what it looked like.

You know, I’m going to use this term again, the mutual incomprehension of the audience member and the panelist in this case, it’s a perfect example, a perfect illustration of the cultural gulf that existed back then that helped create the Middle Eastern mousetrap a hundred years ago, and that continues to bar so many Westerners from understanding the Arab world today. Now, I need to unpack that a little bit, and to do that, I have to back up just a little bit. This is going to be a recap for everybody who’s heard the first two episodes of Fear and Loathing, but I want to give a very brief summary of the events to which the two men were referring. During the insane and uncertain middle years of the First World War, we’re talking 1915, 16, 17 in there, the British end up bearing a disproportionate amount of responsibility for holding together the Entente powers against the Germans, or against the central powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, but primarily Germany and the Western Front are the concern here. It’s turned into a brutal war of attrition where the whole goal is to last one day longer, to keep your social system, your economic output, keep it all together one day longer than the enemy. Now, the French bore the brunt of the physical and human cost of the Western War, but the British were financing the whole thing, and many of their allies were on the brink of mutiny or revolution. Russia’s falling apart, France is on the brink of mutiny in their army, Britain’s doing everything that they have to do to hold this thing together. Now, down south, the Ottoman Empire is putting pressure on British Egypt and the Suez Canal, they’re putting pressure to the north on southern Russia and southern Europe, and so in 1916, the British induced the Hashemite clan, an Arab clan called the Hashemites, who live on the west coast of what is modern day Saudi Arabia today.

They basically control the strip of the Arabian Peninsula called the Hejaz that includes the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They induced the Hashemite clan to rise up in rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. The idea was that this would force the Ottoman Empire to direct its energies inward and relieve some of the pressure on the Suez Canal in southern Europe. So the Hashemites agree to do this, but they are taking on a humongous risk here. If the war somehow ends in an armistice that leaves the Ottoman Empire with any power at all over Arab lands, the Hashemites are in huge trouble. Probably not even facing defeat, they’re probably facing extermination. And so the British guaranteed that in exchange for the Hashemites’ partnership, the Arabs would establish independent nation states under Hashemite rule once the war was over. The British guaranteed that they would see to it.

But while these promises are being made to the Arabs, the British are making contradictory promises regarding the same stretches of Arab territory to all sorts of people. It’s a crazy war of attrition. The British are doing and saying whatever they have to to keep things together. They’re telling Italy, join us and you’ll get this territory after the war is over. They’re telling the Arabs, you’ll get that territory. They’re doing whatever they have to do. You’ve got the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement promising the French that they’re going to be granted possession of Syria, Lebanon, some of the surrounding territories there. The Sykes-Picot Agreement also stipulated that the British would maintain control of Mesopotamia and Palestine.

That’s most of the territory that the Arabs are concerned with right there. And then they issue the Balfour Declaration making promises to the Zionists regarding the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine. So all sorts of contradictory promises. When the war is over, the peace is being negotiated at the Paris Peace Conference. The Arab military leader, Amir Faisal bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, we’ll just call him Amir Faisal or just Faisal in this talk, he heads up to the Paris Peace Conference to try to navigate the various conferences and bureaucracies of the Entente powers to make the case for the primacy of the promises that were made to the Arabs. But when all is said and done, the French and the Zionists get what they had been promised and the Arabs were left out in the cold. They didn’t get much of anything that they had been promised. So this is a very, very, very high-level brief summary of what the audience member was referring to when he said that the Arabs were used.

And it’s a summary of what the panelist was referring to when he said that the Arabs just played the great game less well than everybody else. So again, that’s a very high-level summary of the shenanigans surrounding the region of the Levant during and immediately after the First World War. To begin to sketch out that mutual incomprehension that I said was so perfectly illustrated in the way that the Arab audience member and the panelist spoke past each other in their exchange, I want to bring you back to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Now this is the first of a series of conferences to decide how the central powers are going to be dealt with and how the spoils of the First World War are going to be divided. But it’s also got something else going on. Remember, three empires had just been shattered in the war. The Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are gone. They’re destroyed.

And so the Paris Peace Conference has got a bunch of national groups showing up who are now no longer under the domination of these empires coming to the Paris Peace Conference to make their case for internationally recognized independence of their people. They want nation-states of their own. And so Faisal comes up to present the Arab case and also to meet independently with the British, the French, and the Zionists regarding their competing claims over his people’s land. Just before the conference begins in January 1919, Faisal meets with Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the international Zionist movement at this time, to discuss the Balfour Declaration and the wishes of the Zionists to immigrate and settle in Palestine. I covered this in episode two of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. But again, I had to cut it shorter than I wanted to. I left out something very interesting. So I’m going to expand on it here.

A very interesting aspect of their exchange, I guess. The outcome of the meeting is well known. Amir Faisal agreed in general terms that the Jews would be allowed to immigrate and settle in Palestine, to be full and equal citizens in the new Syrian kingdom that he was establishing. So this agreement that the Jews were going to immigrate and become citizens of this new Syrian kingdom of Faisal’s, it was typed out and signed by the two parties. But something I found very interesting was a note that Faisal left at the end of the agreement. Sort of an addendum. Now the whole agreement itself was typed out and signed by the various parties. But this note that Faisal put on was handwritten by Faisal himself and signed by him.

And the handwritten note read, Now this right here, that little note, this is where I want to begin. I’m going to bring in a lot of examples and materials in this talk, but honestly that note, I could give this entire talk just by doing an exegesis on this little note. It tells you so much. We’re going to talk a lot about the term honor culture. But the wording of this note that Faisal writes in his own hand, it tells you so much about the people and about Faisal himself. This note doesn’t just say that the Zionist request will be refused if Arab independence is somehow blocked. That’s obvious enough, right? You make an agreement with someone and they don’t hold up their end of the bargain, they’re not going to get anything from you.

That’s the whole point of an agreement. That’s not really what Faisal was doing here. His purpose in writing that note was much more personal. The important part of that note is the last line. If the agreement is breached, I shall not be answerable in any way whatsoever. Faisal wanted to establish in no uncertain terms that if the agreement was breached, his honor was not to be questioned. Now this was something that was puzzling to many observers at the time, most of whom completely missed the significance of it. The people who didn’t miss it were men like T.E.

Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He’d spent years with the Arabs and with Faisal himself. He knew exactly what was going on. But try to imagine how ridiculous and anachronistic something like this would be today in the modern developed world, right? If you sign a contract with someone who’s going to build you a house and it has clauses in it to free you of financial obligation and so forth, if he doesn’t build your house, you understand all that. That we get. But it would just be kind of cartoonish or something if the builder were then to go through the trouble of adding all these extra clauses to lay out explicitly that if you didn’t pay him and therefore he failed to build your house, then his refusal to meet his end of the agreement, that would not be a mark against his personal honor. I mean, we would say, dude, what are you talking about?

Who cares? I don’t pay you, you don’t… What are you talking about honor? This is like a Don Quixote type thing. We wouldn’t even know what to do with that. Most of the British and Zionist observers didn’t know what to do with it. It was just some silly formality done for show by this pompous desert emir. But to Faisal, this was not a formality.

Arguably, to Faisal, this was the most important part of the agreement. And to understand why, you first have to understand that the very idea of typing out and signing a contract was almost completely foreign to someone like Faisal. Whereas the British and the Zionists were kind of amused by Faisal’s primitive obsession with personal honor, he considered it even more primitive that these men required records and contracts at all. That these men weren’t able to just make agreements based on their word and their reputations. Now when the BBC panelist says that the Arabs played the political game with less skilled than the Europeans, he’s either missing or ignoring a very fundamental point, which is that the Arab leadership simply thought it was inconceivable that people would just lie, just outright lie to their allies to get what they wanted. And sure, you could say this is naivety and that it qualifies as playing the political game poorly, but I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they say something like that. Most people mean that they were outmaneuvered. The panelist doesn’t seem to get it.

Sure, everyone was using everyone else, but the Arabs really weren’t using anyone. They weren’t playing that game. They were using the British in the same way that you use a contractor that you pay to build your house. There was an exchange going on, but they weren’t playing the game where you try to slip phrases into the contract so that maybe you can pull one over on them and avoid paying the builder when it’s all finished. It was hardly comprehended, and it was just almost impossible for them to conceive that others, their allies especially, were playing that kind of a game on them. In the first episode toward the end, I quoted a passage from T.E. Lawrence, and I’ll quote that same passage very quickly again here. He said that, quote, Arabs believe in persons, not in institutions.

They saw in me a free agent of the British government and demanded from me an endorsement of its written promises. So I had to join in the conspiracy, and for what my word was worth assured these men of their reward. In our two years’ partnership under fire, they grew accustomed to believing in me and to think my government, like myself, sincere. In this hope they performed some fine things, but of course instead of being proud of what we did together, I was bitterly ashamed, end quote. Faisal knew Lawrence personally. He knew him to be an honorable man. So if Lawrence was a representative of the British government, then the promises of the government had to be true. They could be trusted. If Lawrence said they were good, then they were good. Now I can already hear you out there, right? You’re saying, okay, okay, okay, hold on a second. Sure, they talk a lot about honor. So what? What are you telling me? The Arabs don’t lie? They can’t lie?

Please give me a break. But hold on. I’m not saying that. Of course we should never mistake the professed ideals of an individual or a society when we study history for the lived reality, right? And I’m not asking you to be that credulous here. But I will ask you to consider a few things about Faisal himself before you jump to too many cynical conclusions. Let me tell you a story. Lawrence tells this story about Faisal in the book that Lawrence wrote after the war.

Actually, let me preface this first. Lawrence loved Arab culture. He famously went about as native as a military officer can possibly go while still staying on his own side of the line. When Faisal went to the Paris Peace Conference, Lawrence, who was still a British military officer at the time, attended the Paris Peace Conference as an advisor to Faisal. And he came decked out in full Arab dress and everything. So he’s a huge fan of these people. And yes, you have to keep that in mind when you read his accounts and when you listen to the story that I’m about to tell you. But you also have to remember that there’s a reason he became such a huge fan.

So anyway, in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it’s the book Lawrence wrote after the First World War, Lawrence tells this famous story that begins with Faisal in Damascus in the months just before his family raises its banners in rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Faisal has come to Damascus to meet with Arab nationalist leaders that are allied with his family and are going to rise up with him once the rebellion begins. But his business with them has to be conducted in secret because the Ottoman secret police are all over the place. The secret police are under the command of the notoriously brutal Ottoman general Jamal Pasha and they are ruthlessly rooting out any hint of Arab separatism because they know it’s in the air. So since the rebellion hasn’t begun yet and Faisal’s Hashemite clan is still on paper a prominent ally of the Ottoman Empire, Faisal is brought into Damascus by Jamal Pasha as a visiting dignitary, a visiting nobleman. But he’s kept under close watch. There are suspicions regarding his family’s loyalty but no proof so Jamal Pasha just simply tries to keep an eye on Faisal while Faisal ducks and weaves around the city in secret meetings with his friends and allies. Now whenever the secret police captured an Arab nationalist Jamal Pasha would pull Faisal from whatever he was doing and he would force him to attend the public execution of this Arab.

The condemned man had usually been brutally tortured by the time he’s about to be hanged and he bore all the signs of it, beatings and cuts and bruises and all this as he’s let out to be hanged. Now very often these were men with whom Faisal had just recently met and who were incurring this damage and subsequent execution because they were allied to Faisal’s family. Very often these were some of his best friends. But Jamal Pasha already suspected Faisal’s loyalty so he would have his men watching very carefully for any reaction from Faisal or from the condemned man both of whom had to go through this whole process very careful never to make eye contact with each other or give any sign to indicate that they had any idea who the other person was. Faisal watched many, dozens of his friends be tortured and killed in this way and he would have faced the same fate if he had been caught in his secret meetings with them. He would have faced the same fate if any of his captured allies were tortured but not a single one ever did. Faisal only lost his cool one time during a hanging when he blurted out that Jamal Pasha’s brutality was going to cost the Ottoman Empire everything it was trying to avoid and it actually took intercessions from some of the Hashemites’ high-ranking friends back in Istanbul, the capital of Turkey to save Faisal’s life. So very often after an Arab separatist was captured tortured and killed, Jamal Pasha would make Faisal come up to his chambers and Faisal would have to sit there while Jamal Pasha ate his meal and drank wine and threw a temper tantrum where he would scream at Faisal a bunch of abuse about Arabs about how they were all dogs, all scum and just so forth things like that.

So Faisal would sit through this night after night after night watching his friends be executed and tortured again and again and having to listen to this abuse from the person that’s doing it and looking for an opportunity to slip out for another meeting with his allies to plan this upcoming rebellion. So finally one day Jamal Pasha announces that Faisal is going to be traveling with him and a small retinue back to Medina. Now Mecca and Medina again are part of the territory that is under the control of Faisal’s Hashemite clan. This is Faisal’s home country so they’re going to be heading right back into the heart of Faisal’s territory. Now the Hashemites had been raising and training an army that the Ottomans thought was going to be used in an assault against the British on the Suez Canal but which was actually preparing to rebel against the Ottoman Empire for Arab independence. The purpose of this trip was for Jamal Pasha to go inspect this army that the Hashemites had been raising. So Faisal prepares to mount up with Jamal Pasha and a small bodyguard of Turkish forces when Jamal Pasha comes to him and says that they’re going to have company. Coming along for inspection of this Arab army would be the generalissimo of the entire Ottoman army and their Pasha.

Now this is a huge opportunity. Try to imagine. At the time, three generals were essentially in charge of the entire Ottoman army and two of them, including the generalissimo himself now, were proceeding into the heart of Faisal’s family’s territory with only a small bodyguard to protect them. As they approached Faisal’s Hashemite territory, Faisal has to ride ahead of the group so that he could prepare a proper welcome for the generals. That was the excuse he was trying to give them. He planned to rush into the city, find his brothers, raise the army, raise his father’s banners, and then ride out to attack the generals by surprise. But for whatever reason, the generals refused. They insisted that Faisal stay close to them.

He tried everything, tried a bunch of excuses, tried to break away, but they wouldn’t allow it and soon they were right outside Medina. So they wasted no time once they got there. They didn’t go to their quarters or anything like that. The Arab army was ordered to muster up outside the walls to drill and present itself for inspection. As they were going along marching and the cavalry was performing mock maneuvers and the infantry was drilling and so forth, several of Faisal’s officers, including one of his brothers, pulled him aside and they said, Shall we kill them now? Now they were going to be fighting this Ottoman army in just a few days and here on a silver platter, totally defenseless, they had two of the three high generals of the Ottoman army in their grasp. But Faisal turned to his men and said, No, they are our guests. See, Faisal had been desperate to get away from the group and ride ahead into Medina because Arab custom dictates that if someone is permitted to enter your land or your home peacefully, then you must provide for him and protect him.

If Faisal had gotten away and raised his army and rode out to meet them before they entered his family’s land, it would have been fair game, perfectly above board. But once they had ridden into Hashemite territory with Faisal, they were protected by Arab hospitality custom. And it would have been a Red Wedding scale betrayal for Faisal to harm them. He didn’t like it. He would have loved to have killed them. But he was not going to do something so blatantly dishonorable to himself and his family just because it was in his interest to do so. Now unless you’re a Game of Thrones fan who got that reference just now, unless you’re a Game of Thrones fan whose heart was ripped out by the Red Wedding, if you’ve gone through that trauma, you probably get it. But unless you understand that, you probably think, OK, Faisal, dude, come on, we get it.

You’re an honorable guy, you’ve registered your opposition to all this, but get out of the way. You’ve got the two most important generals of the army you’re about to be fighting, and deception is part of war. Kill them! His officers definitely thought he was taking this whole thing way too far. How many of them were going to die on the battlefield later over this minor point of honor? They thought Faisal was out of his mind, so they decided to kill the generals anyway. Faisal would just have to get over it. In fact, they thought they were doing him a favor because he had registered his opposition, they would take the hit for it.

He ended up having to get in the middle of his men in full view of the Turkish generals, but just out of earshot and plead for the generals’ lives. He had enough respect with his men that he made a dent, but some of his men still thought they had an opportunity to finish off this war right here, right now, and they were determined to act. So Faisal ends up putting his own personal bodyguard on the two generals, escorting them around and eventually riding back with them to Damascus to ensure their safety. Now think about this. This does seem like something out of a comic book, right? Killing these two generals would have been a huge deal. It would have dealt a huge blow to the Ottoman army that Faisal was just about to start fighting. And think about the fact that Faisal had spent months watching Jamal Pasha torture and kill scores of his best friends and allies for the crime, although Jamal Pasha didn’t know it at the time, of being allied to Faisal’s cause.

It seems almost ridiculous not to take advantage of this situation, right? The generals actually ended up becoming suspicious of all the attention they were getting. Faisal tried to explain it away as part of an Arab custom just to show symbolic respect by giving the generals a superficial personal guard, but the generals didn’t buy it. So they become convinced that the Hashemites and their Arab allies are up to something. They begin to reinforce areas that would become key in the uprising. Faisal’s refusal, in other words, cost him the initiative in his rebellion. It almost seems kind of ridiculous, except in a storybook kind of way. But this is the guy who’s trying to navigate the backroom dealings of the Europeans and the Zionists at the Paris Peace Conference.

He might be able to believe that the Zionists and the British would try to renegotiate at the edges of their agreements, but the idea that they were simply lying, that the people that Lawrence was vouching for were simply lying, was almost incomprehensible to someone like Faisal. He wasn’t a child. He had his doubts, but the word of Lawrence and the other British officers, whom he knew to be honorable in their personal dealings, that pushed him over the edge. That was enough for him. Lawrence was a British military officer, so he had to obey orders and tell Faisal what he was told and play his role, but he hated it. So after the war, he ended up doing everything he could to fight for the Arab cause at the Peace Conference and beyond. Now I’m making all this sound pretty romantic and idealistic, right? Surely I’m whitewashing the reality of it, right?

That would be the appropriate response from anybody in the modern developed world, because we almost can’t imagine anybody behaving this way, at least not under duress. We look back today at any age with values different from our own, or that the traditional histories, say, were different from our own, and today we are engaged in rewriting histories and deconstructing traditional narratives, because we assume that those values couldn’t have been real. They must have been whitewashed or exaggerated. Nobody behaves that way. This inability to imagine a worldview different in any fundamental way from our own is at the root of the incomprehension that I mentioned at the beginning. But am I exaggerating? Is this just a romantic idealization? I would say this.

I would say that, of course, Faisal is a kind of embodiment of this value system, right? He took it all the way. And that obviously not everyone, including his officers, took it as seriously as he did. But as to whether this is just some idealization, I would say not really. Not really. But it’s not really whitewashing it either. There’s a dark side to all this, and we’re going to dig into that a little bit, because this is all part of a social system that arose in a specific environment to serve specific social needs. And like any social system, it’s got things that can be idealized, and it’s got a dark side.

These values are romantic to Westerners like Lawrence precisely because they seem to reflect something that we’ve lost in modern society. A lot of people like to say that nothing was lost because none of this honor stuff, none of it ever existed. It was all just stories. I don’t think so. Men like Lawrence didn’t think so. And that’s why they were so fascinated by what they found out in that desert. But the question is where that sense of loss comes from. Because that nostalgia, if you look at our literature, it seems ubiquitous in Western culture.

It has for a long time. Are we looking at something that we had, but then lost? Or are we just looking at something completely different and not developmentally related to our society at all? That’s the question I want to explore a little bit. And to start out, I want to start by trying to imagine a world that would create a person like Faisal. What would that world be like? What kind of world is a place where Faisal is well adapted to it? Is it a world that just creates better human beings?

Definitely not. If you go Google Faisal Paris Peace Conference and go over to the images that come up, you’re going to see a photo of Faisal standing on this wide flood of steps. Behind him are several Arab and English officials, including Lawrence. And in the very back of the group, to the right, in full Arab regalia, is the only black African in the group. That’s Faisal’s slave. The bodyguard who protected the Ottoman generals from death, those were also Faisal’s slaves. So he was a man of his time and place, and in that place, at that time, slavery was still a thing. So that’s not good.

That’s definitely not good. So we’re not talking about better human beings, just a different value system with different points of emphasis. So I’ll come back to the question. What kind of world would create the specific set of values with their light and dark that we see in someone like Faisal? The first thing to notice is that it resembles the value systems we find very often in traditional societies all over the world that have tribal, kinship-based social arrangements that are far away from the centers of state power and the trappings of urban civilization. But I’m not talking about some noble, savage, Rousseauian ideal where honest and innocent men were corrupted by the encroachment of civilization. Not at all. No, no, no.

Not at all. Society does not corrupt us in some simple one-way transaction or degradation of our original purity. Forget all that. What civilization does is relieve us of the burden of needing to be honest all the time. Now what am I talking about? What is this libertine reprobate talking about? I want to repeat what I said. Civilization relieves us of the burden of needing to be honest all the time.

Going back to the first episode of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, the first episode of Martyr Made, toward the end of it, I mentioned that typical scene from old western movies or stories. A scene so common that it’s become a pure cliché now where somebody is called a liar or they’re playing cards and someone’s called a cheater and the target of the insult, even if he’s the good guy in the story, will be ready to throw down over that. Even willing to fight with guns and kill the guy that insulted him if he has to. So we’re in the age of movies like Unforgiven and the HBO series Deadwood, right, where we’re busily deconstructing and mocking all this stuff. But for a long time, until very recently, people accepted that as the proper, if maybe a little overzealous, response to being called a liar. Up until very recently, Americans would watch a western and the good guy would get called a liar and kill the man who called him that name and people just watched that and thought, yeah, well, that’s the proper response to something like that. Maybe a little bit overzealous, but hey, he did call him a liar. What are you going to do?

What is that? Is it just an example of romanticizing violence or some overplayed macho bullshit? Maybe a little bit, but actually, no, not primarily. It’s something that Faisal would have recognized immediately. It’s that lost thing, that lost thing that so enchanted Lawrence. When you live in a place without strong institutions, personal relationships take their place. They have to. Actually, it would be better to switch that around.

It would be better to say that strong institutions, where they exist, replace reputation and relationships as social regulators. Let me break that down. Think of it like this. In a country with strong institutions, like the United States, a person at the bottom of the social hierarchy can go to the police or go to the courts to make a claim against someone higher up the social ladder who has more allies and is better known, has a big family, with a reasonable expectation of a fair hearing. I can hear everyone screaming the word inequality at me right now. Things are not perfect and there’s discrimination and there are people who use connections and have access to better legal counsel and so forth, but generally speaking, the people in a society like the U.S. expect to get a fair hearing. They expect that the institutions are going to mediate their dispute equitably.

Back in 2011, here’s an example. Back in 2011, a man was pulled off an airplane at an international airport in New York and arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. The man who was arrested was Dominique Strauss-Kahn. At the time, he was the head of the International Monetary Fund, a leading candidate for the presidency in France, millionaire, husband of a billionaire wife, so top of the food chain. The woman he was alleged to have assaulted was a hotel maid, an immigrant from the African nation of Guinea. However that case ended up, the case itself, there was a lot of funny business and many people continue to think that Strauss-Kahn may have been set up and so forth, but the point is that the police were not free to simply ignore the accusation because of the relative status of the accuser and the accused. I’m not saying there are no inequalities in the justice system. Of course there are.

The rich and powerful are always going to find ways to leverage their advantages. I’m just saying that the purpose of our institutions is to trim those advantages down. If you don’t believe that, all you have to do is ask yourself how things would look if there were no police and no courts at all. What would it look like? You don’t have to speculate about that. We know exactly what it would look like because we have more historical examples and even contemporary examples than we can count. We know what kind of social situation takes shape and this is a simplified version of Hobbes’ idea of a war of all against all. Instead of all against all, that is, instead of every individual against every individual, it’s more of a war of every group against every group.

And in that world, survival comes down to two things. First, make damn sure you’re part of a group. The most obvious and natural group is what? The family, right? Second, protect your reputation because it’s all you’ve got. On one level, protecting your reputation means making sure that everybody knows that your word and the word of your tribe is your bond. That’s what Lawrence was talking about, persons, not institutions. Remember, when there are no such thing as contracts and no courts to enforce them if there were, your ability and the ability of your tribe to get people to work with you, to procure the things you need to survive, it all depends on maintaining a certain reputation. Faisal’s Hashemite clan had the prestige that went along with being the custodians of Mecca and Medina, the holy cities, and of being descended from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad and so forth, some built-in prestige, say, but they weren’t kings. There was no state that existed of which they were the heads. When they raised their forces in rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, they weren’t ordering their army around. They were calling on their loyal allies to join them, but those allies were under no obligation to join them. Certainly no legal obligation. There were no laws, no courts, no police to manage any of this. Those allies were honor-bound to come to the aid of their pledged ally, but that was it. So in a tribal culture, your word and the word of your allies is all you’ve got.

For those of us in developed nations, it’s really hard to understand how important this is or what it would really be like. If you live here in Los Angeles, where I’m at, you can go down the street to Best Buy and plunk down a few scraps of dirty green paper with the president’s head on it and Best Buy will give you a brand new flat-screen TV right then and there. They’ll trade a TV for your dirty green paper even if every one of your friends and family all think that you’re just a dirtbag, horrible, evil liar. They don’t care. Best Buy does not care because your reputation does not matter to them. All that matters is the reputation of the institution that issued those green pieces of paper in your wallet. In this case, the U.S. government.

Even when your reputation does come into play, say on a credit application, the whole thing is part of this bureaucratic system with scores and official reports and step-by-step ways of repairing your credit and all that. Or if you steal from them. We have systems for that. Best Buy doesn’t send an assassin after you to send a message to everybody that this is what happens when you steal from us. No, they just fill out the appropriate paperwork and file an insurance report, call the police. It’s all standardized. It’s all institutionalized. It’s all perfectly, gloriously boring.

We take it for granted. We have no idea how lucky we are that things like this are boring. Imagine if you lived in a society where none of that existed. Where if you become branded as dishonorable and untrustworthy, even if it’s unjustified and libelous, you might not be able to work. You might not be able to marry. You might not be able to trade to procure your basic needs. Or even if you have something tangible to offer in exchange, in a society where reputation means everything, other people may still not want to risk associating themselves with you. Now that’s where we flip over the coin to reveal the dark side of all this.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Middle East and I’m always blown away by how polite and hospitable Arabs are. In an honor culture, a premium is placed on integrity and individuals go to great lengths to avoid giving offense to others. But it also becomes imperative to make sure that everyone knows that you’re not going to put up with even the slightest disrespect or insult. It’s that old West cliche again, right? One cowboy calls another cowboy a liar or a cheater and it’s not just a possibility, it’s expected that the one being insulted has to be ready to fight even to the death, right here, right now to defend his reputation. That’s not macho posturing. There’s a sociological purpose to it and it’s what we’re talking about here. When you can’t rely on institutions to mediate and regulate your name is all you have to stand on.

Surviving in an honor culture doesn’t mean you have to be violent but it does mean that you have to make it clear to everyone that you’re willing to take it there if you’re pushed. Under a state, the state claims a total monopoly on the use of force. Individuals agree to completely give up their right to retribution and to seek individual redress and self-help. They agree to submit all of their complaints to the state institutions for arbitration and judgment. Now, we’ve lived this way our whole lives, right? So we’re used to it, but it’s not hard to imagine why some people or most people, honestly, most tribal people that the western world has moved in on often resist this encroachment of the establishment of states. It takes such an act of trust that you almost can’t believe it ever happened at all. A good example of all this, a really good illustration of it, rather is in the Bible.

Some of the early books of the Hebrew Bible, or the Old Testament if you’re a Christian, basically records the process of a group of loose, kinship-based tribes trying to make this transition, make the jump into being an early state from a traditional society into a complex society. In the first book of Samuel, for example, the various Hebrew tribes are telling their leader Samuel that they want to have a king like all the other peoples around them. They want a king, and Samuel’s trying to tell them that they’re not going to like it you guys probably don’t want this, and once you step that way there’s no going back. He tries to tell them they should just stay the way they are things are better this way, but they insist, they want a king. And so Samuel has this little chat with God about the whole thing he says, they want a king, what should I do? God says, tell them they don’t want a king Samuel says they’re insisting, God says fine, they want a king they want to be like everyone else, let them have a king like everyone else go tell them. So Samuel goes down in front of the people and this is what the Bible says happens Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king he said, this will be the manner of the king who shall reign over you he will take your sons as his own and they will run in front of his chariots and be his horsemen some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties and others to plow up his ground and reap his harvest and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots this king will take your daughters to be his perfumers and cooks and bakers he will take the best of your fields, the best of your vineyards and olive groves and give them to his servants he will take a tenth of your grain and a tenth of your vintage and give it to his officials and his servants your male and female servants and the best of your cattle he will take for his own use and your asses he will put to his own work real quick, I don’t care what anyone says even if you’re a raging atheist you gotta love a millennia old book a millennia old holy book that has someone warning his people that if they choose a king, that king’s gonna take their asses and put them to work anyway, back to the book of Samuel he will take a tenth of your flocks and you yourselves will become his servants when that day comes you will cry out from relief for the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day but the people refused to listen to Samuel no, they said, we want a king to rule over us then we will be like all the other nations with a king to lead us and go out before us and fight our battles end quote now when they say king here, what they’re talking about is a state they want a state Samuel’s trying to tell his people that they’re gonna give up a lot of autonomy here it’s gone, there’s no getting it back but they’re seeing the people all around them with states and armies and they want to be able to level up and compete with those people and Samuel’s trying to tell them, it’s a trap, it’s a trap he’s trying to warn them that this king is gonna take away their sons and daughters that’s a very important part of that message and remember, this is being written after the fact so this is almost a lament of something that did happen he tells them that the king’s gonna take away their sons and daughters and press them into the service of the state and that’s exactly what happens in nearly every complex society in the last episode of Fear and Loathing I said that family loyalty and state institutions are naturally antagonistic when European explorers started coming across cultures in various stages of development we got to see this playing out in different ways and it often matched up with exactly what we saw in European societies when states were consolidating power in perfect examples, in places like Hawaii and Tahiti and also in Uganda actually the Buganda people we found societies that weren’t quite fully established states as we would think of like a hieratic state but that seemed to be on their way to becoming states they definitely weren’t kinship system, tribal, traditional societies they had a king but the noble families still held a lot of independent power and the fledgling state often did things that were clearly designed to break down clan loyalty you had a king, you had a fledgling state but out in the provinces you still had very powerful and independent clans and the fledgling state was doing things specifically designed to break down the clan tribal loyalties in many kingdoms we find the practice we even had this in European societies where you have the practice of honoring honoring noble families by having their eldest son the family heir basically to come be raised in the king’s court and it’s presented as an honor to have a noble clan leader’s heir raised at court close to the king and other noblemen with all the comforts of the king’s court but the purpose of a move like this is pretty clear to take the son, the heir of that clan out of whatever province his family controls away from all of the people that he would normally be around raising him to be loyal to the king and to the state and not to the people and place that he comes from there are a thousand other little moves that fledgling states make most of them are not as clear and obvious as this a lot of them are more subtle to break down family loyalty and replace it with loyalty to the king and the broader institutions that he represents the Hebrew people that Samuel was trying to talk out of choosing a king, they wanted that predictability and that security we were talking about earlier but Samuel’s trying to tell them, he’s trying to convince them that it’s not worth what they’re giving up because remember it’s not just the power of the government that can become oppressive it’s that life under a state is fundamentally different for individuals and for groups personal relationships erode in importance values change the importance of an idea like honor becomes entirely a matter of tradition and piety nothing more than a ceremonial or fashionable place in the society not a real sociological purpose to it and it’s not just our own society that waxes nostalgic about the days before contemporary society contemporary society ruined everything no no no, that’s a running theme in just about every civilization that you can think of the Roman Republic and then the Empire was always all about how the current generation whichever generation that meant at the time how the current generation never lived up to the example of the hardy pious Romans of the very early days and once the Hebrews and the Bible finally established their kingdom their story is basically one long record of what a terrible idea that was and when a good leader in one of these civilizations does come along he’s usually admired for how well he embodies the old long-lost virtues now there’s a reason that this is an almost universal golden age myth in civilization throughout history and all over the world it’s because they all have this sense that they gave something up maybe they don’t know what it is but there’s this idea that they lost something and something has been lost in most cases when Faisal asked Lawrence to endorse the promises of his government there was this huge disconnect because Faisal, he thought he was talking to Lawrence, the human being, when he was really talking to a captain in the British army Faisal was speaking for himself, Amir Faisal, son of Hussein, grandson of Ali, of the Hashemite clan a flesh and blood human being embedded in a particular social context where it mattered if he lied or if he spoke the truth he thought he was talking to a person in Lawrence but he wasn’t going back to the old west in the United States on the frontier, in an old west town you go down to the general store and you buy something from John Smith the owner of the store who lives down the road from you with his family today when I go to a corporate supermarket and buy something it doesn’t matter who I am or who the person behind the counter is taking my money, it doesn’t matter neither of us are specific people from certain families with personal histories, it doesn’t matter in a civilization every human interaction is decontextualized they aren’t meetings between two flesh and blood human beings, not really it’s more like in every human interaction people just slide in and out of roles according to the need of the moment in a traditional society, for example, a marriage, every marriage is an event of great importance to two families and to a whole community it matters very much who the two people are and what the circumstances of their marriage are, it matters in our society it’s just a matter of contract law, it doesn’t really matter at all who the two people are or why they’re getting married it’s just a legal arrangement, you can swap out the names and nothing would be different I said in the last episode that existentialist philosophy and talk about alienation begins as a society passes from agrarian and herding arrangements to urban civilization and that’s not a coincidence, things change and this is part of the organic process of a society’s development, there’s nothing in my opinion that can be done to stop it but in most societies, after they’ve got their state, they look back and they feel like they gave up something important but don’t get me wrong, it’s not just the values something changes in your relationship to power as well something changes when you’re under the power of a state sure, you can go to the state institutions to complain if somebody harms you but the thing is, it’s not just that you can go to the state institutions, now you have to go to the state institutions if someone attacks your sister, you might want to tear that guy’s head off and normally you would do that, but now you can’t now you have to go to the police and if it turns out that your sister’s attacker has a cousin at the police department or if he slipped by because the cops didn’t read him his rights or whatever well, you’re just going to have to live with that and again, there’s a lot of trust involved here, right? you have to trust all over the world today, we see failed or failing states the vast majority of them, the main obstacle is trying to figure out how to make that leap of faith and establish that mutual trust that the institutions are going to do their job and work as advertised regardless of who’s controlling them we basically more or less generally believe that in the United States you go to a place like Afghanistan or Somalia the main reason they can’t get it going is because they can’t get past that obstacle I mean, hell, go to a place like Ukraine and that’s their problem right now one group takes power and they are entirely pro-Russia and so the other half of the country is angry at that then the other group takes power and they are entirely pro-European Union and the Russian side gets angry and they just switch off and both sides try to undo everything that the last side did consolidate power, make it so that the other side can’t take back over it’s just this back and forth battle we completely take it for granted in the United States but we have had dozens of transitions of presidential power administration to administration to administration some of those transitions were bitterly contested the 2000 election, George Bush and Al Gore you still have tons of people today that say George Bush shouldn’t have won that election it went to the Supreme Court, it was a corrupt process and all that but regardless of that, not once every single one of them has gone through peacefully Al Gore didn’t go get together all his people in the Democratic Party and raise a rebellion against George Bush to take the presidency no, the institutions work and we transition peacefully it’s incredible that we have done that dozens of times now without having any major incidents but actually you don’t even have to look at failed or failing states to see this at work you can see it at work right here we have some of this same dynamic in developed countries like the United States in subcultures that have less of a positive relationship say with the institutions of state power if you look at the criminal underworld, any criminal underworld or if you look at the drug game in the US for example you see that same old west attitude where people can get killed over the slightest sign of disrespect I mean half of gangster rap and that whole aesthetic is about letting everyone know two things that you’re ready to throw down at the drop of a hat and that you’ve got a whole stable of loyal allies who are ready to throw down with you and stand with you this isn’t just some random appropriation of an old value system this is the social system that always emerges in a situation where you don’t have a secure relationship to state institutions in America’s inner cities in America’s inner cities you’ve got whole populations of people who whatever the reality of the situation I’m sure it varies from place to place and city to city whatever the reality is don’t feel like the state institutions are there to serve them that they don’t work for them they feel disenfranchised the state apparatus exists but although they live inside the borders of the United States a lot of these people have traditionally been on the outside of that state in important ways they’re in the borders but outside the state in many ways we have to remember something important about states and this is something that can really easily get lost when you live in a place like the United States if you live in the US and you look up at the map of the United States you see the outline of the country including Alaska and Hawaii and we think of the state the state government and so forth as being coextensive with the lines on that map there’s no spot anywhere within that shape that we call the United States that isn’t under the full control of the state you can hide you can slip between the cracks but you can’t defy the state and carve out your little fiefdom you can’t do it if you live up in an empty region of Montana and you get all your friends together you get all your resources guys who know how to shoot a gun, know how to fight and you just decide that you’re not going to follow the laws in your town or in your county you know what’s going to happen in the US?

first the sheriff’s going to show up but maybe the sheriff doesn’t have the resources to fight with you and you can fight off the sheriff you think you win? You don’t win no, eventually the state police show up and maybe you have the firepower to fight them off and we will take it all the way to the air force and the US marines if we have to but we will go to full blown civil war and drain the whole US treasury before we let you win there is never a point at which we will just sort of shrug our shoulders and say, well, nothing we can do, I guess he’s got us no, we’ll go to civil war before we let that happen this doesn’t mean you can’t carve out a little area of control I’m sure things like that exist in different places but the point is you have to stay off the radar of state power even if they know that you’re there you have to stay off their radar it doesn’t matter who you are street gangs, militias, the mafia if you get the state’s attention if it becomes a matter of open defiance, you’re done so we’re used to looking at states with the borders we see on a world map but usually it’s better to think of states another way it’s important to remember that throughout history and in many places still even today that’s not how state power works at all most of the time it’s better to think of state power like a magnet or like a series of magnets centered in the cities and military garrisons exercising strong control near the center but then kind of shading off and weakening as you get further away from those centers of state power large populations, like the large populations of cities can only be supported in fertile areas with plenty of food, plenty of resources and so all throughout history what we see is river valleys and trade crossroads, places like that coming under the control of states that’s where cities crop up and states control those areas and cities are pushed out to the hills and deserts and that’s where we see tribal dynamics and more traditional groups flourishing in areas where there aren’t enough resources to support large populations and so they become kind of uninteresting to states in the first place and where populations are more isolated and spread out so it just becomes inefficient resource-wise for the states to put forth the effort to dominate them you see these regions by the way they’re within the borders of modern states it can be really deceiving look at a place like Iran Iran’s a pretty developed modern state in many ways but there are whole regions up on the Iranian plateau or around the Baluchistan border region with Pakistan where nomadic tribes live simple lives with almost total autonomy it can be very deceiving because they’re within a country and in most ways they don’t really belong to that country they live autonomously only occasionally making contact with any signs or representatives of state power most importantly though even though these people fall inside the borders of modern nation states they very much consider the governments of those states to be essentially foreign powers they retain all of their tribal dynamics and power structures and consider the governments of whatever state they happen to fall in as a sort of foreign power they identify fully with their tribe and when they have dealings with the representatives of the state they experience it as something like meeting with a foreign dignitary it’s hard for us to imagine that but that’s really how it is in a very literal way the states are very powerful and they have armies most tribes know this so they have to respect that power and sometimes they try to ally with it or use that power in their own tribal lives or disputes but they don’t identify with it now think about this much closer to home we see the same phenomenon in Mexico today we all know the shape of Mexico on the map but that’s not really Mexico you can’t influence fading the farther you get from each magnet and where those magnetic fields don’t overlap or where they’re interrupted by mountain ranges or deserts you can’t really call that Mexico in anything but a geographic sense politically it doesn’t make a lot of sense to call it Mexico in the US that group of special forces guys in Montana they would never reach a point where they win where the state apparatus just shrugged its shoulders and said there’s nothing to be done in Mexico this is exactly what happens for whole swaths of territory there are whole regions that are under the control of the cartels who when the government forces come around they don’t hide from the government they reach for their guns so coming back to the US and other developed societies and some of the subcultures think of it like this if you’re an African American in one of our inner cities very often the extent of your direct experience with the state probably consists of getting your head cracked by the cops that come prowling through your neighborhood in a car with a shotgun across the dashboard they don’t really have a relationship to the state or any level of familiarity with the apparatus in the way that other people might be able to and if you’re talking about drug culture specifically that underground then you’re talking about a situation where you literally cannot use the state institutions to mediate your relationships you can’t go to a notary and sign a contract for a drug deal you can’t go to the cops if someone jacks you and even if you could when you feel disenfranchised you probably wouldn’t it’s like Tony Montana said in Scarface what do you got? all I’ve got is my balls and my word now he’s not just being a tough guy here his balls and his word really are all he has in a situation where he cannot appeal to a higher authority for conflict resolution so anyway, coming around to bring these two ideas together the idea about state power being like a series of magnets and the subcultures in the US the next step is to realize that the state is not one thing the very word state makes it sound like the most solid permanent thing there is but really the state is a series of institutions layered institutions working together to manage a series of tasks and relationships and each of these layered institutions is like its own series of magnets and they all have different levels of coverage you have the state’s instruments of violence like the police, the prisons, the national guard, the army and so forth and their reach and resources are pretty much infinite for all intents and purposes if you’re a citizen of the United States if you’re an inner city dealer you’re very familiar with this aspect of the state there are no gaps in the magnetic fields if you were to draw a map of the practical coverage of the state’s instruments of violence it would look the same as the map of the US but then there are countless other layers other institutional layers that don’t have nearly the same penetration think of if you’re an upper middle class family in the suburbs and you have a dispute with someone well, we have a state institution for that you can get a lawyer and take it to court and submit your case to the state for arbitration if you don’t like it, appeal the judgment, whatever if you are a poor African American in West Baltimore living in a row house you can theoretically do all of those things but in reality if you were to draw a map of the practical real world coverage of this aspect of the state in terms of whether the people can in real life access it and relate to it you would see blank spots all over the place from the days before we explored the globe does that make sense? the state’s institutions of violence cover every square inch of our territory but there are gaps in the overlapping magnetic fields from many of the other state institutions you’ve probably heard a common cliche that gets tossed around a lot that the family is the basic building block of society it’s helpful for me to think about a society not as being a structure an edifice built up out of solid blocks as the sum or the aggregation of all these little solid family blocks but instead think of it as a series of interlocking networks that’s how I think of a society a series of interlocking networks through which individual people interact with each other in different ways what I mean is the family can live off by itself like Little House on the Prairie and not really be a means by which an individual interfaces with society even in modern cities actually if you think of a modern city in the United States the family doesn’t really serve that role it doesn’t really serve as a sort of port that I can jack into to plug into the broader society we visit families for holidays we see the family as one of the meaningful ways that we interface with the society it’s like those visits and phone calls with the family it’s like their social cul-de-sacs you go to interact with your family and it’s sort of a good in itself but it’s not an outlet to the broader social world I guess what I’m trying to say is in very few instances is your status as a son or a brother or a grandfather or a grandmother aunt or uncle or something like that in very few instances is that going to be the decisive role that you wear in a given social context very few instances where you’re going to be out acting in the broader society and your status as son or grandfather is going to be something that matters the role you’re playing in a given context very very rarely and this is not the case in a traditional society that’s based on the kinship system by the way in a tribal kinship based society the fact that you are grandfather or that you are cousin or second cousin relative to someone else or uncle or whatever that is the decisive factor it determines your whole role in the society your duties and responsibilities and other people’s obligations to you and so forth it’s the decisive factor that is how you interface with the society it’s through the medium of your family well if I’m not interfacing with the society through that medium how am I interfacing with it? the answer is several different ways through several different networked institutions and I plug into that network through the medium of the Federal Reserve or another financial institution if I’m using currency or a credit card or something in other words I am interacting with another person or another group of people and who they are and who I am in this particular interaction is being defined by the institution that is mediating our exchange I’ll have another interaction where I’m an employer or I’m an employee and those are roles that you can put on and take off and there are institutions to mediate your relationships there in another context I am a health insurance customer or in another context I’m a member of a political party and so I hope this is making sense but this is where I’m going with all this the state is not the buildings and the offices and the titles and any of that the state is the network of institutions that mediate and standardize the relationships and exchanges between individuals I want to repeat that one more time the state is the network of institutions that mediate and standardize the relationships and exchanges between individuals and someone might object that it’s not just the state that many of the institutions that we jack into are private institutions and that’s true, it’s not just the government but even those private institutions can only exist under the power of a state a financial institution needs a state to mediate disputes and issue currency when it comes down to it and I’m talking to anyone out there calling yourself an anarchist your important choices come down not to oppression or freedom but to institutions or gangs those are your choices nothing we would call freedom has ever existed except under the domination and control of a state ever and true, independent tribes have certain liberties that people under states give up I want you to think about freedom even of a man’s life in most cases in Pashtun Waziristan today and get back to me about how free it is the groups have freedom as groups but it often comes at a greater cost to individual liberty than any states require because individuals can’t survive on their own you have to have a group usually your family to back you against other groups it’s like they say in prison you gotta find a gang so even though you’re theoretically free to do whatever you want there are no laws or police to tell you you can’t you’re theoretically free to do whatever you want groups tend to police individual behavior internally they police individual internal behavior fiercely and they have to if there’s a possibility that my whole tribe is going to get sucked into a multi-generational blood feud because my loose cannon cousin tries to sleep with the daughter of some tribal leader I’m going to make damn sure that my loose cannon cousin gets tightened up real quick and that girl’s father is probably going to make sure that his daughter stays indoors because she has to go on when she has to go outside in Homer’s Iliad the Achaeans go to war and destroy the city of Troy because a prince of Troy ran off with the Spartan king Menelaus’ wife Helen a whole city and people was destroyed to avenge that insult well if Helen had been in a burka that probably wouldn’t have happened the classical Greeks actually seem to have taken that lesson from the Iliad by the way I don’t know how much you’ve read about it you read about how the Athenians were with their wives and it’s not an exaggeration, it would make the Taliban proud that’s not an exaggeration I don’t know how the enlightened Greeks get off the hook for that by the way now look, I’m not saying any of this is good definitely not, I’m definitely not saying it’s good I’m just saying that it had a sociological purpose it had a sociological purpose that had nothing to do with religion by the way and everything to do with the group anarchy of a tribal system so generally speaking groups give up their autonomy under states but unless you’re one of the most powerful members of the most powerful tribe individuals usually experience more freedom more freedom under state power you know what though actually let’s talk about religion for a second very quickly because I know a lot of people out there are going to have strong opinions one way or the other about what I just said I’ll stick with things most people today associate with the Islamic world because that’s kind of what we’re talking about most people think about the sequestration of women or female dress codes like the burka in the Muslim religion or to take the most extreme example they consider something like honor killing where a girl is killed by her family members because of some real or imagined unapproved sexual relationship to be about the Muslim religion or at least about religion since honor killings occasionally happen in other groups as well other religious groups occasionally but all of these things existed before Islam ever came around the prophet Muhammad didn’t invent the burka he didn’t invent honor killing or any of that these behaviors existed before it came around they’re rooted in tribal social arrangements where as ugly as they are and believe me they’re as ugly to me as anybody they had a purpose at one time it’s not a justification to say that something has a purpose and I’m not interested in having pointless conversations it’s not about that see very often even the most oppressive laws laid down by a new religion are a moral step forward at the time and that’s something that’s really hard for a lot of people to grasp we see it out of context today and all we see is the oppression people will point out some rule in the bible say like how if a man rapes a woman then all that man has to do is take her as a wife and pay her family some fixed amount of money people bring that up as evidence of how the bible is endorsing evil patriarchal values and it’s hard to argue with that line of reasoning it says right there you can do whatever you want to a woman as long as you have 50 pieces of silver to give her father it sounds pretty obviously horrible until you realize the reason that a rule like this comes about I mean what do you want thinking back to that time what do you want you want the rapist to go to prison who’s going to arrest him there are no cops who’s going to sentence him there are no courts there are no judges there are no prisons so if you want him to be killed then ok great because that’s what would have happened before this rule you are honor bound to avenge your sister and go kill him but it doesn’t end there it’s not over it doesn’t matter that you had a good reason now the family of your victim is honor bound to kill you and your brothers they have to avenge their family member so they call on their allies to get ready to fight and it steps up one level once you and your brothers are all killed your tribe is honor bound to avenge you all you see how this goes this is how the Starks and the Lannisters end up fighting each other and the seven kingdoms get torn to shreds the 50 pieces of silver rule looks horrible to us we have experiences with institutions but when it was written at the time it was a first step it was an attempt by these people in the absence of all that it was an attempt by these people to get together and come to some kind of an arrangement where there were commonly agreed upon penalties for violations so that they could stop getting into these full-fledged multi-generational blood feuds every time a crime happens at the time it was a step forward it was an attempt to answer a pressing social question in the absence of established social institutions now coming back to states I said earlier I want to come back to something because I can hear people choking on whatever it is they’re eating even though I’m in the past and inside my own house right now I said earlier that individuals often had more freedom under states and I should qualify that it’s probably important to say that individual experiences may vary obviously some states are tougher to live under than others for most of human history states were undisguised mechanisms of oppression and exploitation but while modern states vary in the degree of coercion that they apply you cannot coerce all of the people all of the time so those institutions they depend first and foremost on some level of common agreement without those agreements there is no state or at least no legitimacy that you have as force and you can only push that so far and those agreements they depend more than anything on trust I keep coming back to that same thing they depend on trust people have to be able to trust each other and I should say very quickly that these are just models it’s a way of thinking about things that helps me understand certain ideas and certain behaviors and dynamics so again, don’t mistake the map for the territory it just helps me to think of a society not as a structure built out of individual blocks but as the series of networks which allow individuals to regulate their interactions with each other and by the way, societies come apart because they are unable to find network jacks that they can kind of plug into that’s something that we need to keep in mind in our developed societies today you can have all the state apparatus you want but when too many people find themselves in those little blank spots those areas with no coverage find that they can’t access the broader society through the state institutions the critical thing to keep in mind is that all those different networks have different areas of coverage different areas of participation now there are many, many places all over the world and even in developed societies where if two people have a dispute they don’t have access to the state institutions if two people have a dispute, they’re not going to court they’re fighting over it again, he would have put it differently he wouldn’t have said my balls and my word but Faisal would have understood that perfectly he lived in a world where your balls and your word mattered a lot of people in modern society today look back or look forward, if you’re watching The Walking Dead to a time when that mattered more than it does today they look back on it with some nostalgia because today, nobody cares if you have balls and if the financial crisis in 2008 taught us anything it taught us that worrying about your word is for suckers you can be a cowardly, dishonorable dirtbag and you could end up with your own private island and a whole society that treats you like a king because your personal honor really doesn’t mean anything it doesn’t we have a few sensitive points here and there we have a point where most people just expect that their politicians are lying to them, for example we expect that, and it doesn’t hurt our politicians at all you think they care at all? do you think they care at all that you think they’re dishonest when they’re clinking champagne glasses at some thousand dollar a plate fundraiser I assure you, they do not give a shit but this was not the world that Faisal lived in in Faisal’s world the dearth of legitimate institutions meant that personal relationships and reputation and honor these things were still paramount this is actually a good way to think about it just ask yourself why anyone was following Faisal’s Hashemite clan in the first place back then I’m going to speak a lot more to this point in the next episode because it’s going to become very, very important to understanding the situation in Palestine and really in the whole Muslim world in the 20th century to be honest with you so we’re going to get deep into that in the next episode but I’m going to crop it a little bit here real quick actually, I want to make very clear that I’m not pretending to exhaust all of the ins and outs of tribal dynamics or honor cultures or the inherent difficulties of establishing states or national institutions with this talk with way more horsepower than mine to these questions I’m just barely scratching the surface and offering some random thoughts that came to mind as I was working on these previous two episodes so if you have more thoughts on it I’d love to hear them and actually if you have anything that you’d like me to explore and talk about email me that too, I’ll put out another one of these supplemental episodes with any questions that people might have so I mentioned that Faisal’s clan were the custodians of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and that they were descended from the Quraysh tribe of the prophet Muhammad so their position is derived from a very interesting combination of political and religious authority and there’s a very specific sociological reason for this in the traditional tribal cultures of the Muslim world religious figures have always filled a very unique and important sociological niche so when there are no strong and legitimate states that hold a monopoly on violence and retain to themselves the final authority to render and enforce judgments groups have no choice but to resort to what anthropologists who study this kind of thing who study tribal cultures call self-help now this has nothing to do with positive thinking or morning yoga routines it just means that if you have a dispute with someone it is on you to solve it if someone kills your brother and there are no police, no courts to arrest this guy or sentence this murderer the only way justice will be done is if you do it yourself, if you go and avenge your brother yourself and since the killer probably has a family and a clan and a tribe who will be honor bound to avenge him if you get to him for murdering your brother you can very easily get into this back and forth cycle reprisal after reprisal that we mentioned earlier and unless one side is wiped out a blood feud can eventually pull in these vast super tribes that are allied to both sides and go on for years and years or even generations unless the two sides can somehow agree to terms and so very often a mediator is called in to negotiate an end to the dispute and very often it’s in the interest of everybody who is not directly involved in it to get a dispute negotiated now since the families are all nested into larger lineage structures the mediator is often a common respected relative so if you think of the tribal structure as like one of those Russian eggs that each contains a smaller egg think of it like a gigantic family tree tumbling down from a single ancestor into more and more granular families through the generations the mediator will often come from someone on the same branch who doesn’t have a preferred relationship to one side or the other so if you have a dispute with your brother your father or your uncle can serve as a mediator but if you have a dispute with a cousin your father or your uncle is not going to work because they’re not going to be impartial so you have to go up another level and maybe have your grandfather or another one of your unrelated uncles perform the function see the thing is neither side is bound to accept any of the decisions or terms that the mediator suggests remember this is all voluntary there are no state institutions, no courts there are no laws there’s no law saying that you have to listen to this guy and the decisions he hands down are not legal judgments if you don’t like the mediator’s suggestion it’s all voluntary so the mediator has got to be someone who is so widely respected whose honor is so unquestionable who is so widely regarded that the two sides in the dispute feel compelled to put in an effort or else they’re going to risk losing face he’s somebody with so much honor that all the people around if you can’t come to an agreement with him as your mediator that’s if you’re the problem so successfully mediating disputes is one of the most powerful ways to gain a reputation, to gain honor in a culture like this and the larger your reputation the more gravitas you’re going to bring to future arbitrations and there’s a leftover recognition of this whole dynamic even in the American system by the way we still call a judge your honor in a culture where these informal arbiters don’t have any institutional backing an American judge has institutions behind him where there are no institutions their power to force both sides to the table and mediate disputes comes from their reputation alone so that all works fine when the feud is between two families with the same great grandfather but what do you do when two whole tribes with no common lineage or overriding authority that doesn’t exist, they have no common lineage to bring them to the table or what do you do when the tribes of a region who are all theoretically equal and free need to deal with national governments when those situations I’ll let a British anthropologist William Lancaster describe it he spent decades studying the Rwalla Bedouin tribe spread out to the east of Palestine he uses an Arabic term Ibn Am which is basically just an extended family with a common ancestor between 3 and 5 generations back so it’s a branch of the family tree and he uses the term Ibn Am that’s what it means here and he writes quote any ordinary tribesman mediates within his own 3 or 5 generation Ibn Am or if he is well known between other Ibn Ams he can never mediate on a larger scale because his reputation range is limited and because there are no larger groups to mediate between until the level of the tribe this is the job of the Sheikh as well as acting as mediators at Ibn Am level for themselves and others the Amir and the Sheikh are mediators on behalf of the tribe or with national governments end quote so when the first world war brought about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the Arab forces faced a choice they could just allow that state authority to recede back into Turkey and go back to enjoying the freedom of tribal life but they knew that once the Ottoman Empire was gone that wouldn’t be the end of it they knew they were going to have to contend with other states including the European colonial empires who could bring resources to bear that no collection of independent tribes could resist or compete with if they hoped to have any chance of keeping their independence now that the Ottoman Empire was gone they were going to have to give some of it up by creating and submitting to a state of their own but who? who could possibly be trusted to lead this state without just making it into an instrument of domination for the benefit of his tribe see the balanced opposition of tribes that balanced opposition of tribes had been thrown completely out of whack with the introduction of the possibility of centralized states suddenly the battle for power became a win or take all affair there was no balanced opposition in a region with several independent tribes each tribe can always draw a line in the sand to let everyone else know where they had better back up or be ready to throw down and if other tribes grow too powerful you can always pack up and move a little bit further away power was reflected in a series of fluid relationships and shifting alliances tribes were always moving around it sounds like chaos to have a bunch of tribes using deterrence to manage their relationships to each other and I guess it kind of is but it’s a sort of structured anarchy with built in limitations on how much of an upper hand one tribe can gain on all the others but when you’re talking about states now you have a single institution that asserts a total monopoly on power at least within that territory there is no balanced opposition anymore if one tribe or one confederacy of tribes is able to take control of the state machinery even if it’s by perfectly legitimate institutional means suddenly that tribe has tax revenues armies, police forces if they not only don’t have the power to retaliate and protect themselves now it becomes illegal to protect yourself retaliating against the dominant tribe now it becomes treason there was no such thing as treason or sedition in a traditional tribal arrangement so the big tribes in the middle east after the war was over they were scratching and clawing and doing anything they could to keep any upper hand as centralized states were coming into power and this rendered them totally unable to work together and it left the Arabs with no credible leaders who could be countered on to represent the whole group if they were put in charge throughout history religious leaders have often stepped into this credibility vacuum in the middle east in the absence of any neutral parties the communities often turn to a respected religious leader to serve as a mediator or to be the voice of the people to an outside national power now of course the religious leaders are people with interests of their own but theoretically at least and often at least to a degree in reality the system worked because there was a value system that reinforced it and helped it work like I said this was such a vital sociological necessity that successfully arbitrating a dispute and getting a reputation as an impartial mediator was one of the single most powerful ways to become a prominent influential person that was able to call on others anytime you needed them and so there’s this whole shared value system built around incentivizing this kind of honorable behavior and Faisal’s decision to protect those two Ottoman generals and to protect his honor by attaching that note all of that has to be understood in this context his personal honor famously firm even in the most extreme situations that was the key to the entire Arab national project Faisal’s personal honor because it made him into someone that all the independent tribes of Levant could trust to be the leader of their new state this is why they continued to follow him by the way even when they didn’t agree necessarily with the decisions he was making regarding the Zionists and the French whatever they thought about his decisions they all knew that no one else had the kind of reputation that would allow them to step up and replace Faisal as the leader of an independent Arab state he was the linchpin of the alliance no one else could fill that role because he commanded the respect that would allow the other tribes to trust their impartiality there’s so much more to talk about on this subject and again I’m not going to pretend to be getting anywhere near the bottom of it in an hour what I wanted to do in this little supplemental was hopefully just begin to answer a few of the questions and bridge a few really common cultural misunderstandings that have plagued questions involving the Middle East right up to the present day there’s this Arab proverb that goes I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin me, my brother and my cousin against the world in the Arab world where large deserts and inhospitable terrain made it a poor and inefficient use of resources like we talked about, for states to try to dominate to spend the time trying to dominate every inch of the territory they claimed and where it was difficult for large permanent settlements to take root anywhere away from the coast or the river valleys these malleable tribal relationships persisted and actually continue to persist in many places even today in the 20th century, beginning before the first world war the Arabs began to construct political institutions that might have one day created the conditions that would have allowed people to move beyond tribes and embrace national identities centered around legitimate political entities anyone today with a television set or a twitter feed knows that that didn’t happen the proximate causes for that failure differ in each region or country but in every case, at least a portion of the blame can be laid at the feet of the outside powers who actively undermine any attempts to unite under secular identities you’ll hear writers like Edward Said he wrote the book Orientalism where he kind of lays out this view you’ll hear writers like him say that all this talk about tribalism or any other generalities he calls it Orientalism he says that the failure of Arab peoples to establish secular national states is entirely due to western exploitation but that takes it way too far by the way they exploited internal divisions and took advantage of tribal dynamics yes, but those weaknesses had to exist in order to be exploited and so the question is if you’re in a society that finds itself being exploited and colonized by outside powers and every attempt to find common political ground on which to construct political institutions to face the threat is undermined what do you do? what happens?

do you just give up? just agree to keep fighting amongst yourselves and being colonized and exploited forever? what do you do? what happens? well I’ll tell you what did happen starting after the first world war western powers moved into Arab lands took control and installed leaders and political institutions that were never going to enjoy political legitimacy I mean most of them were designed so that they would never enjoy popular legitimacy the support of the majority of the people they were designed that way that’s why the French put Shiites in control of the majority Sunni country of Syria that’s why the British put Sunnis in control of the majority Shiite country of Iraq and so forth think of it like this what are you supposed to do if you’re a part of the oppressed Shiite majority are you just supposed to be a proud Iraqi and a proud follower of Saddam Hussein probably not right you’re a second class citizen who is excluded from participating in the society and in the state institutions in any meaningful way national identity is not really an option that you have and so if national identity is out of the question as a rallying point you can take the communist route and turn it into a class identity instead of national identity we know how that turned out that’s a great way to end up in one of Saddam Hussein’s torture centers probably with an American CIA operator watching the proceedings so that’s out of the question so what then if you’re being exploited and humiliated and colonized by outside powers the only hope you have of changing that situation is finding some way any way to unite so that you can meet other nation states on an even playing field so when the usual secular political identities are all illegitimate what are you going to do you’re going to find something else and in the Middle East that something else has been religion 100 years into this process and 14 years into the war on terror we’re used to hearing that there’s something especially fanatical about Islam something inherent in that religion that prevents the separation of politics and religion and people will go find passages in the Quran and so forth to back that up in the next episode we’re going to start to see why that’s nonsense that is total nonsense there’s nothing special about Islam in this regard every Christian in Europe a few centuries ago would have considered it just as impossible to be separated as any member of the Islamic State does today go back five or six centuries to Spain or France and tell anybody you find that politics and religion should be totally separate realms and see what happens to you okay they would have considered impossible religions become the identity of choice in the Islamic world because it is the only feasible legitimate rallying point in a part of the world where outside forces have made every effort to poison all the other options often these outside powers have gone so far as to fund and support religious extremists specifically to counter any secular nationalist movements we’ve done this over and over again in the next episode we’re going to see how this process began in Palestine and how it helped set the terms of the Arab-Israeli conflict up to today and through that story we’ll also see how it shaped Palestinian and Arab identities and created the conditions now for a civilizational conflict but I’ll save all that for the next episode of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem the next narrative episode give me two three weeks at most and I’ll have it out for you I’ve put it out there now so now I’m on a deadline if I don’t have it out by then you can hold me to account if you have any questions by the way or any disputes with anything I’ve said feel free to hit me up shoot me an email go to the website and leave a comment if there’s something that you want me to dig into and research or if there are questions you have you want another supplemental episode I’d love to hear it at the end of each one of these by the way at the end of each series I’m thinking of doing maybe a question and answer so that I’ll open up the floor and if anybody has questions about anything that we covered in the story I might do like a good hour or two hour whatever episode where we really dig into some of the questions that come up more frequently so if you have any questions hit me up on Facebook or Twitter or on the website and I’ll definitely get to them and get back to you one way or another if it’s not on the podcast it’ll be back with an email so feel free open door policy I’ll see you next time

Episode 4

Summary

Transcript

The people will always remember it. No, they will forget. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist.

Episode 4 AI Summary

Here is a summary of the main points and ideas from the given text, along with a table of the key events mentioned:

The text discusses the story of Jacob Israel DeHaan, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi who moved to Palestine in 1919 as an ardent Zionist. However, he quickly became disillusioned with the Zionist movement’s treatment of local Arabs and Orthodox Jews. Key points:

DeHaan was a homosexual poet and writer from Amsterdam, one of the few non-Eastern European Zionists in Palestine at the time
After witnessing the poor conditions of Jews in Russia in 1912, he became a passionate Zionist
Once in Palestine, he was alarmed by Zionist mistreatment of Arabs and Orthodox Jews
He began meeting with Arab leaders and trying to negotiate agreements on behalf of religious Jews
In 1924, DeHaan was assassinated by a Zionist militia officer on orders of Zionist leaders for being a “traitor” to the movement
The Zionist movement was changing, with leaders like David Ben-Gurion taking a harder line than Chaim Weizmann
Many of the Zionists streaming into Palestine were young, single men - revolutionaries choosing Zionism over communism

The author argues these Zionists were “cut from the same cloth” as those in other revolutionary movements, unafraid of confrontation, and knew little about the realities in Palestine.

Event	Thoughts
DeHaan moves to Palestine as a Zionist in 1919	Arrives full of enthusiasm for Zionist project
DeHaan becomes disillusioned with Zionist treatment of Arabs and Orthodox Jews	Begins speaking out against Zionists, meeting with Arab leaders
DeHaan assassinated by Zionist militia in 1924	Considered first Zionist political assassination, ordered by Zionist leaders for being a “traitor”
Zionist movement leadership shifts to harder line figures like Ben-Gurion	Reflected approach of Zionists on the ground in Palestine, more “in-your-face” than Weizmann
Young, single male Zionists stream into Palestine from Russian Empire	Revolutionaries choosing Zionism over communism, unafraid of confrontation, little knowledge of realities on the ground

The text provides insight into early divisions within Zionism and the movement’s shift to a more aggressive, uncompromising approach in the 1920s under new leadership. DeHaan’s story illustrates the fate met by some dissenters during this period.

Citations:
[1] https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/7742445/fe02581a-4624-493f-baa3-c10889162200/Martyrmade-Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem pages 123 - 196.pdf

Episode 5

Summary

European Conquest of the Ottoman Empire: Europeans dismantled the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire, leading to the establishment of the League of Nations’ mandate system.
Syrian General Congress: Arabs in the Levant convened the Syrian General Congress to express their desire for independence and opposition to mandatory powers, particularly France.
Mandate Preferences: The Congress preferred the United States as the mandatory power, with Britain as a second choice, and strongly opposed French control.
Zionist-Arab Tensions: The Zionists viewed the 1929 riots as another pogrom, leading them to prepare for war rather than compromise with the Arabs.
Arab Perspective on 1929 Riots: The Arab population saw the riots as a response to Zionist encroachment and the loss of their land and rights.
Historical Context: The narrative emphasizes the continuous cycle of violence and the lack of strong institutions or leadership to mediate conflicts.
Empathy and Understanding: The speaker stresses the importance of understanding the perspectives and actions of both sides in the conflict.
Impact of Nationalism: The rise of nationalism in Europe and the Middle East significantly influenced the dynamics between Jews and Arabs.
Economic and Social Changes: The influx of Zionist immigrants and the resulting economic changes in cities like Haifa exacerbated tensions.
Historical Grievances: Long-standing grievances, such as the massacre at Jaffa by Napoleon, continued to influence Arab attitudes towards European powers and Zionists.
Ottoman Reforms and Resistance: The Ottoman Empire’s attempts at modernization and control, such as the Hejaz Railway, faced resistance and contributed to the changing dynamics in Palestine.
Jewish Emigration: The pogroms in the Russian Empire led to significant Jewish emigration to the United States and other countries, with some choosing to move to Palestine.
Zionist Determination: The Zionists were determined to establish a Jewish state and were unwilling to compromise, leading to increased preparations for conflict.
Arab Leadership and Resistance: Figures like Izz ad-Din al-Qassam emerged as leaders of Arab resistance against Zionism and European colonialism.

Timeline

1799: Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and Palestine, including the massacre at Jaffa.
1881-1914: Significant Jewish emigration from the Russian Empire due to pogroms.
1911: Italy’s invasion of Libya, highlighting the Ottoman Empire’s weakening control.
1914-1918: World War I, leading to the defeat and eventual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.
1919: Paris Peace Conference and the establishment of the League of Nations’ mandate system.
1919-1920: Syrian General Congress convenes to express Arab desires for independence.
1924-1925: Izz ad-Din al-Qassam works as an official for the Grand Mufti Supreme Muslim Council in British Mandate Palestine.
1929: Riots in Palestine, marking a significant escalation in Zionist-Arab tensions.
1930s: Continued Zionist immigration and preparations for conflict, with increasing tensions and violence in Palestine.

Citations:
[1] https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/7742445/651c2bfb-6313-40c3-a1be-81d48c5ede2d/paste.txt
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/law-and-practice-of-international-territorial-administration/mandate-system-of-the-league-of-nations/1D6E45373D241F153CA50E55BE69638D
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations_mandate
[4] https://edwardwimberley.com/courses/10580/ottoman.pdf
[5] https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-fall-of-the-ottoman-empire-1914-wwi.html
[6] https://www.ungeneva.org/en/about/league-of-nations/overview
[7] https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/resolution-syrian-general-congress-damascus
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Ottoman_Empire
[9] https://www.gzeromedia.com/news/analysis/how-the-ottoman-collapse-led-to-decades-of-bloodshed-in-the-holy-land
[10] https://www.britannica.com/topic/mandate-League-of-Nations
[11] https://www.britannica.com/topic/decline-of-the-Ottoman-Empire-2230672
[12] https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1919Parisv12/d380
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian%E2%80%93Palestinian_Congress
[14] https://origins.osu.edu/read/long-end-ottoman-empire?language_content_entity=en
[15] https://bcc-cuny.digication.com/MWHreader/Resolutions_of_the_General_Syrian_Congress_1919
[16] https://nzhistory.govt.nz/war/ottoman-empire/collapse
[17] https://www.wilsoncenter.org/book/how-west-stole-democracy-arabs-syrian-arab-congress-1920-and-destruction-its-historic-liberal
[18] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Class-A-mandate
[19] https://tabayyun.dohainstitute.org/en/issue003/Pages/art02.aspx

Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper and you’re listening to the Martyr Made Podcast. You’re about to hear episode 5 of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a 6-part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoy this series, please do consider subscribing to my Substack page where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes, including interviews, available to subscribers only for just $5 a month or $50 a year. To all of you who are already contributing, I very much appreciate it. You are what allows me to continue doing this. Substack can be found at www.martyrmade.substack.com I hope you guys like this one. Here we go. I’m content to die for my beliefs, so cut off my head and make me a martyr.

The people will always remember it, no, they will forget. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking.

I ask you, why must we tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion? One thing you may have picked up on through the first few episodes is that I’m not real big on blame. I want to blame. It’s natural when you see or hear about something unpleasant to imagine that it must have been the result of an independent human agency and to want to see the source of that agency exposed and brought to justice. But I’ve got this problem where every time I want to get myself worked up to blame or hate somebody, the closer I look at their situation, the harder it gets for me to hang on to that hatred. And I’m not some bleeding heart that you’re going to find out on a street corner trying to get some child murderer off death row. Believe me, that is not me. But if I start letting my mind wander back through a person’s history, that all that hatred, even if I try to hold on to it, it just starts to melt away until all that’s left is pity.

It’s as if, I don’t know, it’s like the further back you go into anyone’s story, you push it back through the history of their life, through the worst hidden decisions and the most awful moments of his or her life. And if you keep pushing back through that back wall, what you find at the back of all of it, at the root of everything, is pain. Before that, it’s just innocence. The innocence of a three-year-old Uday Hussain, sitting there playing with his toys, completely clueless. No clue, no clue at all what’s waiting for him in this world, except for maybe this vague, nameless anxiety of a small child deprived of basic emotional care. But that’s it. Other than that, he’s clueless. He has no idea what kind of world he’s been born into.

He’s just a little boy who didn’t ask to have Saddam Hussein as a father, didn’t ask to be born to the head of a ruling minority that’s been holding down a disenfranchised and oppressed majority that hates him the moment he’s born. Didn’t ask for that. Didn’t ask to be made to watch grisly torture sessions and executions regularly from the time he was six years old, when most of us are learning how to play dodgeball. He didn’t ask for that. You try to think back and try to see him before everything took him away, and it gets real cloudy, because it’s tough. It’s hard for me. It goes against everything natural to even try to do it. But if you push, when I push at least, I start to get this feeling that maybe we’re just, all of us are just sort of, you know, we’re floating along in our early lives until that day that we receive that first scar from fear or from loss or humiliation or physical suffering, whatever it is.

You get that first scar, and then your reaction to that scar and the contortions you go through to try to protect yourself in the future, that becomes the first outline of what we eventually call your personality. Maybe you suffer, and maybe you’ve been given the tools and the resources to use that experience to expand your compassion for other people who are suffering. Maybe. Or maybe you become fearful of new experiences, and you become withdrawn and introverted. Maybe. Or else maybe you seek the comfort of always trying to be surrounded by other people instead. Or maybe the pain just rolls right over you with such overwhelming ferocity when you’re a six-year-old Uday Hussain watching a girl from your class being gang-raped in front of her suspected dissident father. Maybe then you find that your own six-year-old resources are just completely inadequate to help you deal with what you’re seeing.

And that the only options available that are psychologically possible to your six-year-old mind are to either just adopt the values of the world that you’re being confronted with, or just go insane. And so you react. All of us. We react out of pain. And you react to protect yourself. Or maybe to take revenge on the world. And everything you do seems to create the conditions for more confrontation and more pain. And then that’s it.

Now you’re caught up in it. You’re caught up in it, and that’s it. Now it’s rolling. You’re on that wheel of samsara again, living out the karma, that first scar, that long cause-and-effect chain we call our lives. And never again, unless you maybe reach that state they call rock-bottom or unconditional surrender, where you just don’t really have any more attachments to the early moments of your history. You’ve hit that point where there’s nothing to look back on, and now you can start over. Unless you reach that point, never again do you feel like you can stop to catch your breath and get your head above water. To stop reacting.

And to look back and see clearly all the chain reactions that brought you to this present moment. And then to be able to turn back around toward the future and say, OK, OK, now that that’s done, let’s move forward. We just don’t get an opportunity to do that most of the time. And sometimes I think that who we are, both individuals and societies, in a very real sense, that who we are is just that collection of habits and reactions and feelings and ideas that we’ve cobbled together to try to keep our heads above water since that first trauma. And always, always, as we’re trying to get some air, always we’re telling ourselves, right, that after we do this next thing, or make this next dollar, or meet this next person, then, then we’ll be able to stop and get ahead of things, and we’ll be able to get back to what we always intended and imagined ourselves to be. To being that person we kept pretending we were, even in the face of decades of contradictory evidence. The person we were that we believed ourselves to be underneath the compromised moral mediocrity that we’d allowed ourselves to become. And I know I’m talking like everybody does this, it’s probably just me, but I’m going to keep saying we because it makes me feel better. Like, no matter how we behave, day in, day out, no matter what we’re doing on a day-to-day basis, and how it looks from the outside, we know that we’re doing the best we can, right? Most people feel that way all the time, no matter what. And we know that our mistakes are just that, they’re mistakes. They’re not representative of who we really are. Those are the aberrations. There’s who we really are, and we make mistakes sometimes. It’s as if we picture ourselves as a clean, white, pristine statue, and that pure, clean statue, it occasionally gets some dirt caked on it, but you can wipe that off. You just take a wet towel, wipe it off, and then there.

Now you can still see the nice, true statue underneath. But what do we do very often when it’s somebody else? Usually we’re not quite as understanding. You know, you meet somebody, and they seem really nice, but you’re watching, looking closely, waiting, waiting, and overall they seem pretty cool. But then at some point, of course, inevitably, they do something that hurts us or upsets us, and we seize on that thing, like, Aha! I knew it! I always knew that the real you was hiding underneath all those fake smiles. I knew that eventually you’d slip up and show me your true colors.

It’s like we’re the pristine statue that occasionally gets some mud on it, and everyone else is a cheap, ugly statue that just happens to have a thin veneer of clean, white paint over it, covering over that ugliness. Everything I just said about individuals, I think, can be said about movements or about societies. The way we look at our own as opposed to others. Our people are basically good, as evidenced by all these great things we’ve done. Yeah, we occasionally make some mistakes that don’t measure up to who we are, but those other people, those other people are basically corrupt or basically violent or evil. And all those good things that they’ve done, those apparently good things, those are just attempts to cover up their true nature. The bad things we do, those are mistakes that don’t measure up to our values. When they do the bad things, that shows who they really are.

I know that’s a little dramatic and literal and on the nose, but on some level, we do this all the time. I mean, it’s election season right now in the United States, it’s 2016. Go turn on a TV if you don’t believe me. Listen to a Republican talk about a Democrat and vice versa. And you see it all day when you study and discuss the Arab-Israeli conflict. You try to point out some of the really terrible things that have happened over the years, that have been done by Zionist and Israeli forces. You point that out to a Zionist, and they’ll start pulling out quotes from prominent Zionists at the time that it happened, denouncing the actions. And they’ll sort of give you some version of, well, first of all, we were provoked, but I’ll admit, things got a little out of hand, but we all recognize that.

That’s what’s different about us. We recognize that that was wrong. Those events, those things that were done, that’s not what we’re all about. They were committed by a tiny minority of people on our side, but with whom I have nothing to do with. And they kind of do that Pontius Pilate hand-washing gesture, and that’s it. And I don’t want to pick on the Zionists. You go over to the other side, and you say to a Palestinian activist, hey, I get that you’re angry. People on your side, though, are suicide bombing buses full of women and children.

What are you guys doing? And I can already tell you what you’re going to hear, because I’ve heard it a thousand times from a thousand people. You’re going to hear about how the person you’re speaking to does not condone terrorism, but it is hardly surprising if a few, very few, of the people living under such awful conditions would occasionally lash out in the only manner available to them. But now flip it around and try asking your average Zionist to understand how the desperation under which the people in a place like Gaza might lead to violence, or ask the Palestinian activist to understand that today’s Israelis did not create this situation. They inherited it. They were born into a world where, whichever of our grandparents’ fault this whole thing was, the reality is that they were, today’s Israelis, found themselves born into a world surrounded by people who hated them. I’ve tried both of these conversations many, many times. Trust me.

And if you try it, you’re not likely to get that same kind of understanding for the other side. Now, I know I tend to repeat myself a lot in this podcast. That’s something I’m working on, but I’m going to do it on purpose again right here. The things that I’ve probably repeated most of all have been two. The first is that the most ruthless and extreme elements in any given conflict, but especially ones that are not mediated by institutions on both sides, that the most ruthless and extreme elements are almost always able to dictate to everyone else the stakes and the terms of the fight. Even if they’re just 1% of each side, it’s like it’s just something in group psychology. This is why we have things like the Geneva Conventions, right? On some level, we know that without hard rules and confidence that the other side is going to follow those rules, every conflict eventually devolves into a series of atrocities and payback for atrocities and payback for the payback and on and on.

With more people on each side becoming radicalized the further it goes. One psycho on this side rapes a woman on that side. Someone from that side rapes five women from this side in return. Someone kills a child, the other side kills a family, and then the other side goes further than that. There are only two ways to short out this process as far as I can tell. You’ve either got strong institutions or else you’ve got strong unified leadership that can keep control of things on both sides. And both of these conditions are conspicuously absent as we pick up our story in Palestine. And the second thing I keep repeating is to ask you to please imagine what you would do in someone else’s situation.

Not in theory, but in reality. When you’re not expecting to have to make this decision and all of a sudden it’s the middle of the night and it’s here now and you’ve got to decide what to do with your three kids and your wife and you’ve got to make a decision right now. I always tell myself that if I find myself unable to understand, even vaguely, how somebody or some group could behave in a given manner then that just means that I haven’t done enough work. We’re talking about human beings here, not monsters, not aliens. And so if I write off someone else’s actions as simply evil or incomprehensible, that’s a failure of both imagination and empathy on my part. It means I’m not doing my job. And we ended the last episode with the riots that erupted across Palestine in August 1929. When Arab peasants poured into the cities after the cry went out that the Zionists were trying to seize the hill in Jerusalem that still is sacred to both Muslims and Jews.

These riots were a real tipping point in relations between the two groups. Partly it was because it was such a massive and sudden escalation in the level of savagery, but more than just the shock of violence the events of 1929 were a watershed because of how they fit into each side’s understanding of what was happening. We’ve already given a fair amount of context for how these events might have been experienced by the Zionists but there are still a few points I want to spend some time on. It’s really important to understand, even Israeli politics today. The first is to emphasize the extent to which pride became an overwhelmingly important factor. It was always a big part of the Zionist mix, but the 1929 attacks crystallized this sense of offended honor in a way that it would become one of the defining characteristics of Zionism right up to the present day. To understand why, I want to take a moment to just go back a little bit. The age of nationalism began in Western Europe before it arrived in Eastern Europe in the Russian Empire.

When the nationalist era arrived, both Jews and the Europeans surrounding them had some difficult problems to solve. When you’re living as a minority in a multi-ethnic empire, say, the Austro-Hungarian or Russian Empire or the Ottoman Empire, you don’t have the same privileges as the ruling elite, but at the same time you’re just one minority amongst many minorities. There’s no real pressure to assimilate into the general life of the empire to the extent that such a general life exists at all. Similarly, when you’re a minority community living in a traditional feudal realm, like the Europe that the Jews moved into in the Middle Ages before the modern era, you’re inhabiting a very stratified society where every single group fits somewhere into the hierarchy in some very specific way. Everyone has special, exclusive functions. The aristocracy rules and fights in war, the priests administer the religion, the serfs or peasants do the work, and so forth. Living as a minority under a regime like that, this was very familiar to Jewish communities for a long, long time, and it held certain benefits that they got used to, relative benefits. If every group has a specific niche to fill, then the Jews could just be another group with another role specific to what they could offer and what the settled population needed from them.

The fact that they were apart, it wasn’t as much of a factor because everybody was kind of in their own little situation. For most of the last thousand years of European history, Jewish communities were basically left to run their own affairs. They would face violence sometimes, and in crisis moments things would happen, but on a day-to-day basis they were left to themselves for the most part. They existed as separate, corporate communities with their own legal codes, with the right to administer social events like weddings and births and funerals according to their own customs, and to arbitrate their own disputes according to their own rules and traditions. We take all that kind of stuff for granted today, and we would think of anything other than that maybe to be discriminatory or something, but you’ve got to remember this is happening at a time in Europe when pagans and even heterodox Christians are being exterminated. And so the Jews, being permitted to live according to their own religious traditions, it was a bit exceptional at the time. And so the centuries start to creep on a little bit, and the absolutist state in Western Europe gives birth to the early nation-state, and Jewish communities and their newly nationalist neighbors, now they’re facing some very difficult questions about where the Jews are going to fit into this new type of society. There’s a great Jewish novelist and short story writer named Joseph Roth, and in one of his short stories he’s got this quote where he captures how strange this new nationalist world was to some of the people at the time.

He says, quote, It had been discovered in the course of the 19th century that every individual had to be a member of a particular race or nation if he wanted to be a fully rounded bourgeois individual, end quote. And the author put these words into the mouth of a count, a man who lived in the AustroHungarian Empire, he was a count, and he loved the Austro-Hungarian Empire specifically because it was transnational, and included many, many peoples. And he was horrified that the little constituent groups within the empire had suddenly decided to divide themselves up along ethnic and cultural lines. This was a terrible thing to him, and he says in another passage, quote, My former home was a large house with many doors and many rooms for many different kinds of people. This house has been divided, broken up, ruined. I have no business with what is there now. I’m used to living in a house, not in cabins, end quote. And he’s referring to a ship’s cabin, where each person has his own little room off by himself, and if people all over Europe are suddenly dividing themselves up into Poles and Lithuanians and Serbs and Germans and so forth, where did that leave the Jews?

Who inhabited every country, but didn’t rule any of them. Who weren’t a majority in any of them. During the French Revolution, a member of the French General Assembly in 1791, he laid out the answer to that question, and the answer that he gives is the one that most new nationalists would end up adopting with regard to the Jews. Quote, The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals. They must be citizens. It is claimed that they do not want to be citizens, but there cannot be one nation within another nation. It is intolerable that the Jews should become a separate political formation or class in the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen, end quote.

And that’s it in a nutshell. That’s the response of the nationalists basically summed up. Right at the beginning of the nationalist era. This French Assemblyman’s point, it makes enough sense. It’s a fair enough point on its face. He’s saying, look, it was one thing when we had a king who ruled the various disconnected communities of his realm, but there is no king, and there’s no realm any longer. We’re a nation now, and the Jews are welcome to become a part of our nation, but they cannot and must not exist as a separate nation within our nation. The universalism of the French revolutionaries was especially hostile to the idea of having a separate group within the country which operated according to completely different principles.

It’s really not too different from the debates taking place in many Western countries today over whether Muslim immigrants should be allowed to follow and enforce Sharia law in their new countries. Most people say, no way. Even if it’s voluntary, and even if everyone in the immigrant community wants to do it and agrees with it, we can’t have groups running around completely isolated from one another and operating according to different legal codes and human rights regimes. We can’t have that. But now, just as most Muslims who immigrate to the West have no desire to live under strict Sharia law, most Jews, at the beginning of the Nationalist era, most Jews eagerly took up the French assemblyman on his offer to come out of the ghettos and start to work their way toward integrating into their respective nations. But again, political development throughout Europe happened unevenly. Within states and between states. And when the era of full-blooded nationalism was already rolling in Western and Central Europe, Eastern Europe and Russia were lagging far behind.

And so as a result, the history of Western and Eastern European Jewry, which had a fair amount of uniformity before this period, now their histories begin to diverge. As the Jews in the West began the process of what would come to be called Jewish Emancipation, the Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews, they could only stand by and hear about it from afar. By the time we get up to the period of Zionism’s emergence, early Zionism is driven by Eastern European and Russian Jews who are fleeing a much more traditional Jewish life. One in which Jews had hardly even begun the process of assimilation. We’ve remarked a couple times already about the difference in attitude and approach between the Eastern and Western Jews once they got to Palestine and how, for example, it created a certain incomprehension and even occasional hostility between a sophisticated modern British Jew like Chaim Weizmann and some of the more aggressive Russian Jews living in Palestine. Well, it was these Eastern Jews in Palestine who experienced the horror of 1929, who didn’t hear about it or read about it, but who were there. It was these Eastern Jews who experienced it, and so it was their prior experience that informed the Yeshua’s response to it. And so, again, their life in the East was a much more traditional diaspora Jewish life.

They were geographically and occupationally restricted. To the peasants around them, they were not just different, they were experienced quite literally as a foreign presence. And so, while the Western Jews had begun to feel a little more comfortable in their skin when moving among their Gentile neighbors, the Russian Jews still interacted with their neighbors with the same distrust and hostility that had colored the relationship of each to the other for centuries. You know, when you live in diaspora for 2,500 years, and you actually manage to survive that way, both physically and culturally, that does not happen by accident. The Hebrew Bible, remember, begins with Adam and Eve being exiled from the Garden of Eden and being forced to wander the earth working for their meals. That’s the first book, the book of Genesis, right at the beginning, and before the first book is finished, it tells the story of Abraham making his way to the land that would eventually become Israel, only for his descendants to flee to Egypt in order to be saved from a famine. Centuries go by, and the descendants of these Israelite immigrants to Egypt almost completely forget who they were, they forget their covenant with God, they forget that they even had a homeland off somewhere to the northeast, and God seems mostly to have forgotten about them. Some time goes by, and at a certain point, and we’re in the second book now, the book of Exodus, we’re told that God remembered his people and his promises to them, and so he charged Moses and his brother Aaron to go wake his people up and lead them out of the land of Egypt to a land which he would show them. A bunch of frogs, a bunch of blood, some boils, and a whole bunch of dead Egyptian children in a miraculously parted Red Sea later, they escape Egypt, but then it occurs to God that this mass of people he just led to freedom, this is not a nation yet, this is just a big group of people. They have no common identity, no shared customs or laws or traditions. They’re probably going to arrive in the promised land, start intermarrying with the locals, worshipping their gods, living how they live, and what was the point of leading these chosen people out of exile if they’re just going to melt into the surrounding populations who actually have a stronger, more rooted identity? And so God decides they’re going to have to hang on for a while, and before they get to their new home, they’re made to wander around the Sinai Desert for 40 years, just wandering around. Enough time for the young to be indoctrinated according to their new traditions, and enough time for those that are too old to change to die off. While they’re out there, they receive the revelation of the law, and almost all of it has to do with two things. One, maintaining internal cohesion in the community, for example, by providing guidelines for how to resolve disputes without having them escalate into blood feuds and so forth. We talked about that in the Shop Talk episode.

And number two, marking them off as separate from everyone around them. And to this latter end, they were threatened with death and often were killed for worshipping the gods of their neighbors, for marrying outside the tribe, for taking up foreign customs, or for failing to follow the idiosyncratic ritual or dietary laws whose primary function was to serve kind of as a secret decoder ring that would tell us, in an age before laminated ID cards, who is us and who is them. The Hebrew Bible didn’t take its final form until the period during and just after the Babylonian exile of the 6th century, when the entire leadership class of the remaining Jewish community was shuffled off to live in Babylon, under the theory behind the whole Tower of Babel story. Remember that one? Everybody in the world is coming to live as one community in the shadow of the great tower to heaven, and so God pushes the tower over and everybody just immediately forgets why they’re there and what they’re doing. They find that they can’t communicate with one another, and then they just all go their separate ways. The ancient Near Eastern empires employed a similar strategy when they wanted to destroy their neighbors defeated in war. You didn’t always want to kill everybody if you don’t have to, because the way the ruling class made its wealth back then was by taxing peasants and other commoners, and if you could keep them alive, that was better.

And so sometimes, rather than killing everyone, people would either be dispersed and just sprinkled around all over the empire with the hope that they would simply be absorbed into whatever populations they now lived among, or else they’d be transplanted as whole communities, like the Jews were to Babylon, with the hope that uprooting them would break that sense of historical and cultural continuity that gave them the motivation and the organization to resist. And so the Bible didn’t take its final form until after the experience of the Babylonian exile. And it’s actually a very interesting and useful exercise to read the Hebrew Bible as a manual for how to survive in diaspora, how to survive in exile. In the Bible, the reason they got into Egypt and were allowed to stay and avoid the famine, for example, was because one of their brothers had been sold into slavery in Egypt sometime before, but he had proven himself so useful to the pharaoh that he ended up rising to be a prominent administrator, was able to get his people in. When Abraham was traveling with his wife to Egypt, he had to pull a few tricks out of his headscarf to make sure that they were kept safe and treated well. And the laws, again, the laws are mostly about making sure there are plenty of unique markers and social rituals that nobody else would ever think of just randomly picking up on their own, and that anyone who was thinking they might want to become a part of your tribe, they would have to be real committed if they were going to be willing to slice off their foreskin or stop picking up sticks on Saturdays and all the rest of the stuff. The first thing, the very first thing any organism needs if it’s going to survive and not just melt away into its surrounding environment is a membrane to separate it, separate the inside from the outside and to mediate between those two realms. The body of ritual law that most of us today just find completely incomprehensible and irrational, it was like a sociocultural membrane.

Now by the 18th, 19th centuries, Jews had been living in diaspora for a long time, 2,500 years for the most part. When the Babylonians were destroyed by the Achaemenid Persians and the Persians offered to let the Jews go back to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple and their country, the majority of Jews in Babylon said, yeah, thanks, but no thanks. The exile had only been 70 years, but that still meant that the Jews living in Babylon had mostly been born there, and those who hadn’t been born there were raised there. And they weren’t slaves or prisoners in Babylon, weren’t allowed to live in their home country of Judea. So when the Persians came to see who wanted to leave the bright lights of big city Babylon and go kick rocks back in Palestine, the majority said, no, thank you, we want to stay in Babylon. A couple hardliners went back, started to rebuild, and they had some very interesting history. And when the Romans came along and finally destroyed Jerusalem and exiled the last Jews from Palestine, when they did that, there were about 8 million Jews living in the Roman Empire and 6 million of them lived outside of Palestine. 6 million out of the 8 million Jews already lived outside of Palestine.

In cities like Alexandria in Egypt, at the time of the Roman-Jewish wars, had a larger Jewish population than Jerusalem did. And so by the time we get up to the early modern era, Jews have been living in diaspora, in countries where other people always had a monopoly on violence, where they owned no land, and so they didn’t grow their own food or mine their own minerals or do any of those base-level, any of the base-level work we associate with a complex, settled society. They didn’t do any of that themselves. And they managed to survive like that for 2,500 years, keeping their religious traditions, their cultural identity, their sense of collective historical continuity intact. And I’ll say it again, that does not just happen by accident. There are strategies that groups like this use. And the Jews are not the only group like this. They’re called middle-man minorities or sometimes service nomads by anthropologists and they include groups like the Roma and Sinti, the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and Indonesia and the Philippines, the Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese in West Africa and Latin America, many, many others.

And the strategies that they employ to survive and the ways that they’re treated and spoken of by their hosts and the way that they relate to and speak of their hosts are very similar across the board. For example, diaspora Chinese communities in Indonesia and the Philippines and other countries, they had become a financial and commercial elite class and they were spoken of in almost the exact same language most people in the West today associate exclusively with anti-Semitism. They’re always crafty, they’re sneaky, they’re clever, they’re greedy, they’re obsessed with money. It’s all right down the line, very similar. They faced similar resentment and envy and mistrust and when the post-colonial nationalist era came to Asia, they faced the similar discrimination and hostility and then pogroms and massacres dwarfing anything that the Jews experienced in the Russian Empire. And it’s a very similar dynamic. In the 1970s, you might remember, the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada expelled 70,000 Indians who were living in his country. Back when the British ran Uganda in the 1890s, they had imported thousands of laborers from their colony in India and the ones that stayed in Uganda eventually moved into commerce and the service industries and became a prosperous class in that undeveloped Ugandan economy.

So Britain leaves and when Uganda’s economy starts flagging under Idi Amin’s just disastrous regime, he blames the greedy, sneaky, shifty Indians and throws them out. Incidentally, back in the 1890s, Palestine was still under the control of the Ottoman Empire and the British actually offered part of Uganda to the Zionists and Theodor Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, he wanted to take them up on it. The Palestine Party obviously won that debate within Zionism but if they hadn’t, we probably would have been talking about thousands of Jews being expelled by Idi Amin in the 70s. So everywhere you find these communities, whether they’re Chinese, Indian, Gypsy, Jewish, whatever, they all eventually learn a few things. And one of them is that you keep your head down. You do everything you can to keep the people around you calm. Don’t give them a reason. It’s not enough to not give them a good reason, you can’t even give them an excuse to take their day out on you.

Because they’re already going to distrust you as an outsider, as someone of another religion or culture, or for being part of a group that always seems to be a little more clever, a little more urbane, a little wealthier than the peasants. And so you keep your head down. Don’t give offense. If someone gives offense to you, you turn the other cheek, you smile, and you let it go. Not as a matter of principle, as a matter of survival. If someone spits in your face, you wipe it off and say thank you. If someone spits in your wife’s face, you wipe it off and you say thank you. Because nobody is going to care about your honor or think that you’re some kind of hero when you retaliate like a big man and then the locals form up a posse and come burn down your entire village.

You keep your head down. Now this remained very important in the East, even as it became less important in the West, where Jews were beginning to assimilate. By the time Jewish emancipation begins to reach the Russian Empire, young Jews have had it with what they saw as the stagnant traditions and social life. Just the life, the culture of exile that they were experiencing in their urban ghettos and rural villages. They’d had enough. And so as opportunities began to open up to them, they just embraced it with both hands. They flooded the secular schools and universities. They were throwing off Yiddish, the language of exile, and learning Russian.

Instead of study groups pouring over pedantic commentary on the Torah, they were applying that same tradition of deep reading and study and discussion to Pushkin and Tolstoy, to scientific ideas and socialist and democratic political theory. A huge generational gap starts to open up between the traditional parents and the enthusiastic young adopters of Russian nationalism. The Jews were still restricted within the Russian Empire as far as where they could live and the activities that they were permitted to engage in, but the restrictions were not a whole lot more onerous than those faced by other minorities in the empire, except insofar as Jewish quotas in universities and occupations were always full because they were so successful at anything they did. They were geographically restricted, but restricted to a massive area, stretching from the Black Sea in the south to the Baltic Sea in the north including some or all of the modern countries of Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, a big, big area called the Jewish Pale of Settlement on the western frontier of the Russian Empire. The Russian National Project eventually faced the same problem spoken of by that French assemblyman, only on a scale that that Frenchman could not have possibly imagined. During the 19th century, the Jewish population in the Russian Empire increased from 3 million to 7 million. The empire made the decision that the Jews would eventually be fully emancipated and integrated into the empire with everyone else, but remember, in the east, the Jews had not begun to assimilate yet. They had been living by themselves for centuries according to completely different principles, and so the empire decided that they would be emancipated eventually, but they were going to have to remain quarantined until they went through a process of Russification.

And again, this was a process, just as in western Europe, that many young Jews just jumped right onto. They faced resistance from both their traditional parents and from the resentful and superstitious and envious local peasants and townspeople around them, but the trend was obviously moving in one direction. At least, that’s what they thought. That’s what they thought until 1881. In 1881, the Russian Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a group of revolutionaries, and many people in the Russian Empire blamed the Jews. It was true that many Jews had been becoming involved in revolutionary politics, but in this instance, the Tsar’s killers were a group which included only one Jewish assassin. This was not a Jewish plot. This was not a Jewish assassination.

But the previous year, another Jewish assassin had made an attempt on the Tsar’s life, and I guess people… Some people were anti-Semitic, and they took advantage of this, for sure, but the fact that people bought into it as easily as they did probably just has a lot to do with… They just didn’t go too far beyond that connection of the previous assassin. And they just went berserk. You remember I opened up the first episode talking about the hundreds and hundreds of pogroms and attacks that took place all over the Russian Empire. This is the period we were talking about. And this outbreak of violence hit the Jewish community like a ton of bricks. Especially, especially the young Jews, who had been pouring so much of themselves into becoming a part of the Russian culture.

For the entire 19th century, Jews had been energetically doing everything they could to become a part of Russian society. They were learning the language. They were becoming writers and poets in their own right. They were building up the Russian economy. Everything they could do, only to find out, to their shock and horror, that they hadn’t even begun to be accepted at all. That the progress they thought they had been making all this time was just an illusion. And this had an incredibly traumatic effect on the Jewish population of the Russian Empire. An effect, honestly, far out of proportion to the actual scale of the violence. I mean, in the worst of the pogroms, we’re usually looking at a few dozen killed and wounded. The Kishnev pogrom, which is one of the most infamous. We spoke of that one in the first episode. Killed 118 people. That’s horrible, but we compare this to what, with hindsight, we know was coming down the tracks of the 20th century. Whether we’re talking about the 7,000 killed by the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 in Srebrenica, or the 850,000 to a million killed in Rwanda a year before that, or the millions and millions killed in revolutionary terror in the decades before that. All the pogroms together would barely register in comparison. And yet, this did have an incredibly traumatic effect.

And across the Jewish Pale of Settlement, there arose very quickly a consensus that this could not go on any longer. They could no longer continue to live under these conditions. They thought that their situation had been improving. Clearly, it had not. They had to leave. And the only question was where they were going to go. And Jews, especially younger Jews, they came up with three answers to that question. The first answer was to go to the United States, or as a second choice, Western Europe.

And so from 1881 to 1914, two and a half million Jews would leave the Russian Empire. And a full million and a half of those went to the United States. And this, I hate to say it, but thank you for that. As an American citizen, I can’t thank Europe enough for being so mean to its Jews, because it’s been hugely beneficial to my country. If you guys have any more Nobel Prize winning physicists you want to send us, just send them our way. That’s fine. I probably shouldn’t make light, but several hundred thousand others emigrated to Western Europe, or Britain, or sometimes to other destinations like Argentina and Brazil and so forth. But most of them went to the United States.

And the second answer they came up with was to just stay put, but to move out of their isolated communities and into Russia’s big cities to join revolutionary parties en masse. At first, revolution meant utopian socialism to most Jews. They were idealizing the humble, hearty peasant. This was in the period where they were still trying to become nationalists. But after being attacked by peasants in the pogroms of the early 1880s, Jewish revolutionaries turned on the peasants and then turned on utopian socialism and began to take up the banner of Marxism instead, shifting their allegiance from the peasantry to the urban working classes. Yuri Slezkin, he’s a Russian-Jewish professor of Russian history at UC Berkeley. He’s got a great book called The Jewish Century. And in writing about this period, he says that virtually every village and ghetto in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, it was full of the very young and the very old, but that virtually every young adult and adult Jew who had not left for America or someplace else had bolted for the big cities of the Russian Empire, taken over with enthusiasm for this idea of overcoming their separateness and their exile by joining in with the brotherhood of revolution.

And these two migrations, which represented on the one hand a simple desire to get the hell out of here, just escape, and on the other hand, an intention to overturn the system under which they’d been oppressed. That encompassed the vast majority of all Jewish emigrants from the Russian Empire. This was the vast majority of the response to those pogroms of the early 1880s and then right after the turn of the century. But there was another answer. And finally, a few tens of thousands of those Eastern European and Russian Jews chose a different path, inspired by a feeling perhaps experienced by many who had gone to the United States or into Russia’s revolutionary parties, but which became the driving force behind the Zionist movement. And it’s really what sets it apart to me, to be honest with you. And I think it’s probably the reason that Zionism came to really become identified with the world’s Jewish community in general today. A moment ago, I was talking about the need for these diaspora communities to keep their heads down, right?

Degrade yourself, act dishonorably if you have to, but you will back down. If your whole community gets a reputation for being a bunch of cowards, yep, sure, that’s great, we’re cowards. Nothing to worry about from us, just a bunch of cowards, nothing to worry about. Because again, what’s the best case scenario? Somebody insults you or, you know, does something to you and you humiliate him and beat him up in front of everybody and prove that you were right and he was wrong. And then the local peasant community gets together and burns down your whole village. No. Okay, no.

You back down. Whatever you have to do, you back down. It’s not cowardice, it’s just the only reasonable strategy. But after a 19th century in which so many young Jews had spent so much energy trying to become what the Russians said they wanted them to become, only to experience what felt to them like betrayal in those pogroms of the early 1880s, many young Jews had just had enough of all that. They were tired of backing down. Someone attempted to capture the feeling and I think really did a great job of it. There’s a poem by a Zionist Jew named Chaim Ne’em Bialik. He’s a Jew from the Russian Empire who had come to be considered by many one of the fathers of modern Hebrew literature.

And listen to the anguish and the rage that the young Bialik feels over the fact that so many Jews had allowed themselves to be victimized without so much as lifting a finger in their own defense. He wrote this after the pogroms. Note also, do not fail to note, in that dark corner and behind that cask, crouched husbands, bridegrooms, brothers, peering from the cracks. They saw it all. They did not stir or move. They did not pluck their eyes out. They beat not their brains against the wall. Come now, and I will bring thee to their lairs, the privies, jakes, and pigpens, where the heirs of the Hasmoneans lay with trembling knees, concealed and cowering, the sons of the Maccabees.

The seed of saints, the scions of lions, who crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame, so sanctified my name. It was the flight of mice they fled. The scurrying of roaches was their flight. They died like dogs, and they were dead.” This was a poem of a man who would not move to America. He would not migrate to a Russian city to join a Marxist reading circle, but who would become a Zionist and move to Palestine in 1924. Jews like Bialik, few as they were in those early years, adopted the nationalism of their attackers. The answer was not to flee to another land, to live under a somewhat safer, hopefully safer, set of circumstances among a new set of strangers. They had been doing that for too long. The answer wasn’t to join revolutionaries in destroying not only the Jewish, but every other national identity in the name of somebody else’s class war. It was to become a nation of their own and learn to defend themselves. To Bialik, the fault was not with the pogromists, at least not solely with them. They, at least, were acting out of strength and asserting their own national prerogative in their own land. He felt less anger at the pogromists than he felt disgust and shame over their cowering victims. His parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and the whole line of his Jewish ancestors who had allowed themselves to degenerate into a people who, the way he saw it, so broken and so cowardly that men would hide while their wives and daughters were being murdered in the next room. And again, this is not a fair assessment of what was going on, but you can’t think of it in terms of historical accuracy. You have to imagine that you’re a strong 15-year-old Jewish kid who just ran away along with your father because he told you to, only to find out that your mother and sister hadn’t run fast enough and they’d been raped and killed by drunk, slobbering mob of Russian peasants.

And to watch over the ensuing years as your father, now a broken man, degenerated into a depressed alcoholic, constantly telling you stories about how really he had no choice, and maybe he didn’t, but now you’re not 15 anymore, now you’re 25. And now you’re really strong, you’re a man, and you spent the last 10 years fighting and then nursing and then fully embracing your outrage of your father’s cowardice and promising to yourself that you will never, ever, ever allow yourself to be the weak and helpless one again. A Jewish-American friend of mine told me how his family happened to have arrived in the United States. His great-grandfather had lived in the Pale of Settlement with his family, and after coming of age, he robbed his family’s life savings to move to Palestine and join the early pre-World War I militia movement there. After contracting malaria, though, he ended up moving to New York. That’s a pretty typical story. It was something that had been growing throughout the Jewish Enlightenment period, but after 1881, that generation of young Jews broke away very definitively from their parents’ traditions. The Zionists who began arriving in Palestine had had enough of running and hiding, enough of keeping their heads down and avoiding trouble, enough of Judaism and the whole Jewish tradition for that matter.

And so from the first, as we described in an earlier episode, the first wave of Jewish immigration before Theodor Herzl put out his call around the turn of the century, the Zionists arriving in Palestine exhibited a certain, we’re not going to take it anymore, kind of belligerence. And when the post-war nationalist riots in 1920 and 1921 landed on their fledgling communities in Jerusalem and Jaffa, the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, they didn’t have the strength for doing much beyond being outraged about it. Throughout the 1920s, under David Ben-Gurion and the labor movement’s policy of quiet, offthe-radar evolutionary Zionism, the Yishuv adopted something like the old diaspora strategic meekness, keep your heads down. But this was guaranteed to be unacceptable to many of the Zionists who had come to Palestine specifically to throw off the humiliation of exile. These more militant Zionists were first personified by Zev Jabotinsky and his revisionist party, but later the mantle is going to be picked up by many others and it’s carried forward almost intact into present day Israeli politics. The Berkeley professor I mentioned a moment ago, Yuri Slezkin, he wrote about this in his book as well. He said, quote, characterized by low levels of income and secular education and the big cities of the Russian empire shaped by government regulations and the high culture hierarchy to favor the wealthier and more educated. Zionism appealed to the young and the radical, but most of the young and radical seem to prefer the, quote, no distinction between Jew and Gentile and the spirit of true equality and brotherhood offered by the leftist revolutionaries.

And then Slezkin quotes a young Chaim Weizmann writing to Theodor Herzl in 1903. In his letter, he says, quote, It is impossible to calculate the number of victims or describe their character that are annually, indeed daily, sacrificed because of their identification with Jewish social democracy in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of very young boys and girls are held in Russian prisons or are being spiritually and physically destroyed in Siberia. More than 5,000 are now under police surveillance, which means the deprivation of their freedom. Almost all those now being victimized in the entire social democratic movement are Jews, and their number grows every day. They are not necessarily young people of proletarian origin. They also come from well-to-do families and, incidentally, not infrequently from Zionist families. Almost all students belong to the revolutionary camp.

Hardly any of them escape its ultimate fate. We cannot enter here into the many factors, political, social, and economic, that continuously nourish the Jewish revolutionary movement. Suffice to say that the movement has already captured masses of young people who can only be described as children. Thus, during my stay in Minsk, they arrested 200 Jewish social democrats, not one of whom was more than 17 years old. It’s a fearful spectacle and one that obviously escapes the West European Zionists to observe the major part of our youth, and no one would describe them as the worst part, offering themselves for sacrifice as though seized by a fever. We refrain from touching on the terrible effect of this mass sacrifice, the effect that it has upon the families and communities concerned, and upon the state of Jewish political affairs in general. Saddest and most lamentable is the fact that, although this movement consumes much Jewish energy and heroism, and is located within the Jewish fold, the attitude it evidences toward Jewish nationalism is one of antipathy, swelling at times to fanatical hatred. Children are an open revolt against their parents.” And finally, Professor Slezkin concludes, Not all of those victimized in the entire social democratic movement were Jews, of course, but it is true that Jewish participation in the Russian mass sacrifice was very substantial in absolute terms and much larger than the Jewish share of the country’s population.

The Jews did not start the revolutionary movement, did not inaugurate student messianism, and had very little to do with the conceptual formulation of Russian socialism from Herzen to Mikhailovsky. But when they did join the ranks, they did so with tremendous intensity and in ever-growing numbers. No history of Russian radicalism is conceivable without the story of the Jewish children’s open revolt against their parents.” I’ve mentioned a few times in previous episodes, it’s crucial to understanding what happens in Palestine that we remember the Jewish community there was not just a random cross-section of European Jewish society. They were mostly young, mostly male, and they had come in large part because they were tired of taking shit from the rest of the world. After the 1929 riots, over the fate of the holy places on the Temple Mount or Noble Sanctuary, take your pick, the Jews of Palestine, they faced a dilemma similar to the one they had faced in the Russian Empire in 1881 when the pogroms hit. They had thought throughout the 1920s that they were making progress, and it was now clear that they had not been making nearly as much progress as they had thought. The labor Zionists and liberal Zionists like Chaim Weizmann, as well as the British government itself, had always maintained that the Arabs, lacking any real sense of European nationalism, would eventually realize that the economic benefits brought to the country by Jewish colonization outweighed any half-baked feelings of nascent national feeling they might have entertained, and that they would accept that they were better off under Jewish leadership. This was naivety coming from far-off Zionists like Chaim Weizmann, and probably disingenuousness coming from labor Zionists in the country, because while the Arab notables and the urban merchants certainly filled their pockets with the benefits of Jewish migration into the country, the Arab peasants, that is, the vast majority of the Arabs in the country, were devastated by Zionism.

But still, nevertheless, this was the prevailing narrative, though, throughout the 1920s, and even if it doesn’t make any sense, unless you’re confronted with the consequences on a daily basis, it’s easy to maintain narratives that don’t make any sense. We do it all the time. And now that that narrative had been thrown out the window, they needed to reconsider their position, because it had also been thrown out the window by the British, who responded to the riots by placing limits on Jewish immigration into Palestine, such that new immigration would have to be tied not only to the Jewish unemployment rate, but to the overall unemployment rate in the whole country. And of course, we mentioned before, this didn’t last very long, after several wealthy and influential Zionists from all over Europe threatened and bribed and cajoled the British Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald, into changing his mind, but the Zionists now knew, they’d been put on notice that the British government was beginning to waver. That means the clock is ticking. And just as in 1881, when their grand hopes were dashed by indigenous violence, the Zionists, again, had some decisions to make about their future. There were a very few who tried to make the case that this had been a predictable outburst of anti-colonial nationalist violence from a local population, which was being displaced and marginalized in its own country. And that the Zionists needed to change their approach, but those voices were few and far between.

They were quickly silenced. They were few and far between, again, because that’s just not who the Zionists were. That is not why they had come to Palestine. They had come to Palestine out of a sense of outrage at having always been pushed around, at having people attack them and them having to respond by changing their ways, at always being the weaker party who has to defer to the stronger in order to survive. And they’d come out of a conviction that they would never again allow this to be the case. And so the Zionists decided to see this as just another pogrom, no different in kind or in motivation from any of the pogroms or persecutions that Jews had faced since the days of Babylonia. And so instead of compromising with the Arabs, the Zionists began to prepare for war. And they wouldn’t have to wait very long until it came to their doorstep.

So what about the Arabs? How were the events of August 1929 experienced by the attackers, by the Palestinian Arab population? I can already tell you I feel bad because I’m not going to be able to spend as much time on their perspective here because I ran so long on the Jewish portion, but I’ll probably cover it more deeply when we do a question and answer episode in the next few weeks. And if anybody has questions about it, we will cover it. But I’m going to spend some time on it now because it’s just as important and even lesser known or understood. As fond as many people are of dividing history into clearly demarcated eras, I definitely do that all the time. In reality, of course, one age always blends into another and it becomes more difficult the closer you look to determine where one period ends and another begins, but we’re still forced to make distinctions sometimes. If we ever hope to keep every story from just growing into a full history of the world.

So I’m going to make an arbitrary decision here and start this history at 1799. In 1799, Napoleon had just conquered Egypt the year before in the name of revolutionary France and now he was moving up northeast into Palestine, through the Sinai Desert, through El Arish into Gaza and from there on to Ramle. And as he’s going, he’s taking thousands of Ottoman prisoners along the way. Many of these prisoners, most of these prisoners, are not patriotic Ottoman Turkish volunteers. They’re just peasants who have been, they’re Arab peasants from the area who have been pressed into the Ottoman army on pain of death. And so as the French army is making their way north, they get to Jaffa and the French besiege the city for four days and when Jaffa falls, Napoleon’s troops just loot the city, slaughter tons of its inhabitants, just wreck the place. And two days later, the French lead 3,000 prisoners southward to the outskirts of the city and once they’re clear of city limits, they divide up the prisoners into groups and execute them all. The killing lasted for hours.

And again, these prisoners are mostly Arab peasants who have been forced on threat of death into the Ottoman army. And the killing goes on for hours. Certain units ran out of ammunition before they had finished with their quota and rather than stopping and going to resupply on ammunition, they just stabbed their prisoners to death with bayonets, one by one by one, up and down the line. Groups of prisoners bound at the wrists and ankles, put on their knees or on their bellies, waiting their turn as French troops move down the line, spraying their brains into the sand or shoving their blades into the guts and organs of these helpless prisoners. And you can’t stab a prisoner once and be done with it, not unless you want to listen to him scream for the next half hour as he bleeds out. So you stab and stab and stab until he stops moving, which doesn’t happen right away. At first, they all had that natural involuntary bodily response that you would expect when a 12-inch serrated blade is shoved into your torso. They squirmed, they pulled away, they writhed in agony and terror and they screamed.

And the French soldiers, trying to end the racket, stabbed and stabbed, punching holes in the chest and stomach and groin, stabbing the face, stabbing the throat as the prisoners jerked and writhed and screamed. 3,000 people. In his book, Napoleon, his army and his generals, the French author, JeanCharles-Dominique de La Coutelle, wrote that the piles of bodies after this massacre were left to rot and eventually they became pyramids of bleached bones, standing as monuments to the beginning of the modern cultural interaction between Europe and Palestine’s Arabs. The last cultural memory shared by everyone in the region before Napoleon had been the Crusades. That was the last shared cultural memory of interaction with Christian society. And the return of the Christians to their country had only confirmed the worst fears and stereotypes that had lingered since that period. It can sometimes be difficult, or it’s always difficult, to get an idea of how an event like this affected people at the time. Again, it’s important to remember, this is the first real interaction any of these people have ever had with Europeans.

And it can be so easy to sanitize events like this because of the lack of any real drama. A hundred people are killed in an urban riot. That leaves behind dozens of just grist for newspaper stories, you know, these harrowing tales. They chase that woman down the street over there and then they beat her with rods and they stab that man with knives as his children screamed. I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do. Compared to an event like the execution of these prisoners, where it’s just, you know, they shot the first man and then they shot the second man and stabbed the third and they shot the fourth and on and on and on 3,000 times and no one survived and that was that. Joseph Stalin famously, perhaps apocryphally, said that one death is a tragedy and a million is just a statistic and there’s a bit of that at play here. A riot that kills a hundred people can seem infinitely more horrifying than the brutal murder of 3,000 that lacks the drama and from which no one survives.

For centuries, the Arabs of Palestine had lived in peace with the Christians and the Jews in their midst. Neither of the two minorities, Christians or Jews, enjoyed equality with the Muslim majority, of course. I mentioned in the first episode that the Ottoman Empire, as far as places in the world went at the time, was a decent place for a Jew to be and I got some flack for that from people who wanted to point out, well, there was this type of discrimination, there was that. I get all that. I’m not saying there was equality, but you have to speak in relative terms. It was a different world. No place in the world conferred equality on minorities until very, very recently in world history and many would say that this really hasn’t even been accomplished across the board in any country on earth today. On the whole, though, the Ottoman Empire in general, and Palestine in particular, was the easiest place on the planet to be a Jew.

So take this quote, for example. This is a quote from, honestly, one of the better studies that I’ve found on the Jewish experience in Ottoman Palestine. It’s called Letters from the Land of Israel by a great writer and scholar named Avraham Yari. He writes that the authors of the letters that he surveyed, thousands of letters over hundreds of years, that the authors of these letters invariably emphasize, quote, that the regime does not discriminate against the Jews and that the Arab inhabitants harbor no special hatred of the Jews as Jews. The writers stress in particular that there was no contempt for the Jew and his faith, the kind of contempt that had become etched in their souls during their time living in Christian lands. They declare in astonishment that the Arabs honor Jewish holy sites and the tombs of Jewish saints. Rabbi Yitzhak Latif writes in his letter from the last quarter of the 15th century, quote, The Arabs are at peace with us. They will never strike us and never pillage, end quote.

At about the same time, Rabbi Yosef de Montagna declared in his letter from Jerusalem, quote, On the way, we were sometimes in the field among many Ishmaelites, and I never heard a man open his mouth to speak evil, end quote. A few years later, in 1488, Rabbi Ovedayev Bartanur wrote in his first letter from Jerusalem, quote, The Jews feel no sense of repression at all from the Ishmaelites in this place. I have traveled the length and breadth of the country, and no one opens his mouth or jeers, end quote. A student of this same Rabbi Ovedayev Bartanur describes in a letter the punishments imposed by the authorities, remarking that, quote, As a rule, there is a single law for the Jews and the uncircumcised, the Christians and the Ishmaelites, but they do not hate Jews and castigate and abuse them as in your country, Italy, end quote. In the mid-18th century, Rabbi Avraham Gershon of Kitav wrote from Hebron, quote, The Gentiles here very much love the Jews. When there is a brit milah, circumcision ceremony that I probably butchered, or any other celebration, their most important men come at night and rejoice with the Jews and clap hands and dance with the Jews, just like the Jews, end quote. And so, this book, it goes on to describe the close relations and business interactions between Arabs and Jews, close social relationships, and although tensions began to rise during the first wave of Jewish immigration, of Zionist immigration, it wasn’t widespread enough to affect most of the country. Just before the outbreak of the First World War in 1913, I remember reading about a band that would play together in Jerusalem, and the band consisted of three Muslims, two Jews, and a Christian, and this was not strange to anybody.

But let’s go back to the 19th century. After Napoleon’s forces reintroduced Europe to Palestine’s Arabs, you know, although relations would not really go off the cliff until the post-war Zionists drove it off the cliff, things did slowly begin to change after the French atrocities, not least because some groups of Christians and Jews saw an opportunity in the French conquest and collaborated with them. It hadn’t occurred to the Arabs before this that the Jews and Christians in their midst might have identified more with these Europeans than they did with their neighbors, and most of them didn’t, but the collaboration of a few was enough to make the Muslim majority suddenly more aware of the difference between themselves and their Christian and Jewish neighbors. Suddenly it became necessary to remember that, hey, Christians have been trying to conquer the Holy Land for a thousand years, and the Jews still spoke of returning to their homeland in Palestine. When the Ottoman Empire was strong, they could afford to imagine that both of those groups would be happy living in Palestine. But as the Ottoman Empire was eclipsed by Christian Europe in power, the Arabs realized that they had to actually worry about being conquered. Suddenly the Christian and Jewish minorities around them began to look a lot more dangerous. And this is happening over the course of the 19th century.

The Ottoman Empire begins instituting changes which are roiling traditional village life in Palestine. There were over a thousand villages in Palestine in the mid-19th century, and most of them operated along very similar traditional lines. A typical village would consist of four or five clans. Each of those clans would be led by an elder, and the village itself was led by one of these elders, empowered by consensus as the village Sheikh. Villages were autarkic, that means they were economically self-sustaining and independent. They produced the food and materials that they needed to survive, but then they would produce cotton and lemons and olives and other products that they could export or trade for goods the village couldn’t produce on its own. Probably the most well-known export are the famous Jaffa oranges. You might have eaten those.

They’re real big giant oranges with real thick skin, so they were perfect for exporting to places like Europe. So you had a developing market in Palestine in the 19th century. It was starting to become integrated with the rest of the world. So now in Palestine in the first half of the 19th century, up until 1858, the vast majority of the land is owned by the Ottoman government. But custom allowed the peasants to keep the produce and pass down the right to use the land to their children as long as they continued to pay their taxes and didn’t displease the authorities and all that. Practical land rights though, like that was the official Ottoman policy, but practical land rights were managed collectively at the village level. Typically each family would receive allocations of land to grow crops, and this land would be reallocated and passed around to different families every two years or so, so that each family could take advantage of the different opportunities that each plot of land offered. Meanwhile, grazing lands, woodlands, water sources, and those kind of things, those were all held collectively by the village, and no one family could claim exclusivity over those commons.

The whole world was changing in the 19th century, and the Ottoman Empire was no exception. Driven by what economic historians call the integration and peripheralization process, the Ottoman Empire and its constituent peoples could no longer insulate themselves from what was happening everywhere else in the world. This process of integration and peripheralization began in the 16th century, and it was accelerating by the time we get to the beginning of the 19th century, and it could be basically roughly summed up as follows. The world economy is becoming increasingly integrated into a single economic system, with Europe providing high-margin, high-value finished products, and manufactured goods, and capital for investment, and other regions provide raw materials and cheap labor and agricultural products for Europe. Sounds pretty awesome if you’re Europe, right? The Ottoman Empire was thus brought into the world economy as a provider of raw materials for Europe, and as a market for European finished goods. This is basically the center-periphery colonial arrangement against which the American revolutionaries, for example, would rebel toward the end of the 18th century. And so this was one aspect of the changes that are taking place, that are affecting life in Palestine in the 19th century.

These self-sustaining village economies suddenly found themselves involved in a world economy. Another aspect was a series of internal reforms that were being pushed by the Ottoman authorities. The encroachment of Europe and a brief rebellion in Egypt made the Ottomans decide that they needed to reassert control over their territory. This involved many policy changes, many projects. For example, forcibly settling Bedouin nomads as peasant villagers, and building the famous Hejaz Railway. The Hejaz Railway is the line that ran from Istanbul to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. And they built it. It was a huge prestige project.

Muslims from all over the world donated to the project. It was a big important thing for the Ottoman Empire. And so to protect that rail line from sabotage or from people scavenging for materials, the Ottoman army greatly increased the number of garrisons in its presence throughout Palestine, through which most of the railroad ran. The Ottoman Empire had traditionally been a pretty loose governor. Pay your taxes, just remember who the boss is. But other than that, we don’t care. Run your own affairs. Just keep sending your tribute and don’t rebel. But now the Palestinian Arabs were going to have to get used to a much more present and activist Ottoman government. And so the forced settlement of Arab nomads ensured that virtually all of Palestine has been cultivated by the middle of the 19th century. But the recent nomads, they settled in stages. They didn’t just go from being pastoralist nomads and raiders and hunters to completely sedentary peasants just like that. In the middle of the century, for example, the land on the coastal plain of Palestine between Jaffa in the south and Haifa up north was being cultivated by peasants who were living a sort of hybrid lifestyle. They would spend most of the year living in tent villages in the hills or up on the plateau overlooking the plain and their crops. And they would come down a few times a year to plant and tend their crops and reap their harvest. And so when European and Jewish visitors in the 19th century got off their ships in Haifa and looked around that coastal plain, they saw thinly inhabited temporary villages kind of just set up for the times, those rare times that the farmers came out of the hills to work.

And so they concluded that there was nobody around but a few poor natives living in these jerry-rigged villages. So move up to 1858. In 1858, the Ottoman Empire passed a land reform act privatizing most of the land in Palestine. Now this probably needed to happen. It was definitely a modernizing progressive thing that probably needed to happen for the empire. It may have even been well-intentioned enough, but it created a huge amount of turmoil and social upheaval in the country. You remember village land was held collectively and only the right to use it was reallocated by the village itself from time to time. But the Ottoman land law conferred full exclusive ownership on whomever happened to be holding it and claimed possession of it at the time that the land reform act was passed.

And so this led, of course, this led to many unscrupulous people accumulating huge tracts of land and to many other simple peasants who wouldn’t have remotely known how to navigate the bureaucracy in any case to lose out. The Ottoman Empire used land ownership registration to find and conscript peasants into the army so that it knew where to go when it wanted to tax people and stuff like that. So as bad of a time as it has historically been to be a front rank conscripted cannon fodder soldier, it was worse in the Ottoman Empire because they didn’t even have a remote idea yet of a citizen soldier. That was as far away as it could be. You’re real cannon fodder. And so sometimes wealthy urban speculators in Haifa and Beirut and the other cities in the area, they would go out and spread rumors of looming mass conscriptions and wars that would frighten the peasants into selling their land cheaply just to get off the books. And this is not unique to Palestine. In the United States in the 19th century, oil and mining interests would infamously send agents ahead of them to spread rumors in communities of federal seizure of the land or of impending Native American attacks so that a Hearst or a Rockefeller could come along behind and find people who, hey, they’re willing to sell for whatever they can get.

And so just as in the United States at that time in the 19th century, this is something that was happening in a lot of places, this process led to an accumulation of huge tracts of land by urban wealthy notables who had never and would never set foot on it. In Beirut, the Sarsouk family, for example, owned 70 square miles of land in the Jezreel Valley, 70 square miles, and they had never been there. They were living in Lebanon’s capital, their land was in Palestine, and it was nothing to them other than a profit venture. All they cared about was the income being provided by the peasants living there. And if it turned out that they could turn a larger profit by selling to the Zionists, even if they knew the Zionists would evict all those peasants, they didn’t hesitate. They had no connection to the country or to the peasants. And when the time came, they did sell piece by piece, most of it to the Jewish National Fund. It’s important to understand that the standards of living and the rights that were being enjoyed by the, enjoyed is definitely the wrong way to put it, but the standards of living and the rights of the typical Palestinian peasant in the 19th century were at least as difficult as those faced by the Jews of the Russian Empire during the same period.

I mention this because I frequently encounter a common misunderstanding that the oppressed Jews of Europe made their way to Palestine out of desperation, this part is mostly true, and that the Arabs, afraid of losing their privileged place in the land, reacted violently and tried to block the poor Jews from coming. That second part is completely untrue. The wealthy urban Arab notables, they actually didn’t mind Jewish immigration for the most part, they made money off of it. And even into the 1930s, they only slowly began to react to it because they were facing a revolt from their own poor workers and displaced peasants. The vast majority of Palestinian Arabs had lives that were just as difficult and oppressive as anything the Jews faced in the Russian Empire, and these were the people, not the rich urban families, these were the people on whom Zionism landed the hardest. As the European colonial powers began their conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, pressure was turned up all over the Arab world. You remember how the West reintroduced itself with Napoleon? Well, now they’re taking over countries and they’re chipping away at the periphery of the empire and slowly closing in on the core.

Every new acquisition by Britain or France is experienced as another step in that process that began with Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt and Palestine. Eventually, the Europeans controlled just about everything except the Ottoman core, and it was clear that they were gunning for that too. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, all effectively under European control. When the Zionists began to show up in the late 19th century then, they were not resisted as Jews, they were resisted as Europeans. They were universally thought to be agents of European colonial powers, and in fact, that’s how they sold themselves to Britain in the first place. Help us out, help us get established down there, and now you’ll have a friendly Jewish commonwealth that’ll be kind of a part of this global British system right there by the Suez Canal. We’ll help you out. So, during the First World War, when that comes along, Britain comes to the Arabs, encourages Sharif Hussein and the Hashemites to rise up against the Ottoman Empire, promising them that they’ll have sovereign nation-states in the aftermath, but of course, it turned out that Britain and France had other plans.

After nipping at the edges of the empire for years, the Europeans finally finished the job and laid waste to the entirety of the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire. The League of Nations comes and institutes a mandate system, and when word of the mandate system reaches the Arabs in the Levant, they convene the Syrian General Congress to make their collective will known to the colonial powers. We spoke about all this, but very quickly again, because it’s important to understand how this culminates in their response to the 1929 riots. The Syrian General Congress told the League of Nations, okay, first, look, we are ready and prepared for independent nationhood right now. We don’t want a mandatory power controlling our fate. We’re ready to just do this ourselves. You say that the mandate is to help shepherd us and prepare us for self-government. We’re ready for it now.

But they were realists. They said, look, if we’re going to be forced to accept a mandatory power, and since the League of Nations itself has said that the desires of the local population will determine who the mandatory power should be, we want the United States to be our mandatory power, if we’re going to have one. We want the U.S. to be the mandatory power over greater Syria, which, remember, consists of most of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Jordan. But if we can’t have the United States, then fine, let the power over us be Britain. All we ask, and you say that you value our desires, all we ask is that France, under no circumstances, be empowered as a mandatory authority over Syria. More than a century later, and the Arabs had not forgotten the massacre at Jaffa by Napoleon. And finally, they said, the Zionists, the Zionists are coming in here claiming that they want to take away our national rights altogether, insisting that our land is actually their land, and saying openly that they will make their wish a fact.

The Jews who have always lived here as our neighbors, they belong here, and they will be full and equal members of our new nation. But the Zionists, who openly threaten our national future, must no longer be allowed to immigrate into our country. And so, because the mandatory powers did, in fact, value the desires of the local population so much, what do you think they did? Of course, you know the answer to that. They gave Syria to France, and Britain maintained control of Palestine, specifically in order to ensure that Zionist immigration would continue. And when the Arabs decided that they didn’t like that arrangement, and simply withdrew from the process, and declared their independent kingdom on their own, the French army came in, smashed them, exiled their leaders, and imposed a military government over the whole of Syria and Lebanon. You remember in an earlier episode, we mentioned the French general in Syria, and the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, recalling the Crusades explicitly, and rejoicing triumphantly that they had finally returned to the Holy Land, and taken it back for the Christians. Those people who were watching from afar, and wondering at the outbursts of Arab violence, they probably wondered, just like many people today still wonder, why do the Arabs seem so paranoid?

They always think everybody’s out to get them. But if the average European didn’t see the colonization and conquest of the Middle East as a new crusade that began with Napoleon’s conquest, I think it’s pretty easy to see why it was experienced that way by the Arabs. The British, for their part, continued to whisper sweet nothings into the ears of the Arabs, even as they appointed committed Zionists to rule over Palestine’s mandatory government. And the Arab notables, who had been Palestine’s nominal leadership class for quite a while now, but whose relationship with the peasants was always a little less than harmonious, seemed happy to let it all happen. By the end of the 1920s, thousands and thousands of formerly independent Arab farmers are living in filthy, shanty towns on the outskirts of cities like Haifa, walking through beautiful neighborhoods that are now inhabited by Jews and Britons and wealthy Arabs, and they’re walking down to the docks or into the factories to beg for a job from their new masters. The rage, the rage of impotence and betrayal had been building underneath the surface, and when right-wing Zionists in 1929 began marching on the Temple Mount, declaring the area to be the rightful property of the Jews and carrying their Zionist flag and mounting it up over the wall, that was all the spark that the powder keg needed to blow up. The peasants had been slowly and then quickly dispossessed and deprived of their rights and brutalized for over a century, and not just by the Zionists, intermittently by the Ottoman powers and the European colonialists. From the Arab perspective, quite reasonably, I would say, every interaction that they had had with the Europeans, from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 to the brutal repression of national uprisings in Iraq and Egypt and Syria, to everything that’s still ahead in our story, all of it just confirmed their belief that the Europeans were advancing their conquest of Muslim lands, whatever they said, and that the Zionists were just a weapon in that conquest.

The urban wealthy notables had failed, if they had tried at all, to protect the poor Arabs from any of this. What’s worse, they seemed complicit in their dispossession a lot of the time. With the exception of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the Haj Amin al-Husseini, the urban families were becoming objects of scorn among Palestine’s poor. Instead, the poor workers and peasants had begun to turn to the only people who seemed unafraid to speak out about what was happening to them, the religious leaders. On the morning that the violence of August 1929 struck Jaffa, a young imam named Ismail Toubassi, he gave a fiery speech to a crowd in front of Jaffa’s primary mosque, and there was a British military officer there. He wrote about it, and he wrote that the older sheikhs tried to cut him off, but Toubassi wouldn’t listen. The older sheikhs were among these notables, who increasingly seemed to be either impotent at best or collaborators at worst to the common people, and the imams were finally beginning to take them on directly. And so that British officer who was present wrote, quote, Ismail Toubassi rose and said, Ten years protesting, but without results.

This protest will receive the same fate as the others. We must demonstrate. Attack our enemies by ourselves. Lose our lives for the country. He was very excited, and made the assembly very excited, end quote. Now, Ismail Toubassi was just 22 years old when he said this in 1929. He’d just finished his studies at the Islamic College in Jerusalem. There’s something like a dark mirror of that children’s revolt against their parents, that rift that had emerged earlier between the younger and older Russian Jews after 1881, with the former, the younger, becoming so disillusioned with the impotence of the older generation that they finally took matters into their own hands.

As one of the only traditional Arab notables that was still hanging on to a decent amount of influence, the Grand Mufti became more and more important to the British. He was one of the last threads still connecting the British mandatory government to the Arab people on the street, and he was the only one who could credibly exercise any kind of moderating control over them. But this put him in a really difficult position, because that credibility that he was holding onto rested entirely on the people’s impression that he was standing up to the British, and standing up to the Zionists. In August of 1929, the people had begun to awaken to the fact that they could act without the leadership of the big families, or even in defiance of them. And it was the religious leaders who were beginning to finally wake them up to that. And so when the Zionists begin arriving in Palestine, they’re walking into a world where the peasantry had already been thrown into the gears of history by European conquerors, and by their own Ottoman government, and their own wealthy supposed leadership for about a century. The resistance of the Palestinians at first, before the First World War, you couldn’t really call it a national struggle. It wasn’t nationalist resistance at the time.

That idea hadn’t formed yet. They were still part of an Ottoman Empire that they considered legitimate. It was more what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls primitive rebellion. It was just a reaction. It was a disunified response to the fact that they were being bullied and dispossessed. It took the familiar form that you see in any other anti-colonial peasant rebellion. The tactics were the same. The purpose was the same.

The organization level, very similar. Now over time, the struggle tried to find a footing that would allow the resistance to unite as a national movement. First as greater Syrian or Pan-Arab nationalism. When those were off the table, a secular-ish Palestinian nationalism led by Muslim-Christian associations in the cities and by the wealthy urban elites. But after 10 years of watching the British and the Zionists undermine those associations and of watching the wealthy notables sleepwalk through their dispossession while filling their own pockets in the meantime, that fell off too. But the problem still existed. They were still being dispossessed. Still watching their traditional way of life being taken apart and their country being taken over.

And the leaders who stepped up to do something into that vacuum were populist religious leaders who were calling not just for a nationalist struggle but for a jihad that would allow Muslims to unite to defend their land from the infidels seeking their subjugation. These are the circumstances then that would allow one man to emerge and give Islamic resistance to Zionism and colonialism a face. That man’s name was Mohammed Izzadin al-Qassam. Izzadin al-Qassam was the man of whom a Palestinian poet a little bit later would write, quote, Who would imitate Qassam as Islam’s ideal soldier? Follows, if he wishes, release from the inherited humiliation the best master. For he forsook words and the weakling’s idle chatter. Our leaders have stuffed our ears to bursting with talk. We believe true what they wrote, but it was only a delusion, end quote.

Izzadin al-Qassam was born in Latakia on the northern coast of Syria right around the time that the pogroms were occurring after Czar Alexander II’s murder in the early 1880s. We don’t know the exact year, 1880, 1881, somewhere in there. Two generations of men in his family before him had been leaders of an order of Sufi Muslims called the Qadari Sufis. Most people today hear the word Sufi and they think of whirling dervishes drunk on the divine experience or the mystic love poetry of Rumi. That’s not what this was. Sufism had undergone changes in the late Ottoman Empire. By the 19th century, many Sufi orders had gotten out of the business of mysticism and they were responding to both their followers who were looking for something that spoke more directly to their daily needs and to the ideas of the Ottoman government who sent them out and put them to work spreading a standardized Islamic orthodoxy, part of the nationalizing project that the Ottoman Empire was undergoing. Professor James Gelvin from UCLA, by far one of my favorite sources for every stage of this conflict up to the modern day, he wrote, quote, the most prominent Qadari leader in 19th century Syria was Abd al-Qadir al-Jazayri.

Abd al-Qadir had led the resistance against the French occupation of Algeria before he was exiled to Damascus. While in Damascus, he preached the lessons that he had learned during that resistance. Muslims not only had to use Islamic law to guide them in their daily lives, but had to apply the principles of reason to make that law compatible with modern conditions. Furthermore, Muslims had to assimilate Western scientific and technological practices. The ideas Abd al-Qadir preached were commonplace in the Middle East during Izz ad-Din al-Qassam’s youth. Al-Qassam’s association with like-minded members of other Sufi orders in Syria and modernist scholars at the Islamic University of Al-Azhar in Cairo reinforced these ideas. As soon as he returned to Syria from studying in Cairo, al-Qassam began applying the lessons he had learned, end quote. He very quickly gained a reputation as a man of thoughtful piety and fierce independence.

Once he was back in Syria, he soon became a popular and respected imam of a mosque in his hometown, as well as a teacher at a local Sufi school. Al-Qassam looked around at the Arab world under the late decadent Ottoman Empire, which was on its last legs, and he did not like what he saw. It disturbed him. He had just returned from Cairo, which was once the largest city in the world west of China, and to him it was a reminder of Islam’s glorious history, but also a reminder of how that mighty city and the rest of Egypt had been brought completely under the control of foreigners from some tiny little island north of Europe. When the Committee for Union and Progress, the so-called Young Turks, staged their 1907 revolution in the Ottoman Empire, al-Qassam must have looked upon that with some ambivalence. I’m not aware of any record of his thoughts at the time, but the Young Turks, they were a modernizing force in Ottoman politics and his Qadhari Sufi order would have supported most of that, but they were also pushing toward Turkish nationalism, specifically Turkish nationalism, and kind of abandoning their role as the leader of the whole Muslim world. And already they had abandoned their responsibility to protect some North African Muslims from European domination, and when Italy moved against Libya in 1911, the Ottoman Empire appeared ready to declare it too much trouble to protect as well. Some people started to wonder if they would let it go that easy if they were Turks and not Arabs.

Muslims who had depended on the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph for protection, they were being exploited, being killed by European colonial powers, and the Turks seemed prepared to watch it happen again. Resentment and worry over the fact that the Turks were not any longer interested in protecting their Arab subjects was a big factor in the Hashemites’ decision to take the British up on their offer to rebel during the First World War. But if the Turks were prepared to watch Libya fall under the Italian yoke, Izz ad-Din al-Qassam was not. He began gathering up men and making preparations to set sail for Libya himself to go fight the Italian invasion, to join up with whoever was fighting it. He took up collections and donations for supplies and weapons, and he got together as volunteers, and he was at the port ready to depart when the Turkish government ordered them to stay put and intercepted them all before they could embark. So Libya is taken over along with the rest of North Africa by the Europeans, and Qassam, frustrated, he went back to work as a teacher. And so 1914, the World War comes along, and Qassam, he’s frustrated with the Ottoman Empire, but he’s still an Ottoman subject, and he still believes in it to the extent that it’s a reality and it exists, and it’s the primary vehicle Islam has at that moment to defend itself. And so he joined the Ottoman army and serves as a chaplain.

He wasn’t originally slated to serve in combat, but he demanded to serve in combat, and so he received training on weapons handling and basic tactics and survival, basic stuff. I’m not sure if he ever actually made it into combat. He also made valuable contacts with other trained military veterans, and when the war ended and the Turks were gone and their ostensible enemy, Faisal ibn Husayn al-Hashimi, the Hashemites, who had staged the Arab revolt, he was the only leader who was available at the time that could unite the Arab kingdom of Syria, and so Qassam threw in with him and his supporters. And when the French decided to throw Faisal out, Qassam thought that his time had finally come. This is what he’d been waiting for. He was ready to fight. This time he wasn’t traveling to some other country in the name of defending an abstract concept. This jihad would be in his home country to defend an Arab ruler from European invaders.

Pretty clean. But we already covered how this went. Faisal backed down, surrendered to the French without a fight, and Qassam was disappointed by the passivity and compliance of the elite leadership again. After Faisal surrendered, Qassam was not prepared to give up, so he was one of those who took up to the hills to carry on the fight against the French. These militias were made up of former soldiers from the Ottoman army, from peasant and working class volunteers, and there were some wellequipped fighters from wealthier families who kind of expected their status to guarantee that they would be leaders, that they would receive some deference from everybody else in the hills, from all the poorer fighters and militia members. The landowners and the urban notables were necessary to help fund and supply the resistance. And the French, they’d been doing this a long time at this point, they knew it was much easier to target these self-interested rich supporters of the resistance instead of chasing a bunch of jihadis who had nothing to lose but their lives. And the French didn’t have to do much.

They didn’t pull out toenails or publicly hang any of these wealthier supporters. They just threatened to disrupt their businesses, seize their lands and their assets. Basically they took aim at their pocketbooks and the notables, the landowners and the notables, they just showed no heart at all. No heart at all. Not only did they immediately fold and stop funding the rebels, leaving them in the hills without supplies or ammunition as French planes flew by and strafed them, they also called back their own sons and relatives who took all their fancy gear back home with them and then they even collaborated to help the French target the remaining fighters. This was a formative experience in Kassam’s life. It was probably the formative experience in his life. And he made a decision right then and there that he was never going to trust the wealthy to come through again. Not for their country, not for their religion, not for anything. Men who had too many worldly interests were shackled by them. Only the common people had proven reliable when push came to shove in that rebellion and it would only be the common people from now on with whom Kassam would hold any truck. After the resistance against the French in Syria fizzled out, Kassam was marked for death by the French and so he fled into British Palestine taking up residence in the port city of Haifa and quickly rose to prominence there as a pious and eloquent teacher. In 1924-25 I believe he got a job as an official for the Grand Mufti Supreme Muslim Council going around administering Islamic marriages in the villages and this was a big deal for him because this not only provided him an income, it gave him an opportunity, a rare opportunity in British Mandate Palestine. As a marriage official he was one of the few people who had license to travel freely anywhere in the country because he never really abandoned his primary mission which was freeing Islamic lands, especially Arab lands and specifically greater Syria from European domination and his gigs as a teacher and a traveling marriage official afforded him the opportunity to make the connections and and to build the beginnings of a resistance network. Now Izzad Din al-Kassam was not only, he wasn’t just a fighter and he didn’t see the problem in Palestine in purely military terms. Living in Haifa he was at the epicenter of the chaos resulting from British rule and from Zionism.

Haifa was Palestine’s main port city and so when Zionist immigrants arrived they arrived in Haifa. Many of them stayed there at least for a while and Haifa’s population doubled during the 1920s. Real estate prices went up beyond what any of the Arabs for the most part could afford and so it became a British and Jewish city for the most part and all of the changes that were happening in the rest of Palestine happened first and happened in Haifa. Haifa was the first city of Palestine as far as the British were concerned because it was the Mediterranean outlet of the oil pipeline they had built from Mosul in Iraq and this along with the influx of Zionist immigrants and the capital they brought with them made Haifa the first destination of the displaced Arab peasants who were now looking for work and the degradation of the Arab poor was more evident there than anywhere else. Arabs who had lost their farms, lost their land, lost their sense of agency, who suffered each day the indignity of begging for jobs from the people who had evicted them and who were doing back breaking manual labor in exchange for a pittance especially compared to the Jewish laborers doing the same work each of whose wages were marked up 30 percent flat from the Arab wages whenever they worked for the British. This was a policy the British paid Arabs one wage they paid all Jewish workers 30 percent more flat and these people these Arabs these young Arabs especially were not doing well especially the young men. You know if you were 20 in 1930 then you were 10 in 1920 and so most of your life had consisted of watching your parents stress out over Zionist encroachment then watching them lose the land you had grown up on to the Zionists. At some point in your early or mid teenage years you had moved with your whole family to live in a cramped apartment if you were lucky and if you weren’t you slept under a tarp in one of the dirty shanty towns outside one of the cities you watched your father ask Jews or Britons for work maybe you saw your mother cleaning their houses just so they could get a few lentils in your belly to feed you the moment you became old enough you had to go out and look for work as well no other choice well this this generation of young Arab men as you can imagine they were not doing well many many of them began to drink a lot alcoholism was becoming a major problem they were spending their time gambling and looking for fights with young Zionists the most dangerous animal in the world is a young person with no future and for the moment in Palestine that dangerous animal was being caged in by liquor and gambling and other vices Kassam was watching all this and he believed that this loss of morale not even so much morality in the sense that God will bless us if we do what we’re told but morale that this is what had caused his people to lose and lose and lose to these Europeans the people had lost their purpose and and a major reason for that was that they had terrible leadership the elites were forever squabbling amongst themselves using the people as pawns in their wars with one another and and Kassam thought they would eagerly sell the people into slavery if the British or the Jews offered them a few coins everything he experienced in those Syrian hills Palestine was full of that same betrayal every single day but there were no other leaders stepping forward who could give the poor Arabs and remaining peasants a voice well Mohammed Izzah al-Din al-Kassam was not a man to wait around for someone else to act he began going into the slums out into the shanty towns preaching doing what he could do to help the poor but more than anything he began calling on the young men calling on young Arab men to remember who they were and stand up for themselves get their act together it’s tough to convey how rare this kind of leadership was at the time among the Arabs in Palestine or how necessary it was but you know just think of the fact that the Arab people were amazed because of the simplicity of his lifestyle and because he could often be found in the slums chatting and laughing with the poor or out in a shanty town sharing a meal in his imam’s robes with destitute workers they were amazed at this because it was unheard of for any of the notable elites to even visit those places they would never be seen there and these places were Kassam’s home those were his people and he wanted nothing to do with the traditional leadership or what they had to offer Kassam began to build a following of young Muslim men men who were roused by his message partly because they wanted to resist the British and the Zionists sure but also and I would say mainly because it was an opportunity to do something meaningful to be something other than a poor Arab kicking around the slums with no future instead of being a pawn in someone else’s game Kassam was calling on them to participate directly in their own future and in the future of their country his followers would stop drinking stop gambling and all the rest when he’d hear of one of his people ending up in a brothel or drinking den he’d go in and get them out and bring them home he would even go seek out brothels and hashish dens as opportunities to preach calling on the young men in those places to look at what they were doing and get it together join his movement soon he began to lead groups out of the cities to intercept shipments of liquor and hashish and he would throw it away in the in into the water break the barrels and bottles and just leave everything spilled in the sand Kassam was not involved in the 1929 violence but when it became clear after those riots that things had changed that the country had entered a new phase of conflict Kassam began to focus full-time on his resistance work he began organizing his followers and we’re talking about a small number of people here 800 maybe a thousand men he began organizing them into semi-independent cells to begin attacking the British and sometimes the Zionists and sabotaging their activities he began secretly training Arabs with his limited military experience and some other volunteers taught others to make simple explosives basic tactics the groups were not centrally commanded by Kassam and so the level of violence varied from group to group some groups would go after symbolic targets by burning down Zionist trees or tearing up British railroad tracks others engaged in murder and as the pace of the violence picked up Kassam tried to convince the Grand Mufti the Haj Amin al-Husseini to join him he suggested that they issue this was the time issue a joint call for a general uprising against the British occupation but the Haj Amin didn’t want to do it he refused his relationship to the British had always been complicated and it will remain complicated and we’ll talk a lot more about that in the next episode the last episode and at critical points in this story the Grand Mufti did what he could to quell Arab violence even though it was his rhetoric that often inflamed it but he would usually at the critical moment try to slow things down he was one of those one of those leaders who needed people to be angry because then they would look to him for leadership but he didn’t want him to start breaking things and killing people and burning things down the Haj Amin’s antipathy had migrated for the most part toward the Jews and away from the British and this wasn’t just self-interest because the British were his patrons it was also due to a change that had been taking place in the way the Arabs perceived the Zionists since the end of the first world war they had always seen the Zionists I mentioned a little while ago they had always seen the Zionists as a Trojan horse for European imperialism but after a dozen years of listening to bitter British military officers complain that there was nothing that they could do that you know I agree with you guys but hey I can’t do anything the Jews are too powerful and they control the actions of our government back home the Arabs began to buy into that they began to learn the language of European anti-semitism you know and there’s there’s there’s anti-Jewish bigotry right you just don’t like some group of people but anti-semitism has a specific connotation for most people right when most people hear it they don’t just think of people who don’t like Jews they associate it with a particular kind of dislike the conspiracy theories about the Jews running the world and controlling the banks and governments and bending the planet to their diabolical will well that was something that never existed in the Arab world they didn’t have any experience with Jews other than the traditional Middle Eastern Jews that they were used to and got along with for the most part it wasn’t until the Europeans showed up with Mark Sykes if you remember from the first episode telling Amir Faisal that the Jews controlled all the world’s financial centers and governments and so forth and so many important leaders Winston Churchill so many others were writing and talking about all this that the Arabs began to pick it up and if it seemed improbable to them at first their experiences seemed to confirm it how else were they supposed to explain the fact that so many of the military police and mandate authorities working for the British government that they came into contact with and who seemed to support their cause that they were saying that they had to take their orders from a British government that was always seeming to come down on the side of the Zionists now there are good cultural and historical reasons why this was the case of course it’s not a big conspiracy but you can imagine a Palestinian Arab in the 1920s and 1930s just accepting Mark Sykes’ word on the matter the Haj Amin definitely accepted it and by the 1930s he’s usually a good bet to be found openly quoting from the protocols of the learned elders of Zion during official government proceedings so it wasn’t a good look but this wasn’t universal yet in Palestine so while the Grand Mufti was directing his ire toward the Jews Qassam was still aiming at the British and the Zionists only secondarily as agents of the British and the Haj Amin wanted nothing to do with that and finally in 1933 after a few of his followers burned down a Zionist house and killed a father and son the British took notice and Qassam was forced into hiding they still didn’t really know who he was but they were moving now against the violence and against the insurgents but even though he was underground Qassam never stopped working finally finally the scattered energies of the anxious Arab masses were beginning to move to something like a common rhythm they were beginning to find a vocabulary vocabulary rooted in both Islam and Palestinian nationalism a fusion of the two that might finally allow them to express and organize their resistance and make a stand for their country but this is happening just as the Zionists were discussing plans to make a stand of their own in the wake of the 1929 violence one prominent leader of the labor Zionists a protégé of David Ben-Gurion Chaim Arlassarov wrote a long letter to Chaim Weizmann in 1932 sharing his thoughts on the Zionist situation in Palestine and he writes with an urgency that you’re going to hear in a minute and he wrote this just six months before events in Germany would sweep every other consideration except escape off the table the Zionists all along they had hoped to establish themselves so powerfully before the Arabs caught on that they not only could not be dislodged before the Arabs awoke to it but also to secure a strong enough beachhead that they would be able to guarantee unlimited Jewish immigration into Palestine on their own without the British whether the Arabs liked it or not but the riots in 1929 had come too soon and now without unconditional British support the Zionists could not stand up to the Arabs if the Arabs decided to get together and make them leave and so it’s in this environment that Arlassarov wrote to Weizmann quote it is evident that if we do not wish to establish diaspora conditions in Palestine once again we must strive toward the quickest possible settlement of hundreds of thousands of Jews in order to assure at least a rare equilibrium between the two peoples in the country I am forced to the conclusion that with the present-day methods and under the present regime there exists virtually no opportunity for solving the problem of large-scale immigration and colonization this is so because our policy is based on the assumption that it is necessary and possible to attain our aims gradually step by step the present stage which we have attained by means of gradual development may be defined approximately as follows the Arabs are no longer strong enough to destroy our position but still consider themselves strong enough to establish an Arab state in Palestine without taking into consideration Jewish political demands whereas the Jews are strong enough to preserve their present position without possessing sufficient strength to assure the constant growth of the Jewish community through immigration colonization and the maintenance of peace and order in the country in the course of its development the next stage will be attained when the relationship of real forces will be such as to preclude any possibility of the establishment of an Arab state in Palestine i.e.

when the Jews will acquire such additional strength that as will automatically block the road for Arab domination this will be followed by another stage during which the Arabs will be unable to frustrate the constant growth of the Jewish community through immigration and constructive economic activity the constantly growing strength of the Jews will influence the Arabs in the direction of seeking a negotiated accord end quote and so you can see here when the two Zionist leaders are speaking frankly and privately that they’ve left off any language indicating a desire or hope for a peaceful resolution everything is about strength and our law survived is speaking purely in terms of having the power to impose what they wish on the Arabs now this was the line of Jabotinsky’s revisionists all through the 1920s when they would say plainly that questions of right and questions of morality had no place in struggles over identity and statecraft the strong would do what they wished the weak would suffer what they must the social Darwinian militancy of the revisionists after 1929 had finally burst through the membrane and even the left-wing anti-colonialist labor Zionists were using their language Arlasrov goes on to describe to Weizmann what he sees as the regional situation and also his anxiety over the fact that the Arabs were beginning to learn how to organize themselves he says quote in addition we are witnessing a shift in borders in the middle east which has not yet come to an end should syria and iraq come under one ruler the united states could exert upon us a greater pressure than if the states in the north were to remain apart the question whether the emir of transjordan will succeed in extending his rule southward and annex parts of arabia is also more serious than it was six months ago we must not forget that the Arab movement in Palestine has meanwhile learned all the political practices of Zionism from congresses and presidents down to banks and campaigns it has succeeded to some extent in attracting the attention of the Arab and Muslim world to Jerusalem and Palestine any policy which aims at isolating the Arabs of Palestine will now encounter greater obstacles than it would have encountered 10 or even five years ago end quote and we spoke in an earlier episode of the efforts by the British and the Zionists to ensure that the Palestinian Arabs remain divided amongst themselves and isolated from any other Arab states the grand mufti haj amin had stirred up fears about the al-aqsa mosque partly in an attempt to get the attention of those other states those other Muslim countries from which our law sir off would prefer to keep Palestine isolated he continues quote moreover it is scarcely necessary for me to remind you that the non-Jewish population of Palestine is increasing at a rapid rate a decade ago a Jewish majority or numerical equality in Palestine was a matter of 500,000 additional persons today it’s a question of 800,000 in another 15 years it’ll be a question of a million and a quarter but since the area of Palestine even within its widest borders is fixed the pressure on the means of subsistence in the country will rapidly increase i do not mean to say it is impossible to overcome this pressure it is definitely possible to overcome it but to do so great means and a government loyal to its tasks are required end quote see our loss of is telling Weizmann who is not in Palestine remember that we are running out of time Jews have lived in diaspora for thousands of years moving from place to place when that’s your life it doesn’t really make sense to have 12 kids per family because a dozen kids are hard to herd together if you have to flee a pogrom or you’re run out of town by the local peasants and so as a result to this day Jews tend to opt for a low output high investment reproductive strategy right don’t have a lot of kids put a huge amount of energy into the ones that you do have the Arabs on the other hand had been a tribal people until like yesterday and even the settled townspeople and peasant villagers still structured their daily lives according to a lot of tribal customs and traditions and in such a society strength in numbers is the operative principle and so the Palestinian Arabs tended to have lots of children and throughout the 1920s the Zionists had failed to convince many Jews to migrate into Palestine and although their numbers had grown the number of Arabs had grown even more quickly at a certain point however you slice it the country would start to run up on its carrying capacity which would make the question of Jewish immigration or rights to the land moot without considering drastic actions to rectify the situation and drastic action is exactly what Arlasorov had in mind first he reminds Weizmann of another danger limiting their timetable by invoking the prophets with a prophecy of his own he wrote quote this array of circumstances may reach a climax if an international struggle in which Britain is a participant should break out and can there be any doubt that we are nearing another world war five or ten years may pass before it breaks out and we cannot foretell exactly the form it will assume but whether it will be in the form of a concentration of forces against Soviet Russia partly in order to halt the spread of Bolshevism or the lines will be drawn some other way Bismarck once said history does not permit us to look at its cards but it is clear beyond all doubt whether we are going end quote he wrote this letter in June 1932 it’s not a bad prophecy and finally he tells Weizmann he lays out what he’s got on his mind quote I see before me four possible conclusions one possible way out is to declare that it is an ignorant prejudice to assume that every problem must have a solution that all calculations must balance in the end actually it is not so we have no choice but to continue wandering along devious paths without knowing exactly where we will come out we must carry on even though we stand before a seemingly unscalable wall we must gather strength as best we can we do not know what the future will bring perhaps the poets will die perhaps the dog will die as the famous Jewish anecdote has it new opportunities may be in store for us meantime we must hold our positions that’s one option and it’s a characteristically Jewish attitude it is the typically Jewish manifestation of courage but it is definitely not a Zionist attitude should the Zionist movement adopt such an attitude it would renounce political action which implies a calculated policy and a constructive plan and descend to the level of Jewish fatalism the consequence of passivity during many generations in this sense I have always looked upon Zionism as a rebellion against Jewish tradition end quote now those are the words of a true Zionist 50 years after the pogroms following the czar’s assassination still carrying the words of the poem in his heart remember quote note also do not fail to note in that dark corner and behind that cask crouched husbands bridegrooms brothers peering from the cracks they saw it all they did not stir or move they did not pluck their eyes out they beat not their brains against the wall this poem was ringing in Chaim Arlassarov’s mind as he wrote these words and so we know what Arlassarov thought of the first of his four conclusions he writes that the second possible conclusion is to declare simply that given current conditions the Zionist vision simply cannot be put into practice it’s just not viable we thought it was one way it turned out to be another way game over and you can imagine what he thought of that option the third theoretical possibility he wrote is to cling to fundamental Zionist principles but to contract the geographic limits of their realization instead of all of Palestine only certain parts of the country and he cites the plan of another prominent labor Zionist as creating a Jewish state in Palestine rather than making Palestine into a Jewish state he admits that there’s some sound thinking in this idea since Jewish life would be able to develop freely in the smaller zone and that nothing would preclude possible future expansion but he finds four problems that would make settling for a smaller piece unproductive first the small area of Palestine in general second the problem of what to do with Jerusalem because nobody was going to agree on that third the unfavorable geographic situation of the separated and disparate Jewish colonies and fourth that even in the areas where Jews are concentrated there’s still a minority in those areas and so he dismisses the idea of settling for a smaller territory as being just as unworkable as going for the whole country and if both your careful and your ambitious plans seem unworkable you might as well go for the moon right and so Arlosserov outlines the fourth option as he sees it I don’t think anyone has ever given a list of four options and didn’t order them such that the one they preferred was prevented last after the others had all been dismissed and Arlosserov holds on to this pattern this is this is the one that he wants to push the fourth possible conclusion he wrote to Weizmann in London quote is that under present conditions Zionism cannot be realized without a transition period in which the Jewish minority would exercise organized revolutionary rule it is impossible to attain a Jewish majority or numerical equality between the two peoples by means of systematic immigration and colonization without a transition period of minority national rule in which the state apparatus the administration and the military establishment would be in the hands of the Zionists in order to eliminate the danger of domination by the non-Jewish majority and to suppress rebellion against us it would be impossible to suppress such a rebellion unless the state machinery and the military forces were in our hands during this period a systematic policy of immigration colonization and development would be practiced such a conception of the problem might shake the foundations of many beliefs which we have cherished for a great many years it might even resemble dangerously certain political states of mind which we have always rejected end quote and when he speaks here of a revolutionary government under minority rule in 1932 in in the middle of Stalin’s commission of one of the century’s greatest crimes in Ukraine Kazakhstan and throughout the Soviet Union it’s impossible that he does not have in mind the Leninist idea of the revolutionary vanguard taking control of things until the rest of the country catches up if the world’s not ready for our project goes to thinking and of course they wouldn’t be we face the choice of either of abandoning the project and accepting defeat or of making a decision to drag the world kicking and screaming to our vision of it and he knew that history that all of history was really a series of successful fates accompli right 17 years after it had happened when he was writing this who but the Armenians remembered the Armenian genocide certainly the Turks hadn’t suffered for it time loses its meaning as events fall further back into the past one year ago and 10 years ago feel a lot different to us but do 500 years and a thousand years feel much different to anyone except maybe historians eventually it all just smushes together into this thing we call the past and whatever happened in the past if it’s not excused at least eventually falls under the category of events which in the name of maybe intellectual humility we kind of let pass without judgment because we admit our limited understanding of it you know what the Mongols did to Baghdad was terrible but I wasn’t there who knows it was a tough place back then that kind of thing if I say that America enslaved Sub-Saharan Africans that hits you one way if I say Pharaoh enslaved Sub-Saharan Africans it hits you another way one carries a lot more emotion the world always forgets the world always forgets and all you have to do is have the courage to make difficult decisions and see them through to their conclusion you might be hated for it at the time but the world forgets you know this was the logic that starved the Ukrainian countryside and filled up Stalin’s death camps and it was the logic that informed the man who would take power in Germany six months after Chaim Alaserov wrote his letter to Chaim Weizmann his letter closes with the words to demonstrate his conviction he finally says quote at first it might even appear as impractical visionary and contrary to the conditions in which we all live under the British mandate all these questions require discussion which I do not intend to inaugurate here in writing but there is one thing about which I feel very strongly I will never become reconciled to the failure of Zionism before an attempt is made whose seriousness corresponds to the seriousness of the struggle for the revival of our national life and for the sanctity of the mission entrusted to us by the Jewish people nor should you forget that any change in the world or in the Middle East any emergency situation might compel us to resort to a line of action which we would never choose of our own free will we must bear this in mind when weighing our political policy whether we like it or not end quote now the Zionist movement which began in earnest as a cry for dignity and for security and national rebirth had seen its idealism crash into the wall of practical considerations you know as we saw in previous episodes this wasn’t exactly new any movement with room to operate is going to have elements made up of young men who just like to fight you’re gonna have to deal with that and Zionism had its share of zealots who were calling for military solution before the first Zionists had even unpacked their suitcases in Palestine but I’ll say again that phrase that seems to be the motto of this episode or at least one of the two mottos of this episode the most extreme elements in a conflict zone usually have the power to force everyone else to operate on their level it started as a reasonable reaction to a demonstrable need that the Eastern European and Russian Jews were experiencing after the militant Zionist hero Joseph Trumpledore was killed at the Battle of Tel Hai and after the Nebi Musa riots that followed many Zionists became convinced of the need for Jewish self-defense in Palestine and this led to the formation of the Haganah which we’ve talked about the Zionist militia and this became the main Zionist defense force nominally affiliated with the socialists that were led by David Ben-Gurion and his circle but when British futility or complicity depending on who you ask left the Jews defenseless again in Jaffa and especially after the massacres in 1929 more and more Jews came to agree with Jabotinsky that conflict with the Arabs was inevitable even natural you know there’s a there’s a dark game theoretical logic to social life that was captured brilliantly in this blog called Slate Star Codex by a guy named Scott Alexander if for some miraculous reason Scott this podcast makes it to your ears I love it and keep it up and in a post that went around last year in 2015 called Meditations on Mulloch it’s really long but it really deserves to be read in full and it Alexander describes how in any system of and I’m just going to use his language here in any system of sufficient competitiveness in any sufficiently competitive system any positive principle or general good that can be discarded in order to make one party more competitive will eventually be discarded and this is not because all men are cutthroat or venal creatures but because those who refuse to discard their principles in order to optimize their competitiveness will be outcompeted by those who do eventually after everyone has either discarded the social good or refused to do so and disappeared equilibrium is re-established so that everyone’s basically in the same relative position they were before only the society as a whole is worse off because everybody has discarded one more voluntary principle which served the general good you know we can get away with holding on to our principles as sub-optimal luxuries and environments where competition is less than fierce but that does not describe Palestine at the time that Arlazarov is writing that letter the competition in Palestine had become the definition of zero sum in the eyes of both parties and much to the frustration of the British but at least up to this point zero sum to the Zionists had meant that only one side or the other would win the privilege to exercise their national rights with the stakes less than total some Zionists managed to hold on to their illusions especially Zionists outside of Palestine like Chaim Weizmann but in January 1933 the stakes the Zionists were fighting for would go parabolic in that month Adolf Hitler had been elected chancellor of Germany Hitler was one of those veterans of the first world war of whom it was said that you know although they walked around and continued to live their lives after 1918 in truth whatever they had been died back in those trenches Hitler never left those trenches you can see a few old pictures of Adolf Hitler sporting a normal mustache in the early days of the war the shortened mustache tucked under his nose that was a modification made in order to allow a soldier’s gas mask to seal against his skin during an attack this is one of those little nuggets that gets lost over the years and decades but when Adolf Hitler gave his fiery speeches to throngs of screaming Germans every one of them knew what that little mustache meant Hitler’s choice to wear it was not just a nod to the fact that he had been a veteran in the great war nearly every German of his age group had been a veteran Hitler was putting the entire nation on notice that the war had never ended Germany had been forced to beat a tactical retreat in order to deal with the traitors and saboteurs at home but she had never been defeated in battle I’m giving you Hitler’s perspective here with the help of Germany’s enemies the traitors had taken control of the country taking control of the government during the 1920s after the revolutions but German patriots had never forgotten their treachery and had finally risen up to correct the injustices of the past this was Adolf Hitler’s religion it was his philosophy it was his life during the war the German army had been a force of nature but they were finally overcome in the end partially by a lack of material and an eventual collapse morale first on the home front and then out in the trenches many veterans not just Hitler many many veterans of the war blamed socialists and communists for instigating strikes and undermining support for the war and they weren’t wrong about that part leftist groups were working against the war effort and strikes at munitions factories and and the spread of leftist ideology among the soldiers did undermine the ability of the German army to sustain its momentum in that final push in 1918 it’s I mean it’s highly questionable at best whether Germany ever could have won the war once the United States threw its full weight behind the allies behind the entente but it’s not hard to imagine how an individual soldier might have felt betrayed or stabbed in the back as General Erich Ludendorff and many other German veterans took to saying after four years of abject horror in the spring of 1918 the Germans had launched a massive assault on the dug-in impenetrable allied defenses of the western front and against all odds they break through and force the allies back taking hundreds of thousands of casualties in the process but they eventually grind down for a lack of ammunition and material there are reports of soldiers literally starving to death when they get to the allied trenches after they push through they find more food and better supplies than they’ve seen in two years and so imagine eventually being halted in large part because you’re delirious with hunger and undersupplied and then finding out that many of the workers back home who were supposed to be making the stuff that you were missing had been on strike imagine hearing after you’ve been bleeding out in the trenches for years that people back home were complaining about the conditions that they were having to endure and they were calling for a revolution and imagine hearing that part of the reason your advance had been halted was that up and down the line many soldiers were refusing to do their duty or at least to do it to their fullest you know we know today that it’s much more complicated than that we’ve got access to millions of pages of contemporary records and diaries and supply invoices and we can sort of spread it out on a table and look at it from a historian’s perspective but if you were a German soldier who had given everything to your country for years and you’re there on the western front in 1918 in an attack that is stalled out you’re not a historian you’re not pouring over the records you’re there in the mud hearing what people are saying and it’s not hard to see how you could feel betrayed and Adolf Hitler was one of those soldiers when Hitler took a shrapnel wound at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he was sent back home to recover and then he was assigned to light duty for a while and he had an experience that a lot of soldiers in France and Britain talked about having as well you know he had spent years under such extreme conditions watching people he loved be torn apart fighting off insanity during artillery barrages but when he was on light duty recovering from his injuries he looked around Berlin and he saw people complaining about their lives about how the war was affecting them and he just could not handle it he was so appalled by the apathy that he immediately requested to just return to the front. I don’t know how often any soldier in the first world war demanded that their leave be cut short or their light duty be cut short so they could go back to the front but that’s what he did and then in October 1918 Hitler was wounded again temporarily blinded by a British chlorine gas attack and as he lay in his hospital bed a few weeks later an elderly pastor came to him in his bed he’s still blinded and the pastor’s speaking to him he tells him that there’d been a revolution in Germany that the German empire he’d been fighting for didn’t exist any longer the Hohenzollern dynasty was over and the government of the fatherland had been taken over by socialists and communists in his book Mein Kampf Hitler would later write quote there followed terrible days and even worse nights I knew that all was lost and these nights hatred grew in me hatred for those responsible for this deed end quote and those Hitler held most responsible for this deed were the Jews he shared the view of many people in Europe and the United States that leftist revolutionary politics was dominated by Jews just a month before Hitler was discharged from the German army in March 1920 Winston Churchill had published that editorial some of which I quoted earlier called Zionism versus Bolshevism he said that international Jews this is Winston Churchill speaking I know I’ve probably read this part in an earlier episode but it’s worth reading again he said that the international Jews were engaged in quote a worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization there is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews it is certainly a very great one it probably outweighs all others with the notable exception of Lenin the majority of the leading figures are Jews moreover the principal inspiration and driving power comes from Jewish leaders in the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing and the prominent if not indeed principal part in the system of terrorism applied by the extraordinary commission for combating counter-revolution has been taken by Jews and in some notable cases by Jewesses the same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled Hungary the same phenomenon has been present in Germany especially in Bavaria so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every wit is bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing end quote now Hitler could have written those words but Jews had had to fight off conspiracy theories for hundreds of years during plague years they were often accused i’m talking the black plague of the 14th century and so forth they were they were accused of poisoning water supplies and causing the plague and then paranoid Christians would spread rumors about secret Jewish societies engaging in grotesque rituals and child sacrifice Jews have been persecuted for centuries as well poisoners and drinkers of Christian blood but deep in the mind of Adolf Hitler a mind which was you know let’s be honest probably damaged from the start and then profoundly traumatized from years in combat on the western front something new and terrible was being born his nationalist resent resentment and his his sense of betrayal was combining with conspiracy theories like the one that Churchill was writing about and ideas that well ideas that as crazy as it sounds today for their time can only be described as modern the bourgeois population of Europe like to think of themselves as high-minded rational people who embraced reason and human progress and rejected superstition but if the Jews thought that meant that things were going to get any easier for them they were terribly mistaken even hard-headed even hard-headed atheists and practical politicians found a way to hold on to their old anti-semitism the real horror of 20th century anti-semitism was that it was not a throwback to some fading age one last resurgence of superstitious reactionary nonsense among peasants still going on about how the Jews killed Christ that’s not what it was when the Jews were persecuted in the 20th century it was not in spite of the enlightenment not in spite of reason in spite of science and the ideas of modern government in the 20th century anti-semitism was driven by all of those things you know the Nazis are often framed today as reactionary conservatives trying to recover some supposed lost age but in the 1930s the Nazis were considered by themselves and by most other people to be on the cutting edge of modernity progressive people at the time believed that science and technology had granted man vast powers over nature and that power demanded that man be a responsible steward of nature eugenics is a dirty word today thanks in part to the Nazis but again in the 1930s there were people all over the world mainstream serious progressive people who believed that bringing human intention to bear on human evolution was the next obvious step in applied biology i mean we’re all eugenicists to a degree unless you pair up with the first available mating partner who agrees to hook up with you unless you don’t use any criteria at all to select among possible mates you’re a eugenicist the rest is just a matter of where you draw the line and the place that the Nazis drew the line was you know problematic the Nazis and the scientists and thinkers that they followed believe that if we now have the knowledge that would allow us to rid humanity of physical and mental handicaps inherited diseases and other degenerate traits that’s one of their favorite words degenerate progress demands that we do that okay um all right Nazis i’m with you so far we all like vaccines right well as you may have heard there was a bit of a problem with their implementation things didn’t go well i mean Hitler never won the Nobel Prize for medicine let’s just put it that way they believed in ideas like racial hygiene and if the term itself sends a shiver up your spine that’s good you need to hold on to that Hitler’s beliefs were not original ironically there were some strange affinities between the way the Nazis and the Zionists saw the world and saw themselves the Nazis for example would end up adopting the same racial definition of a Jew as the Zionists and which the state of Israel still uses today to determine someone’s right to immigrate the German Jews they call themselves Germans who are culturally Jewish but the Nazis were able to say no no you can’t be culturally Jewish or culturally German or culturally anything Jewishness is in your DNA no matter how much you pretend to wear the clothes and speak the language of a German Jew a Jew is who you are it’s your race it’s who you are and the Zionists agreed with that whole cloth you probably remember me mentioning Chaim Weizmann’s line from an earlier episode a line which again could have been spoken by Hitler’s propaganda minister there are no German British Russian or American Jews only Jews who happen to be living in Germany Britain Russia or America on a deeper level the Zionists and the Nazis agreed about some of the fundamental attributes and shortcomings of the Jewish community the Nazis would complain incessantly that the Jews were rootless cosmopolitans unattached drifters they’re all cleverness and and greed not a true nation but one which lives as a parasite on the underside of true nations according to one German racial scientist Zionism was quote a laudable effort to rehabilitate the Jewish race by curing it of its parasitic tendencies end quote well a guiding principle of all Zionists was the overcoming of exile the very first Zionist who showed up in the late 19th century they had tried to establish a plantation system in which Jews would live a comfortable life on the back of cheap native labor it was more straightforward colonialism Theodor Herzl said he was inclined actually toward that kind of an aristocratic republic but of course this fell apart because you can’t have a whole nation of privileged aristocrats that’s not a nation a nation needs its own farmers its own industries its own miners builders teachers public servants it needs its own writers and poets a nation needs to position itself such that in theory at least it could continue to exist if every other person in the world ceased to exist a nation needs to be a world unto itself in order to be truly independent that doesn’t mean that you don’t interact with others or that being cut off wouldn’t be disruptive for you it just means that your existence does not depend upon the contingent support of others throughout the whole history of the Jewish diaspora they had been in a position where they had a lot to offer but if the local population just decided yeah we’re not going to feed you anymore we grow the food and you’re not getting any and there was nothing they could do about that they just had to pack up and leave and hope they could find someone else this was something that the second generation of Zionists after the plantation generation and especially the labor Zionists were really concerned about and they never wanted to allow the Jewish communities in the world to be in that position again and so all their policies and plans were designed to escape the type of life that they learned to live in exile where they were all bankers and lawyers and doctors and traders and shopkeepers and not a farmer a miner in sight and these policies sometimes look bad but again there are always multiple layers to things that are often presented in a as polemical weapons by people who are ideologically motivated to wield them that way the the fact that the Zionists refused to hire Arabs the labor Zionists refused to hire sounds like nothing but ranked discrimination if you think of it like one group refusing to hire another group in a modern developed country today but when the labor Zionists made that decision they had a lot more on their minds than just discrimination that first migration had failed because the plantation owners were employing cheap Arab labor and there just wasn’t anything for a working-class Jew to do in Palestine the labor Zionists had this concept of the conquest of labor and it was a very self-conscious attempt to reform the Jewish people to purge them of the habits of life that they had picked up over the centuries in their urban diasporas Jews as a group hadn’t planted a seed or hoed a garden in thousands of years and the labor Zionists were completely committed to changing that and that was a change that Hitler would have wholeheartedly endorsed it got to the heart and source of his distrust for the Jewish people and why he thought that they were dangerous elements in his own and in other nations I mean don’t get me wrong his his racism was so fixed in place and his hatred for the Jews was so rooted that he probably would have said that that attempt was doomed to fail or or that if it succeeded he probably would have just made up some new excuse to hate them don’t get me wrong but it is interesting because it shows that there’s an underlying internal logic to nationalism the Nazis and the Zionists were both nationalists and in a way they both valued many of the same things and criticized and distrusted many of the same things and again it’s unlikely that anything would have changed Hitler’s mind don’t get me wrong and don’t think that I’m trying to say that Hitler only hated the Jews because of some real deficiency in the Jewish community I’m not I’m just pointing out that there are almost inevitable conclusions that confront you once you adopt the perspective of a nationalist part of Hitler’s inflexibility had to do with the way he adapted the ideas of social Darwinism to shape an ideology around the idea that every people or race the Nazis use words like race and people and nation interchangeably that they all had certain essential traits not only physical traits like darker skin or blonde hair bridge noses but internal characteristics having to do with psychological makeup and creative abilities things like that and again the Nazis were definitely not alone in thinking this way this was a very modern progressive way to be thinking back then but the Nazis believed that many of these traits many of these internal traits were a drag on the human race the same way that a genetic disease was today again from our broader perspective we don’t need a conspiracy theory to account for the over representation of Jews in the early 20th century revolutionary movements I mentioned it I think in the first episode when you’ve got any group that is disproportionately educated literate urban you get that group of people and force them to face endemic discrimination and persecution for years and years what do you think is going to happen of course they’re going to be first in line for any movement that’s going to overturn that order but the Nazis didn’t see it that way they took these modern scientific principles and applied it to this problem like maybe there was just something about these Jews I shouldn’t even say that the Nazis believed this because again that gives a false impression of what things were like at this time and I don’t say this to lighten the load of responsibility carried by the Nazis but it’s important it’s very important in my opinion from the standpoint of historical accuracy and and moral honesty to understand that the Nazis were just following through on a line of thinking that was absolutely mainstream everywhere in Britain the US and Europe when Belgium divided up Rwandan society along lines that would later fracture into the 1994 genocide they did it in the name of race science when the Belgians had taken control of Rwanda as a spoil of the first world war they adopted the ideas of this English explorer John Henning speaks in his socalled hemitic hypothesis the taller Tutsi minority with their delicate features and somewhat lighter skin if you asked a 19th or early 20th century race scientist you can see my little finger quotes there they were actually supposed to be a caucasoid race from Christian Ethiopia and they were in fact descendants of the biblical King David that was the theory the Hutu on the other hand they represented further proof of the accuracy of scripture since they’re mentioned in Genesis 9 right there in that chapter Noah having successfully stayed above water long enough to outlast the flood gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent upon waking up Noah’s outraged to learn that his son Ham had seen him naked which is probably a euphemism for taking advantage of his father’s drunkenness to perform you know acts that the rest of the bible spends a disproportionate amount of time condemning and so Noah responds to his son’s violation by cursing Ham’s descendants with the words a slave of slaves shall he be to his brothers and this is who the Hutu were supposed to be and so this is what people were thinking like back then this was mainstream the same myth was frequently used to scripturally justify slavery in antebellum american south i mean actually i got a quote here listen to this speak writes about the Hutu in a section of his book called fauna the section of his book called fauna is where he writes about the Hutu tribe of people and he describes them like this he says quote how the negro has lived so many ages without advancing seems marvelous when all the countries surrounding africa are so forward in comparison and judging from the progressive state of the world one is led to suppose that the african must soon either step out from his darkness or be superseded by a being superior to himself end quote this was boilerplate normal victorian racist blabber not exceptional among the intelligentsia anywhere in europe or the united states it informed the colonial policies of every imperial power including the ones in this story and so every nation that becomes so horrified by the devastation that’s about to be wrought by the third reich every single one of our nations was intellectually complicit in the nazi crimes this ideology held that whole ethnicities were the equivalent of genetic degenerate strains corrupting the social bodies of superior races this is the way the nazis thought about it and so instead of only naming the physically deformed the handicapped and so forth the nazis targeted groups like the romani gypsies as they’re often called by the rest of us i guess they targeted the slavs and they targeted the jews and several other groups but most of all the jews these pseudo-scientific ideas of social darwinism and racial hygiene changed the language of anti-semitism the jews weren’t just morally evil as the murderers of jesus as they had been in the middle ages they weren’t just treacherous foreign agents as they were viewed by the nationalists instead of just evil or treacherous the nazi anti-semite is using words like pollution contamination filth jews are compared to plague rats and spoken of as vermin think of the way people react in the presence of an infectious disease imagine standing near a pool of blood containing the ebola virus the way your skin crawls the way societies tear themselves apart with panic during a plague under the nazis the jewish problem becomes not so much a religious or even a national problem but a medical problem a public health problem something to be quarantined and eventually cut out now back when adolf hitler was 18 years old he watched his mother slowly break down and die after a long painful bout with breast cancer now the doctors at the time believed it was some kind of blood poisoning the historian and journalist dr joachim reicher he wrote about this he said quote in his madness hitler was convinced that the jewish poison had done the same thing to his beloved germany in 1918 that the cancer poison had done to his beloved mother in 1907 end quote now hitler would give a voice to the frustration that so many germans felt after the war that they had not been defeated and overrun by an external enemy in hitler’s fevered mind germany’s energy had been sapped from inside as its life was eaten away from the inside by a corrosive disease like the cancer that had killed his mother and he vowed never to let it happen again this was the voice that rose up in 1933 and captivated the nation of germany the rapidity of the change in german society it caught germany’s jews flat-footed when the first world war broke out over a hundred thousand jews enlisted to fight for germany the german army officer who recommended hitler for his medal was jewish and yet in 1935 nazi minister of propaganda joseph goebbels would make an announcement regarding the jews who had given their lives fighting for germany in that war he said quote it is forbidden to list the names of fallen jews on memorials and memorial plaques for the fallen of the world war end quote 12 000 jews had died fighting for germany the rest of those hundred thousand had suffered along with all the german boys out in those trenches many more were gravely wounded the names of these jews were chiseled out of existing war memorials sometimes replaced with the names of battles or crudely covered over with some kind of embellishment now try to forget for the moment that you already know where this is headed go back into 1935 and forget that you know what’s about to what’s about to start try to put yourself in the mind of one of those hundred thousand german jewish war veterans who had suffered in those trenches during those horrible years who considered yourself as one jew who was shocked by this sudden reversal had said more german than the germans it happened quickly and they didn’t know what to make of it once hitler was in power jews around the world very quickly saw that something was happening jews around the world rallied and besieged their governments wherever they were to act against germany in whatever way they could tens of thousands of american jews rallied in madison square garden to denounce the nazis and jews around the world organized a massive boycott of the german economy keeping in mind the economic power of the jewish community at the time which was substantial this boycott stung a little bit and it confirmed in hitler the certainty that the jews did in fact have it out for germany and they had set out to crush her as soon as someone who was onto their game had taken power and again hitler’s plans did not depend on a boycott from world jewry and i don’t mean to say that anyone provoked nazi persecution of the jews but the boycott gave hitler the pretext he needed to get started with the persecutions the first concentration camps were opened right after that in 1933 and at this point we’re not talking about death camps but basically open air prison networks like the gulag system in russia before stalin took them over open air prison networks that were there to isolate political dissidents from the general population to keep them from spreading their ideas and re-educate them and reform them or whatever jewish businesses were boycotted and often smashed up and the daily hostility that jews faced in the street it ramped up again it ramped up so quickly and it seemed to reverse so fast that even despite the nazis rhetoric jews were caught off guard because the nazis can say what they want but they they won the election with a majority or rather without a majority of the vote and these people who were now avoiding them in the street or insulting them these were their neighbors germany had always had strains of anti-semitic thought but jews were not accustomed to the kind of daily treatment that their cousins in romania and ukraine were used to dealing with now at this time it the record seems to indicate that extermination as a policy had not yet emerged in hitler’s mind as an answer to germany’s jewish question at this point his goal seems to have been to make life in germany miserable enough for the jews that they would leave on their own self-deport i think is the term being thrown around in this 2016 u.s election and and he wanted them to leave and leave their assets and their property behind and so to that end they began to pass laws restricting jewish land ownership and pushing them out of certain professions improvements in their lot that they had made since the end of the 1918 war they were banned from the civil service and most germans began to avoid jewish businesses and refused to serve jews you had many german jews who were trained doctors and lawyers many of them were professors and scientists and these people were in many cases being forced to find work essentially cleaning toilets and scraping out gutters it was a repetition of what happened to many people after the russian revolution when you could go to berlin or vienna and find your chauffeur had been a general in the russian empire that the lady selling you clothes at the department store had been a grand duchess many germans were voluntarily beginning to dissociate themselves from jews signs were posted outside public buildings and in public spaces to indicate whether or not jews were allowed to enter there or linger there park benches would be marked specifically as being designated for jews and to the people on the ground who are trying to get through their day trying to buy groceries or looking for for somewhere to sit down in a park all this feels like discrimination to people looking back to us looking back who know what’s coming it looks like something else it looks like quarantine now to the jews who were caught up in the events this was disorienting but discrimination was not so new to them and so very few of them had any real idea of what processes have been set in motion i mean who could have possibly understood in all the history of the world there was no precedent for what was about to happen there were signs though it didn’t happen all at once in one ominous move jews are banned from obtaining health insurance through the national health system that’s a little bit like a weatherman who also happens to run an insurance company coming to tell me that my flood insurance has been canceled in 1935 at the annual nazi rally in Nuremberg two laws were proposed which put to bed any remaining hope that this was going to stop a discrimination the first was called the law for the protection of german blood and german honor jews were forbidden from marrying or having sexual intercourse with germans or even having german women under 45 years old work in their homes and the second law would strip all jews of german citizenship including all rights and all legal protections and they hadn’t just lost certain privileges or legal rights their basic status had changed the jews had been removed from the social body and marked off as an intruder like an invasive species that the german immune system or the nazi autoimmune disorder was about to attack this was happening fast and it made the urgency of getting jews out of germany and into palestine immediate and desperate just as arab resistance was beginning to stiffen many zionists were willing to grit their teeth and try almost anything to find a way to get them out the man we spoke of earlier khaim al-assarov he had a premonition even before hitler had been elected that the world was headed for a cliff and so already in 1933 he began to take action as the political head of the jewish agency and someone who had been gary on his ear directly our loss are of open negotiations with the nazi government to facilitate the transfer of jews out of germany and into palestine the germans had been playing around with ideas like this they thought about perhaps deporting the jews to madagascar and they were receptive to our loss or off’s plan the nazis had been confiscating the property of any jew who emigrated but our loss or off was able to put over a scheme that would allow emigrating jews to retain most of the value of their assets and basically simply put he had convinced the germans to go along with a scheme whereby jews would be permitted to leave for palestine and their assets would be placed in a trust when they departed they couldn’t take the assets with them but instead the assets were used to buy equipment and supplies from german companies that they would need for their lives in palestine in this way our loss or i was able to get 60 000 jews out of germany into palestine almost certainly saving their lives but the scheme also provided a major boost to the nazi german economy as you can imagine and so not everybody was happy about this especially the revisionists now the british had banned zev jabotinsky from entering palestine once he’d left in 1930 and they were beginning to find out that despite his tough rhetoric he may have actually been a moderating force on the zionist right wing the younger ones coming up behind him were more ferociously antiliberal and they felt none of the opponent’s respect that kind of respect for the enemy as a fellow you know as a worthy opponent that jabotinsky kind of exhibited for his enemies they didn’t feel any of that and now when our loss or i’ve made this deal he saved 60 000 jews from almost certain death but the revisionists were furious furious at our loss or of furious at ben gurion and the whole zionist left what did they think they were doing you don’t sit down at a table and legitimize the nazis by negotiating with heinrich himmler it doesn’t matter if you can save a million jews and so when our loss or off returned to tel aviv he was threatened and insulted in the streets and the rift between the fascist revisionists and the socialist labor zionists began to tear open one night on a beach near tel aviv two men approached khaim our loss or of as he sat on the beach with his wife one asked him for the time and as he reached for his watch the man pulled out a gun and murdered him his wife was left alive and she identified two members of a hardcore revisionist group but a trial that was threatening to break apart the jewish community in palestine decided that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them but nobody in palestine doubted what had happened ben gurion and the labor zionists were outraged blamed the revisionist completely and even the revisionist party dissolved the particular subgroup of which those two men were apart and that year 1935 massive numbers of new jewish immigrants are flooding into palestine as hitler continues to ramp up his reign of terror and as anti-jewish violence spreads in places like romania and ukraine it’s getting worse and worse all over the place in 1931 zionists still only made up about 17 of the population and that’s a little bit deceiving because the zionist immigrants are are heavily weighted toward young single military age males which in a conflict like this is really the operative demographic but still they were only 17 of the population in 1931 four years later by the end of 1935 they would be a third of the population now try to step back for a moment from those abstract numbers and put that in a perspective that you can relate to i’ll use the united states but use whatever country you’re comfortable with in the united states today 2016 immigration is one of the hot button controversial issues it gets a lot of people riled up over the impact that it has on native workers on the ability of our economy and social institutions to absorb so many new people so think about that and then think about this hispanics which is the main part of the immigration question the united states hispanics make up about 17 of the population of the united states today right around the same proportion as the zionist population in palestine 1931 and about half a million new immigrants come in from latin america every year into the united states maybe another few hundred thousand or so come in illegally so let’s say a million or so new arrivals each year is enough to cause one of the most bitter acrimonious debates in u.s politics now imagine that over the next four years 75 million new immigrants from latin america come into the united states because that’s what it would take to create a demographic change in the u.s population equivalent to the one that palestine went through from 1931 to 1935 75 million in four years now imagine that those new immigrants aren’t even making a show of trying to assimilate imagine that the presence of so many new people was driving up rents and real estate prices to levels way beyond what anyone who lives here can afford anybody except for the immigrants can afford and the immigrants are being funded by a massive international infrastructure and wealthy financial interests from all over the world and imagine that the new arrivals who are displacing huge chunks of the native population are refusing to hire americans who are piling up in shanty towns outside of our major cities and imagine that the immigrants are importing weapons and forming up their own police and military units and holding parades and rallies openly talking about their intention to take over the country for themselves and now imagine that the entire operation is sponsored by some overwhelmingly powerful international institution that we have no choice in the matter this is being imposed on us it was the british empire in palestine there’s nobody really who could impose this on the u.s but let’s say it was a huge coalition under the u.n imagine that the u.n had been completely co-opted by the movement behind this immigration and takeover to the point that when the americans sent a group of people to express their concerns to the u.n they were sent to talk to the leader of the takeover movement i think i mentioned in an earlier episode this actually happened at one point when the palestinian arabs decided to go around the high commissioner directly to the british government to make their case after careful planning and months of debate over exactly how to craft their message to present it to present the palestinian arab position to the british government when they finally arrived in london to make that presentation to the prime minister or at least to the cabinet or at least to the foreign office instead they were sent to see khaim weitzman to plead their case to him so just imagine that and ask yourself how long you think this would go before any country turned itself into a Hieronymus Bosch painting the british governors in palestine have an idea that tensions are rising but even now they only really interact with the grand mufti hajj amin al-husseini and some of the other notables even qassam and his followers are really below the radar horizon for the british leadership so they have no idea how close to the edge the people on the street are but they’re about to find out because in october 1935 a month before the nazis held that nuremberg rally and passed those nuremberg laws a belgian flag cargo ship was being unloaded in the palestinian port city of jaffa when a barrel of cement headed with most of its cargo to tel aviv fell and cracked open on the deck a group of arab longshoremen and steve doors gathered around the spilled cement pointing and talking among themselves getting more and more excited and then they started to take hammers and axes and break open all the other barrels and spill their contents out on the deck and british supervisors start to see what’s going on and they immediately intervene get control of the arab workers but as soon as they saw what had gotten them so worked up they immediately closed off the area and called in the british police when the british police got there spread out across the deck were weapons rifles machine guns ammunition explosives now it had long been suspected at least by the british and the arabs that the zionists were smuggling in some weapons a few rifles here a box of grenades there that kind of thing but the british had more or less maintained a monopoly on violence in the region and they didn’t allow the jews or the arabs to organize militias or to really seriously arm up even the haganah the labor zionist militia organization that was still an underground organization it wasn’t legal and when these cement barrels were all broken open british investigators found 800 rifles dozens of machine guns 400 000 rounds of ammunition the arabs again had imagined that the zionists were bringing in a few weapons here and there for self-defense they couldn’t process this this was something on a scale so far beyond anything they had imagined was going on or that they had access to themselves that they were really excited about this to say the least there had already been rumors from some of the more radical arab leaders the zionists had been plotting to launch a preemptive attack against the arabs to drive them out of palestine but the british had generally been able to convince most of the others that that they had things under control some other arab leaders were demanding the right to arm arm themselves in order to protect themselves from whatever this was but the british wouldn’t allow it reassuring most of the locals that the jews were not plotting violence and if they were were the british empire we’ll find out about it and we’ll deal with it don’t worry but when the cargo of of weapons here is discovered and they see that something is going on on a scale that they had not imagined possible the news was not received by the arabs merely as a thwarted shipment of arms as some contraband that didn’t get in but as proof that the zionists had been violating the british instructions this whole time and that they were arming themselves and training fighters while the arabs had been asleep at the wheel mindlessly obeying the british were they supposed to believe that this was the first shipment and the first shipment just happened to be intercepted how many how many others had gotten through undetected many arabs are thinking hey if if the zionists do have a secret army and they’ve been training and building up arms without our knowledge we don’t have anything like that right now if they are plotting an attack we’re defenseless we start to hear arabs even peaceful arabs like khalil al-sakakini we quoted him in the second episode he was the arab christian we quoted whose heart was sick and who was so shaken after the violence of the nebi musa riots of 1920 and after this he’s writing quote if this immigration continues palestine’s future is very black there is no choice but to rouse ourselves there is no choice but to shake ourselves there is no choice but to act you know one thing about the dynamic of paranoia paranoia in the clinical sense is that it causes the paranoid to sort of lose the ability to create psychological distance between himself and other people in the rest of the world does that make sense in in a world inhabited by a paranoid person nothing just happens to him everything is done to him and the paranoid creates a world in which his persecution is the driving engine and sole purpose of that universe where there are no others just friends and enemies nobody is just out there living their lives everybody has a relationship to you that is either antagonistic or or friendly the idea that most things that happen have nothing whatsoever to do with him is increasingly lost on the paranoid and the opposite idea that the whole world is is is conspiring against him and that everything that happens is more evidence of it seems completely self-evident you know this is the paranoia of the anti-semite who just can’t imagine anything in the world happening that the jews don’t control or it’s the paranoia of the the zionist who imagines that palestinian fighters are purposely putting their own children in the line of fire just to make israel look bad when they accidentally kill them when people lack a grounded sense of their own identity a strong sense that their identity is rooted and unshakable anything can be experienced as a grave threat to to break that identity up or to break up their mind or body even and it becomes difficult for the paranoid to even conceive of a truly independent indifferent other now this obviously becomes less precise when we apply these psychological ideas to groups but individual paranoids are for example as a rule very concerned with what goes in and out of the body they’re obsessed with purity paranoid buzzwords throughout history have been things like borders membranes pollution cleanses purges and as this way of thinking sets in it’s only a matter of time before paranoia turns into panic by the mid-1930s we’ve got germans arabs and zionists all on the verge of panic on three different train tracks headed right at each other and the rest of the world is just watching this with their fingers on buttons waiting for the fire to start after the discovery of those smuggled weapons arab leaders called together a meeting to discuss their future and to try to figure out what the zionists were planning and what to do about it what were they planning to do with all those weapons the british didn’t help matters when they just confiscated the weapons and didn’t even investigate who they were supposed to go to didn’t make a single arrest and you know at this point it didn’t even matter what was actually true the momentum of the rumors were taking on a life of their own and it wasn’t long before many palestinians were completely convinced it wasn’t a belief it wasn’t a thought it was just reality to them that the zionists were planning widespread organized violence against them at any moment the palestinian notables and tribal leaders huddled in meetings to talk about the possibility of calling a strike maybe or of drafting a petition to call on the british to act and as they’re huddled together haggling over things at this point is that dean al-qassam who had been in hiding for the last two years he decides he’s seen enough once again he approaches the grand mufti hoping to persuade him to issue another joint call for jihad against these invaders and to lead a mass rebellion but again the hajj i mean refused saying that he was working for a political solution to the crisis and maybe that was the right thing to do but to is that dean al-qassam who at this point felt that there was no reason to continue talking he just left once again disappointed by these elites these collaborators who who would never risk endangering themselves or their positions at all for any reason they would talk and talk and talk until there was no palestine left to talk about about and then when that was done they’d eventually sell the arabs of palestine to the british or the zionists just as his syrian backers had sold their people out to the french now al-qassam was renowned by this point among the poor people and the people of the countryside for his refusal to compromise with the palestinian arab leadership and he knew that the palestinian people were not prepared for armed resistance but he just decided that there’s no more time left and so he put out the call to activate the cells of peasant fighters he’d been training over the last two years and this is a small number of people maybe 800 to a thousand members organized into five-man cells but they had a lot of support throughout the countryside and he called on them to rise up against the british and to push the zionists out after two years of keeping a low profile he gathered up a few dozen followers and headed up into the mountains with what few weapons and supplies they could scrape together now qassam knew that open war with the british or the zionists was useless his few hundred ill-trained peasant fighters didn’t have half the arsenal that had been uncovered in that one belgian smuggling shipment never never mind the shipments that hadn’t even been discovered they didn’t know about this has become the modus operandi of islamic jihad and anti-colonial resistance ever since there’s no way a bunch of guys with limited supplies and rickety weapons are going to stand in front of the british army or a u.s ranger battalion or the israeli defense force and expect to survive that’s not noble it’s just suicidal and crazy it means that you’d rather die symbolically than have any hope of actually achieving the goals you say you set out to achieve for your people the largest part of the syrian resistance that actually hung in there and fought against the french in 1921 they tried that you might remember from the second episode at the battle of may salon and their tiny force of civilian militia was torn to pieces by french tanks and artillery and aircraft now new tactics were going to be needed qassam knew that the only way for a civilian militia to beat a world empire was through guerrilla warfare and not only against military targets but against any target that would make staying in your country more painful and the strategy of jihadis ever since has essentially been to say look we are going to make this place unlivable for us and you until you either get out or come to the table and negotiate a settlement that we can live with and so his people focused their attacks on things they knew would be important to the british and that were vital to life for the zionists they would attack railways they would try to attack pipelines and other infrastructure they tried to disrupt cargo traffic around the country block roads destroy roads things like that burn down orchards al-kassam’s group lived in caves up in the mountains ducking around trying to avoid british aircraft studying the quran for hours and hours and hours every day this was a man who was completely committed this wasn’t a game to him it wasn’t a way to achieve power for himself he had to know there was almost no way he was coming out of this and so despite the tiny size of his forces and despite the fact that the actual damage they were doing was negligible to both the zionists and the british his message and his his persona his way of life resonated with a people who had for so long felt completely unrepresented and more than that it resonated with a society who needed something they needed to find an identity that they could all get behind when there were no legitimate political entities or other secular alternatives the arabs in palestine had been a thousand little groups trying to form up a defense against the unified british and the unified zionists you know the british were the british were the british the zionists were the zionists they both knew what they wanted and acted with a single will to accomplish their goals if they had differences they handled them in-house and then they worked toward their common goal the british were the british the zionists were the zionists the palestinian arabs were the husseinis the nasha shibis the khalidis and so on occasionally cooperating but never offering the people an identity that would bring them together as palestinians to allow them to meet the british and zionist with the united front this is the need that qassam was speaking to and it was turning him into a folk hero now qassam had learned from his campaign against the french he wanted to avoid the mistakes of the resistance campaign in syria this time there were no landowners among his group no rich benefactors who could betray him and his people when things got a little bit dangerous you know everybody wants to be a revolutionary until it costs something qassam had already given up everything he had and he chose only the most committed men to follow him up into the hills he didn’t want any weekend warriors no war tourists the british intelligence described his group as being quote from the poor the ignorant and the more violently disposed of the pious end quote but qassam put it a different way he said quote look my hair has turned white and i have much experience which has made me hope for something good from peasants and workers they put their trust in god they believe in heaven and the day of judgment and whoever has these qualities is more likely to sacrifice and has the daring to push forward besides they’re able to endure difficulties and are stronger end quote and so about a month after qassam took to the mountains with this small group a few of his men were spotted taking grapefruits from an orchard a jewish policeman and two others went after him and a firefight erupted the jewish officer was shot twice once in the body and once in the head killing him instantly the plan had been qassam’s plan had been to conduct small-scale raids and sabotage while recruiting arabs to the cause over time but this gunfight in the orchard ruined their timeline the alarm was raised and the police chased qassam’s men into the hills until the entire group was eventually surrounded and discovered a manhunt was organized and the chase turned into a running firefight as al-qassam and his men avoided the british army and the palestine police forces that were after them there were close calls and escapes and stories began to leak out that qassam was being hunted by the british and the zionists and so this geronimo like manhunt went on and on the 10th day one of qassam’s men was shot and killed and his group decided to split up one group headed north and al-qassam headed west toward the coast eventually taking refuge for two days with a local sympathizer before slipping out of town on november 20th running out of supplies running out of ammunition running out of options qassam and his dozen men were herded toward an olive grove by the british and a lengthy gunfight erupted and al-qassam’s group were pushed back and finally cornered in a cave now they’re in the cave and everybody’s kind of waiting to see what happens and the british call out that they would be allowed to surrender to this large british force that had assembled outside and qassam thought about it he looked at his men and he addressed them and called on them all to die with honor and they went out in a hail of bullets when qassam’s body was searched folded into his headdress were his handwritten last words a prayer to god asking for strength in his struggle the outpouring of grief and outrage from lower class palestinian arabs was immediate and visceral and the british were completely unprepared for it one labor zionist leader burt katznelson said a little bit later that the killing of al-qassam was a huge mistake that they shouldn’t have done it he wrote quote what could he have done at most he would have killed 10 jews end quote katnelson he knew the value of a hero myth he had written the memorial prayer for the first zionist martyr the one-armed hero joseph trumpledore tom segev writes about it in his book one palestine complete he says quote this event was the arab tell hi david ben-gurion said and it portrayed al-qassam as a fanatic warrior willing to face martyrdom indeed al-qassam was the arab joseph trumpledore like trumpledore al-qassam had come from another country and had brought military experience with him the zionist nationalism of the dentist from russia was mixed with marxism the arab nationalism of the teacher from syria was interlaced with islam each of them had built his support among the working people trumpledore’s followers were urban russian students who had left their homes to work in the land of palestine al-qassam’s were farmers who had left their villages to work in the city the veneration in which both men were held in life intensified after their deaths in battle they each gave their national movements a heroic myth a far more useful contribution than anything they had done in life end quote and i would take that statement even further and add that giving their people a heroic myth was far more useful than anything that anyone could have done in any life the british and the zionists are about to find out why because the outpouring of grief and outrage after al-qassam’s death was immediate and visceral and caught off guard the british called up the grand mufti and the other arab notables demanding to know what all this was about but the arab leaders distanced themselves from al-qassam all along they’ve been afraid that his populist message was just going to encourage the palestinian people to stop looking to them the traditional leadership their positions were derived from simply being a member of an important family it wasn’t based on ideology and that’s what al-qassam was pushing they agreed to do their best to do what they could to defuse the people’s rage and to avoid al-qassam’s funeral they promised not to go muslim funerals they’re held almost immediately after a person’s death usually within a day to at most so there’s no time for elaborate arrangements there’s no time for much spreading of the word this is happening the next day after al-qassam is dead and the british are shocked when thousands and thousands of people turned out for his funeral british intelligence officers were watching in consternation as the crowd grew and grew and people would step forward and start delivering speeches and sermons denouncing the british and zionist occupation and even denouncing their tribal leaders as collaborators and calling for a populist jihad to drive out the colonialists a long funeral train proceeded toward al-qassam’s hometown of haifa growing and gaining energy as it made its way it would pass villages and people would join it like tributaries into a river professor abdullah schliefer of american university in cairo wrote quote al-qassam’s defiance and the manner of his death which stunned the traditional leadership electrified the palestinian people thousands forced their way past police lines at the funeral in haifa and the secular arab nationalist parties invoked his memory as a symbol of resistance it was the largest political gathering ever to assemble in mandatory palestine end quote most of al-qassam disciples had escaped into the mountains and they were making their way through villages and shanty towns calling on the people to rise up and the air was beginning to crackle with violent energy throughout the country the grand mufti and the other arab notables were trying to contain the spread of violence but they were losing control a few weeks after al-qassam’s funeral they went to the british high commissioner arthur wachob and they begged him you got to give us something you got to give us anything to take back to these people as a show of good faith because they’re on the edge and we can’t control them much longer now arthur wachob had a good even a friendly relationship with the mufti and so he was responsive to it he understood their predicament he wrote back to the british colonial office that at least one-fifth of arab villagers had been reduced to wandering migrant work and he warned the british government that without some kind of a change their friendly arab leaders were not going to be of any use to them anymore he said quote i think that they are right in saying that with an unsatisfactory response to their demands from the mandate the possibility of alleviating the present situation will disappear end quote he asked the arab leaders to consider a revamp proposal for a legislative council that he had been trying to push through for two years his proposal would create a new representative council that would govern the daily affairs of the country it would consist of 11 muslims seven jews three christians and of course the british mandatory government would retain final authority and veto power on all decisions but but they promised not to micromanage now up until now the arabs had resisted the terms of this proposal because it based jewish representation on the council on the numbers that they had now after the doubling of their population which had occurred against the arabs will in just the last few years they didn’t want that to count and they’d also resisted it because it really didn’t change their situation the british would still retain ultimate power and so while the arabs may be able to govern on marginal issues in the country no fundamental alterations to the government or the international status of palestine would be permitted but something had to be done and so finally the grand mufti and the others relented they accepted a power sharing arrangement with the zionists including all the recent new arrivals in a palestinian representative government they brought the message back to the people that look it’s not perfect but at long last the transition to a palestinian self-government has begun and they prevailed upon the people to halt and condemn any violent activities but it wasn’t going to be that simple the zionists had always been focused on establishing a majority in the entire country of palestine but as late as the early 1930s this was something that most of them were seeing happen maybe a hundred years down the road you know one more acre one more goat right well they had just doubled their population in palestine the last four years many of them began thinking about a majority not by the end of the century but by the end of the decade and so the zionists just rejected the plan outright if they could keep up this rate of immigration just a little longer they might have a majority soon and then they would consider talking about a representative government until then the zionists didn’t want to do anything that might legitimize any arab claim to palestine now this annoyed the high commissioner arthur wachow to no end and he pushed the proposal up to london anyway which received it with a stamp of approval from both the high commissioner and the arab leaders so this proposal arrives back in whitehall the palestinian high commissioner that they have down there in charge wants it the arab leadership wants it but by the time the proposal was brought before the british parliament in march 1936 haim weizmann had you know tickled enough ears and maybe greased enough palms to make sure that the measure was defeated the mandate authorities want it the arabs want it the zionists don’t want it too bad the arabs thought by accepting this they were making huge compromises they knew that the high commissioner fully supported this legislative council and so when it went down in parliament two things were completely confirmed as far as the arabs were concerned first the zionist owned the british government how could a proposal go down in flames when the high commissioner the highest authority the highest british authority in the country and the whole arab leadership representing two-thirds of the country’s population were in favor of it how was that possible and second it confirmed to them that the zionists were not negotiating in good faith they were getting a good deal here the arabs were compromising by agreeing to a power sharing arrangement that legitimized and accepted the gigantic number of immigrants that had arrived in the last four years but the zionists wouldn’t even accept that and so to the arabs this seemed like proof that the zionists were not interested in any proposal that involved sharing any power in any way high commissioner watch open the arabs had tried to find a compromise that might allow the notables to maintain enough credibility to diffuse this simmering rage to go back to the people and say look we’re making progress but the zionist torpedoed it and watch hope was insane after this he was so furious he said quote the thing is i have never met the prime minister and i don’t suppose i ever shall weizmann can go in there whenever he wants to end quote so with this latest failed attempt at compromise by the arab leadership sporadic violence resumes around the country led by those disaffected young men who were not connected to the big families or to their political parties or to anything else they’re just pissed off some of the big families gave them a bit of tepid or rhetorical support because they were struggling to keep them under control but their credibility and their control was slipping away very quickly now young men from the slums and the shanty towns following kasam’s example had taken up to the hills to resist they were not interested in lobbying the british to approve alterations to the mandate they they weren’t interested in lobbying the british to listen to the arabs please why were they begging the british to stop giving away their country without the british they were saying none of this would have been possible this is not immigration it’s never been immigration and thinking of it that way led to a are crippled and confused response to it when an army occupies a territory making way for other people to move in dispossessing the population and trying to impose a new governmental regime that the people there don’t want that’s not immigration that is an invasion it doesn’t matter if the people moving in are using someone else’s army to do it it’s an invasion and it’s always been an invasion now ben gurion sure talk jabotinsky and many of the rest of the zionists could have told them that a long time ago but their public relations teams had convinced the arabs that british occupation and zionist colonization were two separate issues to be dealt with on their own terms as the grand mufti had been doing being friendly toward the british but opposed to the zionists all this time he’d been wasting his time asking the british to stop the zionists but they were never separate issues the british were the invading army for the jewish conquerors on april 15th 1936 a convoy of trucks was ambushed by arab shooters and two jewish drivers were killed in the firefight the next day revisionist paramilitaries executed a coordinated reprisal and murdered two arabs while they were sleeping in their beds you know the swiftness and sophistication of this attack being organized launched and and executed within 24 hours it just shocked the arabs two days later the funerals for the two murdered jews mushroomed into a giant anti-arab demonstration and armed zionists raided an arab neighborhood smashing up several houses and shops and assaulting several people including a couple children reportedly the arabs responded with anti-zionist demonstrations in several cities several of these turned into riots and led to several killings all over the country spontaneous councils were formed up in in several arab towns and they were all calling for a general strike the haj amin the grand mufti called together the heads of the arab families they were on the edge of losing the last shred of ability that they had to manage this thing but it was going to be useless to try and stop it he knew that there was too much momentum if they tried to stop it they would lose that last shred of control they needed to try and play catch up at this point their only hope was to own it to co-opt this growing movement in the hope that they might regain some legitimacy and be able to steer the situation back onto the road the grand mufti’s chief rival i mean hated rival hated on each of them hated each other rahiba nasa shibi he was loathed to submit to the grand mufti’s leadership but the grand mufti had the upper hand here on april 25th 1936 they formed the arab higher committee under the leadership of the grand mufti haj amin alhusseini and called for a general strike throughout the country now the british are practical people they care about money and public relations and the flow of oil from iraq to the port in haifa similar strikes had helped egypt iraq and other arab nations extract concessions that moved them toward independence the grand mufti hoped that a coordinated workers and taxpayers strike would compel the british to respond while channeling the anger in of the people into a form of at least peaceful resistance that wouldn’t necessarily provoke a british military response but as in 1929 the older cooler heads were not going to prevail author and journalist jambi judas in his book truman and american zionism writes quote the committee included the different factions including the husseinis and nasa shibis with the mufti his head the committee issued a manifesto calling for a complete halt to jewish immigration a prohibition of the transfer of arab lands and a national government responsible to a proportionately representative legislative council the husseinis and nasa shibis were still hoping that the pressure of the strike would persuade the british to grant palestine’s arabs the same self-government neighboring arabs had won but younger militants dismissive of peaceful protests took the initiative in pressing the case for an arab palestine over the next six months arab groups attacked the jews and the british the oil pipeline from iraq to haifa which had opened in 1935 was sabotaged british police stations and railways were targeted forests planted by the jewish national fund were burned down about 80 jews were killed end quote the revisionists on the zionist side are watching this and they are chomping at the bit to fight they wanted a war but ben-gurion knew better if if arabs and jews start fighting each other in the streets the british would come out in force and suppress both of them to keep the peace no no no no this was a time for restraint sit back let the arabs rise up and enjoy the view as they learn what the british empire is all about and this drove the revisionist crazy because that british response didn’t happen right away watch hope was angry with the zionist refusing to accept anything less than total control and so he was still friendly with the mufti and for the most part he was treating the sporadic violence as a police problem not a military problem but he was under pressure from the british government back home to get this situation under control and in june 1936 the palestinian arabs get a lesson in what india and sri lanka and south africa and hell even ireland already knew about what happens when the slow thighs of the british beast begin to move the arabs had heard but they had never seen what the greatest empire since rome could do and they were about to find out in late june after receiving reports of snipers marauding outside the ancient city of jaffa this is a city just south of the jewish city of tel aviv the british army entered the town in force suppressing a minor attempt at resistance with armored vehicles and machine gun fire the residents of the town were rounded up and forced to watch as british soldiers moved down boulevards and streets demolishing buildings and houses one by one you remember that line in the that that batman movie the dark knight but the joker that one where where alfred is describing to batman how a mysterious bandit had been robbing supply trains making their way through the forest and giving away all the loot and alfred says that his military unit that he was in at the time searched in vain for months for this bandit and when batman finally asked how they finally caught him alfred says we burned down the forest that’s supposed to be a shocking line in that movie but alfred is just describing counterinsurgent warfare you burn down the forest asymmetric warfare is always horrific and i mean you have an organized and identifiable force fighting people who are indistinguishable from the general population and who set traps and melt away a favorite strategy of the colonial british empire was just habitat destruction a lot of the violence at the time was thought to be emanating from the southern city of jaffa but it was impossible to know exactly who was an enemy so the british burned down the forest they destroyed almost the entire arab section of jaffa making 6 000 people homeless the only warning the residents received came in the form of leaflets hours before the demolition warning them to evacuate right now most of them had no idea what was going on and they escaped with nothing more than the clothes on their backs this is in a country and at a time where people don’t have bank accounts they don’t have insurance they don’t have stock options for most of these people every single thing they owned generations of accumulated wealth in the form of a home and their furniture and their clothing and other articles were burned up and buried in rubble and 6 000 more people made their way into the already into the already crowded shantytown outside the city and so the grand mufti realized that this strike was not working the british and jewish economies were largely decoupled from the arab economy they had created a british zionist society within a society and they weren’t nearly as affected by the arab strike as the arabs themselves were jaffa had been one of the most important ports along with haifa on the palestinian coast but when arab jaffa was destroyed its port functions moved up to the jewish tel aviv the arabs were becoming more and more desperate while the british and the zionists had access to outside funding that insulated them from the strikes the gangs of young people were getting harder and harder to control and some began to denounce the big families again as collaborators and even as enemies of islam the arab higher committee reached out to the high commissioner again to try to negotiate an end to the strike and with the help of the surrounding arab countries and some of their ambassadors some some of who had contacts with the gangs fighting in the hills you know the gangs in the west bank area the jordanian government had some contacts with them and in galilee and up in the northern parts the lebanese and and the syrians had some contacts with them and so with their help watch hope was able to convince the arabs to end the strike while the british government would send a commission to investigate the crisis and figure out how to mediate the dispute well the grand mufti was suspicious of this of course he’s heard it all before but outside pressure from transjordan and egypt as well as internal pressure from the nasha shibis forced the hajj i mean to agree both the high commissioner and the arab leadership used that last bit of capital they had to hold their people at bay just to long enough to let this process work its way through british generals had been sent from outside the area and they didn’t like the idea that they were being held back from fixing this problem by the high commissioner who clearly favored the arabs and wanted to give this an opportunity to be resolved peacefully these generals were soldiers sent to do a job and their solutions to the problem were soldier solutions the hajj amin and the arab leadership managed to convince most of the people to stand down and end the strike in september 1936 they were saying look everybody we made our point don’t worry the british are sending a delegation to address our concerns and so the british sent a commission under sir william peale which sent the next several months conducting an investigation into what was going on and this commission came in carrying a big stick historian tom segev describes in his book again one palestine complete he describes the commission he says quote the commission was most respectable royal by definition headed by a distinguished peer lord peale former secretary of state for india four of the commission’s five members bore the title sir they included a former governor and a high court judge a former ambassador and a professor of history from oxford all of them were highly experienced people equipped with the necessary background for such a weighty inquiry they arrived in palestine wearing top hats and tails the commission’s hearings were treated with the utmost seriousness weizmann ben-gurion jabotinsky the mufti winston churchill and the elderly lloyd george all testified as did many others some testified in closed door sessions ben-gurion told the commission that the commission ben-gurion told the commission that the bible was the jewish people’s mandate according to accepted zionist practice ben-gurion was careful not to use the term state end quote now two decades after the american king crane commission had tried to draw attention to the contradictions built into the balfour declaration the peale commission finally brought the british government around to the same understanding the causes of the recent disturbances it said were not anti-semitism but the desire of the palestinian arabs for national independence and their hostility and fear regarding the zionist project in their country lord peale wrote to the colonial secretary quote the social moral and political gaps between the arab and jewish communities are already unbridgeable end quote zev jabotinsky testified before the commission detailing the zionist complaints about everything that had happened since the issuance of the balfour declaration before the commission he testified quote the arabs were never told what the balfour declaration was meant by lord balfour and all the others to mean they were never told here again my lord i’m going to limit myself as being perhaps a sufficient illustration of that attitude to truth to recall a little story which has been told to this commission in palestine that instead of writing on coins it’s and so forth eretz israel that means the land of israel they just write the two letters ei why what is the meaning of it if the country is to be called eretz israel land of israel if that is the name avowed then print it in full if it is something which cannot be allowed remove it but the way out adopted in this case illustrates the whole system which is to hint that there is a balfour declaration and perhaps there is something in it and then again perhaps there’s nothing in it that has been the system from beginning to end end quote you can almost hear david ben-gurion and chaim weizmann in the background grinding their teeth for every bit of work they put in trying to put the british to sleep there was always a revisionist like jabotinsky shouting from the rooftops as ionist true intentions even at this late date the british did not intend had never officially intended to support the making of palestine into a jewish state and ben-gurion weizmann and others wanted to keep them believing that that’s not what they were doing but the right wingers for the the right wing for all its ruggedness and potential for savagery has been and in my opinion remains to this day in israel more honest than the left has ever been about their demands and their intentions jabotinsky continued his testimony quote you have of course heard of compromises and halfway houses which are being suggested including cantonization or the parody scheme or the cultural rapprochement or the jews giving in and so on believe my sincerity and it is the sincerity of the whole movement the sincerity of every jew i am now trying to voice we wish a halfway house could be possible but it is perfectly impossible we cannot accept cantonization because it will be suggested by many even among you that even the whole of palestine may prove too small for that humanitarian purpose we need a corner of palestine a canton how can we promise to be satisfied with it we cannot we never can should we swear to you we would be satisfied it would be a lie end quote around the same time and probably in reaction to testimonies like jabotinsky’s that arch colonialist and zionist supporter winston churchill wrote very presciently that quote the wealthy crowded progressive jewish state lies in the plains and on the sea coasts around it in the hills and the upland stretching far and wide into the illimitable deserts the warlike arabs of syria of transjordania of arabia backed by the armed forces of iraq offer the ceaseless menace of war to maintain itself the jewish state must be armed to the teeth and must bring in every able-bodied man to strengthen its army but how long would this process be allowed to continue by the great arab populations in iraq and palestine can it be expected that the arabs would stand by and passively and watch the building up with jewish world capital and resources of a jewish army equipped with the most deadly weapons of war until it was strong enough not to be afraid of them and if ever the jewish army reached that point who can be sure that cramped within their narrow limits they would not plunge out into the new undeveloped lands that lie around them end quote and when churchill concluded quote i find it difficult to resist the conclusion that the partition scheme would lead inevitably to the complete evacuation of palestine by great britain jabotinsky indirectly replied to that statement in his testimony quote we utterly deny that it means bringing great britain into conflict with world islam it has been exaggerated beyond any recognition it is not true given a firm resolve made clearly known to both jews and arabs all this would be performed with the normal smoothness of any other equally big colonization enterprise end quote now the report produced by this commission is one of the best documents on the period that you can find it’s over 400 pages very clearly written insightful i had read so much about it and so many books that i didn’t actually get around to reading the full report itself until i was almost wrapping up this episode and it really impressed me the guys on this commission knew what was going on and in the end the peele commission shared churchill’s skepticism about the future but they accepted jabotinsky’s optimism about bold action the commission concluded that the mandatory government in palestine was being asked to manage an impossible situation the claims of the arabs and the claims of the jews in palestine were irreconcilable the balfour declaration had always rested on the assumption they said that arab nationalism was not that strongly felt or that it could be dampened by building a few roads and schools but on the contrary the increase in literacy and quality of education among the arabs had only supercharged the desire for national independence the commission’s report implicitly acknowledged that imposing the balfour declaration on palestine had been a mistake and yet having made the mistake it didn’t exactly know what to do relations between the jews and the arabs had degenerated so badly that the peele commission worried about what could happen if britain acquiesced to the arabs demands for a representative government any government that represented the population would be a threat to the peele any government that represented the population of palestine would contain a large arab majority britain had helped create the conditions for this current animosity and the commission said that quote belief in british good faith would not be strengthened anywhere in the world if now after helping create this problem the british threw their hands in the air and just left the zionists to fend for themselves under an arab majority government the recommendation of the commission was to break the country up partition divide palestine into jewish and arab states and as you can imagine the arabs went berserk at this point they just they just couldn’t believe what they were hearing ever since khaim weitzman had met with emir faisal in 1919 they had been promised over and over and over that any idea of splitting off their territory and giving it away was impossible out of the question that whatever else happened they definitely don’t have to worry about that even accepting the basic idea there were practical reasons that the arabs rejected this partition having to do with the demographics and geography of the proposed division the zionist portion was to be granted independence full independence it would be a state while the arab portion was going to be absorbed into jordan transjordan still it’s going to be absorbed into transjordan and ruled by faisal’s brother abdullah and still firmly under the stewardship of the british who basically controlled transjordan still at this point now abdullah loved the idea of partition and had always wanted to absorb the arab lands west of the jordan river he had rahim nashashibi working on his behalf trying to push this in palestine twice during the 1920s the arabs had put forth plans that actually would have done this but again those were the days just after the destruction of the arab kingdom of syria had left the arabs in palestine with a very confused national identity by 1937 after everything that had happened nationalism in palestine had become firmly and permanently fixed as palestinian nationalism they didn’t want to be a part of jordan in addition to land partition the commission reported that large transfers of populations would also have to be necessary in order to promote lasting peace a few jews and lots of arabs would have to be forcibly moved from one another’s areas in order to avoid discrimination by the authorities in each this would affect the arab population far more than it would the jews some areas set aside for the zionists were still 90 arab in population the arab partition only contained about 1200 jews but the jewish portion was home to 225 000 arabs who would have to be moved and so to say the least the arabs were not pleased with this idea the peel commission’s report had anticipated that neither party would like its recommendations it didn’t expect that obviously the arabs hated it but the commission might have hoped to bring the zionists around but that wasn’t to be the haganah had been planting spies and listening devices around the hotel where the peel commission was holding its interviews and deliberations so it had moment-by-moment updates of how things were going when it became clear that the commission was contemplating a partition plan the zionists scrambled to expand their presence as quickly as possible in the country in order to make a case for a larger partition the establishment of new settlements was regulated by the mandatory government the man the british mandatory government decided if you could create another jewish settlement somewhere but there was a loophole in the law that the jews rushed to exploit while the peel deliberations were going on the law resisted new construction you couldn’t build any new settlements unless the british say it’s okay but the loophole was that there was another law stating that a building could not be demolished if it was completed once the roof was completed that’s actually how the law was written you couldn’t tear it down then it becomes a whole other thing and so zionist work teams were sent out at night with pre-fabricated construction materials to throw up tiny outposts all over the country to establish a jewish presence in an area they were called tower and stockade settlements and they were basically four walls a few shacks and a watchtower just something to put a mark on the map presented to the peel negotiators in all 57 of these settlements were established and they did what they were supposed to do the partition gave the zionists a lot more land than they otherwise would have received based on their population but even that wasn’t enough for everyone according to the partition plan the jews would receive almost the entire coastline and most of the fertile land in galilee and the rest of the north while the arabs would receive the hill territories bordering jordan and then the empty negev desert to the south and then you’d have a the city of jerusalem in a quarter to jaffa would remain under british control but it wasn’t enough now that the zionists had gotten the british talking about partition and talking about forced population transfers many zionists wanted to use these recommendations as just a basis for further negotiations hoping to extract even more concessions now david ben-gurion thought this was madness and he pleaded with the rest of the zionists to accept this partition he told the doubters that it didn’t matter how much land the partition granted to the jews because it would just be a jumping off point for future acquisitions anyway let him give us somebody’s backyard and then we’ll import a couple million jews and then we’ll take what we want writing to his son in a letter ben-gurion said quote a jewish state in part of palestine is not an end but a beginning our possession is important not only for itself though this would increase our power and in and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety establishing a small state will serve as a very potent lever in our historical efforts to redeem the whole country end quote and he also wrote quote the compulsory transfer of the arabs from the valleys of the proposed jewish state could give us something which we have never had even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second temples a galilee almost free of non-jews we are being given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginations this is more than a state government and sovereignty this is a national consolidation in a free homeland if because of our weakness neglect or negligence the thing is not done then we will have lost a chance which we had never had before and may never have again end quote haim weitzman after reading the recommendations of the appeal commission spoke to the british official overseeing the partition plan and he wrote about their conversation afterward regarding the transfers of the arab population he said that quote the whole success of the scheme depended on whether the government genuinely did or did not wish to carry out this recommendation the forced transfer could be carried out only by the british government and not by the jews i explained the reasons why we considered this proposal of such importance mr ormsby gore said that he was proposing to set up a committee for the twofold purpose of a finding land for the transferees they hope to find land in jordan and possibly in the negev desert and b arranging the actual terms of the transfer he mentioned the name of sir john campbell who had much experience in connection with the transfers of population between greece and turkey and who knew all about the matter end quote so now in 1937 20 years after the issuance of the balfour declaration the british government and the zionist leadership from weitzman to ben-gurion to jabotinsky are speaking plainly and openly about forcibly removing the arab population from large parts of palestine the arab leadership had been hoping that this commission would give them something to take back to their people and they just couldn’t believe this were the british seriously talking to them about forcibly transferring over 200 000 arabs from their homes and their land to some other place why were they trying to give areas that are 90 arab to the jews anyway and for that matter why is anybody talking about giving any of our country over to a group of european jews most of whom got here in the last five years what is happening we welcome the jews at first when they started flooding in and our attempts to create representative governments kept getting blocked you said don’t worry don’t worry they’re only looking for a place to live when they started isolating themselves and proclaiming their intentions to take away our land you told us that you would never allow that to happen when they were discovered stockpiling weapons you suggested we form a government that gave them half the power when they were only a third of the population and we agreed and now after all your assurances and all our compromises you’re telling us that we have to give up a part of our country altogether and the best parts what are you talking about and no we don’t care if the germans or any other europeans are being cruel to the jews we cared in 1918 we don’t care anymore this is not our problem why don’t you go give up scotland or wales if it’s so important to you with the arabs finding the peal partition so repugnant you might think that every zionist would be rushing to sign on the dotted line of the commission’s recommendations if the arabs hate it that much the zionists must love it but that wasn’t even true despite passionate pleas from weizmann and ben-gurion they were begging the zionists to take this on the jewish agency who now was being influenced by an increasingly assertive and militant zionist organization of america refused to accept the plan but they did agree to consider future proposals if maybe the pot were sweetened but there would be no time for future proposals the plan had proposed to give the jews most of the important land in the country and to transfer the arabs to jordan and the zionist had still refused if there were any arabs left that needed proof that the zionists would settle for anything less than owning the entire country there weren’t any more within weeks arab fighters had taken back to the hills erupting with more fury than ever ben-gurion fumed over the interference from american zionists who were tucked away safely in the united states and who never had any intention under any circumstances of settling in palestine he would later lament how many jewish lives might have been saved if the peal partition had been accepted in 1937 after the failure of the peal commission there was no way to mistake for criminal violence what had clearly evolved into a rebellion sporadic and disorganized as it was these young arabs lacked a leadership structure and the rebels well the british called them rebels rebellion indicates that somebody is defying a legitimate authority i guess and the palestinian fighters would have said that they were fighting against the colonial overlord and that you can’t be a rebel in your own country the great palestinian historian george antonius writing a year after the peal commission described how ineffective the arabs public relations efforts had been compared to those of the zionists and this deficiency led again and again to britain and then later to the united states to for them to pursue policies that could only lead the arabs to conclude that the west was only ever in league with the zionists to displace them and if that was the case then what use could further talk be antonius writing about the way history and journalism that was appearing about the conflict in 1938 writing about that he remarked quote it has to be used with care partly because of the high percentage of open or veiled propaganda and partly because the remoteness of the indispensable arabic sources has militated against real fairness even in the works of neutral and fair-minded historians end quote this is something i have encountered again and again by the way excellent books by very diligent and honest historians often rely entirely on hebrew and english sources with a few sections pulling from moderate christian arabs like khalil osakakini or a few others but that’s it the experience of the arab peasant is almost entirely excluded or else viewed from the perspective of one of these other groups the way it typically manifests is that the british and the zionists will be presented as having individual motivations that collect up until they form into a historical picture so david lloyd george and winston churchill and arthur balfour may have had the following intentions and these incentives and those biases and so forth and therefore the british acted in a certain way and david ben-gurion might have thought this and chaim weizmann may have been prejudiced in the following manner and zev jabotinsky believed this other thing and therefore the zionists moved in some given direction the arabs on the other hand are spoken of almost entirely as a collective individual personalities are almost entirely excluded in favor of talking about the seething countryside the inflamed mob the disenfranchised peasants it’s always just masses of people and it’s not that these other accounts don’t exist they do exist although mostly in arabic and nobody bothers to translate them i had a conversation with a professor here in los angeles who specializes in this conflict and i asked why such valuable first-hand sources of any historical period or event could be ignored when historians are perfectly aware that they exist and he told me he told me that many historians know from experience that just taking arabic sources seriously at all will undermine their credibility with the english and hebrew speaking public and i’ve had dozens of conversations and debates with people that tell me he’s right about this i can’t count the times that i’m talking to someone and they’ll cite a politically crafted public statement from the zionist leadership as hard evidence of how an event went down in real life and when i pull out a letter from one arab to another describing what he saw with his own eyes the response i get was well they would say that come on and that sounds bad but the majority of people carry that same prejudice around at least in the english speaking world especially in the united states israeli spokesmen insisted that the victims of the drone strike were active militants and that to most people means they were active militants full stop the protests of the family and community of the dead that they had nothing to do with militia activity is usually met with a healthy eye roll and yeah well of course they would say that i mean even close reading can leave huge holes in our understanding and i’m i’m constantly reminding myself that no matter how many books or articles or papers i’ve read or even how many people i speak to my own understanding of an issue like this can only ever be an open-ended narrative and my job is just to make sure that that narrative remains open-ended instead of deciding that i know how it is that i know whose fault it is and why it happened and to avoid taking some ideological stand based on that closed incomplete book i was quoting antonius let me go back to that quote regarding sources on this conflict he says quote it has to be used with care partly because of the high percentage of open or veiled propaganda and partly because of the remoteness of the indispensable arabic sources has militated against real fairness even in the works of neutral and fair-minded historians a similar equality inequality vitiates the stream of day-to-day information zionist propaganda is active highly organized and widespread the world press or at any rate the democracies of the west is largely amenable to it it commands many of the available channels for the dissemination of news and more particularly those of the english-speaking world arab propaganda is in comparison primitive and infinitely less successful the arabs have little of the skill polyglotic ubiquity or financial resources which make jewish propaganda so effective the result is that for a score of years or so the world has been looking at palestine mainly through zionist spectacles and has unconsciously acquired the habit of reasoning on zionist premises end quote now that could have been written in 2016 but it was written in 1938 a year after many young arabs had finally decided to stop trying to make their case because there was nobody to make their case to their parents had believed that perhaps the british were basically well-intentioned but that they were hamstrung by a byzantine bureaucracy and by zionist propaganda and influence and so forth and that if they could just punch through all that and get their own message across to the british that maybe things would change but this new generation and remember in 1937 an arab who was born when the balfour declaration was issued he was 20 years old now that’s who we’re talking about people who have lived their entire lives with the tension and hostility we’ve been talking about in this story their first memories were the nebi musa and jaffa riots and they were 12 years old during the 1929 riots these are young people who were born in the dirty shantytowns and whose lot in life when they came of age was to hope that a zionist or british official would give him a job somewhere all they’ve ever known from the time they were children is that there are foreigners here trying to take away our country and just as the young people who were and just as the younger generation of jews resented the feudal appeasement and and endless negotiations that had already cost their parents so much these younger arabs were finished with trying to talk to their conquerors trying to talk their conquerors out of their conquest the arab fighters were organized along the lines that qassam had left behind in small independent cells without an organized centralized command structure in september 1937 a british district commissioner was killed by a cell in galilee now high commissioner wachope who was under tremendous pressure to get this situation under control ordered the arab hire committee disbanded and issued mass arrest orders to the rest of the palestinian leadership having given up on working with the british the grand moved the escape to lebanon and began to help conduct the rebellion from there the heads of all the other notable families on the committee were exiled to an internment camp on the tiny island of seychelles in the indian ocean and this turned out to be terribly counterproductive the notable leadership and especially the mufti had been the only force holding back the younger generation and keeping them in check at all all the british had accomplished by taking out the leadership was to remove the lid on the rage that had been boiling under the surface for so many years and again these younger militants the ones left behind they’re cut from a different cloth dispossession eviction poverty violence hopelessness and desperation these were not deviations from normalcy for them these were the fundamental conditions of the only world that they’d ever known and they harbored a kind of rage that only a person born in such a world can understand john b judas writes quote with the older leaders exiled younger local militants many of them radical islamists stepped forward in their own villages they imposed islamic customs including forcing women to wear veils they targeted christian arabs and druze when they raided jewish villages they killed indiscriminately in tiberias rebels killed 19 jews including 11 children who appear to have been burned alive by early 1938 these rebels had forced the british to evacuate jericho and other towns the british military commander in palestine wrote that quote the situation was such that civil administration of the country was to all practical purposes non-existent end quote now as 1937 turns over into 1938 david ben-gurion still calling for restraint mostly keeping the left under control he doesn’t want to distract the british because now they’re really gearing up to pacify the arab revolt but the revisionists the revisionists are not listening anymore just as there was a younger generation of arab firebrands who showed none of the flex that their parents did a new generation of zionists had grown up from the beginning from the cradle hearing about this conflict zev jabotinsky had been banned from the country by the british back in 1931 he’s been organizing activities in europe in the united states and just as when they had exiled the arab leadership during this revolt that was going on now the british found that a seemingly extremist leader was really the only thing keeping the even more extreme elements on a leash a new generation of violent more openly fascist men jabotinsky when you really look at his politics was more liberal than he gets credit for this younger generation coming up behind him is not afraid of the fascist label this is the late 1930s and and these men had risen to prominence in the revisionist party in recent years zev jabotinsky had been traveling around europe organizing cells of would-be jewish immigrants and training and preparing them for a move to palestine he spoke 10 languages and he was very effective at spreading revisionist zionism on the continent beitar the the paramilitary youth organization that jabotinsky had modeled on mussolini’s black shirts had become a worldwide movement i’ve seen one academic source that said beitar had a hundred thousand members in poland alone but i don’t know where they got that and i find it a little bit hard to believe but either way jabotinsky was making a lot of progress but was he making it fast enough beitar members trained in their home countries as they prepared to immigrate to palestine ready to fight the moment they stepped off the boat a small group of fighters had split off from the haganah proper in 1931 but had nevertheless obeyed the policy of restraint up until now they were called the irgun and they were a paramilitary organization mostly made up of this new breed of beitar fighters new breed men like the future israeli prime minister yitzhak shamir and menachem begin menachem begin was an archetype of this uncompromising new breed he was born to a well-off merchant family and he grew up in poland but his father his father was an early zionist who when theodor herzl died in 1904 he took an ax and broke into a local synagogue to hold a secret memorial service with some friends in the middle of the night now his father was a marxist zionist in the mold of joseph trumpeldore but menachem begin himself took up with beitar after hearing jabotinsky deliver one of his trademark speeches begin was only 16 when he joined the movement he very quickly rose to prominence when he was 23 he was put in charge of the beitar in czechoslovakia and when he moved back to poland he was given a job organizing the movement there and delivering lectures and speeches around the country he would travel all around the country recruiting members and giving speeches in gymnasiums and synagogues and even on street corners anywhere he could get a few jews with a little bit of fire in their bellies to listen to him as he traveled around organizing giving speeches he would sleep on park benches and eat whatever people gave him begin idolized zev jabotinsky but at a beitar conference in 1938 he openly defied him regarding the policy of restraint they argued in front of the audience and jabotinsky was using practical arguments about the effectiveness of it and and and the pointlessness of engaging directly with the arabs or the british in large-scale military operations but begin was more a man of the times and he ignored jabotinsky’s practical arguments to make romantic emotional pleas to the assembled zionists in the end begin won out and the beitar oath was altered to change a line from i will raise my arm only in defense to i will raise my arm only in defense and in the conquest of my homeland menachem begin explicitly laid out a strategy that’s common to all non-state rebels everywhere the zionists should attack and humiliate the british through methods of terror and ambush force them to respond violently and then stand back as more zionists are alienated and they come rushing into the arms of the revisionists and we would say sure the haganah might be able to protect you as you sit behind your walls in your settlements and wait for the storm to come but who’s going to get your revenge not ben-gurion not the haganah not the labor zionists you need someone who isn’t afraid to go out beyond our walls and hit back you need us begin also calculated that forcing the british to overreact would attract worldwide media attention and that then the the zionists would be able to work their magic on that front to bring international pressure to bear on the british to get the hell out in the meantime they were not going to wait for the arabs to attack no no they were going to go out and they were going to attack the arabs they would attack them in their homes and in their markets they would attack the british in their barracks and on the roads and those outside the country would pour all of their energies into overwhelming british immigration checks and infrastructure in palestine smuggling in as many jewish fighters as they possibly could begin was one of those revisionists who were still out of the country organizing immigration efforts and training people and he began working with other revisionist leaders around the continent as well as with the polish government which is actually a very interesting story they were very happy to see their jews off somewhere out of their own country and so they were actually facilitating illegal immigration into palestine helping the revisionists do it and so the irgun renounces ben graham’s policy of restraint and begins to attack arab civilians their goal was not just to retaliate but to instill such fear in the arab population that they would just wish for peace and quiet the irgun and other revisionists began a campaign of terror against the arabs executing dozens of attacks against civilian targets after the peel commission had failed irgun gunman fired into the windows of houses and into crowds on the streets they threw hand grenades and and and fire bombs into windows improvised explosives and hand grenades were thrown into markets and buses in just a few weeks in july 1938 the irgun murdered dozens of arab civilians on july 5th alone seven arabs were killed in a coordinated attack by gunmen in tel aviv three more were killed by a bomb planted on a bus in jerusalem and another arab was ambushed and beaten to death the very next day an irgun bomb placed in haifa in a produce market killed 18 jews and five arabs and wounded another 60 mostly shopping women and children on july 8th four more arabs were killed in a jerusalem bombing july 16th the bomb was thrown into another jerusalem marketplace killing 10 july 25th a massive bomb was planted in the haifa market a big landmine 43 more arabs were killed ben-gurion and the labor zionists had long used the revisionists kind of as their pitbulls where they could kind of stand back and denounce their violence but then call on them when they needed somebody to get dirty but now the pitbulls were off the leash jabotinsky still back in poland trying to organize defense units to protect jews from the multiplying pogroms and persecutions that are taking place in eastern europe you know he’s saying he’s screaming at the top of his lungs that the jews in europe are living on the edge of a volcano and he’s screaming to the zionist leadership in palestine there’s no more time we got to do something now something is happening in europe and you’re not here but it’s different it’s not like the other times we’ve got to get everyone the fuck out of here in march 1938 hitler had annexed austria and austrian jews came under attack by their former neighbors the next day pogroms were raging in poland and romania and most of the rest of eastern europe and so at the urging of the united states a conference was held in france to discuss possible options regarding what to do with jewish people who wanted to flee remember all the western countries after the first world war for the most part had shut down their immigration even the united states locked it down in 1924 so all this has been going on and the jews have nowhere to go okay the british are limiting the number of people who can come into palestine and they’ve got nowhere to go and so this conference called the evian conference held in 1938 led by the united states and great britain and france and a lot of these other countries are going to get together 30 something countries and decide what to do with these jews how are we going to look if we all get together you take a few we take a few we can get the jews of germany out of here there’s not that many of them it’s only a few hundred thousand and so hitler hears about it he sends word to the conference that if these other nations wanted to take his jews off his hands he was fine with that he would even help facilitate their immigration he said quote i can only hope and expect that the other world which has such deep sympathy for these criminals will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid we on our part are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries for all i care even on luxury ships end quote but not britain not the united states not anybody was willing to expand their meager quota for jewish refugees the association of the jews with communism was not confined to the fevered mind of adolf hitler and the u.s and britain were wary of letting radical jewish revolutionaries slip in among the refugees and so relieved of any pressure from the two great powers none of the other nations was willing to help either and hitler just he mocked the pretensions of these participating nations he said he mocked him for quote oozing sympathy for the poor tormented people but remaining hard and obdurate when it comes to helping them end quote you know he’s saying oh sure yeah yeah you’re so appalled by what i’m doing but you obviously don’t want these people either in september 1938 the european powers signed the munich agreement allowing germany to annex the sudetenland from czechoslovakia and anti-jewish legislation immediately went into effect there nazi authorities began to expel foreign jews so french jews and british jews american jews often rounding them up in the middle of the night and shipping them out without warning in late october over 12 000 polish jews were rounded up and deported in a single night and when they arrived in train cars at the polish border these are polish jews they live in poland polish border guards refused to take them forced them to march back to the german border and of course the germans don’t want them and they were sent back and forth for days and finally you have thousands of homeless jews living in this nameless no man’s land between the german and polish border control stations and a makeshift refugee camp they weren’t in germany they weren’t in poland neither country wanted them and no other country would take them there were thousands of people here but this is the situation now for all jews in nazi europe after a relative of one of the polish jewish refugees in revenge shot a german diplomat at the french embassy nazi officials used that opportunity to officially strip jews in germany of their remaining rights and organized a nationwide pogrom against them on november 9th 1938 at the urging of the nazi government riots erupted throughout germany homes were ransacked and looted over 7 000 jewish shops and businesses were vandalized and virtually every synagogue in germany was damaged or destroyed same story in austria jewish cemeteries were vandalized gravestones were kicked over and broken and even graves were dug up so that the bodies could be desecrated everywhere in germany jewish neighborhoods were covered with graffiti saying get out jews or jews are blood suckers and scrawled on the walls of many jewish buildings was go to palestine jews dozens were killed in two days of brutal violence tens of thousands of german and austrian jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps many of them never came back out november 9th 1938 is remembered today as kristallnacht the crystal night or the night of the broken glass for the streets that were covered in glass when the jews finally ventured out into the streets to assess the damage now a large portion of the german public didn’t like this they were outraged by the violence especially in the bigger cities kristallnacht was a first major test of how the german people would react to this kind of violence and hitler’s government discovered that many were not prepared to accept this many ss and sa units openly defied their orders and refused to participate and and many nazis nazi party members helped hide or defend jews during the pogrom the u.s ambassador to germany actually reported back to washington quote in view of this being a totalitarian state a surprising characteristic of the situation here is the intensity and scope among german citizens of condemnation of the recent happenings against jews end quote and again this is in berlin and some of the some of the bigger cities the nazis had overstepped their bounds they moved too quickly and so hitler told his lieutenants that a permanent solution to this problem was necessary in a meeting with other members of the nazi leadership on november 12th one of hitler’s men herman goring informed the rest quote i have received a letter written on the fuhrer’s orders requesting that the jewish question be now once and for all coordinated and solved one way or another i should not want to leave any doubt gentlemen as to the aim of today’s meeting we have not come together merely to talk again but to make decisions and i implore competent agencies to take all measures for the elimination of the jewish of the jew from the german economy and to submit them to me end quote now many palestinian leaders they they it’s not that they were insensitive to the plight of the jews in germany but given that much larger and richer countries even the countries who were the country who was imposing this on them had refused to take in a single refugee at the evian conference they rejected the idea that this should just be their problem alone to deal with george antonius the palestinian arab historian we quoted earlier he wrote in 1938 quote the treatment meted out to jews in germany and other european countries is a disgrace to its authors and to modern civilization but posterity will not exonerate any country that fails to bear its proper share of the sacrifices needed to alleviate jewish suffering and distress to place the brunt of the burden upon arab palestine is a miserable evasion of the duty that lies upon the whole of the civilized world it is also morally outrageous no code of morals can justify the persecution of one people in an attempt to relieve the persecution of another the cure for the eviction of jews from germany is not to be sought in the eviction of arabs from their homeland and the relief of jewish distress may not be accomplished at the cost of inflicting a corresponding distress upon an innocent and peaceful population end quote following antonius comments are these remarks by john baggett glubb a british commander of the transjordanian armed forces in 1939 quote the jewish tragedy owed its origin to the christian nations of europe and america at last the conscience of christendom was awake the age-long jewish tragedy must cease but when it came to the payment of compensation and expiation of their past shortcomings the christian nations of europe and america decided that the bill should be paid by a muslim nation in asia end quote the desperate jewish refugees who were now flowing into palestine from germany they often lacked any conviction regarding the zionist project they were fleeing to palestine because there was nowhere else to go they had had opportunities to become zionists and move here before 1933 and even earlier before the persecutions ramped up and they hadn’t done it they were coming in now because they had no other options but when they arrived and found themselves dropped in the middle of a battle in progress they were forced into alliance and affiliation with the most hardened zionist groups you know they say when you go to prison in the united states you’re you’re forced to link up with a gang whether you sympathize with what they’re doing or not because you can’t survive on your own and this was kind of like that and it was becoming increasingly like that on the arab side as well the savagery of the irgun and some of the other jewish terrorist groups that were that were ramping up was being matched by the arab militias and both sides more and more people are being drawn to the extremists the high commissioner arthur watch hope is still attempting to de-escalate the situation politically london ordered watch hope to institute martial law in the country but he refused to do it he said it was unnecessary and it would just make the situation worse so he’s he’s trying not to escalate this but watch hope didn’t realize that the british government was no longer interested in whether the situation got worse they wanted it over and so watch hope was replaced with somebody who was a bit more passive as a high commissioner who was going to let the generals run things and palestine was placed under the control of generals who specialized in counterinsurgency and colonial pacification since the mandate had begun the british and the zionists had worked with one goal in mind do anything you can to prevent the arabs of palestine from coming together and uniting they worked to keep the leadership at each other’s throats and that wasn’t hard the leadership made that pretty simple they funded islamic fundamentalist groups to marginalize the arab christians and the secular nationalists they used carrots and sticks at the right times and humiliated the local elite sometimes and and flattered them at other times to undermine their credibility the goal as always had been to slide into the spaces between the disparate identities in this colonized society co-op the various subgroups deflect the animosity from coming towards you and play them off against each other it was all right for the people to feel paranoid to feel rage and to fear that they were surrounded by enemies everything was all right everything was all right as long as they didn’t wake up and realize that there was just one real enemy you know this is how a tiny island had ruled nearly a quarter of the world’s land mass as a colonial empire the british refined this divide and rule strategy over the years and it worked brilliantly but inevitably there came a time when the strategy ran its course and for those times the british empire always had a plan b even when you’ve done everything possible to undermine the attempts of a local population to unite under a common identity when you’ve diverted their attention and exploited the rifts and funded opposition parties and employed collaborators and outlawed national institutions even when you’ve done all these things there comes a time when the awakening of the local population can no longer be avoided some powerful leader captures their imagination or one clumsy colonial governor presses too hard or an executed criminal becomes a martyr and a symbol for the people to rally around you do everything you can to avoid it you put it off as long as you can but when the jig is up and finally the people recognize themselves and rise against you you do not hesitate you crush them you either crush them or you pack your shit and go home or you pack your shit and go home any response on your part is going to further galvanize the new identity so if you’re going to do anything at all you do it all the way now for a time the british had actually lost control of the northwestern hills and some of the other areas of palestine and up to 25 000 troops and four royal air force bomber squadrons were brought in to put down the rebellion this was the largest concentration of troops that the british had anywhere in the world at this point and this right on the eve of world war ii they were taking this very seriously it’s always a little bit strange to me when you’re about to do something completely awful and yet because you’re such sticklers for procedure and decorum you find it necessary to legally justify what you’re about to do although there were international agreements pertaining to treatment of the enemy the british placed the arabs outside the purview of those agreements by classifying their resistance as an internal insurrection an internal insurrection is not an international concern but a matter for internal british law and so that logical leap having been taken the next leap was as simple as using british law to declare an emergency situation and enact several martial law type statutes that would give the military authorities the power to basically do whatever they wanted according to the law quote the existence of an armed insurrection would justify the use of any degree of force necessary to effectively meet and cope with the insurrection end quote that’s pretty open-ended he went on to say that collective punishments and reprisals that would quote inflict suffering on innocent individuals were indispensable as a last resort end quote that’s what the law said but as as in too many counterinsurgency campaigns throughout history it wasn’t long before the last resort became the first resort now collective punishment may not be moral but it’s a natural strategy and an effective one in counterinsurgency often a contumacious opponent who might risk his own safety to resist you is more sensitive about bringing pain upon others lacking the flexibility or local intelligence to track the small arab cells through the hills and countryside terror and intimidation against the remaining civilian population continue to be a primary strategy for flushing out the insurgents the ultimate goal of any occupier is to deprive the insurgent of the popular support that allows them to resupply and hide and move it’s another way of burning down the forest destroying the habitat there are two approaches to achieve this goal you either win hearts and minds by building schools and giving jobs whatever it is or you convince the population that they should fear you more than they fear sympathize with the insurgents if insurgents attack a british convoy and the british respond not by chasing the attackers up into the hills but by making a left turn to level the nearest village how many times does this have to happen before the villages that are left standing start to give up the insurgents how long does it take before the villagers actually begin to blame the insurgents as much as they blame the british this is a real goal of an occupying force when a captive population begins to blame the elements of internal resistance for bringing the occupier’s wrath down upon them you see it in the modern day conflict between israel and palestine when the israeli military levels whole neighborhoods after hamas fires off a few qassam-2 rockets into the southern desert hardline israeli asks why are you making us hurt you and there are significant elements on the palestinian side who look at the militants their own militants as the real cause of their suffering when that’s the way you’re thinking that is what defeat looks like now heading into 1939 the british haven’t reduced palestine to defeat just yet but they’re working on it psychological dominance and initiative are the keys to gaining compliance from a population that outnumbers your soldiers in the german concentration camps prisoners would often be forced to do things that were designed less to break the body than to break the will they would be required to perform pointless repetitive tasks like digging a hole all day only to be told to fill it up in the evening and they would be forced to do this over and over and the camps had a thousand meaningless little rules like being mustered each morning so that their uniforms could be inspected for good order or missing missing pieces you know this isn’t a nazi concentration camp that this is happening and violation of these rules was unavoidable over time because it’s not like the prisoners are being allowed to take care of themselves and so each violation would result in individual or collective punishments now the nazis didn’t care whether their prisoners uniforms were missing buttons even if the rules were followed punishments would often come randomly the point was to establish your dominance to slowly but surely force the prisoner to dehumanize himself and recognize the utter futility of resistance and if somebody did resist you wanted the prisoner to hate that person for bringing you down on him and so when there were reports of rebel activities in a region of palestine the british would very rarely waste their time chasing the militants up into the hills instead as one british soldier reported they would take a turn to a nearby village whatever was closest to quote knock the place about it’s very alien to a chap like you or me to go in and break the chair and kick cupboards in what with all the oil in it and then to mix the oil in with the bedclothes and break all the windows and everything you don’t feel like doing it and i remember the adjutant coming in and saying you are not doing your stuff they’re perfectly intact all those houses you’ve just searched this is what you’ve got to do and then he picked up a helve and sort of burst everything i said right okay so i got a hold of the other soldiers and said this is what you got to do and i don’t think they liked it much but once they’d started on it you couldn’t stop them you’ve never seen such devastation end quote often houses would be chosen at random for demolition sometimes they were blown up with villagers often made to set the explosives to destroy their own homes other times they were forced to tear down their own homes manually board by board brick by brick any villagers who resisted or tried to escape were shot or beaten when the destruction was complete the british would present the village with a bill charging them for the soldiers time and equipment and even they would even charge them for the explosives used to destroy their own homes now the british don’t need the money it’s not about that it’s about power it’s about dominance of course the villagers couldn’t pay the bill and their homes and goods had all been destroyed right down to their last change of clothes and the majority of their livestock and crops had been carried off so when they couldn’t pay they were often thrown into prison or else the villagers were pressed into forced labor to pay off their quote unquote debt rahib al-nashashibi long accused of collaborating with the british and the zionist he pledged his family to their cause when the british turned up the heat wanted nothing to do with what was going on in palestine he had allied himself as i mentioned before with king abdullah of transjordan who supported the partition because he wanted to annex the west bank of the jordan river nashashibi reached out to the jewish agency offering his services and promising to agree to whatever they proposed and they worked with the british and the zionist to inform on the arab militias the grand mufti haja min al-husseini he was still a dominant voice in palestine despite being in lebanon he denounced the nashashibis and the hashemite regime in transjordan as traitors very often when the british had selected a village to receive the treatment once the place had been smashed up and the people separated out into wire cages the men would be marched in front of an informant an arab informant of the nashashibis who would be hidden under a hood or behind a screen so that the informant could indicate who should be imprisoned and who should be executed sometimes the british took the strategy of making the palestinians do their dirty work very literally historian matthew hughes in a paper on british counterinsurgency tactics during the palestinian uprising mentions a creative i guess a creative mind countermeasure system that the british employed and before i read this quote for any other britannically challenged americans out there when he refers to the bonnet of a lorry he’s talking about the top of a vehicle he writes quote it was common british army practice to make the local arabs ride with military convoys to prevent mine attacks often soldiers carried them or tied them to the bonnets of lorries or put the hostages on small flatbeds on the front of our trains all to prevent mining attacks the naughty boys who we had in the cages in these camps were put in vehicles in front of the convoy for the deterrent effect as one british officer put it the army told the arabs that they would shoot any of them who tried to run away on the lorries some soldiers would break hard at the end of a journey and then casually drive over the arab who had tumbled from the bonnet killing or maiming him as arthur lane a manchester regiment private candidly recalled and now he’s quoting lane sometimes when you finished your duty you would come away and nothing had happened no bombs or anything and the driver would switch his wheel back to make the truck waver and the poor wog on the front would roll off onto the deck well if he’s lucky he’d get away with a broken leg but if he was unlucky the truck up behind would hit him but nobody bothered to pick up the bits where they were left you know we were there we were the masters we were the bosses and whatever we did was right well you know you don’t want him anymore he’s fulfilled his job and that’s when bill usher the commanding officer said that it had to stop because before long they’d be running out of bloody rebels to sit on the bonnet end quote there were several instances when after a british officer or soldier was injured or killed by a mine british soldiers would load up arab prisoners or villagers onto buses and force them to drive over landmines themselves anybody that survived they would just leave to bleed out on the road and while the casual tone of private lane’s description of events is chilling it’s important to note that not all british observers or soldiers were as lacking in ambivalence over what was going on there were many many people in the british military and the civilian command structures who were not comfortable with everything and the majority were not involved in some of the worst stuff several objected until they were fired or transferred and many resigned in protest one british policeman wrote quote what i dislike about this war is that more often than not it is the innocent who suffer our hospitals here are filled with women and children maimed and blinded for life life for the police is now all work and no play even at the best times palestine is as dull as ditch water but what with the curfews and people walking about with fear of death in them it’s like living in a cemetery end quote but many of the british soldiers and policemen in palestine during the latter half of the arab rebellion they saw things very clearly many of the senior officers were veterans of the infamous black and tan units from the irish rebellion during the first world war and they openly compared the two situations in another part of his interview private lane tells us what happened when several arabs were taken prisoner after a fight in which several british soldiers had been wounded the prisoners were taken back to camp and tied to posts quote they were in a state and they were really knocked about whoever had done it when they got them on the wagons to bring them to camp the lads had beaten them up said about them and then the interviewer asked what the prisoners had been beaten with anything anything they could find rifle butts bayonets bayonets scabbards fists boots whatever there was one poor sod there he was i imagine my age actually and i’d heard people say in the past that you could take your eye out and have it cleaned up and put back i always believed it but it’s not so because this lad’s eye was hanging out on his lip on his cheek the whole eye had been knocked out and it was hanging down and there was blood dripping from his face end quote and asked why the soldiers had done this lane replied simply quote same as any soldier i don’t care whether he’s english german japanese or what lane’s giving this interview a little bit later after having experienced the other side as a japanese pow during the second world war so he’s been on the other end of this he continues quote but it’s even today there’s a beast in every man i don’t care who he is you can say the biggest queen or queer that you come across but there’s a beast in him somewhere and in a situation like that it comes out end quote you take men like private lane and send them around the world with orders to snuff out and put down a rebellion by people who by and large have the support of the local population you get what you get every country that ever thinks about invading another country needs to keep that in mind because somehow we always pretend to be shocked whether we’re talking about the philippine insurrection after the spanish-american war all the way up through vietnam and abu graham when counter-insurgencies veer off into mad max territory we always act shocked soldiers who lose friends to booby traps and sneak attacks inevitably end up hating the enemy more than they would a uniformed opponent on the other side of a battlefield paranoia sets in and soldiers start to wonder if the villager eyeing you as you move through his village was the one who set the landmine that killed your buddy the night before or if the woman smiling at you from her fruit stand will inform on your movements as soon as you pass through i don’t think i’m aware of a single asymmetric guerrilla war that didn’t run off the rails you just have to look at the conduct of the american civil war between the union and the confederate armies in virginia compared to how it was fought by the guerrillas out in missouri the civilian population inevitably suffers terribly in this kind of fighting those who refuse to support the insurgents are often seen as collaborators and treated accordingly those who do help the insurgents are treated by the conventional force as rebels and treated accordingly the conventional force through a combination of sticks and carrots tries to convince the civilian populations that their lives would be a lot simpler if they just sided with the ruling power rather than with the insurgents one part of that is hearts and minds right providing bribes and other inducements to people who are willing to work with you and the other part is making sure that they’re more afraid of you than they are the rebels arthur lane describes an incident when a group of arabs were about to be released from a british concentration camp having been interrogated and found to be uninvolved in the fighting these arab prisoners these uninvolved arab prisoners were taken to the gate where they were supposed to be released and then they were lined up outside the gate were two big paddy wagons open at the back onto which the prisoners were supposed to load up for transport back to their villages lane describes what happened quote the soldiers took them around back and any lads who were doing nothing at the time we all gathered round and stood and to form two lines of men facing each other with pickaxes pickaxe hells some with bayonets scabbards you know with the bayonets inside some with rifles whatever was there tent mallets tent pegs and the rebels were sent one at a time through this what do you call it gauntlet and they were belted and bashed until they got to the other end now any that could run when they got to the other end went straight to the police meat wagon and they were sent to acre any that died well they went into the other meat wagon and they were dumped at one of the villages on the outside end quote those were innocent prisoners very often angry soldiers don’t even bother taking prisoners in a letter to his parents back home british policeman sydney burr wrote quote at one time the ulster and west kent units caught about 60 of them in a valley and as they walked out with their arms up mowed them down with machine guns i inspected them afterwards and most of them were boys between 16 and 20. no news of course is given to the newspapers so what you read in the papers is just enough to allay public uneasiness in england end quote euphemistically named arab investigation centers were set up all around the country these were facilities set up for what we today euphemistically call enhanced interrogation although again it was often just about terror and establishing psychological dominance it was about those things more than it was about gaining any useful information many british military and civilian officials complain that the torture centers were useless for interrogation and that they were counterproductive overall the majority of the brutality came during the village operations and street patrols committed by british soldiers in a not necessarily sanctioned but not necessarily discouraged kind of way but terror and torture was also official policy sanctioned by certain circumstances by the british colonial office historian matthew hughes described another incident again after a landmine inflicted casualties on a british unit impossible to know who had planted the mine british soldiers made their way to the nearest village quote on the morning of 7 september soldiers came up to elbasa they shot four people in the streets in cafes and in the homes of the village after which the soldiers searched and looted the village before gathering and beating the inhabitants with sticks and rifle butts the british then took 100 villagers to a nearby military base camp number one where the british commander selected four men who were tortured in front of the rest of the group the four men were undressed and made to kneel barefoot on cacti and thorns specially prepared for the occasion eight soldiers then told off the four men and two per arab detainees said about beating them without pity in front of the group pieces of flesh flew from their bodies and the victims fainted after which an army doctor came and checked their pulses the army then took the group of villagers to another base camp number two while soldiers destroyed the village of elbasa end quote there are many accounts of arabs being beaten into paralysis or death of being left in cages in the sun without food or water to die of dehydration or at exposure of prisoners being beaten with chains and wet ropes of men being held down so that their teeth could be smashed out with hammers of prisoners having their feet dipped in boiling oil arab complaints to the british authorities were dismissed out of hand but the list of complaints that they filed include countless beatings claims of prisoners having needles used on them although i haven’t been able to find anything that tells me exactly what that means i’m not sure i want to know prisoners were thrown to dogs dobermans were actually imported from south africa for use in palestine and to remind us again of the psychological aspect to all of this there are accounts of arabs being forced to hold heavy stones and being beaten if they drop them you want to get the people to blame themselves for what you’re doing to them guards would use bayonets to enforce sleep deprivation and there are accounts of prisoners having bells tied around their necks and forced to dance and now if in your mind you’re seeing images of the american guards at abu ghraib putting leashes and dog collars on iraqi prisoners and forcing them to crawl around you’re probably on to something and don’t think that the people in iraq did not remember what the british did when they heard about abu ghraib it’s all disconnected to us it’s not to them the anglican church actually had a mission in palestine and they were a constant thorn in the side of the british army and the police during this insurgency they filed various petitions and and then they spoke of prisoners jumping to their deaths from high windows to avoid further torture the anglican church wrote about testicles being tied off with cords until they came off beatings being delivered with boards which had nails protruding wire being tied and tightened around the toes hair being torn from faces and beards fingernails and toenails being torn out using special instruments brands and hot skewers being used on prisoners boiling oil being poured over them electric shocks water being forced by funnel into prisoners stomachs and various types of sodomy a british doctor elliot forster was assigned to palestine he was horrified at what he was witnessing he wrote in his diary quote the british could probably teach hitler something he didn’t know about running concentration camps arabs who were loyal to or paid by the nashashibis were sent out into the towns and countryside to identify and report on possible militants nashashibi peace bands as they were called by the people employing them were partially funded by the jewish agency the leadership of the palestinians is gone the entire leadership class has been picked up and exiled these are the peasants these are young destitute peasants who are facing the full wrath of the british empire the jewish agency and even certain families of their own people who were funded by the jordanian government the primary purpose of the nashashibi peace bands was to target and eliminate other arabs hostile to the nashashibi clan especially those who were loyal to the grand mufti haj amin the grand mufti seems almost to have gone mad by this point witnessing all this from exile he declared the nashashibis and anyone who collaborated with the british or the zionist enemies of islam and he called for holy war against the british and the jews but day by day the british the zionist and the nashashibi collaborators were sapping the remaining ability of the palestinian arabs to resist although the zionist irgan and other militias were blowing up markets and buses in arab neighborhoods the majority of the zionist in palestine were still under ben-gurion’s control and obeyed his command to be patient to sit back and let the british do their work without complicating things and his patience was rewarded in nineteen thirty eight a british intelligence officer ord windgate prevailed upon the military leadership to let him set up joint british-jewish special operations units to hit the palestinians where they lived unlike many of the other counterinsurgency experts britain had imported to handle the palestinian uprising windgate considered the assignment to be much more than a job he was a christian with a fanatical devotion to zionism he considered a religious duty to empower the jews to take control of palestine destroy their enemies he would often make explicit references to biblical legends of the hebrew conquests of their ethnic cleansings and genocides when speaking of his own mission windgate was distrusted by many in the british administration general bernard montgomery who was in palestine fighting the insurgency called mentally unbalanced he was a member of a devout some would say radical christian sect which interpreted the prophecies of the book of revelation to mean that the reconquest of the holy land by the jews would inaugurate the end of the world the enemies of god were anybody who tried to stand in the jews way and he saw himself as leading an apocalyptic jewish army toward the final armageddon even many zionists thought he was a bit too much of a wild card but some others saw an opportunity to finally get the british to authorize officially authorized training and arming jewish military units the haganah at this time was again still officially a banned organization and the importation of weapons and military equipment was still officially forbidden although the british had largely looked the other way ever since the arab revolt started wingate communicated regularly with haim weizmann and with david ben-gurion and other zionist leaders as the revolt went on and he served as one of their men on the ground in palestine he considered himself a part of the zionist movement more a part of the zionist movement than a part of the british military moshi shertak whom we quoted in an earlier episode one of ben-gurion’s right-hand man described him as quote a man devoured by a kind of inner fire addicted to a single idea that had captured his imagination end quote wingate’s special night squads as they were called pulled most of its british soldiers from the royal ulster and royal west kent regiments the same units private lane was talking about gunning down sixty people a moment ago the jewish soldiers in the units were drawn from the haganah and most of these would go on to become the leadership of the zionist and later israeli military forces the zionist leadership considered the special night squads to be an extension of the haganah calling it plutag haesh unit of fire and the jewish agency fronted the majority of the costs for the special night squads so these are officially british military units but they’re operating basically on orders from ben-gurion and they’re being funded by the jewish agency the agency supplemented the soldiers salaries they funded a training course for them they gave bonuses to the company commanders when they did certain things it paid for provisions vehicles and horses it constructed barracks and stables the jewish agency’s doing all this and they spoke freely of the units as being in their service the special night squads were organized into ten man teams and given zones of responsibility and an absolutely free hand to suppress and deter hostile activities the teams used arab collaborators and long-distance patrols to launch surprise attacks on suspected insurgents subunits would surprise arab villages on the night paying what the team would call friendly visits to impress upon them the idea that aiding the insurgents would be a bad idea even in the context of the ongoing nightmare in palestine at this time the special night squads got a reputation for such outrageous cruelty remember everything i just listed off that the british were doing the british finally decided to pull wingate from his position and send him back to britain and his british passport was stamped to indicate that he was forbidden from ever entering palestine again okay boiling oil pulling out toenails smashing out teeth all those things and wingate and the special night squads are too much for the british in the meantime the situation in europe is going critical jabotinsky looks around and believes that he sees clearly what is happening and he’s in poland screaming that the zionists have got to find a way to get millions of jews to palestine right now menachem began busy cooperating with the polish government trying to organize thousands of beitar fighters to come ashore in palestine en masse he’s got a plan to take over british government buildings take british officials hostage officially declare a jewish state in palestine in early nineteen thirty nine jabotinsky wrote from poland quote the catastrophe is coming closer my hair has turned white and i have aged in these three years because my heart is bleeding for you my dear brothers and sisters do not see the volcano that will soon begin to spit out the fire of destruction he also said quote to be frank i fear that the time is already past eleven o’clock perhaps twelve o’clock is already run that means midnight that means the end however it is best that we shake off this fear let it be only eleven this is therefore the last hour as the summer of nineteen thirty nine approached the arab revolt in palestine had begun to fizzle out the arabs were starving and destitute as the fighting had ruined all of their farms all of their herds and they were out of supplies the british and the zionist had no such problems in the nosha she bees use money and food from the jewish agency to buy off more and more arab villagers who had no other way to feed their families but with the help of german italian propaganda services who want to make the british look bad reports of the british army’s brutality were leaking out to the rest of the arab world and causing outrage with the possibility of war seeming more more likely britain could not afford to lose its allies in the middle east and india the british need to wrap this up and they need to wrap it up right now the british convened a conference to hold settlement talks and to the zionist horror the british invited officials from iraq and syria and saudi arabia egypt’s yemen some other arab countries to participate and give their opinions the british did bar from participation any palestinian arab who had participated in her font the revolts so effectively everyone uh… basically eliminated the voice of the entire palestinian resistance in the hope that maybe the zionist leaders would be able to talk to these other arab leaders who weren’t involved with the fighting the british told the zionist this is the last opportunity to come to an agreement with the arabs if it doesn’t work the british would arbitrate the situation however we see fit well they failed the arab delegation made several overtures several revisions but every one of them involved an end to any further zionist immigration and the establishment of a national government with an elected representative legislative body david ben-gurion speaking for the zionist refused to accept any plan involving independence or a representative government until the jews had displaced enough arabs to become a majority the british negotiators eventually became frustrated with the zionist all-or-nothing refusal to participate in any arrangement that gave them anything less than full control the clock was ticking the british needed to end this as the cabinet met to decide what to do prime minister neville chamberlain famously or infamously depending on your perspective said quote we are now compelled to consider the palestine situation primarily from the standpoint of the international situation if we must defend one side let us offend the jews rather than the arabs end quote and so the zionists are starting to figure out that their spell over the british is finally breaking zionist militias increase their terror operations against arab civilians in an effort to derail the negotiations on february twenty seventh after palestinian arabs in several cities held rallies celebrating rumors that the british were going to give palestine its independence similar in form to the independence granted to the iraqis jewish terrorists launched a coordinated bombing campaign killing thirty eight civilians and wounding forty four well this didn’t provoke the response that they had hoped in may nineteen thirty nine the british issued a white paper announcing their intention to finally set up a national government in palestine and to end the mandate since the balfour declaration had been issued heim weizmann had tried to hide the final goals of the zionists from the majority of the british government twenty two years after the balfour declaration was published the impatient and belligerent zionists who were in palestine had finally made it impossible to keep up appearances any longer the white paper started out by addressing the misunderstanding or maybe the deception directly quote this is the white paper it has been urged that the expression a national home for the jewish people offered a prospect that palestine might in due course become a jewish state or commonwealth his majesty’s government do not wish to contest the view that the zionist leaders at the time of the issue of the balfour declaration recognized that an ultimate jewish state was not precluded by the terms of the declaration his majesty’s government believed that the framers of the mandate in which the balfour declaration was embodied could not have intended that palestine should be converted into a jewish state against the will of the arab population of the country that palestine was not to be converted into a jewish state might be held to be implied in the passage from the command paper of nineteen twenty two which reads as follows and now quoting from the earlier white paper which had been issued by winston churchill in nineteen twenty two quote unauthorized statements have been made to the effect that the purpose in view is to create a wholly jewish palestine phrases have been used such as that palestine is to become as jewish as england is english his majesty’s government regard any such expectation as impracticable and have no such aim in view nor have they at any time contemplated the disappearance or the subordination of the arabic population language or culture in palestine they would draw attention to the fact that the terms of the balfour declaration referred to do not contemplate the palestine as a whole should be converted into a jewish national home but only that a national home should be founded in palestine end quote that was the earlier nineteen twenty two paper now i’m back to the nineteen thirty nine white paper quote but this statement has not removed doubts in his majesty’s government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that palestine should become a jewish state they would indeed regarded as contrary to their obligations to the arabs under the mandate as well as to the assurances which have been given to the arab people in the past that the arab population of palestine should be made the subjects of a jewish state against their will end quote so this is it the jig is officially up until now the plan had been to not talk about a jewish state just keep bringing in jews and preparing for a jewish state don’t ask about it don’t even bring it up just keep moving forward and don’t give the british an opportunity to say no to anything the majority of the british government had never supported setting up a jewish state but the project move forward as long as the palestine question remained a marginal issue handled by a few well-compensated interest parties while the rest of the government was off worrying about germany or the soviet union and other bigger fish well the international situation had finally made the rest of the british government take notice of palestine because they couldn’t lose the rest of the arab world and the british were saying no the white paper stated that the government considered the terms of the balfour declaration fulfilled we did our job half a million jews have immigrated to palestine under the british supervision but the british have never offered and never intended to give the whole country over to jewish rule or to import every single jewish person on the planet to displace the native arabs that was not the agreement all plans for partition were dropped in the nineteen thirty nine white paper and independent by national state would be established in which both jews and arabs would participate in a representative government jewish immigration would be restricted to just fifteen thousand per year for five years and seventy five thousand more total under special permission further transfers of land to the jewish agency of the jewish national fund would be restricted in most of the country the british administration would now operate with orders to establish an independent palestine within ten years at which point the mandate would officially end and so when the zionists get their hands on the white paper they go insane they denounce it as illegal claiming that it violates the commitments made in the balfour declaration but this goes nowhere the balfour declaration was never a legal document it was just a letter from one british diplomat expressing the general intentions of the government almost any zionist history you actually read even today still describes the decision by the british to create a representative government in ethnic terms given the state of the conflict at the time i understand but what the way historian martin gilbert writes in his history the state of israel is typical of the way it’s presented quote majority rule would be instituted after the nineteen thirty nine white paper that is to say the arab majority would be given legislative powers end quote yeah marty that’s what democracy is this is why democracy only works after a shared national identity has been established at every level of society if groups within the nation do not identify with one another at least more than they identify with anyone outside the country the loyal opposition becomes impossible instead of politics being a process where you seek a consensus that is legitimate to everybody even if they happen to disagree the process is considered legitimate politics instead becomes a game of just pure majority rule since the first world war the jews had been welcome to participate in a representative government but they had used their influence over the british to block the formation of any government that didn’t place them in complete control but now the time was up david ben-gurion called the nineteen thirty nine white paper quote the greatest betrayal perpetrated by the government of civilized people in our generation end quote and several zionist leaders begin calling for outright war against the british government a special unit within the haganah was commissioned to commence sabotage and terrorist attacks against the british ben-gurion’s rage was primarily directed at the british not the arabs regarding the arabs ben-gurion told a friend quote were i an arab i would rise up against an immigration policy likely in the future to hand the country and all its arab inhabitants over to jewish rule what arab cannot do his maths and understand that immigration at the rate of sixty thousand per year means a jewish state in all of palestine end quote so he’s angry at the british for thwarting their plans he understands where the arabs are coming from at least to a degree now it’s easy almost eight decades later to look back and think that the zionists are being a little bit ungrateful toward the british none of this would have remotely possible if the british had not made it possible the british had earned the hatred of a large part of the arab world to help the zionists get this project off the ground everything the zionists had the british had given to them the british didn’t see the white paper as a betrayal at all the british had always from the beginning maintained that they never intended to deliver the whole country to the zionists they’ve been perfectly clear about it except perhaps behind the scenes and now the zionists were just outraged to learn that they had meant what they had been saying all along but again i try to put myself in their position they are desperate and trapped and they have nowhere else to go okay remember i said this a couple times but the jews are not going to palestine as one out of their many options in nineteen thirty nine all of the major powers have strict limitation on jewish immigration the jews in europe are literally trapped they’re trapped even though hitler is offering to pay their way if somebody else will take them but no one will take them an escape to palestine was their only hope to flee the persecution that was intensifying every day the british might have thought they were clear about their intentions but the zionists are looking at them now and saying wait wait wait now you’re doing this now when hitler’s thugs are rounding us up like animals for god knows what you know i mean the truth is press me for uh… for to take a position on this and i want to say that i’m not i’m not big on blame uh… i began this episode talking about uday hussein because i think that all of us in each of our societies is we’re all caught up in a storm from the moment we open our eyes and every nightmarish thing we do to one another it makes some kind of sense from inside the head of the person doing it but but if you press me about it i have to say that the arabs have a right to resist the colonization of their country even when the nazi persecution ramped up arabs had a right to defend their homes but it’s much harder for me to forgive my own country and all the other oh so enlightened nations of the west who could have if they wanted to saved every single jew in germany with relatively little trouble to themselves but who made the decision not to do it you know the victor of every war gets to write the history of it and so rarely do we hear that the nazis were parroting ideas popular in america and britain and the rest of europe rarely do we hear that hitler offered to pay the way of any jews that our own wonderful enlightened nations were willing to take on as refugees but that we refuse to take any of them at all we rarely hear that we get to pretend that what’s about to happen was just this unaccountable historical anomaly came out of nowhere the result of one crazy guy with a stupid mustache and a good public speaking voice getting his country all whipped up and we get to pretend that the rest of our nations watched in horror at what was happening with maybe denial being the worst thing that we did we just didn’t see it coming we’re lying to ourselves but that’s the worst we did and then we get to pretend that we finally swooped in to save the day you know what bullshit what bullshit germany pulled the trigger but every nation in europe painted the bullseye around the jews after the nineteenth and early twentieth century pogroms the zionists had left europe in disgust over the way their people had allowed themselves to be dishonored and abused they were often chastised by assimilationist jews, jews who wanted to assimilate into their countries for stirring things up but the zionists just kept doing their work confident that the jewish people would eventually understand what they were doing at the beginning of the nineteen thirties khaim arlosarov believed that the chances of their project succeeding were looking dim but after a decade of massive immigration in preparation for war that was no longer the case they were ready the arab population had been decimated by the british pacification of the rebellion ten percent of all arab males in palestine were dead wounded or exiled ten percent of all arab males in palestine were dead wounded or exiled and that ten percent was not chosen at random the british had lopped the head off the arab population eliminating every person who exhibited any leadership qualities at all or any tendency or ability to resist at all the grand mufti and his supporters were exiled any prominent arab who wasn’t willing to be an open collaborator was gone anyone who knew how to hold a weapon or give a speech or organize a demonstration was gone the zionists on the other hand were now well trained well organized and armed to the teeth between nineteen thirty seven and nineteen forty menachem beguin and the rest of the beitar revisionists in europe would import eighteen thousand zionists almost all young men trained and ready to fight after the arab revolt was over david ben-gurion remarked to a friend that there was now nothing the arabs could do to interrupt the zionist plans all that remained was to get the british to drop the white paper or else drive them out so that the rest of the jews in europe could migrate to build their majority in the future jewish state but just as the zionists came into the fullness of their strength the clock ticked midnight three months after the issuance of the white paper adolf hitler moved against poland bringing almost three million jews under his power instead of using their new strength to create a majority in palestine out of europe’s jews in six years the zionists would pick through the rubble and find that there weren’t enough european jews left the news of hitler’s invasion broke while the twenty first zionist congress was in session in geneva arthur rippen was there and he said the announcement exploded like a bomb over those assembled in his final words to the congress on the last night the evening of august twenty fourth nineteen thirty nine chaim weizmann told the delegates quote if as i hope we are spared in life and our work continues who knows perhaps a new light will shine upon us from the thick black gloom the remnant shall work on live on until the dawn of better days towards that dawn i greet you may we meet again in peace with tears in his eyes, weeping chaim weizmann embraced his colleagues on the platform and as he descended from the dais and made his way through the crowds out of the hall every eye was full of tears every heart was already full of mourning and hundreds and hundreds of hands reached out for dr weizmann as he went out into the darkness

Episode 6

Summary

The speaker apologizes for a meandering introduction and explains the need to discuss the Zionist right wing.
The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invade Poland, leading to World War II.
Thousands of Polish Jews and Beitar Zionists go underground to fight as guerrillas.
Jabotinsky was in New York at the war’s outbreak, while Begin was in Poland.
The Soviets often invited suspicious individuals before seizing them.
The speaker considered providing historical context but decided to focus on the main story.
The Holocaust’s central role in the Zionist story and Jewish self-understanding is emphasized.
The speaker plans to bring in other voices to tell personal stories related to the Holocaust.
Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” is quoted, describing the mass murder of Jews in Kiev in 1941.
Jabotinsky’s death and its impact on Begin are discussed.
Begin’s sorrow over Jabotinsky’s death is highlighted.
Moshe Sneh’s delays in a planned attack and Begin’s frustration with labor Zionist politics are described.
The King David Hotel bombing on July 22, 1946, is detailed.
The speaker discusses the complexity of Jewish history and the need for proper context.
The British favored a single binational state in Palestine, which the Zionists opposed.
The post-World War II situation in Europe and the displaced persons camps are described.
The Yishuv’s consolidation of power and the marginalization of Jabotinsky and Weizmann are discussed.
The speaker describes the internal Zionist politics and the split between labor and revisionist Zionists.
The Biltmore Conference in 1942 and its significance for American Zionist support are mentioned.
The final partition plan for Palestine and the UN vote in 1947 are discussed.
The Irgun’s responsibility for the King David Hotel bombing and the British reaction are detailed.
The speaker explains the concept of political Zionism and its historical context.
The British launched Operation Agatha in 1946 to seize Zionist documents and leaders.
The speaker describes the challenges of dealing with Jewish displaced persons after World War II.
The speaker emphasizes the commitment and sacrifices of Zionist militants.
The escalating violence between Zionist groups and the British in Palestine is described.
The speaker discusses the influence of American politics on the Zionist movement.
The speaker describes the internal conflicts within the Zionist movement and the rise of Menachem Begin.
The speaker highlights the importance of the Holocaust in shaping Jewish and Zionist identity.

Timeline

1939: Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invade Poland; World War II begins.
1940: Jabotinsky dies in New York.
1941: Mass murder of Jews in Kiev, Ukraine.
1942: Biltmore Conference in New York; Ben-Gurion and Weizmann secure American Zionist support.
1943: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; Begin receives temporary discharge and takes command of the Irgun.
1944: Irgun declares war on the British; Stern Gang assassinates Lord Moyne.
1945: End of World War II; British continue to enforce the White Paper limiting Jewish immigration.
1946: King David Hotel bombing on July 22; British launch Operation Agatha.
1947: UN Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) convenes; UN General Assembly votes on partition plan.
1948: Establishment of the State of Israel (implied from context, not directly mentioned in the transcript).

Citations:
[1] https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/7742445/99952da3-4107-4b5f-821e-223d4362203e/paste.txt

Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper and you’re listening to the Martyr Made Podcast. You’re about to hear the final episode of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a six-part series on the early history of Zionism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoyed this series, please do consider subscribing to my Substack page where you’ll find supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 a year. That’s how I’m able to do this, so to all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate your help. You can find my Substack at martyrmade.substack.com, and if you don’t have $5 a month or you don’t want to part with it, maybe if you like this series, at least go over to iTunes and give me a good review. I hope you guys enjoy the show. Here we go. I’m content to die for my beliefs.

So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No, they won’t forget. Hell does exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere.

Hell does exist. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. I must go. Why must we tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion? The godfather of political Zionism in its modern form, Theodor Herzl, he once wrote in his diary that if the Jews ever returned home one day, and he’s talking about Palestine, I’m quoting him here, if the Jews ever returned home one day, they would discover on the next that they do not belong together. For centuries, he said, they’ve been rooted in diverse nationalisms, and they differ from each other group by group. The only thing they have in common is the pressure holding them together. See, there’s nothing like a threatening other to force together people who are relatively closer to one another, right?

Relatively closer to one another and have more in common with one another, more shared interests with one another than they do with whatever this other is. Absent an outside threat, societies very often tend to lose a sense of themselves. The boundaries start to become a little bit muddy. You know, if you’ve got a foreign army bearing down on your town, it’s going to become, they’re going to impose on you an understanding of the interests you share with your neighbor, right? You both have an interest in not getting killed or losing your political sovereignty or whatever. It becomes pretty obvious at that point. It becomes pretty obvious at that point, and you remove that outside pressure, and what you start to focus on about your neighbor is not what you have in common, but what you don’t. And not reasons that you should ignore the things that you don’t like about him because you have more important things to worry about right now, and you start to wonder why you should put up with this guy at all.

That’s what tends to happen. You hear old timers a lot, you know, everybody’s grandfather who was in World War II or Korea or Vietnam or something, you hear them all the time saying, what America needs is a good war. This is what they’re talking about. They’re not just saying that people need to go off and get killed or that, you know, they don’t even mean it in the old Prussian sense, right, of the German Empire and so forth, where, you know, they’re saying that war sort of firms up a nation and that the hardship and the challenge of it, it’s not even really that. It goes deeper than that. There’s a social psychological aspect to it, right, which is that without an other, societies, especially ones that are held together more loosely by a set of ideas or something other than, say, a shared biology which you can’t get away from, people start to question it and the boundaries start to shift and get a little bit more porous when you don’t have something out there to sort of provide that pressure that Herzl’s talking about. In the 17th, 18th, and early 20th centuries, when the Christian aristocratic social order of Europe began to collapse and gave way to popular nationalism, new others had to be found to define the boundaries of these new social identities. And how severe and virulent the thinking toward the other was, was often determined in part at least by the relative security of the identity that was in the process of being born and the precariousness of the social order that was being defended, okay?

When the United States still had settlements in the West that were being attacked by native tribes, it was just kill, kill, kill. And almost as soon as that threat was neutralized and it was clear that the United States was not going anywhere, people began to look back and think, hmm, you know, we might have been able to handle that a little bit differently. Germany only became a country, as we know it, in 1871. You know, it’s really easy for non-history nerds to forget that, that the country that went off to war in 1914 had only been around for about four decades. I don’t place the responsibility for the First World War primarily on the Germans, that’s my personal thing, but there’s no doubt that they often spoke and acted in a more overtly belligerent manner than, say, France and Britain, who had been around for a long time and so they didn’t have to worry about their publics not buying into their national idea. There was very little danger of that in Britain, right? When Bismarck took the German principalities and hammered them together into a state, into a nation state under Prussian leadership, you know, he didn’t wake up the next day and find that everyone in the German Empire was a German patriot. That’s not how it works.

To this day, there are still people that you can find in Germany who feel more Bavarian than they do German. Another example, the U.S. Civil War had proximate causes having to do with slavery and economics and some of these other things that served as a sort of catalyst for it, but those causes, they were only proximate. They were surface level, okay? No matter how you sliced it, slavery or no slavery, whatever, a country basically bound together with chewing gum and silly putty in 1776, when you had a Puritan English elite in the Northeast and a bunch of second son cavaliers and territorial Scots-Irish who identified more with their state than they did with the country, the overall country itself, down in the South, eventually there was going to be a reckoning. In antebellum writings, you’ll often see the writers talk about, they would often say these United States are, right? Plural. These United States are this or that, whatever.

And after the Civil War, you always see the United States is, singular. The precariousness of the identity of a nation that was settled by waves of immigrants from its founding has led the United States to go almost our entire history without having a single gap of time where we weren’t chasing down one boogeyman or another, just to keep us focusing on our collective differences with that boogeyman, whatever it is at the moment, communists or Islamic terrorists or whatever it was, and to keep us distracted from the differences we had with one another. But some nations don’t have to manufacture or exaggerate their threats. Sometimes the threat is as real as you can possibly imagine and as serious as it can possibly be. And right now I have in mind a place like Poland between the world wars and that’s where I want to go to start this off. So let’s go back to Poland. You’re in Warsaw. It’s 1935, you’re on one of the main boulevards in the city and there’s shouting and the road is full of soldiers and military equipment and the air is thick with smoke from guns and fireworks.

But relax, this is just a parade, it’s not a battle. The national hero of the Polish war against the Soviet Union in the early 20s, Józef Pilsudski is dead and the whole country is in mourning. So here’s Warsaw, this massive parade is passing by in remembrance and honor of their great man. And in his spirit, military and local militia units in sharp formation in squared away uniforms and everything are passing proudly in tight formation, saluting the crowd, saluting their officers. Floats are passing by commemorating the great military victories in Polish history. Lines of artillery and tanks and cavalry officers in their dress uniforms on their horses and saluting with their cutlasses, the whole thing. Józef Pilsudski had been a hard right, hard right-wing nationalist who had helped save Poland from being swallowed up by the Bolshevik barbarians in the early 20s and had sort of served as their national symbol, and had sort of served as their national symbol, their leadership rock since then, but now he’s gone. Gone just at the time when National Socialist Germany is rising in the West and Stalin was consolidating total power in the Soviet juggernaut to the East.

This militant parade was a message to the Polish people that Pilsudski might be gone, but you are safe. Your men are trained, armed and prepared to fight and die on your behalf. So the parade continues. You’re there, you can hear the cheering, you can feel what they feel in that situation. And the parade continues and there’s not just soldiers and militias and military equipment. You see passing by, you’ve got artisans and trade unions and youth organizations and women’s groups and churches, more and more of these kinds of institutions rolling through with their heads high to give confidence to the onlookers that the home front, and not just the military, but the home front is committed to doing its part for the country and her people. And then at a certain point, during the passing of the military portion of the parade, but separate from the Polish officers and men, comes a contingent of squared away uniformed soldiers marching in perfect formation down the thoroughfare. They strode proudly and took in the cheers of the parade goers who were cheering them on just like they’re cheering on everybody else.

And flanking their formation were uniformed members of their group on motorcycles, riding along with them. Each of those motorcycles with two staffs posted on the backs of their bikes, one flying the Polish flag and the other the white banner with the blue six-sided star of Zionism. Hundreds of smartly uniformed Polish Jews, members of the right-wing Beitar paramilitary organization, were saluting the Polish crowd and signaling to them their commitment to fighting for Poland if the day ever came. Over loudspeakers, you can hear the Polish National Anthem whose first lines, Poland has not yet perished so long as we live. What foreign violence has taken from us, we will reclaim, saber in hand. Those first few lines of the Polish National Anthem, any revisionist and Beitar Zionist would have no trouble identifying with. I’ve said it many times throughout this story, but this is a good place to repeat it because I’m going to get a little bit into the internal Zionist politics of this period just to start us off and it’s going to become clear, but I want to point it out to begin with. Despite all of the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists who love this kind of stuff, in these earlier years especially, there was never really any such thing as world Jewry, in the sense that Jews the world over were ever working together towards some common goal.

That just didn’t exist. There were worldwide networks of Jewish activists and revolutionaries who were working together with one another over here on Zionism, over there on Bun Socialism over there on the Bolshevik movement or whatever, but they were never united in any way. In fact Jews from different regions and different countries very often did not get along with one another very well. Chaim Weizmann the Zionist elder statesman that we’ve talked a lot about, who rose to leadership of the world Zionist movement after he got the Balfour Declaration out of the British Empire he infamously told Arthur Balfour, he of the Balfour Declaration in 1906, that when it came to German Jews, Weizmann himself he’s the one speaking and telling this to Balfour, that Weizmann himself who was a Polish Jewish transplant to Britain, he might as well be considered an anti-Semite when it comes to German Jews. He despised them. When after 1881 millions of Jews from the Russian Empire began flooding into America and Western Europe many of the Jews that were already in those countries, who were very well assimilated very plugged in, they dressed like everybody else, they spoke the language they knew how to navigate the institutions and all that kind of stuff, a lot of these Jews who were already in these countries started to become very worried about what was going to happen with these new unassimilated immigrants, who were coming from a part of the world where they were going to be very strange in their behavior and their looks to the new hosts, and very often didn’t speak a language that was familiar to anybody, and since they were in a part of the world where Jews were used to being sort of shut off within their own traditional Jewish communities, and didn’t have the same kind of regular day-to-day interaction with the people around about, they were often very direct and open with their hostility to Christianity, or in their commitment to communism and other subversive movements, anarchism or whatever, and so the Jews who were already in these places started to become worried that these new arrivals were going to bring down the wrath of the local populations upon all of them. When this influx of Russian Jews into the U.S. began, the mostly German Jews who were already here in the U.S.

actually set up these intake centers they were sort of like training and indoctrination centers almost, to teach the new people how to behave in their new country and to set them up with a trade or a job because they didn’t want these new arrivals many of whom had been steeped in radical politics in the Russian Empire to come over here and start acting up in their new home. This was somewhat successful in some countries, not very successful in others, and so from Berlin to New York City, as these immigrants start coming in, it became impossible for people to ignore the fact that when trade unions were being radicalized terrorism was starting to occur in countries that had never experienced really anything like that before, all these things began to occur and it just became impossible for people not to notice that more often than not there seemed to be a disproportionate number of these eastern Jews crowded around the warm center of these disruptive movements. So you’ve got these unassimilated, often radicalized eastern Jews, these Jews from the Russian Empire who have come into these other countries, you’ve got well-assimilated German Jews, you’ve got Jews in the U.S., Britain, France, the Netherlands, some of those other countries who are very prosperous and very well built into their countries, and then you’ve still got Sephardic Jews and Middle Eastern Jews spread out from Portugal to Iran, from there all over the world. So this is a very diverse community, and it remains so today. These various groups, especially back then, very often did not have a lot in common. They didn’t communicate very much, and very often when they did communicate, they didn’t much like each other. We’ve already talked a bit in this story about the friction that immediately started affecting relations between the conservative, indigenous, traditional Middle Eastern Jews that were in Palestine before Zionism, and the libertine, revolutionary European Zionists who were coming into the country. That was pretty normal.

That wasn’t the only place where that kind of thing happened. You’re talking about people who had lived in different parts of the world for hundreds or even thousands of years. And when you drill down even more, you find Jews within countries and within communities split along generational lines or ideological lines. In fact, this is what I’m going to do. So it might be useful to map out a few of these fissures within the Jewish community by referring to a few of the Zionists we’ve mentioned in the story. That’ll give me a chance to sort of catch up with where we’re at and give you a refresher since I took so long to get this episode out, but also set us up for the rest of the episode. It’ll be a good pivot point for bringing us back to that Polish parade in 1935 and from there to launch us into the last chapter of this part of the Zionist and Israeli-Palestinian story. So give me a few minutes to talk about some of the internal Zionist politics that I’ve kind of been skimming over up until now, and hopefully you’ll just trust me when I say that it’s going to illuminate everything else that happens from here on out.

So let’s start at the beginning with Theodor Herzl. Herzl, again the founder of modern political Zionism whom we met in the first episode, he was raised in a very assimilated, secular, very comfortable, some would say spoiled Austrian-Jewish home. He didn’t speak Yiddish, he didn’t speak Hebrew, he had almost no exposure to Judaism, and he would never be interested in any of that stuff. He didn’t care. He was a very well-assimilated Viennese Jew who for the first part of his life basically just wanted Jews like himself to be accepted as members of their respective societies. Just be an Austrian, be a German, be an American, be a Frenchman, whatever. And if you want to be a religious Jew, that’s fine, whatever, but just be a member of your society, a normal member of your society. He longed his whole life for that sort of full, seamless acceptance into Austria’s Gentile culture, to just be a normal person in his society.

He’s trying to get away from that sense of alienation that was another Austrian Jew was sort of the prophet of Franz Kafka. That’s what he’s trying to escape. This was basically his orientation up until the French Dreyfus Affair, which you also remember from episode one, but a quick refresher. Alfred Dreyfus was the French Jewish army captain who was accused of providing French military secrets to the Germans, and then in his subsequent railroading and show trials, it sort of brought to the surface this sleeping anti-Semitism in the supposedly enlightened Republic of France. Well, Herzl, he was still a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but he was a journalist working in Paris at the time, and so that experience, seeing that happen, it made a Zionist out of Herzl. But then, even his Zionism was not particularly Jewish, and you wouldn’t expect it to be, given his background. In his pamphlet Der Judenstaat, The Jewish State That Set Everything Off, Herzl practically, I don’t want to say he attacks them, but he indicts his fellow Jews, laying out their faults as a people, as a sort of incomplete and half- formed people, interfering in the affairs of other nations. Just as he had hoped for individual acceptance, his own individual acceptance into Viennese society as an individual non-Zionist, now as a Zionist, what he really just basically wanted was the Jewish people to become a proper nation, to be accepted in the international community as a normal people.

And that all tied back to his original desire for individual acceptance. You know, if he was no longer an Austrian Jew from the Diaspora, living in somebody else’s country and interacting with Austrians, say, on that basis, but instead was a Jewish visitor from a Jewish state, just like an Austrian from Austria, then he thought he would finally be able to meet the people from the nations of the world on equal terms. And so after Herzl, the next great leader of Zionism, chronologically at least, is Chaim Weizmann. He’s been a big player in the story so far, and he’s going to stay that way. Now, unlike Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann was born into a large, traditional Jewish home in Poland. I think he was the fourth or fifth of fifteen kids, very traditional. And he leaves home as soon as he can and goes to Germany to attend university, and while he’s there, he grows to hate the assimilated German Jews. He kind of sees them as Uncle Toms or, I don’t know, Uncle Bennys, I guess, maybe.

And he resented the way that these, you know, again, well-plugged-in, assimilated, sophisticated German Jews tended to look down on Eastern Jews like him. And there was some of that. There was quite a bit of that. He also developed this abiding hatred for ordinary Germans, of which he’d never let go. Now, he rebelled somewhat against his traditional upbringing. When he became a Zionist, he wanted to keep Judaism out of the Jewish state as far as, you know, he didn’t want to turn it into some kind of a theocracy or light theocracy where, you know, the rabbis and the religious ideas were somehow involved with the government or that the government was going to be structured that way. But he did have this very deep awareness of difference, and it led him to expect, unlike Herzl, it led him to expect the eternal exclusion of the Jews by the rest of the world, not only as a diaspora population living in other people’s countries, but even as a Jewish state on the international stage. Herzl had grown up in Vienna during a sort of Jewish renaissance.

You know, this was the period of Freud and Kafka and many other intellectuals and the Vienna cafe scene and all that was going on. Viennese Jews during the time were prosperous. They were part of the intellectual culture of the country, and so Herzl didn’t mind Gentiles. Weizmann saw Jews and Gentiles as eternal foreigners, and he had no hope, and he really had no desire that that was ever going to change. David Ben-Gurion comes next, of course, and he takes over the movement within Palestine, takes over the movement within Palestine in the 1920s, and he’s still in control when the Second World War opens up. David Ben-Gurion grew up in Poland as well, not too far away from Weizmann. They were separated by a decade or so. I think Weizmann was 11 years older, but whereas Weizmann sought to escape the traditional life of a Polish Jew by heading west, first to Germany and then to Britain, where he eventually made his home, Ben-Gurion instead dug in his heels. He grew up a street fighter, and instead of picking up and moving to Britain or the United States, he was busy fighting in the 1905 Russian Revolution as a Jewish socialist before eventually catching the Zionist bug and heading to Palestine. Once he was there, he employs the tactics of the revolutionary that he had learned in Russia to consolidate his own power and the power of his side of the movement, fighting both the Communists and the right-wing Zionists, organizing the labor movement into a big, single, powerful union called the Histadrut, even threatening and shaking down Jews who were not ideological and who were just trying to do business and thought that they could maybe skate by without getting too involved in politics, things like that. Typical revolutionary tactics. Well, Herzl’s approach to Zionism was shaped by the traditional diasporic Jewish community formation strategies that they had used in Europe throughout history. Herzl wanted to ask the Ottoman Turks for a community charter in exchange for the Zionists rendering traditional Jewish services to the Ottoman Empire. Let us have this little patch of land down here, and the Zionists will help the Ottoman Empire run its finances, for example. And while Chaim Weizmann, the British subject, he did become a committed British subject, he was thinking in terms of great power colonial politics. He had kind of imbibed and taken in that British view of the world, and so he was hoping to convince Britain to take Palestine as a colony that the Jews would administer locally.

And maybe eventually, down the road, they could have their own allied sovereignty, but that’s the way he was thinking. David Ben-Gurion, while he had come from this radical background, he focused on the practical politics of interpersonal and community relations among the Zionists in Palestine. He focused on building institutions and establishing meaningful, effective power on the ground. A recent book by a great author named Milton Viorst called Zionism, the Birth and Transformation of an Ideal, he describes David Ben-Gurion at this point in his life, in the 1930s, as he’s really coming into his own and becoming comfortable with his power. He says, quote, And now Viorst is quoting from a Jewish newspaper at the time. Now at this time in the 1930s, it’s often said that there are three centers of Zionist power. You’ve got Tel Aviv under David Ben-Gurion. You’ve got London under Chaim Weizmann in the British.

And then you’ve got Warsaw, Poland, which is where we started out. New York is getting there, but it’s not there yet, and we’ll talk about the Americans later. So if London is associated with that sort of colonialist-minded, liberal capitalist Chaim Weizmann, and Tel Aviv is associated with the ornery socialist labor Zionist David Ben-Gurion, Warsaw Zionism was this hard right-wing nationalist flavor organized by the revisionists and the Beitar paramilitary movement under the revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Now keep this in mind as we go on, because when we left off the last episode with the outbreak of the Second World War, the eventual establishment of a Jewish state was starting to look like a certainty, at least eventually. And these three men are already competing with one another in the late 30s to see who’s going to rule it. Tensions had existed between those three poles for a long time, but they intensified throughout the 1920s, and they were coming to a head in the 1930s. Ben-Gurion was the man on the ground in Palestine, organizing the bulk of the Yishuv, the Zionist community in Palestine. It’s called the Yishuv.

Ben-Gurion had done a pretty decent job of consolidating power and marginalizing Jabotinsky and Weizmann within Palestine itself. Weizmann’s promise to the Zionists that the British were going to come through and forcibly establish a Jewish state in Palestine hadn’t panned out, at least not yet. And so he was being accused by Ben-Gurion loyalists of being too cozy with the British. Jabotinsky’s Beitar followers were being blamed by Ben-Gurion and the labor Zionists for organizing those awful 1929 riots and massacres over the Wailing Wall and then the subsequent British reaction, which was the issuance of a white paper limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine. The British had banned Jabotinsky from the country altogether while he was in Europe in 1931, and despite his appeals, he would never set eyes on the place again. So he spent his time traveling around the world giving speeches and trying to organize people, but he wasn’t allowed back in the country. He still did command tens of thousands of revisionists around the world and he still had the sympathy of right-leaning Jews wherever they were. And his troops are starting to get a little bit restless.

With Jabotinsky barred from Palestine, Ben-Gurion was working on turning the future Jewish home into a socialist home and the labor Zionists under his leadership were going to be in total control and the Zionist right wing would be completely excluded. By 1935, the revisionists had already officially seceded from the official Zionist movement and from then on were going to work on taking Palestine their own way, whatever Weizmann or Ben-Gurion or the British thought about it. Jabotinsky was actually disappointed in the need to break with the official Zionist organization, but many of the more radical younger revisionists who served under him were glad to have been unshackled from it. One of his followers, the young, very dynamic Menachem Begin, we introduced him briefly toward the end of the last episode, he was one of these types. Begin was, he’s built for Zionism practically from birth, especially for the particular role that he’s going to play. In the mid-30s, Begin’s a young man, he was born in the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk in 1913. It’s an interesting time to be born in that town, right? He was born on the last Sabbath before the fast day mourning the loss of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple by the Romans.

Begin’s birthday Sabbath is known as Shabbat Vahamu, I’ve butchered that as I’ve butchered so many other non-English phrases and names and everything in this, so you just have to forgive me, but it’s called the Sabbath of Comfort, and so he was named Menachem, which means Comforter, but little Menachem would get very little comfort in his life, especially as a child, and he was going to provide no comfort to those people who stood in his way as a man. Begin once said that he was born into war, between the armies of the Kaiser and the Tsar, a year before they stormed into battle against each other in the First World War. Menachem Begin’s sister said that he had never really gotten a childhood as she and her other brother had. His whole early childhood was that of a refugee put to flight. His hometown fell to the Germans in 1915, it was briefly part of the Belarusian Democratic Republic in 1918, and then it changed hands twice more during the Polish-Soviet War over the next few years. Menachem Begin never knew his grandparents, never really knew any of the things of childhood, but he did come of age with a very acute sense of the perils of statelessness and physical insecurity. When he was 16 years old, Begin returned to Brest-Litovsk in 1929, joins up with Beitar. In 1935, he sees Jabotinsky speak and immediately becomes a disciple of the revisionist leader, worships him. Begin had inherited from his father a tendency that was amplified by Jabotinsky, he had sort of internalized this sort of aristocratic idea of how a Zionist should conduct himself, a principle that was called Hadar, that the Zionist right wing seemed to think of almost like a samurai thought of Bushido or something, not that extreme, but something like that, something like the manner of conduct of a British gentleman in the 19th century, not a defined code, but just a way of carrying oneself. That term Hadar doesn’t translate very well into English, but you’ll see it translated as dignity or honor or majesty. Jabotinsky constantly reminded his fellow Jews that they were descended from the kings of a great civilization, and that their mission required that they conduct themselves with the gravity demanded by that heritage. In a 1934 essay to the youth of Beitar, he reminded them that quote, behind every one of us stands 70 generations of ancestors who could read and write, and who spoke about and inquired into God and history, peoples and kingdoms, ideas of justice and integrity, humanity and its future. Every Jew is in this sense a prince, end quote. You see, the revisionists, you know I shouldn’t even say that, because many on the Zionist left as well, maybe in a slightly different way, but they believed that living in exile for so long had sort of crippled the Jews as individuals and as a community. For example, if you have too acute of a sense of honor, just as one example, a too acute sense of honor can be a severe liability when you’re living in somebody else’s country. We talked about that in an earlier episode.

If you’re a diaspora Jew living in Ukraine in the 17th century, and you’re walking down your village road, and some local Ukrainian guy comes up and spits in your face, it might feel great in the moment to just beat his ass right there in front of everybody, but when him and all of his friends come and burn down your entire village that night, you’ve got to learn to kind of roll with some of those punches when you’re a minority in somebody else’s country. And so over time, over centuries, this sort of becomes a part of your culture. The idea that honor is maybe a little bit of a liability. Well, Jabotinsky and also the revisionists, and I shouldn’t just give them, I guess, the credit for this, because the Zionists left had this idea as well, but it was just stronger and more militant with the revisionists. This was something to them that had to be rehabilitated. Part of the reason that they needed Zionism, needed their own country, was so that they would have a place to go through this process of rehabilitation. Jewish culture had also been exclusively urban for most of the last 2,000 years. And while there’s nothing particularly wrong with urban culture, just like any culture or subculture, there are good things that it lacks and bad things that it has in excess.

And when it isn’t moderated by, it’s not balanced out by a more traditional rural component that’s sort of in dialogue with the urban side, the type of people produced by that culture are going to be similarly imbalanced. This was something that Jabotinsky and his followers wanted to rectify, beginning with their own conduct. And so Menachem Begin was always known from an early age, especially once Jabotinsky got a hold of him, to conduct himself with that same kind of dignified, almost military bearing that Jabotinsky was so well known for. And he was known, as he became a leader, as he came up through the revisionist ranks, to demand the same from other betaris and revisionists that he came into contact with. By the mid-1930s, Begin is already traveling around Eastern Europe. I mean, he’s in his early 20s at this point. He’s traveling around Eastern Europe, giving talks to any Jew who would listen to his message. He’s literally sleeping on park benches when he rolls into a town because he refuses to accept quarters in a stranger’s house without paying. He’s skipping meals in order to pay for the printing costs of betar posters and pamphlets. That’s where he’s at in the mid-30s, and that’s who this guy is becoming. Completely committed. Somebody who was born for this in a way that very few people could have been. The Zionists are looking for a home for the Jewish people. He was born as this refugee in the First World War, being bounced back and forth in all these different places. And so in 1936, at just 23 years old, Begin is already sharing the dais with his idol, Jabotinsky, at the Betar World Conference in Krakow. There are private writings from revisionists in 1937 talking about Begin’s rhetorical prowess already starting to rival or some people even thought surpassing that of Jabotinsky.

Meanwhile, Jabotinsky’s now years-long exile from Palestine and the constant travel and the rise of Nazism in Europe and the stress that that obviously was causing for somebody like him had begun to take a physical and emotional toll and he was beginning to slow down. And so Menachem Begin, like many young betaris and other revisionists, they took personal offense at many of the insults that Ben-Gurion and the laborites would constantly throw at Jabotinsky. Especially since Jabotinsky’s commitment to the principle of Hadar prevented him from ever responding in kind. I mean, they would just say vile things about him and he refused to ever respond with that same kind of vitriol. And so as you can imagine, these young soldiers who worshipped Jabotinsky did not take kindly to seeing him slandered by Ben-Gurion as Vladimir Hitler. And even when Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky met and agreed to bury their differences for the good of Zionism, Begin and other revisionists were far less willing to forgive or forget. That’s how it works very often, right? So it’s not too surprising.

If you’ve got somebody that you admire and somebody else is constantly slandering them and insulting them and all that, the other person, you know, the person you admire, they might get over it, they might advise you to get over it, but very often it’s the acolytes or the students or whoever that stays angrier longer than the target themselves. And that was the case here. In fact, Begin, when Jabotinsky and Ben-Gurion had gotten together and sort of come to that mutual agreement to kind of back off and set certain limits on their competition, Begin openly denounced that agreement. And to really kind of grasp what that would mean, I mean, this is not the United States in 2016, this is a different time and a different culture. Openly defying your leader like that was a big deal in an interwar right-wing movement that placed very high value on obedience to leadership. You know, this is the time of the rise of fascism, which revisionism was influenced by to a great degree, Italian fascism anyway. And this idea that you sort of, to a certain degree, submit your will to a leader because that’s how your group can best coordinate its actions and so forth. I mean, the idea of openly denouncing an agreement made by your leader is a big deal.

Jabotinsky was fighting in the Jewish Legion in the First World War while a young Menachem Begin was being carried as a refugee infant in his mother’s arms, but Menachem Begin had found his identity in that Beitar uniform. And so he didn’t hesitate to say that, unlike my teacher, I have not forgotten that Ben-Gurion called him Vladimir Hitler. And then Jabotinsky, you know, he’s trying to smooth out the differences between the various Zionist groups. And so he fires back. He publicly reprimands Begin for this outburst, saying, I will never forget that the people like Ben-Gurion wore the uniform of the battalions, fought together with me, and I am sure that if Zionism will require it, they will not hesitate to wear those uniforms again and fight. The power works in mysterious ways, right? And so the mere fact that, even though Begin was denounced by Jabotinsky, not personally, but what he said was denounced, the mere fact that the great Jabotinsky was forced to respond to Begin’s challenge elevated the younger man’s profile. Up until 1931, the Revisionists had just been something like an opposition political party within the Zionist movement.

But after the Zionist Congress that year voted to censor Chaim Weizmann for subservience to the British, officially voted to censor him. And after that same year, right after that same conference, Jabotinsky was banned from Palestine altogether. The possibility of Ben-Gurion and his faction gaining complete control over the new Zionist state, over the Yishuv, was very real. And so the Revisionists formed up a new militia, separate from the Haganah, which was the main Zionist military organization. In 1937, a few years later, when the second stage, the more serious stage, of the Arab Revolt was getting underway, a number of Beitaris and Haganah commanders who wanted to take a harder line against the Arabs joined up with this new organization, which was called Irguns Vay-Le-Yumi, or by its Hebrew acronym Etzel, but usually just Irgun or Etzel for short. I’ll call them Irgun as we go through here. Pledging allegiance to Jabotinsky, the Irgun was nominally under his command, but his exile from Palestine meant that the local commanders there on the ground had a lot of free reign. From 1937 on, and over those next few years, this would manifest in many reprisal attacks, including dozens of terrorist attacks against Arab civilians.

Jabotinsky and many Beitaris were ambivalent about these pro-active measures, especially against women and children, but as the pressure mounted in Hitler’s Europe and as atrocities began to pile up on both sides in Palestine, more and more Zionists were starting to become accustomed to the idea of using terror as a weapon. Jabotinsky continued to insist that the Irgun at least issue warnings to civilians before launching attacks. Menachem Begin agreed with that part, but he didn’t share any of Jabotinsky’s ambivalence about preemptive offensive strikes against the Arabs. For a time, the clash between Jabotinsky and Begin over this issue led Begin to request a leave of absence from his Beitar duties. He actually left Poland altogether, ostensibly for a legal apprenticeship, but understood by everybody as a decision basically to take time away from Jabotinsky to cool off. You might be asking, I certainly asked this when I first arrived at this point in the story back in the day, why didn’t Begin just go to Palestine? Why did he have to come up with this idea that he’s going to go off to Galicia for a legal apprenticeship? Why didn’t he just go to Palestine?

Well, the answer to that question contains the key to the hostility that’s going to develop between the Zionists’ left and right wings in the coming years. Put simply, the British were only allowing a certain number of Jewish migrants into Palestine, and in accordance with the terms of the mandate, the League of Nations mandate, they worked with the Jewish agency to determine who was going to receive that limited number of immigration passes. And that meant that any Jew that wanted to get into Palestine had to be approved by David Ben-Gurion and his circle, who ran the Jewish agency, and those people were partly selecting for political loyalty. David Ben-Gurion was not interested in bringing in reinforcements for the political opposition, as he already had his eye on the leadership of a future Jewish state, which here in the late 30s, as the British are systematically destroying the Palestinian-Arab society in the second half of the Arab Revolt, was becoming an increasingly likely eventuality. And this wasn’t just petty practical politics on the part of Ben-Gurion, and it wasn’t just personal ambition. Here is a man who thought only in grand historical terms, and who had surrendered himself and his personal feelings almost entirely to his historical mission. I mean, this is a guy, you heard the quote earlier from Bjorst, I mean, this is a guy who was indifferent to personal wealth, after he’s prime minister of the future state of Israel, spoiler alert, years from now, after he’s prime minister, he lives in a tent for a while in the Negev Desert with his wife, because he has this whole thing about how he wants to make the Negev Desert bloom and all that, and so he lives in a tent with his wife after he’s been prime minister of a UN member state. This is somebody who’s not thinking in terms of what he can get out of this.

This is somebody who has surrendered himself and his personal feelings to this mission, and although Ben-Gurion did have a monstrous ego, for him, this was about the shape that his future nation was going to take. The way he looked at it, you only get one crack at this. Now remember what’s happening in 1937 in Europe, right, around those years. European Jews looking to escape this rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe are facing a world where immigration to almost every other country on the planet is closed to them. The US isn’t taking anybody, I mean, there’s nowhere to go. The Israeli author Tom Segev, who we’ve quoted a couple times in earlier episodes, he discusses some positions that Ben-Gurion held that can come across as very severe today, and indeed they’re used against Ben-Gurion and Zionism in general by many people who are critics of both. But I guess I would ask everybody out there to consider which nations in the world were carved out by softer men than this. And again, consider what the climate in Europe is like as I read this.

Tom Segev writes, He also saw other endeavors to help European Jews as harmful competition. Ben-Gurion’s sense of competition explains his reaction to the international conference that convened in Evian, France in 1938 to discuss the problem of the Jewish refugees. He warned that opening other countries to Jewish immigrants was liable to weaken the Zionist demand that they be evacuated to Palestine. The Yishuv depended on Jewish immigration, he wrote, expressing his fear that the persecution in Europe would adversely affect the Zionist movement’s ability to raise development funds. While myriads of Jewish refugees are languishing and suffering in concentration camps, even Zionists will not respond to the needs in Palestine, end quote, he complained. In December 1938, a month after Kristallnacht, Ben-Gurion had made the following statement about the rescue of German Jewish children. If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second, because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people. The tendency to see the Jews of Europe as human material necessary to establish the state, rather than seeing the state as a means to save the Jews, guided the Zionist leadership in setting its immigration policy. Given the choice, Ben-Gurion said, he would opt for young immigrants and not old ones and not children. Children could be born in Palestine. Indeed, most immigration permits issued in the 1930s were assigned to unmarried male pioneers in their 20s. Only 20% were assigned to young women. While a small number of permits were allocated to children, the Jewish agency stipulated that no retarded children should be permitted to come. Three years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, with World War II on its way, a special fund was established in Palestine to finance the return of incurably ill Jews to Europe. The justification was that these migrants, quote, had become a burden on the community and on its social institutions, end quote. While local leaders tried to pick and choose potential immigrants, they were upset that Europe’s Jews seemed to be in no hurry to come to Palestine.

Moshe Shurtok, this is Ben-Gurion’s second command at the time, Moshe Shurtok complained that Polish Jews were not rushing to take advantage of the immigration permits the Jewish agency had sent them. He estimated that thousands had permits but kept putting off their departure. Now quoting Shurtok, the Jews of Poland apparently do not know that a sword is hanging over our necks, he said, referring not to the danger of the Nazis to the Polish Jews, but to the dangers faced by Zionists in Palestine. He suggested creating a panic in Poland to encourage the Jews to leave, end quote. And so Ben-Gurion is looking at everything in terms of building the state, period. And in terms of determining what kind of state it’s going to be. If you’re going to get in line and help with that, great. If you’re not, tough, you’re out of luck.

And so with the Gestapo and the SS looming over Europe, the Jewish agency was banning mentally handicapped Jewish children from entering Palestine. They were sending Jews who became incurably ill away from Palestine back to live under the shadow of Hitler, who actually would have approved of the Jewish agency’s justification that such people were a burden on the community and its social institutions, and Nazis would have understood that just fine. No old people, very few women and children. If you were a Jew married to a non-Jew, you could absolutely forget about it because they took racial purity as seriously as their blood enemies that were running Germany at the time. And so when you take all that into account, it’s no stretch really to understand why, even with the thousands of immigration permits that were going unused by some of the European Jews that the Jewish agency had selected, that Ben-Gurion would nevertheless bar many motivated healthy young Jews who were ready to get to work building the homeland, but who had a very different version of how that homeland should end up looking. It’s not hard to understand from a historical perspective, I mean. But to the revisionists and the young Batares who were living on the edge of the Nazi and Soviet volcanoes, as you can imagine, this was an unforgivable betrayal. At least one young Batare committed suicide after his immigration certificate was pulled by the Jewish agency after they learned about his political leanings.

That’s the kind of thing that goes viral overnight today. Back then they didn’t have Twitter and Facebook for that to happen, but these stories had a similar galvanizing effect on the revisionists back in the 30s. As tensions between the revisionists and the labor Zionists continue to escalate, Begin returns from his hiatus, comes back to Warsaw, and almost immediately clashes with Jabotinsky again, this time at the Third International Batare Conference. This is in September 1938, just two months before the infamous Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany. At the conference, Jabotinsky, of course, is given the honor to speak first, deliver the opening remarks, and after he does, Begin takes the floor and declares bluntly to everybody that political Zionism has failed, and that the time for dependency upon a great power has passed. And I know we’ve mentioned this a little bit in this episode and a couple times in earlier episodes, but I just want to be clear. Political Zionism, when I say it here, means political Zionism is just the approach that was inaugurated by Theodor Herzl’s original vision of working with one of the great powers to secure Palestine for the Jews. Herzl, at the time that he wrote his pamphlet, The Jewish State, it was 1896, and when he wrote that, he spoke of offering to help make Jewish capital and financial acumen and other expertise available to the Ottoman Empire in exchange for the concession of Palestine.

When the First World War blew up, Jews in various countries, thinking along these same lines, sought to make themselves useful, in one way or another, to the great powers that they had access to. And so Chaim Weizmann, you’ll remember from Episode 1, contributed a process to help the British synthesize a critical war material, and when David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, asked what the Empire might be able to do to repay him for that, he requested that Palestine be given as a home for the Zionists. That right there is the essence of political Zionism in a nutshell. It draws on the method diaspora Jews had long used over the centuries to settle their communities. Over all those years, European Jews had been chased out of over a hundred countries. Very often it was due to superstitious anti-Semitic paranoia or some other such thing among the local population. I’m sure sometimes the reasons were a little bit more complicated, right, I mean it would be weird if something was all the other side’s fault a hundred times out of a hundred, but they’re always moving around, they’re always having to pack up, you know, a Jewish community is being forced to pack up and move on all the time, and you have to think back to when this is taking place, think back to the Middle Ages. This is a time when foreign hordes like the Huns or the Mongols still randomly showed up on the horizon to rape all your women, take all your stuff, and kill all your men.

And so people were very wary of outsiders, especially outsiders of another religion when the political order of Europe was explicitly based on Christianity, especially outsiders of another religion who were supposed to have rejected and killed the founder of your own religion, and especially outsiders from another religion who more than occasionally were not that shy with their hostility toward Christianity, and who had even collaborated with and even fought for Muslim armies that occupied Spain and that were taking Christian slaves in Europe to sell to the Ottoman Empire. When you spell it out, you know, when you consider the times we’re talking about, it’s amazing that these Jewish communities were ever allowed to settle anywhere in any of the lands that were controlled by Christian rulers. But they were. And the reason that they were is that they were able to make themselves very, very useful. That was the only way they could survive. You know, again, Jews had been living almost exclusively in urban, cosmopolitan environments since before the destruction of Judea by the Romans in the second century. When the Romans did that back in the second century, already at that point, three-quarters of the world’s Jewish population lived outside of Judea in cities around the Roman Empire in the Middle East, in Asia Minor. And so living in these big cities and sort of having to engage in the trades and activities that that type of a lifestyle requires for so long meant that they could simply do things that European realms that were just emerging out of the Dark Ages simply could not do for themselves.

Well, political Zionists took that same idea. If we make ourselves useful, maybe you guys can let us kick it. Okay? Only instead of asking for a bit of land in the country of the people that they’d be helping out, they wanted one of these great powers to help them get their hands on an Arab country whose inhabitants were never really consulted about it. But that’s political Zionism. It’s the same principle. You know, and again, like that last sentence I said, you remember, it’s 1896, right? So when Herzl wrote the pamphlet, colonial empires are the norm.

So it’s not a particularly odd request, you know, for Britain or the Ottoman Empire, whoever it is, to help you take possession of some piece of territory that happens to have some native population on it. It’s not strange in 1896. Now, Jabotinsky and the revisionists were mostly political Zionists. That was their approach. As early as the First World War, you can already start to see how they approached the idea a little bit differently than Herzl had in mind. They believed, I guess, in what you might call the legion principle, the principle of the legion. Roman legions would fight for the Republic or for the Roman Empire and then be compensated with land grants and settlement in conquered lands. You know, soldiers, Zionist soldiers like Joseph Trumpledore and Ze’ev Jabotinsky had this kind of thing in mind when they formed the Jewish Legion to fight for the British in the First World War.

This is the kind of idea they had in mind. In the view of many revisionists, they had done their part, but the British had reneged on their end, first by separating the land east of the Jordan River from the territory of the Zionists, the territory that the Zionists expected to get, and secondly, by turning on Jabotinsky, the man who had founded and then fought with the Jewish Legion in the service of the British Empire during that war. After Jabotinsky was exiled from Palestine, he’d sort of broken with the British, but he hadn’t given up on the approach of political Zionism in general, and he hadn’t given up on the idea of the legion. Instead, he just began to shift his focus from British to the Poles. Beitares in Poland, you know, they already had numbers that could make up a legion consisting of several divisions for the Polish. Jabotinsky hoped that his revisionists might be able to cut a deal with the Polish government to get their help in securing a Jewish homeland, and this was something the Polish government was very receptive to. There were several reasons, but for one thing, the nationalistic Polish government had some natural sympathy for the outlook of the revisionists, not necessarily for the Zionists themselves, but for the revisionists. You’ve got to have an idea of what the feeling of Polish nationalism was like at this time.

When the great hero, Józef Pilsudski, died, Polish spies were sent into the Soviet Union at the risk of their lives and at the risk of Polish-Soviet relations just to gather and bring back some earth from the sites of historical Polish battlefield victories to fill his grave up with. This almost mystical kind of nationalism was the same political language that men like Jabotinsky and Begin spoke, and so they had kind of a direct line to the Polish aristocracy in the 30s. On the other hand, the Polish government saw Palestine as an opportunity to finally answer its own Jewish question. The three million strong Jewish community in Poland was unassimilated, very, very different and set apart from the rest of the Polish population, but it was very organized and very politically active. You had Zionists, you had communists loyal to the USSR, which again, the USSR had only just recently invaded Poland. You had socialist organizations like the Jewish Bund. Most of these Jews felt very little attachment or loyalty to Polish nationalism, and to the Polish nationalists, that was fine for the most part. Why would they feel that way?

The Poles had been forced to live under foreign suzerainty for years, and now, since they’d been freed after World War I and given their own national independence, as they saw it, the Jews were living under Polish foreign rule, essentially. It was natural that they would want a home of their own, and it was pretty normal for the time that the Poles would want to eliminate this politically disruptive community that they had internal to their own society by helping them find their own home. It was certainly a more moderate solution to the problem than the Soviet Union to the East and the Germans to the West would settle on as far as how to deal with their national minorities. Don’t get me wrong, Poles and Polish Jews have a long history of mutual hostility, and Polish anti-Semitism was as real and as common as the Bieganski stereotype that the Jews often applied to the Poles. There was a lot of inter-community hostility here, anti-Semitism and the reverse. But to the Polish ruling class, their anti-Semitism was mostly political. It was what to do about this group of politically organized people in our society. Jews weren’t a racial problem, as they would become in Germany.

They were just a foreign political formation within the body politic of Poland. So they were looking at this organized community that was not small, that made up 10% of the total population of Poland, and trying to figure out how to manage a group of people who didn’t identify with the Polish national project. You couldn’t just put them aside and treat them like we treat the Amish in America. To do that, you have to imagine that there were 30 million Amish in the United States, that they were very politically active, that they owned a decent amount of the economy, and that many of them were either sympathetic to or working directly on behalf of a much larger hostile foreign state on the border, which had as a large chunk of its government and secret police a bunch of crazy Amish. That sounds kind of crazy, but that’s more or less the situation Poland was dealing with at the time with its Jewish population in the Soviet Union. In the early 1920s, they’d been able to fight off the Red Army, very possibly saving a good chunk of Europe from living under the Red Terror and communism in general, but Ukraine had not been able to fight off the Red Army. So in the early 1930s, Poland got to look across the border to Ukraine and watch the communist secret police, which was 75% Jewish, in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, murdered by intentional starvation of somewhere between 6 and 10 million Ukrainian peasants. We tend to think of foreign affairs today as some kind of a game.

You have a little conflict and you send a spec ops team and a few drones to take care of it with our high-tech, hyper-specialized, boutique volunteer militaries and the overwhelming global superiority of NATO, but this shit was not a game back then. Real things could happen to you, and Poland was going to find that out soon enough. So the Poles were trying to figure out what to do with these people, and here come the revisionists. They come along and they say, look, we actually agree with you. This is your country. This is your country. But we don’t have a country and everybody deserves a home. And look, we hate communists as much as you do.

So what do you say? We take these 90,000 Polish Beitar fighters that we have here in the country and help you guys out. Then, at some point down the road, maybe you can help us out. And so that became the plan. Instead of a legion serving the Brits, Beitar would work with Poland. If Poland was invaded, they could count on the support of a number of Zionists that made up no less than 10% of the total fighting power of the Polish army. So that’s a very important boost. If Jewish communists were organizing strikes or other disruptions, instead of risking the internal and international backlash themselves, you know, by sending Polish police or military after these people, the Polish government instead could call on Beitar Jews and send them in to break up the strike or break up whatever’s going on and then just call that a squabble internal to the Jewish political community.

And then eventually at some point down the road, the Polish state can help the revisionists lead Poland’s Jews off to their own country. And so this is how we got to that parade in 1935 in Warsaw for Józef Pilsudski’s funeral with the Jewish legions marching in tight formations flying Polish and Zionist flags. The Polish army began training and equipping thousands of Beitar fighters as well as gunmen who were going to serve as their officers. Since the British and the Jewish agency were keeping them out of Palestine, revisionists began working with national governments, especially the Polish, but even with the National Socialist state in Germany to facilitate their illegal migration into Palestine. But as the pressure continued to ratchet up in Europe and things started to become increasingly more alarming, the labor Zionists under Ben-Gurion were making things even more difficult for the revisionists in Palestine, having Beitar and revisionist leaders followed and harassed by the Haganah, excluding them from important decisions and things like that. And so again, by the late 30s, Menachem Begin and other young revisionists like him are seriously losing their patience. So now let’s circle back to that clash between Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the maturing Menachem Begin at that third Beitar conference in Warsaw, September 1938, two months before Kristallnacht. Jabotinsky gives the opening remarks, Begin takes the floor, openly repudiates Jabotinsky’s approach essentially and calls for an end to the failed approach of political Zionism.

Britain was never going to deliver a Jewish state to the Zionists, or if they did, it’s going to be a socialist state in which the Jewish right wing is going to have no role and which, shorn of Transjordan, was never going to be able to contain all the world’s Jews anyway. What are we waiting for, Begin demanded? We’ve got tens of thousands of fighters. We’ve got weapons and training from Poland. Why are we waiting to inherit our own land or to receive it as a gift from the Arabs or from the British? Why are we waiting as Ben-Gurion consolidates control over the whole country? It’s time for us to take it. To take the fight to the Arabs and even to the British if necessary.

The Arabs are a simple enough problem. It’s the British and the Jewish agency that are standing between us and our homeland. Jabotinsky is in no mood for this. He had no desire to pick a fight with the British Empire, let alone with other Zionists, whatever disagreements he may have had with them. But the changing conditions had begun to win many revisionists, especially those of the younger generation, over to Begin’s point of view. Jabotinsky denounced Begin’s call to arms as the mere creaking of a door. But by the end of the conference, Begin had successfully won a vote to change a very critical line in the Beitar Pledge taken by new recruits. The original pledge that was written by Jabotinsky said, quote, only in defense will I raise my arm, end quote.

But Begin’s new version that became standard after this 1938 conference said, quote, I will prepare my arm for the defense of my people and the conquest of my homeland, end quote. So it went from only in defense will I raise my arm to I will prepare my arm for the defense of my people and the conquest of my homeland. The change was passed over Jabotinsky’s objections. I mean, he openly argued against it. The fact that it was passed over his objections, that was unthinkable just a few years before. There was nobody with the personality or nobody who could challenge him, and he was unchallengeable himself. But now Begin was really starting to get his feet under him, and Jabotinsky was beginning to fade. But I don’t want to give the wrong impression.

I mean, Begin still looked up to Jabotinsky. He always would look up to Jabotinsky. I mean, despite their differences of opinion, Begin’s talent and his growing power were undeniable, and Jabotinsky trusted him. He placed him in command of Poland’s tens of thousands of Beitar personnel in early 1939, after that conference. And so he still trusted him, and these two men are very close. Begin, once he took command of Polish Beitar, immediately expanded the training camps, and he began to oversee and monitor all of them closely in anticipation of the coming war for Palestine. But of course, in September 1939, Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland from east and west and put an end to all that, and put an end to everything. Okay, so I’m looking at my pile of notes in this outline that I’ve got posted up here, and this was supposed to keep me on track, and I’m realizing that I’ve completely failed to follow any of it.

So this was supposed to be a short introduction, but I’ve gone off on so many tangents that, well, okay, I’ve got to get past this meandering introduction. So I am sorry if you’ve waited for me to, you’re waiting for me to catch up to where we left off the last episode. But this whole time, up through this series, I’ve really kind of been putting off discussing the Zionist right wing. And I couldn’t put it off anymore, given everything that’s going to happen in this episode. So I just kind of dumped it all on you at once to kind of get you caught up a little bit. Hopefully, I’ve earned enough leeway with those of you who have already sat through 20 hours or so of this podcast that you’ll trust me when I say that nothing from here on is going to make sense unless I’ve laid this groundwork. So just give me a little bit more time, but still, I’m going to try to wrap this up and get into the red meat here. So okay, so the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invade Poland, France and Britain have a defensive pact with Poland, so they declare war on Germany, although not on the Soviet Union.

And after the war, they allow the Soviet Union to seize Poland, commit mass murder against noncommunists and turn it into a Soviet police state, but whatever. It’s another podcast, getting me started about communism. So now World War II is on. Whatever the revisionists had been planning, with help from the Poles, was done. That was over. The Polish state was destroyed completely within a few weeks, and the Polish army, along with thousands of faithful Beitar Zionists who were going to stick to their commitments, were pushed underground to carry on their fight as guerrillas and partisans. Jabotinsky was out of the country at the outbreak of the war. He was in New York, but Begin was not.

He was in Poland when it happened. He was over in the east, in the Molotov part of the MolotovRibbentrop pact that split up Poland between Hitler and Stalin, so he was under the power of the Soviet Union. The Soviets in Poland often did this thing when they started to become suspicious of somebody where, instead of just showing up and seizing them on the street, they would first invite them. They would invite somebody that they were targeting to report to the secret police for a conversation, and so Begin very soon got his invitation. When he gets it, he calmly packs a bag, sacrificing a quarter of it. Okay, let me lay this out first. Most people who go in to get interviewed by the Soviet secret police don’t come back, and a whole lot of them are never seen again, whether they’re sent off to a gulag for years or just put on their knees, held by two arms, and receiving a .22 shot in the back of the head before they’re put in a mass grave. That’s where somebody like Begin, who’s a nationalist activist, has to at least have somewhere in his mind might be the fate that is awaiting him when he shows up.

He packs his bag, and he still sacrifices a quarter of the bag’s space for a stack of books that he wanted to take with him into prison. I always loved that part of his story. He shows up to the police station. Begin is one of those unique characters that any movement like this is going to need if it’s going to really have any kind of impact on the world. He was a guy … Menachem Begin was a Zionist, period, and he did not really care about much else. Like I said, from his very birth, born between the Tsar and the Kaiser’s armies in 1913, this was just something that he was made for. His psychology was built for it.

His whole life history brought him up to be the thing that he is. He just was a Zionist, and that was it. He wasn’t really an anti-communist or anti-anything. He was just a Zionist. But the Soviet secret police distrusted nationalists of all kinds, including Zionists. He arrived to the police station knowing that chances were very high that he was never going to be heard from again. He gets in there, and they soften him up with 60 hours of sleep deprivation, 60 hours they forced him to sit in this uncomfortable position in a chair with his legs pressed really painfully against a wall for 60 hours. They don’t feed him.

They rough him up a bit, and then after that, they’re just questioning him around the clock, those marathon interrogation sessions that they would do. But none of this was really necessary because there’s no guile in Menachem Begin. He’s a very upfront guy. They didn’t need to extract Menachem Begin’s political views. All they really had to do was ask. Whatever you might come to think of Begin over the course of this episode, the guy is the real deal. I mean, he’s ready to die on the spot rather than dishonor himself. His interrogators that he started out with at this police station included at least one Jew who was very well-versed in Judaism and in Zionism. They start in on him, and they begin by asking how long he’s been involved with Zionism. This would normally be the part where somebody with a healthy instinct for self-preservation would try to lie or obfuscate, like, Zionism? What Zionism? I’ve never heard of it. But that’s not who this guy is. Since my childhood, he answered, and from 15 onward in Betar. The Jewish-American writer that I mentioned earlier, Milton Viorst, in his book on Zionism, The Birth and Transformation of an Ideal, he picks up this part of the story, he handles it well. Quoting from the book now, quote, the interrogator then volunteered that Begin had long been engaged in criminal activities.

Why criminal, Begin asked. I think my activities were right and proper. You’re a big political criminal. The interrogator answered, because all your activities were anti-Soviet. By offering Zionism to working-class youths as an alternative to Bolshevism, he declared, Begin was worse than a man who has murdered ten people. He called Zionism an artifice devised by British imperialism to entrap Europe’s Jews. Who, the interrogator asked, had sponsored his membership in Betar? Nobody, Begin replied.

I went to a Jewish school. They knew me in my town, and they accepted me without any difficulty. But why did you choose Betar? I liked its program, Begin answered. I had read and observed Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Only when the interrogator described Jabotinsky as the leader of Jewish fascism and a colonel in British intelligence did he upset Begin’s equanimity, striking a court of deep indignation, end quote. I should have mentioned that Jabotinsky had died shortly before Begin’s arrest while he was on a visit to New York. Jabotinsky had been warning that Poland’s Jews were living on the edge of a volcano, and now that volcano had exploded and engulfed them all.

It took its toll. I mean, Jabotinsky was already beginning to struggle in the late part of the 30s. This kind of broke him down. He tried to fight off despair, and he continued in his duties, traveling and trying to rally revisionists around the world, but his strength was just sapped. After reviewing a formation of American Betaris, he retired for the evening, and the last person to see him alive reported that he said, I’m tired. I’m so tired, before closing his eyes for that last time, having been kept by the British for the last decade of his life from seeing the land to which he had devoted that life. Going back to Vyor’s book, Jabotinsky was the greatest Jewish political leader of modern times after Herzl, Begin told his interrogator. He went on to say, if I filled whole pages, I could not explain what his death meant to me.

A stranger will not understand, and in this special instance, stranger also includes some of my own people, and so all I will say is this. The bearer of hope was gone, never to return, and with him, perhaps never to return, hope itself. Begin’s obvious sorrow seemed only to incite his interrogator further. How well did you know Jabotinsky, he demanded. I think I knew him well, Begin replied. In the years before the war, I met him personally. I came when he summoned me. I reckon that in all, I spoke to him a few dozen times. The two discussed the future of Hebrew youth, politics in Palestine, British policy, Palestine immigration, Begin wrote in his memoir. The interrogator insisted that Jabotinsky consistently lied, which Begin vigorously denied. Jabotinsky was my teacher, he declared. He gave me my faith.” Through friends, Begin learned eventually that his wife had actually escaped to Palestine. A young wife, he had recently been married, and once he received that news, he knew that one way or another, he had to survive this ordeal and get down there to reach her. After his interrogation, he was given a communist show trial and sentenced to eight years of hard correctional labor in the Soviet gulag system, but even then, Begin, he kept his bearing, he remained defiant. When he was presented with a confession to sign regarding his Zionist activities, he agreed at once to sign. He said, I don’t mind signing that at all, but he demanded that the papers be drawn up again to replace the word confess with the word admit, since confession implies an acceptance of guilt for doing something wrong.

He was fully ready to admit everything he had done, but he refused to confess to anything. It’s a testament to Begin’s personal charisma and power that his communists and prisoners, who could have had him killed and buried in one of the mass graves they were filling up all over the territories that they occupied during the war, that they actually did it. And then with many others, he was packed up into a cattle car and shipped off to a distant slave camp in the gulag system. In prison, Menachem Begin maintained that same defiant bearing with which he’d met his interrogators. During his time there, he drew on his deep knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to frame his experiences. One time, when he and the other prisoners were given these filthy tobacco spittoons in place of dishes for eating out of, he thought of Ecclesiastes, a man hath no preeminence above a beast. And he would constantly draw on that to frame his experiences over and over. Begin continued to debate Zionism and Jewish politics with anybody that would engage him.

Other prisoners, guards, new interrogators, anybody that would listen. He wanted to talk about it. And it’s all he wanted to talk about. Pain, lice, sores, starvation, back-breaking labor, and very likely death were the lot of Soviet gulag slaves. But Begin stayed focused on Zionism the entire time, and on somehow making his way to Palestine. I mean, here’s another example. Despite starvation conditions that drove prisoners to steal from one another, and in which one missed meal could mean the difference between making it through the next day’s labor and just falling dead on the side of the road, Begin surprised his two cellmates on one occasion when he refused his portion of soup voluntarily and gave it to the other two men because it was Yom Kippur and he said he was fasting. I mean, it’s important to point out also, Menachem Begin, although he was knowledgeable about Judaism, he had never been religiously punctilious.

But instead of abandoning his faith, he clung to it even tighter, even when it imposed hardship upon him when the going got tough. This wasn’t something hanging around his neck, in other words, his Judaism wasn’t something hanging around his neck, it was a well of strength that he drew on. In the spring of 1941, he made a makeshift Passover Seder for himself and another Jewish inmate. They were anticipating, they knew that the holiday was coming up, and so Begin had been trading some of his very meager food supplies and putting aside his small rations of coffee for several weeks ahead of time so that they could each drink four cups of coffee in place of the customary cups of wine. During that meal, he and his friend lifted up a prayer over it, intoning, This year we are slaves, next year we may be free men. This year we are here, may we next year be in Jerusalem. Which is, he’s a year in, and so that’s a pretty optimistic hope for a prisoner with seven years of hard labor left in the Soviet slave camps. But everything was about to change.

Everything was about to change for Begin himself, for the Jewish people, and for the world. A few months later, in June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union. So let’s leave Begin up in the Soviet Union for a little bit. Let’s catch you up on what’s been going on in Palestine. Let’s talk about that. After the Arab Rebellion was suppressed in 1939, many British officials were finally coming around to the opinion that there was really nothing left for them to do in Palestine. Not all of them. Winston Churchill and many others were still all but taking orders from the Jewish agency.

But after two decades of trying to put the place in order and find some kind of compromise with the various groups there, the idea that Palestine was more trouble than it was worth was gaining, well, it had gained at least equal footing with the allies of the Zionists within the British government. The General Bernard Montgomery, who was probably the guy most responsible for putting down the Arab Revolt, said that, quote, the Jew murders the Arab, and the Arabs murder the Jew. This is what is going on in Palestine now, and it will go on for the next fifty years in all probability, end quote. The Colonial Secretary at the same time, William Ormsby Gore, had written, quote, the Arabs are treacherous and untrustworthy, the Jews greedy, and when free from persecution, aggressive. I’m convinced that the Arabs cannot be trusted to govern the Jews any more than the Jews can be trusted to govern the Arabs, end quote. And the High Commissioner at the time speculated that not even a million soldiers would be enough to stop the murders and the terrorism and the reprisals in the country. Another British official wrote that, quote, even had there been no Zionist policy, we should eventually have got up against the Arabs if we had attempted to govern them. The new generation would demand the right to rule themselves, and we should have to have given in, end quote.

And as far as the Jews, another official from the Colonial Office wrote that the Zionists hate all the Gentiles, the British as much as the Arabs, maybe more. The Israeli author Tom Segev, that we quoted earlier, wrote that, quote, the Arabs’ great achievement then, he’s talking about during the revolt, the Arabs’ great achievement then, greater even than the white paper, was to have made the British sick of Palestine. Only a catastrophe, the High Commissioner wrote, might change anything in the country, an earthquake or two, a plague, or a great war. James Pollock, who had come to Palestine a few days after its conquest in 1918, wrote to his father, everything seems to be just as bad as it can be. That same day, World War II began, end quote. And so that’s not good, right, but of course this is Palestine, and just about everything in Palestine is upside down, and when the war came along, it was no different, and so despite the complaints of those British officials, despite the outbreak of the most destructive conflict in human history, naturally, in Palestine, violence actually dropped off, and things began to look up, which actually wasn’t so bad in the early years of the war. Most of the non-compliant Arab leadership was dead, imprisoned, or exiled. The majority of the Arab elites who didn’t suffer one of those fates had voluntarily left the country to go to Syria or Lebanon or Egypt just to get away from everything.

The Grand Mufti, the Arab leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, he remained the symbolic and to a degree the operational leader of the Palestinian Arab resistance, but he’d been banned from the country by the British, and so he was stuck across the border in Beirut. Those who remained, those Arab, those prominent Arabs who remained in Palestine were mostly clients of the Jordanians who were allied to the British, clients of the British really, or else they were just openly collaborating with the Zionists and with the British to keep the peace or for their own personal ambition. After an initial dip in the economy due to the Arab revolt kind of shutting things down, and then due to the shutting down of trade to the Mediterranean, after that brief dip the economy in Palestine actually began to stabilize and then really pick up because the British turned the whole country into this major supply depot for the war, a supply depot that really they used as a base for the whole Middle East. So dozens of factories went up very quickly to provide the allies with munitions, gasoline, spare parts for their machines, clothing, boots, foodstuffs, and you need people to actually work in those factories. It served as a primary destination for soldiers who were on leave from that part of the front, and so many of the unemployed Jews that did exist and many of these destitute Arabs who had been pushed off their farms and were living in squalor outside the city suddenly had jobs. The Zionists were fiercely opposed to the White Paper that the British issued in 1939 to limit Jewish immigration, but with the coming of the war they had reached a sort of internal compromise on how to deal with it. Ben-Gurion laid it down that they were going to oppose the White Paper as if there were no war, meaning that they would do everything they could to facilitate immigration against the orders of the British, but that they would support the British war effort as if there were no White Paper. And Ze’ev Jabotinsky, before he died in 1940, he approved of that formulation, and he pledged the support of the revisionist movement to the British war against Hitler.

Even the more radical Irgun militants had agreed to avoid attacks against the British as long as the British were fighting the Nazis. It wasn’t peaceful in Palestine, and there were still back and forth murders and fights and other disturbances and things like that, but compared to the years of the Arab revolt and to the years that are coming just over the horizon, it was a relatively stable period. It’s hard for us to imagine today, but in 1941 and even into 1942, it was far from clear that the Nazis were not going to achieve total victory. Most of Europe and a good part of the populated Soviet Union was under their control, and they were driving through North Africa from west to east toward Egypt. If the Nazis took Egypt, Palestine would be next on the menu, and people were absolutely panicking over that possibility, as you can imagine. Many Jews were trying to arrange refuge deals, refuges and monasteries and other hideouts. Others were literally carrying around cyanide capsules with them. The British army had offered to allow the Jewish soldiers who had enlisted in its ranks to leave the country, but there was a heated debate internal to the Zionist community in Palestine whether they ought to surrender when the Nazis arrived, which most people expected at that point, or whether they should just stand and fight with honor to the last man. In the fall of 1942, of course, General Bernard Montgomery stopped Field Marshal Rommel’s advance through Africa at the Battle of El Alamein, ending the immediate danger to Palestine. But it gives you an idea of the mentality that’s going on. The Nazis really did look absolutely unstoppable. Throughout this early period of the war, David Ben-Gurion spent most of his time outside of Palestine. He moved first to London in September 1940 because he wanted to be close to the center of British power and decisionmaking during the war. But when he gets to Britain, he finds that he really doesn’t have a whole lot to do in a place where Chaim Weizmann is already the man. Chaim Weizmann knows everybody, he’s got these relationships, he just looms large in London, and Ben-Gurion is kind of a third wheel there. And so to get out of Weizmann’s shadow in London, he moves to New York, and then after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he moves to Washington, D.C.

With Jabotinsky dead, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion are the two men left standing in the competition for Zionist leadership at this point. Begin and other young revisionist leaders haven’t really emerged yet as clear successors to Jabotinsky, and in any case, Begin’s out of the picture in the Soviet Union when the Nazis invade. Until now, Weizmann and Ben-Gurion had been able to divide their labors and avoid direct conflict by letting Weizmann represent the movement in Britain, Europe, and the U.S., while Ben-Gurion managed the Yishuv in Palestine. But Ben-Gurion now disrupted that balance by leaving Palestine to invade Weizmann’s territory, sort of. The decision to leave probably seemed like a tactical mistake at first. He didn’t accomplish very much, Ben-Gurion didn’t accomplish very much, and it allowed his opponents in Palestine room to breathe. If the revisionists hadn’t been in such disarray in the period just after Jabotinsky’s death in 1940, Ben-Gurion might have returned to find a very different Palestine than the one he had left. But his stay in America did leave him, it did yield one insight that was going to prove absolutely critical later in this story, into the whole history of Zionism in Israel.

The insight that Zionism does not need Britain anymore. The future of the Jewish state could be secured much better and much easier through the power of the United States. And there were political motivations at play here as well. You know, Weizmann, Chaim Weizmann, had secured his position as representatives of the Zionists to the British government. He had deep relationships, long-standing relationships, and that was not going to change. And so Ben-Gurion hoped that by pivoting the movement toward the United States while he was in Washington, that he could marginalize Weizmann’s influence and consolidate his own. With the war on in Europe, there was no chance of convening a Zionist Congress on the continent as was customary every year. So instead, they decided to hold a conference of American Zionists at New York City’s Biltmore Hotel in May 1942.

Up to that point, American Jews and American Zionists, the majority of whom, again, were assimilated German Jews or else hard left Jews from the former Russian Empire, had kind of vacillated in their commitment to Zionism and especially over the acceptable means of achieving Zionism’s goals. But in what should probably go down as one of, if not the most important political achievement in the history of the movement, Ben-Gurion, to whom Weizmann deferred to deliver the headline address to the conference, managed to secure the committed cooperation of all the most important American Jewish leaders and organizations in lobbying the American government to throw its weight behind the Zionist project, which the Zionist project was now agreed by all within the movement to be the eventual establishment of a sovereign Jewish state. There was no longer any question about that, something that the Americans had been kind of ambivalent about before. And despite the success of the Biltmore conference, Ben-Gurion was clearly uncomfortable playing second fiddle to Weizmann, as he was forced to do outside of Palestine. Ben-Gurion, he was used to being the man in Palestine. Everybody looked to him for authority. The gruff, kind of ornery Ben-Gurion had put aside the daily struggle in the dirt in the meeting halls of Palestine to enter the world of cocktail parties and entertaining dignitaries, and that’s Weizmann’s home field. He’s not going to do any better than Weizmann there, and it’s starting to frustrate him.

Even though the practical political success of the conference had been Ben-Gurion’s, Weizmann was the better known figure outside of Palestine, and so he still received much of the adulation. Weizmann was going around and he was getting standing ovations when he entered a room, and he was lauded as the heir to Theodor Herzl, and Ben-Gurion was just getting, this was driving him insane. He would get frustrated and blurt out some charge that Weizmann was just playing to the crowds, and then Weizmann would just deftly parry that attack with a charming rebuttal, and that just pissed off Ben-Gurion even more. After the conference, Chaim Weizmann’s summoned to the White House for a meeting with President Roosevelt. That drives Ben-Gurion even crazier. He wasn’t invited. Again, this is somebody who’s used to being in charge, and as far as he was concerned, he’d been doing the more important work for Zionism. This frustration led him during the conference to attack the British very strongly, because the British were standing in kind of as a proxy for his rival.

He didn’t want to attack Weizmann directly, because he didn’t want to open up a rift in the movement between followers of the two men, but he could attack the British, who Chaim Weizmann was understood as being loyal to, and it kind of stood in as a proxy, and so he attacked the British very strongly, rather more harshly than was probably appropriate, and he took a lot of criticism from Weizmann’s allies for it. But his criticism of the British, while politically inadvisable probably, was not completely driven by politics or frustration. The British were continuing to enforce the 1939 White Paper, limiting Jewish immigration while the war was going on. The way the British saw it, they were just fulfilling their obligations to the Arabs, but what this meant on the ground was interdicting Jewish immigrants that were trying to make their way into the country. British ships were intercepting boats and chartered ships that were trying to smuggle Jews into Palestine, frequently Jews who had just managed to escape the grip of the Nazis in Europe. So the British are at this point of trying to balance two principles that both have validity, but they’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place at this point. On some occasions, the British actually sent the ships back to where they came from, literally returning those Jews into German hands. They were taking a lot of heat for that, and so instead, when they would capture these illegal Jewish immigrants, they would set up internment camps, which is what we call concentration camps when they’re set up by people we like.

They set up these internment camps on islands in the Indian Ocean, and they would imprison these Jewish refugees there until they could figure out what to do with them. Which, you know, the British are trying to solve a problem here and trying to deal with a very difficult situation, but you can imagine the effect this had on many of the Zionists and on people around the world, and not just on militant revisionist Zionists. Both the Irgun and the Haganah were working nonstop to facilitate the smuggling of Jews into the country against British orders, and a lot went into it. Tom Segev talks about this as well. He says, quote, Most of the illegal immigrant ships operated by the labor movement sailed from the port of Constanze in Romania. Some 60 journeys were made altogether. Each one was a great human and operational drama, a saga of bravery and passion for life. Ships and crews had to be found and readied for sailing and equipped with food, water, and medical supplies.

Passenger documents and a national flag had to be obtained. The passengers had to be collected and transported to the point of departure. They were frequently smuggled across borders in truck convoys or through mountain paths and thick forests, even as the war raged. The Nazis did their best to intercept them. The immigrant operations demanded faith, courage, organizational talent, contacts, and money to bribe police and secret service chiefs, government ministers, and foreign consuls. The Mediterranean Sea was a battlefield and dangerous for civilian ships, all the more so for the shoddy vessels the Zionists used. Conditions on board were abominable, the ships were overcrowded, and there were insufficient provisions, water, and sanitary facilities. Some of the boats were large, bearing hundreds of refugees.

Others were tiny, carrying but a few. End quote. So inevitably, under circumstances like that, some of the attempts by the Zionists to break the British blockades were going to go terribly wrong. The Zionists had commissioned three ships in November 1940 to bring a few thousand Jewish refugees into Palestine, but the British had interdicted those ships and escorted them to the port at Haifa. British authorities had decided to send these passengers, these refugees, to the internment camp down at Mauritius, an island off the east coast of Africa, and so the Haganah is scrambling to find some way to rescue their comrades from that fate. While the British are making plans for the transfer, they take all the refugees, or most of them, about 1,800 people, over to a converted French ocean liner, the SS Patria, to wait for the logistics of the transfer to be sorted out, and then the ship was going to take them down the coast of Africa to the island. So the Haganah, operating under orders from a future Israeli Prime Minister, Moshe Shoret, determines that their only option, or their best option at least, is to try to set off a minor explosion and to disable the Patria, to try to make it impossible for it to make the trip to Mauritius, betting that the British would have no choice but to either put the passengers ashore and release them, as the British would sometimes do when they would catch attempted illegal immigrants, they would just release them into Palestine and then just count them against the immigration quota, or at least to put them ashore to hold them temporarily, giving the Haganah an opportunity to break them out and free them. The SS Patria is an old WWI era passenger ship that the British had re-outfitted as a troop transport for the war.

As a civilian ocean liner, she had been authorized for 805 passengers, but the British had determined that the Patria could safely hold 1,800 passengers, plus the crew. Unfortunately, even though the British had re-authorized it for those 1,800 passengers, the Patria only had enough lifeboats for the original 805, with a few inflatable life rafts to supplement, and so I’m sure you can see where this is going. At 9 o’clock in the morning on November 25th, 1940, the Haganah’s bombs set off an explosion that ended up being much larger and more violent than they intended, blew a hole about 6 feet by 10 feet in the hull. A Yiddish newspaper from the time, the Daily Journal, described the decision and then the scene of the explosion as follows, quote, After the British deportation order, the Haganah General Staff took a decision at which their leaders shuddered. The decision was not to permit the Patria to leave. The English must be given to understand that Jews could not be driven away from their own country. The Patria must be blown up. The decision was conveyed to Haganah members on the Patria, and in the hush of night, preparations had begun for the execution of the tragic act.

On Sunday, November 25th, 1940, the passengers were informed by the English that they were being returned to sea. The Jews remained silent, save for a whisper from man to man to go up the deck, all up the deck. Apparently, the signal did not reach everybody, for many hundreds remained below, never to see the light again. Suddenly, an explosion was heard, and panic ensued. It was a hellish scene. People jumped into the water, children were tossed into the waves, agonizing cries tore into the heavens, end quote. As soon as the bombs went off, British and Arab ships rushed into the scene and began rescuing survivors as quickly as possible. The air was filled with smoke, and the water was slick with oil and small oil fires burning here and there all over the surface.

The rescuers did a pretty good job considering the constraints and the time constraints they were working under, because it only took 16 minutes for the Patria to go to the bottom. She took 267 people with her, mostly Jewish refugees, with about 50 British soldiers. The exact number varies a bit depending on who you read, but it’s right around there. At first, it wasn’t apparent what had happened. Stories began to circulate that the passengers had committed suicide out of despair or in protest of their treatment by the British. The British suspected that it was the Irgun who had blown up the Patria. It wasn’t actually until 1957, 17 years after it happened, that a former Jewish dock worker, who was sort of guilt-ridden over what had happened, wrote about what happened that day and the Haganah and his role in the disaster. And so that same year, in 1940, a group of Irgun militants decided that they had seen enough, and they refused any longer to go along with the policy of avoiding conflict with the British.

Calling themselves the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, or more commonly by the acronym LEHI, it’s avowed aim, and it’s only focus really, was to drive the British out of Palestine by force. Their leader was a very interesting guy that I wish we had time to really get into, named Avraham Stern, but we don’t really have time for it. The group is very often just called the Stern Gang, that’s how I’ll refer to him here. And so at this point, you’ve got three major militias, or military organizations, among the Zionist community in Palestine. You’ve got the main one, the Haganah, under David Ben-Gurion. You’ve got the Irgun, which is sort of the, you could say, the mainstream revisionist militia, which is smaller than the Irgun, but very effective. And then you’ve got the Stern Gang, which is broken away from the Irgun because they decided that the Irgun weren’t extreme enough, and that’s an even smaller and more extreme group. The Stern Gang did not care that there was a war on with Germany. Their priority was driving occupiers out of their land to form what they called the new totalitarian Hebrew Republic, based on the principles of national Bolshevism. They openly called themselves terrorists, and they defended terrorism as a tactic. Regarding that idea, the founder, Avraham Stern, wrote, quote, Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world. Ye shall blot them out to the last man. But first and foremost, terrorism is for us part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances, and it has a great part to play. Speaking in a clear voice to the whole world, as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land, it proclaims our war against the occupier.

We are particularly far from this sort of hesitation. End quote. The Stern Gang actually reached out on two occasions and tried to make an alliance with the Nazis, offering a pledge to help undermine the British in the Middle East if the Germans would guarantee them an opportunity after the war to set up a Jewish state in Palestine along similar lines to the Nazi state in Germany. They actually met at least once with Nazi officials, but the Germans demurred. The Grand Mufti also, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian movement, he did end up working with the Germans, driven by the same impetus that led many Eastern European states and countries like Finland to throw in with them. You know, for the Eastern Europeans and the Finns, if you’ve just been invaded and slaughtered by the Soviet Union and now the Germans are fighting the Soviet Union and driving them out of your country, you ally with the Germans, at least for today. Similarly, the Arabs were not particularly concerned with whatever was going on in Europe. They just wanted the French and the British out of their countries, and apparently some German with a military uniform and a silly mustache was fighting the French and the British, and so, great, he’s okay with them.

The alliance between the Mufti and other Arabs with the Nazis is hammered on endlessly by many proIsrael activists today, but it really doesn’t go beyond what I just said. Taking sides with the distant Germans because they were fighting the British Empire that had been facilitating the occupation of your country by these hostile outsiders, the Zionists. In the early war, again, the Nazis looked unstoppable, and however things looked to us in hindsight, the people at the time had to deal with reality as they found it. So all this had been going on between the time that David Ben-Gurion had left the country in 1940 and the time of the Biltmore Conference in May 1942. And when Ben-Gurion returns to Palestine, he finds that tensions between the British and the Zionists and between the Haganah and the Irgun within the Zionist movement are still rising and getting to a critical point, and so he struggles to take back control of the situation. But world events were conspiring to ratchet up tensions between the groups even more. In late 1942, the Yishuv began to get its first really reliable evidence that something terrible was happening to the Jews in Poland. I’ve had to make a lot of hard choices throughout this series about what to cover and how much.

But really the hard choices generally come down to what not to cover. There have been very important events and individuals that I’ve had to give very short shrift, and I’m about to do it again here in a spot where, well, part of the reason that I’ve been delayed getting this episode out was that I kept struggling over how to deal with the Holocaust. You know, should I walk it back and try to provide a bit of historical context for it? That’s what I thought I was going to do for a while. For a while I was rereading books on the Russian conquest of Lithuania and everything else you could think of. At one point I had mapped out a brief, with air quotes around it, I had mapped out a brief history of the Jews in Europe to provide some background and cap that with a section about interwar Germany and the Soviet Union and everything that was going on there. You know, because here is what most people know about Jewish history. Bible stuff, Bible stuff, you know, Cain and Abel, King David, more Bible stuff, then Jesus, then almost nothing for 2,000 years, and then bam, the Holocaust.

That’s it. And why did the Holocaust happen? Because a guy with a funny mustache was crazy. You know, when you lay it out like that, it’s such a ridiculous and impoverished understanding of the situation that I couldn’t just leave it there. But every time I tried to deal with it with any kind of thoroughness, it ended up being not just a whole episode, but a whole new series. And so I tried and I reformulated it and I tried again, and what I eventually decided to do was to just put that larger story off for a future series, which fortunately now much of the research is already done for. And the theme of which is going to be roughly described by a halfway decent book in that topic’s orbit called Why the Germans, Why the Jews. And so we’ll address the deep history of all that and that interwar period another time.

But that still left me with the question of how to handle it right here, how to handle it here and now. I mean, to give you anything like a proper context was going to take a whole series. To spend too little time on it risks underplaying the absolutely central role that the Holocaust plays in the Zionist story and in Jewish self-understanding today. And so in the interest of, I guess, let’s just be honest, in the interest of shifting responsibility, but also just to help me break past this dilemma that I’m in, but also just to help me break past this dilemma so I can finally release this episode so that Jocko doesn’t choke me out. I’m just going to call in some heavy artillery and bring in a few others, a few other people with infinitely more sensitivity or talent or both at their disposal to bail me out. And in doing so, my goal is not, when I talk about this, I go through this section. I want to make it clear that my goal here is not simply to emphasize the horror, the horror of the Holocaust because we know it was horrible. So was the rape of two million German women by Soviet soldiers.

So was the starvation of three million Soviet soldiers by the Germans. So was the rape of Nanking and the indiscriminate annihilation of German and Japanese cities from the air by Allied heavy bombers. We know it was horrible. I want to emphasize something else, something that actually has a lot more to do with the story we’re telling here. I’m going to let three people tell more personal stories, and I hope that my intentions here will become clear as we go through them. This first passage that I’m going to read to you is from Timothy Snyder’s shattering 2010 book, Bloodlands, Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. It’s 1941, and you’re in Ukraine. Ukraine, the same land that less than a decade before this had seen six to ten million peasants murdered in Stalin’s Holodomor. And so Snyder begins, quote, In Kiev in September 1941, a further confrontation with the remnants of Soviet power provided the pretext for the next escalation, the first attempt to murder all of the native Jews present in a large city. On 19 September 1941, the Wehrmacht’s Army Group South took Kiev, several weeks behind schedule, and with the help of Army Group Center, On 24 September, a series of car bombs and mines exploded, destroying the buildings in central Kiev where the Germans had established offices of their occupation regime. Some of these explosives were set on timers before the Soviet forces withdrew from the city, but some seemed to have been detonated by NKVD men who remained in Kiev. As the Germans pulled their dead and wounded from the rubble, the city suddenly seemed unsafe. As a local remembered, the Germans stopped smiling. They had to try to govern this metropolis with a very small number of people, dozens of whom had just been killed, even as they prepared a continued eastward march. At a meeting on 26 September, military authorities agreed with the representatives of the police and SS that the mass murder of Kiev Jews would be the appropriate response for the bombing. Although most of the Jews of Kiev had fled before the Germans took the city, tens of thousands remained.

They were all to be killed. A Wehrmacht propaganda crew printed broadsheet notices that ordered the Jews of Kiev to appear, on pain of death, at a street corner in a westerly neighborhood of the city. In what would become the standard lie of such mass shooting actions, the Jews were told that they were being resettled. They should thus bring along their documents, money, and valuables. On 29 September, 1941, most of the remaining Jewish community of Kiev did indeed appear at the appointed location. Some Jews told themselves that since Yom Kippur, the highest Jewish holiday, was the following day, they could not possibly be hurt. Many arrived before dawn, in the hopes of getting good sleep. People packed for a long journey, old women wearing strings of onions around their necks for food.

Having been assembled, the more than 30,000 people walked, as instructed, along Melnik Street, in the direction of the Jewish cemetery. Observers from nearby apartments recalled an endless row of Jewish men, women, and children. The Germans had erected a roadblock near the gates of the Jewish cemetery, where documents were verified and non-Jews told to return home. From this point forward, the Jews were escorted by Germans with automatic weapons and dogs. At the time of the shooting, the Jews were told that they were being resettled, and that they should bring along their documents, money, and valuables. The Germans had erected a roadblock near the gates of the Jewish cemetery, where documents were verified and non-Jews told to return home. From this point forward, the Jews were escorted by Germans with automatic weapons and dogs. At the checkpoint, if no earlier, many of the Jews must have wondered what their true fate would be.

Dina Prnicheva, a woman of 30, walked ahead of her family to a point where she could hear gunshots. Immediately, all was clear to her, but she chose not to tell her parents so as not to worry them. Instead, she walked along with her mother and father until she reached the tables where the Germans demanded valuables and clothes. The German had already taken her mother’s wedding ring when Prnicheva realized that her mother, no less than she, understood what was happening. Yet only when her mother whispered sharply to her, You don’t look like a Jew, did she try to escape. Such plain communication is rare in such situations, when the human mind labors to deny what is actually happening, and the human spirit strives toward imitation, subordination, and thus extinction. Prnicheva, who had a Russian husband and thus a Russian surname, told a German at a nearby table that she was not Jewish. He told her to wait at one side until the work of the day was complete.

Thus, Dina Prnicheva saw what became of her parents, her sister, and the Jews of Kiev. Having surrendered their valuables and documents, people were forced to strip naked. Then they were driven by threats or shots fired overhead in groups of about ten to the edge of a ravine known as Babi Yar. Many of them were beaten. Prnicheva remembered that people were already bloody as they went to be shot. They had to lie down on their stomachs, on the corpses already beneath them, and wait for the shots to come from above and behind. Then would come the next group. Jews came and died for thirtysix hours.

People were perhaps alike in dying and in death, but each of them was different until that final moment. Each had different preoccupations and pre-sentiments until all was clear and then all was black. Some people died thinking about others rather than themselves, such as the mother of the beautiful fifteenyear-old girl Sara, who begged to be killed at the same time as her daughter. Here there was, even at the end, a thought and a care. That if she saw her daughter shot, she would not see her raped. One naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped in after it and in that way found her death. Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761.

Since the bodies were later exhumed and burned on pyres, and the bones that did not burn crushed and mixed with sand, the count is what remains. At the end of the day, the Germans decided to kill Dina Prenicheva. Whether or not she was Jewish was moot, she had seen too much. In the darkness she was led to the edge of the ravine along with a few other people. She was not forced to undress. She survived in the only way possible in that situation. Just as the shots began, she threw herself into the gorge and then feigned death.” And now I’m going to leave Professor Snyder behind and let Dina Prenicheva tell the rest of her story as she related it to the Russian writer Anatoly Kuznetsov. Quote.

All around and beneath her she could hear strange submerged sounds, groaning, choking and sobbing. Many of the people were not dead yet. The whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living. Some soldiers came out onto the ledge and flashed their torches down on the bodies, firing bullets from their revolvers into any which appeared to be still living. But someone not far from Dina went on groaning as loud as before. Then she heard people walking near her, actually on the bodies. They were Germans who had climbed down and were bending over and taking things from the dead and occasionally firing on those which showed signs of life. Among them was the policeman who had examined her papers and taken her bag. She recognized him by his voice. One SS man caught his foot against Dina and her appearance aroused his suspicions. He shone his torch on her, picked her up and struck her with his fist, but she hung limp and gave no sign of life. He kicked her in the breast with his heavy boot and trod on her right hand so that the bones cracked, but he didn’t use his gun and went off, picking his way across the corpses. A few minutes later she heard a voice calling from above. Demidenko! Come on, start shoveling! There was a clatter of spades and then heavy thuds as the earth and sand landed on the bodies, coming closer and closer until it started falling on Dina herself.

Her whole body was buried under the sand, but she did not move until it began to cover her mouth. She was lying face upwards, breathed in some sand and started to choke, and then, scarcely realizing what she was doing, she started to struggle in a state of uncontrollable panic, quite prepared now to be shot rather than to be buried alive. With her left hand, the good one, she started scraping the sand off herself, scarcely daring to breathe lest she should start coughing. She used what strength she had left to hold the cough back. She began to feel a little easier. Finally, she got herself out from under the earth. Dina’s eyes were full of sand. It was pitch dark and there was the heavy smell of flesh from the mass of fresh corpses.

Dina could just make out the nearest side of the sand pit and started slowly and carefully making her way up the sand pit. Then, she stood up and started making little footholds in it with her left hand. In that way, she pressed close to the side of the pit. She made steps and so raised herself an inch at a time, likely at any moment to fall back into the pit. There was a little bush at the top which she managed to get hold of. With a last desperate effort, she pulled herself up and she scrambled over the edge, and as she did, she heard a whisper which nearly made her jump back, It was a small boy in vest and pants who had crawled out as she had done. He was trembling and shivering all over. Quiet, she hissed at him.

Crawl along behind me. And they crawled away silently, without a sound. Dina Pronechieva survived the horrors of Babi Yar. The young boy who had escaped from the ravine with her called out to her as they sought to leave the area. Dina Pronechieva, who had escaped from the ravine with her, called out to her as they sought to leave the area. He warned her that danger was near. Moten, the young boy’s name, called out to her. Don’t move, lady.

There’s Germans here. The Germans killed him on the spot. But not understanding what he said, she made good her escape. End quote. Now I’m going to play for you a recording of Dina Pronechieva. Now I’m going to play for you a recording of an interview that I found. Now I’m going to play for you a recording of an interview that I found. This is something that the BBC did a while back.

This is something that the BBC did a while back. This is an interview with a man who was… He’s an elderly Jewish man who was interned in several concentration camps as a boy. He’s an elderly Jewish man who was interned in several concentration camps as a boy. His name was Jakob Bresler of Poland. This 16-year-old boy has been in the ghetto at Lodz This 16-year-old boy has been in the ghetto at Lodz and five concentration camps. He’s lost trace of all his family. I am the lost Jakob Bresler.

I am 86 years old right now and going on 87. I am 86 years old right now and going on 87. I grew up in a place called Uniejów, and that’s in Poland, I grew up in a place called Uniejów, and that’s in Poland, not far from the German border. I grew up in a large family, four sisters, one brother, my parents, I grew up in a large family, four sisters, one brother, my parents, and we were 65 first cousins, and I’m the only one who is alive. and we were 65 first cousins, and I’m the only one who is alive. My father was a very intelligent man, very loving but yet strict. very loving but yet strict. In 1939, when the war broke out, I became the sole supporter of my family.

I became the sole supporter of my family. My father was taken away right away. They kept him in jail and they took him away to Poznań. They kept him in jail and they took him away to Poznań. I was separated from my mother and the rest of the family in 1942. I was separated from my mother and the rest of the family in 1942. My mother and two sisters were taken to Chalno, which was an extermination camp. They were the first ones to be gassed in trucks.

Two of my sisters were taken to a camp in Poznań. Two of my sisters were taken to a camp in Poznań. I was sent with my brother to get a lodge. I was sent with my brother to get a lodge. I worked in a factory for two years there. My father was in Poznań. I heard that there is a transport coming with prisoners from Poznań. I heard that there is a transport coming with prisoners from Poznań.

I had a premonition that somehow my father will be among them. I had a premonition that somehow my father will be among them. Sure enough, after a while, I have seen columns of wrecks coming towards me. I have seen columns of wrecks coming towards me. And I ran into them and I asked them, Do you know Chaim Bresler, who is my father? Do you know Chaim Bresler, who is my father? He said no. Then I went on the lines until somebody said, Yes, there is a Chaim Bresler here with us.

Yes, there is a Chaim Bresler here with us. And they pointed me to the direction where he was. And I hardly recognized him And I hardly recognized him because he was… He didn’t look like a person anymore. He was a skeleton. They took him to a prison called Czarnieckiego. And I asked my boss, who had great connections to everybody, I said, I would like to take my father out. And he said, How are you going to feed him?

You can’t get a ration for him. Well, I managed to get him out and he was with us for about four days or so. And then one day I came home from work and there was a note on the table, I have returned to prison because I cannot take away your piece of bread. That you are sharing with me. I was very angry. And I ran to prison and I scolded him and I says, Papa, why did you do that? And he said to me, I don’t want to live anymore. If this is life, he says, I don’t want it.

I don’t want it. But you are young. See that you survive. Those words rang in my ears throughout the concentration camps and that’s why I survived. I wouldn’t give up. I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to tarnish that story with… I didn’t want to tarnish that story with my own voice.

I wanted you to hear an 86-year-old man describing his murdered father 70 years after the fact. To hear his voice. At the end of the war, Yaakov was the only member of his entire extended family still alive. Experiences like this do not leave you. They impose themselves on a life in such a way that they… They set personalities in stone. Stuck and reliving that painful moment again and again and again. And again.

And when enough people share experiences like this, the character of whole peoples crystallize around them. With a new self-understanding and with a new relationship to each other and to the rest of the world. Finally, I want to read you a few diary entries from the diary of an unknown woman, unknown Jewish woman, from the Tarnopol ghetto where many of Galicia’s 500,000 Jews died. Quote 7 April 1943 That interview gets me. Excuse me. 7 April 1943 Before I leave this world, I want to leave behind a few lines to you, my loved ones. When this letter reaches you one day, I myself will no longer be there, nor will any of us. Our end is drawing near.

One feels it. One knows it. Just like the innocent, defenseless Jews already executed we are all condemned to death. In the very near future, it will be our turn. As the small remainder left over from the mass murders. There is no way for us to escape this horrible, ghastly death. At the very beginning, in June 1941, some 5,000 men were killed, among them my husband. After six weeks, following a five-day search between the corpses, I found his body.

Since that day, life has ceased for me. Not even in my girlish dreams could I once have wished for a better and more faithful companion. I was only granted two years and two months of happiness. And now? Tired from so much searching among the bodies, tired from so much searching among the bodies, one was glad to have found his as well. Are there words in which to express these torments? It can be easy for 33,761 corpses to become numbing, especially when it happens over and over and over. But there’s something about reading the diary of a young wife searching among corpses for days, hoping, if you can call it that, hoping to find her beloved husband, something about that that brings you back down into the mud.

This was real. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know it was real. I read about it in school or I have a Jewish friend with a grandparent or maybe you’re Jewish and you had a grandparent. No, no, no. This was real. Okay? Close your eyes and look around you at the field of bodies stacked. Smell them and look at the distraught young wife flipping over rotting bodies, hoping, not hoping.

What do you feel in this kind of a situation? See the distraught young wife flipping over rotting bodies in this field of corpses, one by one, hoping to find her faithful husband that she had married only four months before the German invasion. This was real. The diary continues. Quote, 26 April 1943. I am still alive and I want to describe to you what happened from the 7th to this day. Now then, it is told that everyone’s turn comes up next. Galicia should be totally rid of Jews.

After all, the ghetto is to be liquidated by the 1st of May. During the last days, thousands have been shot. Meeting point was in our camp. Here the human victims are selected. In Petrokov it looks like this. Before the grave, one is stripped naked and forced to kneel down The victims stand in line and await their turn. Moreover, they have to sort the first, the executed, in their graves so that the space is used well and order prevails. The entire procedure does not take long.

In half an hour, the clothes of the executed return to the camp. After the actions, the Jewish council received a bill for 30,000 zloty to pay for used bullets. Why can we not cry? How can one see so much innocent blood flow and say nothing, do nothing, and await the same death oneself? We are compelled to go under so miserably, so pitilessly. Do you think we want to end this way? Die this way? No.

No. Despite all these experiences. The urge for self-preservation has now often become greater. The will to live stronger. The closer death is. It is beyond comprehension. End quote. It was beyond comprehension.

It was. And it remains beyond comprehension today, despite the millions and millions of words that have been written about the Holocaust. You can tell that by the almost religious significance that this event has taken on throughout Western civilization. Or not even almost. It has become a religious symbol. And what I mean by that is that it’s looked upon as something without precedent, without cause. And to even inquire too deeply into precedents or causes will sort of draw suspicion. You know, to look into the details of the symbol in a way that doesn’t have official sanction.

You know, the official rituals of denunciation and purgation. Or if you’re in many European countries, you can actually be jailed under anti-heresy and blasphemy laws. And we don’t call them that, but that’s what they are. The point I’m trying to make is that if you’re a Gentile out there listening in a Western country, you know the power of this symbol, the Holocaust, the power that it has over your own culture and society is astounding. And so try to imagine, and we can’t really, but try to imagine the space that it occupies and the minds and the cultural identities of Jews. And we’re going to come back to this later, but I want to leave you with that for now. If you’re one of my Jewish listeners, I don’t have to tell you, but I have found that even many of my Jewish friends just where this would have been situated in the psychology of the Zionists in Palestine once it became clear exactly what was going on. So let’s return to Palestine.

It’s Tel Aviv, December 1942. The news was coming in now that something was happening to the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And so a group of young men, who had gathered to meet in a meeting hall in Tel Aviv to discuss what they might be able to do to help. As the men argued, about halfway through the meeting, a small thin man in his late 20s wearing the short pants uniform of the Free Polish Army and wearing these kind of little small round thick spectacles on his nose enters the room quietly and sits down in the back. He’s at a loss. Some of them are offering, trying to be helpful, but offering suggestions like taking up offerings to send to Polish Jews. Others of them are wondering whether the British or Soviet governments could be lobbied to focus their efforts more on Poland. And finally this thin man who had arrived late, the man in the Polish uniform decided he’d heard enough and he stood up and he announces to the room that there’s only one thing that any of them can do to help the Jews in Poland.

They must attack the British in Palestine until they either lifted the immigration embargo or else left the country. Because as long as Polish Jews know that they have nowhere to go, there’s no reason for them to attempt to flee Poland. Romanian, Hungarian, and many Jews in other countries in their entirety, and at least a portion of Polish Jewry would manage to escape if only they were given hope that they would have a home waiting for them somewhere. When the meeting broke up, one of the attendees, a young Jew who was serving the British army at the time, asked another who the stranger was who had spoken up. He was the head of Beitar in Poland, the other man told him. He was imprisoned by the Soviets and his name is Begin. Menachem Begin had arrived in Palestine. Begin had taken a very long and circuitous route to finally join his wife and his people in country.

When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, the Soviets made common cause with the Polish government in exile. One of the stipulations of their agreement was that Polish nationals would receive a general amnesty from the Soviets and be released from Soviet prisons. This is how Begin was turned out seven years early from his sentence of hard labor. After that, for several months, he wanders around southern Russia, finally making his way to the home of his sister’s family near the Afghan border. While he’s there, somebody suggests to him that he join this new military regiment which was forming up and heading south where he had recently been freed from Soviet captivity. The General Anders himself had spent two years at the nightmarish, god-awful Lubyanka prison in Moscow. They had uniforms and gear supplied by the British and the Americans, but upon forming up, there were about 40,000 of them, it became quickly clear that the Soviets were either unable or unwilling to feed and supply them. So Anders had a meeting with Stalin to allow this new army of his to make its way south through Persia to link up with the British in either Iraq or Palestine. And so Begin jumped at the chance and enlisted in Anders’ army, marching south and finally arriving in Jerusalem in May 1942, the same month that Weizmann and Ben-Gurion are holding the Biltmore Conference in New York. And it didn’t take long for Begin’s star to rise once he got to Palestine. He was quickly nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Begin refused. He said that he wasn’t yet free from his duties to Anders’ army, which had actually carried him home and he wasn’t going to betray that. I always found that kind of remarkable because it would have been very easy for him to desert and just melt into the Zionist community there. But he said that, a deserter from whatever army is still a deserter and any man who deserted an army that was fighting Hitler would do it dutifully and he used his time off to make connections and network and start to prepare for the coming conflict. Within a few months of his arrival, the Haganah considered him sufficiently dangerous to have him tailed and they opened up a secret file to track his activities.

So he’s being noticed right away. While Begin was limited by his duties and responsibilities to Anders’ army, he sat back and observed as Ben-Gurion returned to Palestine after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April of 1943, the Jewish Agency and other official Zionist institutions went to work on the narrative surrounding the uprising, suppressing the critical role that revisionist fighters had played in the battle and making it seem like it was just an uprising purely by Zionist socialists, that they had orchestrated it and fought this doomed war while two Haganah soldiers were parachuted into Romania from a British plane with the mission to spread propaganda among the Jews there that the labor Zionists had actually gone to rescue the Jews in Poland while the revisionists were standing by and doing nothing. A few months after that, near the end of 1943, another mission was launched behind enemy lines to do something very similar. So this is kind of what’s going on. This is a transition with the Free Polish Army. Finally, Begin receives an official letter granting him a 12-month temporary discharge beginning on January 26, 1944. He accepts command of the Irgun the very same day and just five days after that he takes the Irgun to war with the British Empire. Quote, We are nearing the final stage of the war, Begin announced.

The ceasefire announced at the beginning of World War II has been broken by the British. The rulers of our land did not take loyalty, concessions or sacrifices into account. They have fulfilled and are still moving forward with their plan, the elimination of national Zionism. We shall draw our conclusions fearlessly. No more ceasefire in the land of Israel between the people and the Hebrew youth and the British administration The Irgun began with attacks against British office buildings. They set small explosives around, sabotaged infrastructure, engaged in some arson. Menachem Begin, who was already being watched, was immediately declared an outlaw and was forced underground from that point in early 1944 just to avoid arrest and the 10,000 pound bounty that the British had offered for his capture. 1944, 10,000 British pounds, it’s not a tiny amount of money today, it’s a lot of money back then.

So it gives you an idea of how much of a threat they saw Begin as. Underground, he took on a series of successive disguises, first as a law student and then as a rabbi and then as a doctor, moving around from safe house to safe house with his wife and their young son that they now had, directing the activities of the Irgun from these safe houses. So you see in these insurgencies against the British a familiar pattern that very often happens in these kind of asymmetric insurgencies emerges where the various resistance groups will kind of get locked into this cycle of one-upsmanship in an effort to maintain their credibility and relevance among the supporters for whom they’re really all competing. We’ve seen this to a degree in the war in Iraq and Syria right now. It’s toward the end of 2016 as I record this. Syria with ISIS and other Al-Qaeda affiliated groups where they kind of get into this cycle of one-upsmanship. They’re both competing for followers and supporters and so they both have to show that they’re the ones who can hurt the enemy. They’re the ones who have the most guts, whatever it is.

And so in 1944 the Irgun and the Stern Gang find themselves in one of these spirals. And then in November of that year, 1944, the Stern Gang takes the game that they’ve always prepared for. The gang sends two young men to Cairo, Egypt, to follow and learn the routine of Lord Moyne, the British foreign minister in the region, the highest British official resident in the Middle East, responsible for administering all British holdings in that part of the world. In the early afternoon of November 6, 1944, they stood watch outside his residence and when Moyne arrived home, the two Zionists drew their pistols from both Moyne and the driver in his car. There was no plan for getting these two young men out of Cairo so it was essentially a suicide operation. While the Stern Gang, including its leader, Begin’s old friend Yitzhak Shamir, somebody he had known back in Poland, celebrated the assassination, most of the Yishuv, including Begin, were outraged or at least considered it because they knew that this had taken things way too far. Just earlier that year, earlier in 1944, Ben-Gurion had finally, after a couple years of trying, had finally convinced the British to arm and train specifically Jewish military units. Up until this point, they were taking Zionists and other Jews into the British army if they wanted to join.

Ben-Gurion and Weizmann had been trying to get them possibly to aid in the war effort but there wasn’t that much to do in Palestine and so these were weapons and supplies that were being put aside for the war that Ben-Gurion anticipated was going to come with the Arabs eventually. They had just achieved this and now Lord Moyne’s murder had put all that at risk. Lord Moyne was a very close personal friend of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, who took the murder very hard. Churchill, I mean, in addition to losing a close friend, he also lost a close aide because more than almost anybody else, he had been an almost subservient ally to the Zionists for two decades really. After this happened, Churchill warned, quote, If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins’ pistols and our labors for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider this decision, quote. Even Begin knew that this was a mistake, that it had set the movement back and so he refrained from doing something he would consistently do in future years. He didn’t honor the killers as Jewish soldiers or anything like that. He didn’t call for revenge or reprisals after they were eventually executed by hanging several months later.

He knew it was a mistake but Ben-Gurion sees an opportunity here to crush the Irgun and the Stern gang and to strangle Begin in the cradle once and for all and he’s not going to let it pass. And so working with the British, Ben-Gurion unleashes the Haganah against the Irgun and the Stern gang, raiding their hideouts, arresting their members, handing them over to the Nazis. Handing them over to the British authorities, sabotaging their operations, confiscating their weapons and their materials. This period between November 1944 and March 1945 became known as the season, as in the hunting season. And throughout that period, Jews were informing on and turning in other Jews to the British, something that Begin found revolting and shameful. Some people were calling on him to do it and the Stern gang did engage in some of it but he held the Irgun back from it. Here he wrote about this, he said, quote, We said there would be no civil war but in fact, throughout the country, a one-sided civil war raged, end quote. The hunting season came to an end in March 1945 and in the end it wasn’t anything internal design as politics, but external political events that brought an end to the conflict between Ben-Gurion’s faction, Begin’s Irgun and Yitzhak Samir’s Stern gang.

April 1945, of course, marked the Germans’ final collapse and the war in Europe was over. Ben-Gurion’s order had been to fight the white paper as if there were no war and to help the British fight the war as if there were no white paper. Well, now there was no war, but there was still a white paper. And that hard limit of 75,000 total Jewish immigrants that the British were going to allow had been all but exhausted. In July, Clement Attlee’s Labor government won a landslide victory over Winston Churchill and took power. Attlee quickly appoints the gruff trade union leader, Ernest Bevin, who had very little patience for the Zionist machinations, as his foreign secretary. In an interview later on, Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, explained that he didn’t see much more that the British could really accomplish in Palestine. Quote, The interests of Arab and Jew in Palestine were really quite irreconcilable.

It’s true the Arabs had a lot of land and not much development, and you might think that an Arab struggling to keep alive on a bare strip of land would jump at the chance of going to Iraq or somewhere else where there was more opportunity for a better life. But oh no. One patch of desert doesn’t look very different from another patch of desert, but that was the one they wanted, their own traditional peace. Even the Bedouins circle in the same area. They have this attachment to one place and nothing else will do. End quote. Contrary to the Zionist demands, Attlee’s foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, favored the establishment of a single binational state that should be governed jointly by both Jews and Arabs together, something that the British had pushed for for a long time, really until the mid-30s, when they started talking about partition and breaking it up. Bevin sympathized with the Arabs’ plight.

He was not inclined to once again betray British promises to the Palestinians by raising the immigration quotas, especially as attempts to defy those quotas continued and even picked up pace after the war. Menachem Begin’s contention that the British were the real obstacle blocking the Zionist goal of a Jewish ethnostate was becoming more difficult for Ben-Gurion to deny. When the war ended, Europe is a shambles. It’s absolutely destroyed. People have been deported from one side of Europe to the other to work in camps. It’s just an absolute nightmare. Cities are destroyed and Europe is pockmarked with these camps for people who had been displaced or made homeless by the war. Millions and millions and millions of people.

Germany had been divided up into American, British, Soviet, and French zones of occupation. Each of those managed the displaced persons camps that were under their control, but the United Nations, which had been formed in October of 1945, sent the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, the UNRRA, I’ll call them UNRRA. I don’t know if anybody else has called them that, but I’m going to do it. Sent UNRRA to coordinate the efforts at repatriation and resettlement of these refugees, these displaced persons. And very quickly the question of what to do with the Jews was raised. A British Lieutenant General, Sir Frederick Morgan, was pulled off of active military duty to lead the UNRRA, the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, and he wrote about his time there in this first difficulty of answering the question about what to do with Jews. He wrote, quote, He’s writing this a few years later after Israel was founded. As suitable to Jews who up until now had been Russians, Poles, Balts, or citizens of other European countries.

There was not, there never could be, there were those who intended that there never should be, any solution. The whole business of illegally transferring Jews through Europe to Palestine was represented as being the spontaneous surge of a tortured and persecuted people toward their long lost homeland. I fancy that, in reality, there were few among the travelers who, of their own free will, would have gone anywhere else than to the USA. To the world at large, the whole operation was presented as a spontaneous surge of the survivors of hideous oppression towards the peace and safety of the homeland so long and so wickedly denied to them. Seen from among the participants, it did not quite look like that. Except for a few ardent devotees, with the light of fanaticism in their eye, I was never able to discover any great enthusiasm for the cause among the many to whom I spoke. In the camps, all Jews were subjected to ingenious and ceaseless Zionist propaganda.” The Jewish agency under David Ben-Gurion is acting under that same impulse that Ben-Gurion exhibited in the passages earlier in the 1930s, when he saw any possible alternative other than Palestine for Jews who were trying to flee Germany as a threat to the Zionist program. And so now, for these displaced persons who were rotting in these camps, waiting for somewhere to go, the Jewish agency rejected all other possible solutions.

Anything other than Palestine was rejected, and anybody who suggested anything other than Palestine was attacked by their allies in the press. From his vantage point, Lieutenant General Morgan got a privileged view of how determined and dynamic and sometimes ruthless the Zionists could be during this period. They had two related angles of attack. First, they used their powerful and extensive network of allies around the world to push propaganda, especially in the United States, insisting that the British were no longer fit to manage their situation or to find a solution in Palestine. And second, that the only possible answer regarding what to do with Europe’s Jews was to send them to Palestine. Like many people over the years who would be perceived as being in the Zionist way, Lieutenant General Morgan was chewed up and spit out during his brief time as the head of UNRRA. He continues, quote, I was, I suppose I should say, unlucky in that I had, as it were, grown up over the past few years in the general international situation that now in 1945 existed throughout Europe. I was, moreover, by virtue of my cloth and calling, in touch with the elaborate information-gathering network that had been built up through the war so recently ended, which enabled me to build up in my mind’s eye a picture of events taking place around me that had very little appeal. All who have experienced it know the loneliness of high command, even when, as in the Orthodox case, one is surrounded by a trusting and trusty staff. Here and now there was nothing of the sort, hardly an individual with whom one could trust information. On the contrary, there were many in my immediate entourage who could not fail to be actively implicated in what was nothing short of a skillful campaign of anti-British aggression on the part of Zion. There were several UNRRA camps exclusively for Jewish DPs, displaced persons, and refugees, of which it was never possible to get any accurate census. Their populations fluctuated by no perceptible system. These Jewish camps were with one notable exception in the US zone of occupation, but the one camp in the British zone was near the site of the notorious Nazi horror camp at Belsen. This latter had been bulldozed out of existence as soon as its rescued survivors had been removed. The accommodation given to Jewish DPs and refugees consisted of first-class German army barracks as good as any in Europe, but, of course, the name Belsen had tremendous propaganda value.

When bogus complaints making play with the name became too insistent, the offer was made by General Templer, on behalf of the British commander-in-chief, of any alternative housing the inmates might care to select in all the British zone. The offer was at once refused, was moreover distorted into an attempt to inflict further hardship on these unlucky people. So Belsen remained for years as a staging post on the Zionist migration route, and further was built up as the most efficient center of every other form of illegal traffic with ramifications throughout Europe and many other parts of the world. The camp at Zeilsheim, near Frankfurt, was used skillfully to reinforce points of Zionist propaganda of which the general object seemed to be to indicate to the world that those Jews who had just survived the Nazi terror were now being treated little, if any better, by the Western conquerors who were now doing their utmost best for all, including Jews. If the propaganda at the moment alleged that Jewish DPs were being overcrowded in their camps, then the inspection at Zeilsheim would be invited and it would be found to be full to the rooftops. If the cry was one of starvation, the cookhouses at Zeilsheim would be found empty. If clothing were said to be short, then the Zeilsheim population would be found in shivering rags, and so forth, with consummate skill.” And General Morgan, as you read through all of his writings, you can tell he resents all this since he’s the one that’s having to deal with it, but there’s also some begrudging respect for the fact that the Zionists are very, very good at this stuff. Very early in his tenure, and he was only there in 1945 and 1946, but early in his tenure he was obliged to give a press conference and he had no idea what he was walking into.

Even though he was in charge of many millions of displaced persons, Jews and non-Jews, and the majority were not Jews, he wrote, “…the very skillful questioning concerned itself solely with the Zionist problem, and I found myself giving the result of my several weeks of investigation of the business, summing it up by saying that in my view we were witnessing an admirably organized second exodus, this time from Europe.” As I afterwards discovered, this phrase had been used earlier in American papers by various of their correspondents. It was later used again as a result of official inquiries by the British Foreign Office and others, but its use by me, here and now, apparently was the stuff of which journalistic scoops are made. There was an ugly rush from the room to get the red-hot words on the way to the presses, whereafter two or three of the correspondents came back to assure me that if, as a result of what they had done, I found myself in any trouble, they would be only too delighted to help me, all of which, I must confess, puzzled me considerably. If in any doubt, the principle was, one should tell the truth. I had told the truth as I saw it. The devil had surely been shamed. But that was not how others saw it at all. Toward evening, the London headquarters of UNRWA came on the telephone in a mixed atmosphere of sorrow, anger, and panic, to ask me just what I had been at.

I did my best to administer calm, but when there was read out to me a selection of the headlines in the London evening papers, I must admit that there did seem grounds for a certain unquiet. And when, in a few hours, the New York headlines appeared, it was obvious that my childlike endeavor to set the record straight had been used as the detonator to set off an explosion of some magnitude that must have been carefully prepared. The mildest of my detractors labeled me as simply brazenly anti-Semitic. There was no upper limit to the villainy of which I was accused, to the extent that the great comedian, who entertained us in our cinemas for so many years under the name of Eddie Cantor, gave me his biggest laugh ever by announcing in a full-page spread in the New York Times that, in his opinion, I was no less than a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.” David Ben-Gurion later wrote that he was convinced that the main arena for our efforts outside Palestine was not Britain, but America. Aside from the yeshiva itself, we had no more effective tool at our disposal than the American Jewish community. America was not touched by the war, while Europe, including Britain, were either in ruins or bankrupt or both. Either way, the United States was able to exercise a great deal of influence over Britain and the continent by providing or withholding relief and rebuilding funds. The Zionists had realized that America was much easier to manipulate than Great Britain when it came to foreign policy.

Britain had been on the world stage for centuries and had been exercising complicated high foreign policy since long before they had anything truly resembling electoral politics. As a result, the British foreign policy establishment was much freer to make decisions and act than its U.S. counterpart. The U.S. had been an isolationist republic until very recently at this time, and it was much easier to use U.S. domestic politics to dominate questions of foreign policy. The Zionists mobilized the Jewish American community to act politically on their behalf with tremendous energy and zeal. As in Britain previously, allies of the Zionists used their wealth and influence to woo American politicians, and also as in Britain, they opened up this gulf of resentment between the American deep state and the American politicians who held final authority over those people.

The deep state, those persistent networks and bureaucrats that work at the State Department, the Defense Department, the intelligence agencies, people who don’t have to worry about elections, who hang around from administration to administration for 30 years or whatever, these are people who had to keep working on the same problems over the years as politicians and their promises come and go. This deep state was then and would remain for decades at odds with the politicians who could actually be threatened or bought off. This was the same situation that they had had in Britain, where you’ve had the military and many of these cabinet offices dealing with foreign policy, who always advocated for a more balanced approach toward the claims of the Jews and the Arabs, but they had to deal with the politicians who had never met an Arab and definitely didn’t have to worry about losing any of their votes, while they were meanwhile being beset in their offices and on their telephone lines and in the newspapers and everywhere else they looked by Jewish advocates offering or threatening to withdraw political support. The difference, again, between the two countries is that the American foreign policy establishment has much less independence. Britain is very similar to us today, but back then it was a little bit different. The idea that the whims of the British public should be dictating how many Jews the British should be letting into Palestine, rather than the decision being made by the leaders and generals and commissions that had actually been working on the issue, that was not a huge part of British thinking until very recently. In the United States, on the other hand, domestic and foreign politics have always been enmeshed. Think of today, we’ve been doing business with brutal dictators all over the world for years and years and years, and yet we maintained our embargo against Cuba for decades after the Soviet Union collapsed.

We didn’t do that for some reason related to grand strategy. We did that because 7% of Florida’s population is Cuban. Many of those Cubans came here as refugees and hate the Castro regime down to their bone marrow and would vote against any president who tried to ease relations between the two countries, and Florida has been one of the most important swing states in presidential elections for years. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing special, no grand strategy involved. It’s that simple. You can do that in the U.S. If all those Cubans had, for one reason or another, settled in California or Tennessee instead of Florida, or some other state that was either always red or always blue and never played an important role in deciding elections, we’d have been vacationing in Havana in the 1990s.

But what are you going to do? We’ve got a system of government that was designed for a geographically isolated, sparsely populated, mostly agrarian society, and we’re trying to run a global empire with it now. So there’s bound to be some glitches, I guess, and this is one of them. And the Zionists are ready at this point to really take advantage of that glitch. The British Prime Minister, again, Clement Attlee, in that same interview taken a little bit later that I quoted before, he was asked how difficult it was at the time to get the Americans under President Truman to see the British point of view. Attlee replied to the question, quote, There’s no Arab vote in America, but there’s a very heavy Jewish vote, and the Americans are always having elections. There was naturally a great deal of sentiment and very powerful lobbies and, of course, immense sympathy, which we shared for the Jews who had been ousted from Europe. The Americans thought we should introduce 100,000 Jews into Palestine right away without the slightest consideration for the effect on the Arabs.

They had no obligations there. We had. The President went completely against the advice of his own State Department and his own military people. The State Department would tell us one thing, and then the President would come back with the exact opposite. The State Department’s view was very close to ours. They had to think internationally, but most of the politicians were influenced by voting considerations. Thus, according to the published diaries of Mr. James Forrestal, U.S.

Secretary of Defense, he and other U.S. officials met to discuss the situation arising from the fact that Jews are injecting vigorous and active propaganda to force the President’s hand with reference to the immediate immigration of Jews into Palestine. Five weeks after he recorded that, the Postmaster General and one of the chief organizers of the Democratic Party machine had raised at a Cabinet lunch the question of the President making an early statement demanding the entrance of 150,000 Jews into Palestine. This, he said, would have a very great influence and great effect on the raising of funds for the Democratic National Committee. He added that very large sums were obtained a year ago from Jewish contributors, and they would be influenced in either giving or withholding by what the President did on Palestine. Despite the growing pressure from the United States and from their own press and voting base, because things are starting to change politically in Britain as well, Prime Minister Attlee and Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin held their line for now. And so the Zionists in Palestine took their game to the next level. Putting their differences aside, in October 1945, the Haganah, the Irgun, and the Stern Gang came together and signed an agreement to coordinate offensive operations against the British, with the Irgun and the Stern Gang operating under the overall command of the Haganah, which would have veto authority over all operations.

So this is no longer something I should make clear here, because things have kind of been evolving and I haven’t taken a lot of periods to just sort of stop and take stock of the situation. This is no longer just a ragtag group of settlement watchmen with old rifles and rusty revolvers. Ben-Gurion has organized the Yishuv into a society with military power and institutions. A committee of inquiry that was sent by the British and the Americans to look into the situation right around this time opened the report that it eventually produced by stating, ”…Palestine is an armed camp. We saw signs of this almost as soon as we crossed the frontier and we became more and more aware of the tense atmosphere each day. Many buildings have barbed wire and other defenses. We ourselves were closely guarded by armed police, and often escorted by armored cars. It is obvious that very considerable military forces and a large number of police are kept in Palestine.

The police are armed, they are conspicuous everywhere, and throughout the country there are substantially built police barracks.” Why are they so concerned? It was not because of the Arabs. The Arabs had been obliterated by the British from 36 to 39 and had not been really all that much trouble ever since. In the next paragraph the report says, “…we do not think that the conditions in Palestine since the mandate have been fully appreciated throughout the world. It will be seen that up to the year 1939 the Jews exercised very great restraint. It is in recent years that the threat to law and order has come from them.” Yeah, okay, but how much of a threat are we talking about? How much of a threat can they really be? Well, the report goes on to list examples of heavy weapons, and explosives, and landmines, and personal firearms, and ammunition found in the various raids.

The committee found military training camps around Palestine with Jews who had come from all over the country for specialized training. It talks about the various military organizations and mentions that the Haganah at this time had a static militia of 40,000 personnel, another field army trained in mobile operations of another 16,000, and a full-time mobile force of crack troops called the Pamak which was another 3,000 to 6,000 men depending on what was going on. In addition to that, the strength of the Irgun was estimated at between 3,000 and 5,000, much smaller than the Haganah but very effective, and the Stern Gang, again, was 2,000 to 3,000, but the power of these groups was amplified by the fanaticism of their members and their willingness to do almost anything, to do what the Haganah often balked at. Starting in the autumn of 1945, these groups combined their forces and went to work to drive the British the hell out of their country. Rather than targeting specific British officials or personnel now, in the early stages of their cooperation, the three groups were going after critical infrastructure and control points. In one single operation, to give you an idea of how competent and scaled they are at this point, in one operation carried out in a single night in November 1945, about 1,000 Jewish terrorists launched attacks on railroad infrastructure all over the country. They blew up over 150 critical nodes in the railway system. That same night, they blew up three British guard boats.

They blew up the very heavily trafficked Lida railway station, blew up several offices and train cars and engines all over the country. A few months later, in June 1946, the Haganah launched its attacks on all 11 of the major bridges connecting Palestine and neighboring states, completely destroying 10 and severely damaging the 11th. The British are in a very tough spot here. The Zionists are now in open war against them. But in the shadow of the Second World War, and with the whole world’s eyes on Palestine and its Jews, and with the Zionists controlling this extremely effective propaganda network around the world, the British were very limited in what they could do to retaliate, and the Zionists knew that. The British had been here dealing with this situation for decades, so they knew the history of it, they knew what had been going on, but it had only come to the attention of most of the world recently, and only as a possible solution for the Jewish refugees of Europe. That’s the only reason people around the world are even paying attention to Palestine right now. They woke up to it in 1945.

Officially, the Zionist leadership, of course, denounced the terror campaign as the actions of a few rogue elements, but the British knew better. The Second World War may have been won on the strength of British code-breaking, as much as Soviet manpower or American industry, so you might have thought that the Zionists would have been a little more careful with their communications protocols, but British cryptographers had cracked the code that the Jewish agency was using for its secure communications, and so the Brits knew that the terrorism was being ordered and directed from the highest levels of Zionist leadership. The British wanted to present that evidence to the Americans and other allies to demonstrate that the problems in Palestine were a little bit more complicated than everybody realized, but they didn’t want to give away the fact that they had cracked the codes by bringing the intelligence directly to them. The executive branch of the American government was crawling with both Zionist and Jewish communist spies at this time, so the British were certain that the information would eventually get back to the Zionists if they shared it with the Americans, and so the British needed hard evidence, and they needed to send a message. And so on Saturday, June 29, 1946, the British launched Operation Agatha, a massive sweep and raid of Zionist offices and hideouts and settlements throughout Palestine. Operation Agatha, which was called the Black Sabbath by the Zionists, it was on a Saturday, involved somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,000 British personnel, sometimes you see as much as 25,000, 17 is the most common I’ve seen, and nearly 3,000 Zionists were arrested and held. Crate after crate and box after box of documents were seized from the various hideouts and offices, including the actual cooperation agreement that had been signed by the leaders of the Zionist militias. The goal of the British here was twofold. First, to change the political landscape by catching the mainstream Zionist leadership red-handed, endorsing and directing these acts of terror. Hopefully, then forcing a negotiated political settlement with some of the more moderate Zionist leaders like Chaim Weizmann. And then second, to get the more militant Zionist leaders out of action and off the street long enough for that to actually happen. Unfortunately for the British plans, the most important leaders, including Ben-Gurion, Begin, and the leader of the Stern Gang, Yitzhak Shamir, they all slipped the dragnet. But the revisionist and labor leadership were in a panic. The British were already beginning to go through the mountains of documents that they had seized, and the Zionists believed that there was enough evidence for the British to arrest and imprison most of the high leadership of the Yishuv, and even to execute several of them, including a future prime minister, Golda Meir. And so Ben-Gurion and the mainstream Yishuv leadership are scrambling for some kind of a solution. Some people were suggesting maybe asking highly placed Jews in the American government to lobby the president, President Truman at this point, to intercede on their behalf.

New York back then was an important swing state in the 1948 election. Hard to imagine that today, but it was an important swing state in the upcoming 1948 election. And Jewish votes and Jewish money was thought to be critical for re-electing President Truman. But there were doubts whether this would actually have the intended effect because, you know, I mentioned a little bit earlier, American Jews had been more inclined toward achieving the Zionist goal through more peaceful means, and they were kind of in denial about Yishuv leadership having anything to do with what was going on. And many of them had only relatively recently, with the advent of Hitler, who is now out of the picture, kind of come over to the understanding outlined in the Biltmore program, that Palestine should be the exclusive home of the Jews alone. And so if they were confronted with evidence that they had been financing and supporting terrorists against America’s second World War ally, Britain, the Yishuv leadership might lose the confidence of the American Zionists, never mind the American government. And then finally, just cutting through that Gordian knot, Menachem Begin spoke up again. Why don’t we just attack the British where they live?

The documents are being kept at the British headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Why not just attack the hotel and destroy the documents? Just blow the place up? It was a sign of how desperate the Zionists were at this point, that the Haganah quickly agreed to work jointly with the Irgun and the Stern Gang on such a brazen act of war against the British government, who, you know, I mean, whatever else they had or had not done, was the only reason that the Zionist project was remotely within reach. Despite having their high officials targeted for assassination, despite expensive critical infrastructure being sabotaged, even during the war against the Nazis, despite the Zionist actions bringing down upon Britain the hatred of the Arab states with whom Britain had worked for so long to try to cultivate positive relationships, despite all this, the British were still protecting Jewish settlements, and they had still crushed the Arab revolt to make Palestine safe for Zionist settlement. But at this point, the Zionists are desperate, and so all of that is out the window. If the British brought forth the evidence that they would inevitably find in those seized documents, Jewish money and influence in Britain and the United States might be enough to salvage the Zionist movement, but it was not going to be enough to save the current crop of leaders. If they were going to be the ones to lead this future Jewish state, they had to act now.

On July 1st, 1946, the head of the Haganah sent Menachem Begin a secret note authorizing the bombing of the King David Hotel. The operation itself was to be carried out by the Irgun, with diversionary and supporting actions being taken by the Sturmgang. Begin immediately sent his men into action. At first, they sent in undercover teams to case the building and learn its vulnerabilities. And when they did, they learned that the entire south wing, part of which contained the offices out of which the British were operating, was supported by four large concrete pillars in a basement nightclub. Security was tight for obvious reasons relative to other locations, but they learned that the hotel received milk deliveries from Jewish and Arab suppliers, and so they decided that a team of Irgun men would enter the building disguised as milk deliverers and plant 500 pounds of high explosives in milk canisters to take out the pillars and destroy the entire south wing. The operation was supposed to go down on July 19th, but on July 17th, the Haganah’s leader at the time, Moshe Sneh, who had planned the attack, requested a delay and didn’t provide a reason to Begin. What he didn’t tell him was that Haganah’s leaders and Weizmann was threatening to resign publicly as the president of the World Zionist Organization if the Haganah didn’t cease its terror campaign against the British.

Two days later, Moshe Sneh requested of Begin another delay, hoping this time to fly to Paris to meet with Ben-Gurion and to convince him to speak with Weizmann and either get him to change his mind or else just throw his public weight behind the attack and kind of overrule Weizmann. Begin didn’t know anything about any of this. He wasn’t given a reason again, but he agreed one more time to a delay, fearing that every day that passed was going to give the British informants time to catch on, putting his men and the operation in danger. And so he told him he wasn’t going to delay it again, and he gave Moshe Sneh and the Haganah three days to get ready. As the July 22nd deadline approached, Moshe Sneh asked for another delay, but this time Begin didn’t even respond. He was tired of what he saw as the labor Zionist political maneuvering and just kvetching, and he was tired of their cowardice, frankly. So he and the Stern Gang were going to go forward with the operation themselves, his men bombing the hotel and the Stern Gang blowing up the nearby David Brothers building a few minutes later. July 22nd, 1946 comes along.

Seven large milk jugs filled with explosives were set with a 35-minute timer in that basement. At the very last moment, the Stern Gang was caught out of position, and so it aborted its own operation. And now Menachem Begin is out there on the corner, completely on his own, his co-conspirators having gotten cold feet and abandoned him for what would, in just a few minutes, become the largest terrorist attack in the history of the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in Palestine to this day. A little after 12 noon, the bombs exploded, creating a blast equivalent to a direct hit by a 500-kilogram bomb dropped from the air. The entire south wing of the building was destroyed, and 91 people were killed, including 41 Arabs, 28 British citizens, 17 Jews, and four others. Through Jewish agency propaganda organs, David Ben-Gurion insisted that his people had no knowledge of the attacks. They knew nothing about it. They denounced it as a dastardly crime committed by a gang of desperados. Very convenient. Menachem Begin was on the hook as being fully responsible for blowing up the British headquarters. But despite his own anger and frustration over Ben-Gurion’s mendacity, he understood the damage that would be done to the Zionist movement if the official Zionist institutions were fingered for the attack. So instead of denouncing Ben-Gurion as a liar and going public with the fact that the attack had been planned by the leader of the Haganah himself, Begin claimed full responsibility for everything that had happened. And the Jewish agency was happy to let him do it. The British, I mean, you can imagine the British. They practically had blood running from their eyes. Especially the military men on the ground in the country.

I mean, you know, this is a British empire that if this were anywhere else, just ask the people of India, ask the Boers, ask people in British colonies all over the world. I mean, whole cities would have been destroyed over this. But this is a unique situation. They’ve got a lot of eyes on them and they’re going to be they can’t do that. But they are very pissed. The commanding general of the British forces in Palestine said that he was, quote, determined that the Jews should be punished and made aware of our feelings of contempt and disgust at their behavior. And he dismissed the hypocritical sympathy expressed by their leaders and representative bodies and their protestations that they were not responsible. He even commented that he was so free of responsibility to return to his wife in Britain that he would return to Palestine himself to personally help the Arabs fight to free themselves from their Zionist scourge, as he put it.

And many other British soldiers and high officials felt the same way. Over the next several months, the British made several arrests and tried to reassert their authority in Palestine, but they were kept on a very tight leash by a political leadership to have British soldiers arresting and sentencing and fighting Jews just a year after Hitler had been defeated in Europe. Prime Minister Clement Attlee wrote to the U.S. President Harry Truman in the weeks after the bombing, saying, I’m sure you will agree that the inhuman crime committed in Jerusalem on 22 July calls for the strongest action against terrorism, but having regard to the sufferings of the innocent Jewish victims of Nazism, this should not deter us from attacking Palestine with the least possible delay. And you can note a little tone in there, because more than ever, the British at this point are starting to just look for a way to wash their hands of this nightmare. And so after this, although the official cooperation between the Irgun and the Stern Gang in the Haganah had temporarily ended, none of the three groups let up on the British. A few months after the bombing, the Stern Gang set up a bomb station mining nearby city streets to kill and maim any first responders who showed up. The Stern Gang attempted to kill the British commanding general near his house, leaving a baby carriage concealing a bomb for him to find.

That attempt failed, but the British were losing about two soldiers every single day on average, while being forbidden by a sensitive civilian government You know, these were the people who had just taken out 10% of the military-age male Arabs in the country for far, far, far less than what they were suffering right now at the hands of the Zionists. In fact, an Arab leader at the time pointed out that if the British had followed the same policy they had followed toward the Arabs during the revolt for the King David Hotel bombing, it would have been followed by the total destruction to avoid confrontation, but it was not going to be that simple for them. Oh no. Three months after the King David bombing, in October 1946, an Irgun cell based in Italy blew up the British embassy in Rome, destroying half the building. An article a few years ago in Foreign Policy magazine talks about this period. Quote, In the wake of the bombing the Irgun and Stern Gang began operations outside Palestine, including a series of sabotage attacks on British military transportation routes in occupied Germany. In March 1947, an Irgun operative left a bomb at the Colonial Club near St. Martins Lane in the heart of London, which blew out the club’s windows and doors, injuring several servicemen.

The following month, a female Irgun agent left an enormous bomb consisting of 24 sticks of explosives in the air. The head of Metropolitan Police Special Branch, Leonard Burt, estimated that if it had gone off it would have caused fatalities on a comparable scale to the King David hotel bombing, but this time in the heart of Whitehall. At about the same time, several prominent British politicians and public figures connected with Palestine received death threats from the Stern Gang at their homes and offices. Some of those in the first wave reached their targets, but they did not result in any casualties. Sir Stafford Cripps was only saved by the quick thinking of his secretary, who became suspicious of a package whose contents seemed to fizz and placed it in a bucket of water. The deputy leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Anthony Eden, carried a letter bomb around with him for an entire day in his briefcase, thinking it was a Whitehall circular that could wait until the evening to be read, and only realized what it was when he read it, end quote. So now, while the Americans are still shaking off the post-World War celebration hangover, the British are getting whacked all over the world by Zionist terrorists. The Arabs again, the Arabs are largely pacified, as David Ben-Gurion later on wrote, said that from 1946 to 1947 there were scarcely any Arab attacks on the Yishuv.

And so the Arabs are largely pacified, which means that the hatred of the British, especially the British officials and soldiers on the ground, is being pulled purely in the direction of the Zionists now. But the people who are attacking the British are not worried about British hatred anymore. They are at war. As Ben-Achim Begin said when he declared it, a war to the end. The British are not at war. The British are trying to figure out the British are trying to avoid the perception that they’re at war with the Zionists or with the Jews. Try to remember for context here, it’s something that I always have to remind myself of. British voters have been focused on the war in Europe for the last say seven, eight years at this point.

They’re focused on the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and communism the decade before that. So the last 16, 17 years or so, they’ve not been paying attention to this. You’ve got an entirely new generation of British voters who don’t really remember how they got to Palestine or what they’re doing there. Remember the Balfour Declaration was 30 years ago. Palestine’s a minor issue to most British citizens who weren’t Jewish. And what people did hear about it was mostly sanitized propaganda from Zionist-friendly news outlets like The Guardian. But with the war in Europe over and hundreds of thousands of Jews languishing in these displaced persons camps, the British people are opening up their newspapers every day to learn about another dead soldier or another terror attack carried out against them by Jews who say they’re just fighting to free their homeland from occupation, from British occupation. The British had to try to fight back against this propaganda.

And so to do that, the British had to tell the Jewish people and they’re not even fighting against a rogue Jewish militia, but that they’re just fighting against common criminals. This is a propaganda war we fight to this day with all the effort we put in to emphasize that the war on terror is not a war on Islam. In fact, it has nothing to do with Islam. What’s Islam? I never heard of it, but it sure sounds peaceful. This is something we deal with today. As silly as it gets, it’s one of those things that seems it’s really the ritual effort that matters. And that’s the reason we do it.

It gives the people on the other side who are not inclined to fight a reason not to fight, an excuse not to fight. And I think of something like the Cuban Missile Crisis, although obviously that’s a much larger scale, but you’ve got two leaders, Kennedy and Khrushchev, where both of them are looking for a way out that does not involve a nuclear war, and both had internal political reasons that made it practically impossible for them to back down without saving face. To a degree, and I’m not sure how perfect this metaphor is, to be honest with you, but this analogy is, but to a degree that was the position of the mainstream Yishuv leadership under Ben-Gurion and the British government. Ben-Gurion didn’t want to completely alienate the British government, let alone provoke a real response militarily. He definitely didn’t want that. But the British government knew that coming into a real conflict against the Zionist mainstream leadership would have them very quickly denounced in the press and by the Americans as making war on the people who just went through the Holocaust. And in 1947, you don’t want to be that guy, right? And so both of them, they’re in this position where they don’t want to back down, but neither of them really, the mainstream Yishuv leadership doesn’t want an open confrontation with the British, you do not, you do not wait for an occupier to leave your country.

Not if sovereignty means anything, not if legitimacy means anything. You do not wait for an occupier to leave your country. You drive him out. If he’s still busy trying to decide what to do, you make the decision for him. If he’s already walking out, then you make him fucking run. And so Begin and Ergun, as well as the Stern gang, and even elements of the Haganah who now feel pressured by the pace that’s going to be set by these other two groups, they stepped up their attacks. When the British caught Zionist terrorists red-handed, they would punish them, but those who were in prison would become political prisoners, object to propaganda. Those who were hanged became martyrs.

During this period, over these couple of years, the British hanged 12 Jewish terrorists, and most of them went to the gallows singing the Beitar and Zionist anthems. In one operation, Menachem Begin took three dozen fighters and raided the largest British military base in the country. In fact, it was the British military headquarters in the Middle East, in Gaza. They overwhelmed the base defenses and raided the armory for weapons and ammunition, but two of Begin’s Ergun fighters were captured and sentenced to death. Now, the two men said that they didn’t recognize the jurisdiction of British courts or British law in their country, and so they refused to petition for clemency. You see that, at this point, the labor Zionists, the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion, Weizmann, and the rest, they could keep negotiating. That’s fine. Great guys, we’re with you.

Keep negotiating. We hope it goes out. We hope it goes well. But the revisionists are not negotiating anymore. They are not negotiating. You don’t negotiate with someone whose soldiers are on your soil. Your presence here is not under negotiation. Just get out.

It’s not your country. It’s our country. Get out! That’s where Begin’s at. This is a question of sovereignty. If it means anything, and that meant that he is not about to let two of his soldiers and two of his countrymen be hanged by a foreign power in his country. And so Menachem Begin took to the airwaves on the designated Irgun radio station and told the British in very plain terms, do not hang the captured soldiers. If you do, we shall answer gallows with gallows.

A few days later, they kidnapped five British military officers. And after a few more days of intense negotiations, the British Empire backed down. They commuted the sentences of the two men. Now, this might have seemed like an unfortunate but necessary political maneuver by people high enough up the totem pole in the British government. But it is exactly the kind of thing that drives soldiers and security forces and police officers and the people on the ground expected to deal with a situation like this. Absolutely insane. And so a little bit later, when these British security forces captured a young Irgun fighter who was robbing a bank to help finance the movement’s operations, they wanted to send their own message. And so in addition to his prison sentence, they ordered him publicly whipped for 18 lashes.

Now, this was a punishment that was reserved for common criminals in the colonies, that’s it. It had even been banned as a punishment in the British Army for over 60 years. They wanted to send the message that… Well, they wanted to send the message to the Zionists and to the world at large that the people that they are fighting right now are just criminals. Their militias are gangs. Their soldiers are thugs. It’s the message to the world that we are not at war with the Jews. The message to the Jewish terrorists that they don’t even deserve to be treated as a sovereign people.

They are nothing more than common criminals. But unfortunately for the British, they are not dealing with common criminals. When the sentence was announced, the Irgun put up posters all over the place warning the British not to carry out the flogging, which was, they said, contrary to a soldier’s honor. Menachem Begin declared that if the punishment were carried out, then every British occupier in Palestine would be liable to the same punishment. The British ignored the warnings this time. I mean, what else could they do? And the robber got his 18 lashes. The very next night, men from the Irgun kidnapped a British major who had been eating dinner with his wife in a restaurant, whipped him 18 times, beat his ass, and then returned him to the place that they’d kidnapped him in just his underwear. In Tel Aviv, more Irgun men kidnapped two more British officers, tied them to a tree in a public park where they whipped them 18 times. This happened in several other locations over the next several days, every time the men were whipped 18 times. As you can imagine, the British officers in Palestine are, they are going bananas. I mean, they tried imposing curfews, setting up checkpoints, conducting random stops, and before long, they arrest three young Zionists carrying weapons and rope. This was meant for whipping. After they captured them, the very next day, Menachem Begin issues another warning. If the oppressors now dare to injure the body or the personal or national honor of young Hebrews, we will not respond with the whip. We will respond with fire.

Games are over, folks. Okay? Games are over. This dude is not playing around. These people are not playing games. You don’t get to whip our people anymore. Okay? You don’t get to whip an American.

You don’t get to whip a French or a Soviet citizen. And you don’t get to whip us. Not anymore. We are warning you. But even more than warning the British, Begin is sending a message to his fellow Zionists and to Jews around the world. This isn’t just a message to the British that you better not do this. He’s talking to Jews all over the world. We don’t let people whip us anymore.

Not after what just happened. Never again. Never again. And guess what? The British backed down again. The three Zionists, despite their sentences already having been passed and confirmed, were not flogged. And the British never whipped another Zionist again. But still, the Zionists didn’t slow down.

Attacks on trains and buses, cafes, and a British officer club killed dozens of people on a weekly basis. When two airgun terrorists were captured and sentenced to hang by the British after a bombing which killed several people, Zionist allies of theirs smuggled the materials to build an improvised explosive device to them in the prison. They wanted to blow themselves up as suicide bombers in a crowd of British people before they could be hanged. Fortunately, they received word that a friendly rabbi was going to be in the group that was going to be escorting them to the gallows, and so they triggered the explosives before they could get close enough to hurt anybody else. These people are committed, okay? This is what commitment looks like. You look around you, whatever country you think you’re in today, if you’re in the West, I don’t want to say it about other countries, and you look at the people that call themselves nationalists, you look at the movements that think they’re subversive and think that they’re edgy. Give me a break.

This is what commitment looks like, okay? It means dying in a cell, and 70 years later when somebody does a podcast about it, he doesn’t even mention your name because you don’t matter. Okay, the goal matters. That’s what it means. In one week in November 1946, 19 people were killed by Zionist bombs. A few months later, Zionists engaged in an organized attack against five Arab cities using bombs, machine guns, and flamethrowers. The Haganah gloated that 200,000 more Jews had infiltrated Palestine in the last year. In 1947, attacks on infrastructure, on British soldiers and Arab civilians got to the point where people were dying by the dozen on a weekly basis.

January 12, 1947, four British soldiers were killed in a bombing of their headquarters. A month later, 17 more were killed in another raid of a bombing. A week later, another. A few weeks later, a coordinated attack targeting four areas in the densely populated city of Haifa. Now, although the Zionist left is kind of fretting over how the British are going to respond to all this, they’re kind of worried that the British are going to just say, screw it, and just jump on them. The truth was that Begin’s declaration that the only way to help the world’s Jews was to go after the British was actually beginning to work. The British were hearing calls from their own people and their own press and from the press around the world and from other countries around the world to just get the hell out of here, to just withdraw from Palestine. You know, the Zionists are trying to establish their national honor.

The declining British Empire is trying to hold on to theirs. And so again, another Irgun man is captured during a weapon-stealing raid on a British police station, and in early 1947, he’s sentenced to death. Begin goes back to what had worked before, and he threatened death for death if his men were hanged, but this time, the British did not back down, and the prisoner was hanged, going to the gallows once again, singing Hatikvah, the Zionist anthem. Before he was hanged, he had composed a final letter addressed to Menachem Begin, which reads as follows, quote, I will not forget the teachings on which I was weaned, the teachings to be proud and generous and strong, and I shall know how to stand up for my honor, the honor of a fighting Hebrew soldier. The right way, to my mind, is the way of the Irgun, which does not reject political effort, but will not give up a yard of our country because it is ours. And if the political effort does not have the desired result, it is prepared to fight for our country and our freedom, which alone ensures the existence of our people. By all means and all ways, that should be the way of the Jewish people in these days, to stand up for what is ours, and to be ready for battle, even if in some instances it leads to the gallows. For the world knows that a land is redeemed by blood.

I write these lines 48 hours before the time fixed by our oppressors to carry out their murder, and at such moments one does not lie. I swear that if I had the choice of starting again, I would choose the same road, regardless of the possible consequences to me, end quote. That letter was read and broadcast over the Irgun radio station. Menachem Begin immediately ordered every Irgun unit to be prepared to execute a field court-martial on the spot, and to immediately try and sentence and execute any British citizens they were able to capture. In early May 1947, Menachem Begin ordered the Irgun to execute a prison break to free Irgun and Stern Gang men from the jail in the town of Accra. Daniel Gortys’ very good biography of Menachem Begin describes this attack. He says, quote, Like the Bastille, the prison in Accra was a symbol of imperial power. Its freedom to arrest suspects at will, hold them indefinitely, convict them, and when it saw fit, execute them. Accra prison, housed in a crusader-era fortress, held many of the Etzel’s men captured in previous operations. Begin was determined to get them out. Forty-one prisoners were selected for liberation. Thirty were Etzel members. Etzel, remember, is just the Irgun. It’s the acronym for the Hebrew name of the group. And eleven were Stern Gang men. At a prearranged signal, Etzel fighters outside detonated the explosives, creating a breach in the wall.

The prisoners inside blew up internal heavy iron bars using explosives that had been smuggled in earlier. A battle erupted in the prison courtyard, but the prisoners marked for escape made it out. They boarded prepared trucks and sped off. The British police followed in hot pursuit, but was impeded by the mines the Etzel had placed along the road in anticipation of the chase. The Etzel did not anticipate, however, that British soldiers would be bathing south of Accra. Hearing the commotion, the soldiers, dressed quickly, gathered their arms and set up a roadblock. A skirmish ensued, and nine Jewish fighters were killed. In the end, the Etzel had freed 27 of the original 41 prisoners it had originally designated for liberation.

Six prisoners died in the battle, and eight others were captured by the British. In the confusion, more than 200 Arab prisoners, the majority of the Arab prisoners in the jail, also escaped.” Three of the Irgun men who had been involved in the prison break had missed the signal to board the trucks and they were eventually captured by the British at the prison after a long gun battle. They had killed and wounded some British soldiers, and so they were tried and sentenced to death by hanging. Menachem Begin ordered his men again to find and kidnap British personnel to hold his ransom. On July 12, 1947, his men captured two British soldiers, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Pace, in the coastal town of Netanya. These two men weren’t even officers, they were just everyday grunts, sitting in a cafe out of uniform. In fact, Mervyn Pace was known to be sympathetic to the Zionists, and Clifford Martin’s mother was Jewish. The British absolutely locked the city of Netanya down for 12 days.

They went house to house, searching for their captured men, but the men were being held in a tiny underground cell beneath a factory. It was covered with like a foot of sand so that sound couldn’t get out, and the British didn’t find them. Finally, on the morning of July 31, a police patrol found them in a small grove. They had been tortured, and then they had been hanged with wire around their throats. From the police report at the time, quote, They were hanging from two eucalyptus trees five yards apart. Their faces were heavily bandaged, so it was impossible to distinguish their features. Their bodies were a dull black color, and blood had run down their chests, which made it appear at first that they had been shot. The royal engineer’s captain and color sergeant major loft branches off the tree which held the right-hand body, and started to cut the hang rope with a saw.

As the body fell, there was a large explosion. Two trees had been completely blown up, and there were very large craters where the roots had been. One body was found horribly mangled about 20 yards away. The other body had disintegrated, and small pieces were picked up as much as 200 yards away, end quote. The bodies had been booby-trapped with explosives. That night, groups of British policemen and soldiers went without orders, tearing through Tel Aviv, smashing up shop windows and Jewish buses, destroying cars, and if any young Jewish men were caught out by themselves, they paid for it. But the Zionists are not allowing people to whip them anymore, and in retaliation, groups of Jewish men came out in force and began throwing stones and attacking the British police, who were then ordered to withdraw from the city. And then again without orders, more police commandeered several armored vehicles and headed back into Tel Aviv, opening fire on two buses and killing four Jews.

By the time the night was over, five Jews had been killed, and 15 were injured. And at that point, Zionists around the world kicked into high gear. Their contacts in the press and the governments in Britain and America denouncing the British administration and calling for their immediate evacuation. And finally, I know I’ve said it a couple times, they’ve been working toward it, but the British have had enough of Palestine. Winston Churchill, who was now the political opposition to Prime Minister Clement Attlee, he’d been denouncing Attlee’s handling of the Palestine problem and calling on the United Nations to take the situation over since the previous fall, fall of 1946. By January of 1947, the violence against the British had gotten so bad that all families and non-essential British personnel were ordered out of Palestine altogether. In February, a month later, the British Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, told the House of Commons that the Palestine question was going to be transitioned over to the United Nations for resolution. See, a primary driver for the British determination to maintain control over this area, especially over Egypt and Palestine, was to protect that carotid artery of its empire, the Suez Canal, that had connected the two halves of the British Empire, the British Isles and the British Raj in India.

But by 1947, it was becoming very clear that British rule in India was about to be over anyway. The Indians ended up achieving their independence in August of 1947, but it was already pretty obvious early on. And so the British were just about out of reasons to keep putting up with Palestine. In April of 1947, the British reported that they had 100,000 soldiers stationed in little old Palestine at the cost of over 40 million pounds a year. And this is at a time that Britain itself is suffering through a post-war recession bad enough to make power cuts and goods rationing back in Britain itself necessary. So enough was enough. The great British Empire was collapsing, and Palestine was one of the first ceiling tiles to hit the floor. In May of 1947, the UN Special Committee on Palestine was convened to study the problem and make recommendations.

UN Special Committee on Palestine, better known as UNSCOP. This is a committee that’s made up of representatives from 11 countries. Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala. Let me look at my notes here. Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay and Yugoslavia. You notice there are no Arab representatives on that committee. And Iran is the only country having anything at all to do with regional politics. The Arabs who did choose to participate, many did not want to participate at all, and maybe that was stupid at the time, but they didn’t want their participation with all this to bestow any legitimacy on the idea that this newly formed international body, the UN had only been around for a couple of years at this point, that it had any right or legitimacy to set itself up and allow Guatemala and Sweden and some of these countries to decide whether a piece of Palestinian Arab land and these Muslim holy sites should be taken away from them and given to these recent European immigrants. So many of them chose not to participate at all because they didn’t want to give the impression that they considered any of this legitimate. People love to repeat this quote that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, and it’s a clever quote. The implication is that they could have made things easier on themselves if only they knew better how to play the game. But this is not a game to them, and they’re not treating it like one. Their view is, and has remained for many of them, that the question about whether the land on which they have lived for centuries, that’s not a question that is open for negotiation between Swedish and Guatemalan diplomats. And I get that, I do. It’s hard to say what the right thing, the right way to handle that is, but I do understand the impulse. So as the Arabs tried to make their case and the Western powers negotiated what was going to happen, the Zionists began to work behind the scenes, influencing the international decision as best they can while the Yishuv in Palestine continues to prepare for war.

They knew that a partition of Palestine into two countries was going to be the most likely outcome. That was the one they were pushing for. And regardless of the size of the partition that they eventually got, as a sovereign state, the Zionists would have the authority to just lift all limits on immigration, allow all the holding centers filled with Jewish refugees and any Jew around the world, no matter how many it was, to just flood into Palestine. They could worry about where to put them later. And so the Zionists are going into these refugee centers and these displaced person camps and they’re training these future immigrants for the war that they’re going to be conscripted into the moment they step off the boat in Palestine. They’re bringing in fake weapons carved out of wood and teaching them fighting tactics and things like that in the actual refugee camps. The Special Committee on Palestine, UNSCOP, had been split up into two units. One to study the possibility of Jews and Arabs living together in a united or a federated country somehow, and the other one to study the possibility of breaking up Palestine into a Jewish and Arab country and how that would work.

The report that favored binational unity was very scathing and it was almost outraged at what the authors of that report considered very clear bias toward the Zionist claims in the other report, the partition report. But nevertheless, eventually the recommendation for partition won out and that was the recommendation that was sent to the UN General Assembly for a vote. So after some redrawing in General Assembly committees, the final partition to be voted on by the General Assembly was settled. The lines were drawn. But it was very problematic. Even after all the arguing and debating and negotiating, the final partition plan was understood by most people to be unworkable. If it passed, there was supposed to be a Jewish area in which Jews were going to rule over an Arab population that still made up about 50% of the people in that territory. Meanwhile, the Arab partition, the Arab territory, would cover a zone with very few Jews at all.

There would be about 725,000 Arabs compared to about 10,000 Jews. The Zionists owned about 6% of the land in Palestine and comprised about 33% of the population. And yet the partition that was settled on granted them 56.4% of the territory. The Zionists felt that they were as prepared as they were ever going to be and that this was probably the best offer they were going to get. So they accepted the partition and the Arabs rejected it, of course. It was determined that the vote was going to go forward and this was going to provide this two-year-old institution, the United Nations, really with its first big decision to make that was going to involve parties from all over the world. This was going to be its big coming-out party. The United States and the Soviet Union, each for their own reasons, favored the Zionist position.

And so they were directing their allies and their dependent states to side with partition. With the help of some other Muslim countries, Palestinians did what they could and it turned out that, you know, I guess unsurprisingly, they had quite a bit of built-in support from some smaller countries who knew a little something about colonization. The General Assembly began debating the issue on November 26, 1947 and it was determined that a vote was going to be taken by midnight that night in order to wrap it all up before American Thanksgiving, which was the next day. So both sides mobilized what forces they had at their disposal. The Arabs trying to push this message of kind of, you know, basic unfairness and international ethics to Western and non-Western countries alike. Meanwhile, the Zionists are deploying this powerful and sophisticated realpolitik propaganda machine to sway delegates to their side. The representative from the Philippines, General Carlos Romulo, he had closed himself off for the previous three or four days with orders that nobody should have access to him because he was just trying to avoid all this extremism and extreme pressure that started being brought on him and the other delegates. After the pressure started hitting him, he called up the President of the Philippines and he read the speech that he was going to deliver to him because he just wanted to get the President’s approval for everything he was going to say, and he got that approval.

The President said, fine, signed off on it, and after General Romulo had that, he just stopped talking to anybody else. And so, when the day of the General Assembly debate arrives and the various delegates are getting ready to give their speeches, General Romulo was the second of the many speakers scheduled throughout the day. He took the floor and he gives this fiery, passionate speech condemning the partition of Palestine. And then, you know, he’s a general, he doesn’t want to sit all day through speeches for the next 12 hours. He leaves written instructions for his alternate to vote in his place against the partition. And when all there are 56 national delegates present, the UN only had 57 members at the time, and Thailand was going to be absent from the vote. So you have 56 delegates present. And the UN rules required a two-third majority for this kind of General Assembly resolution.

With Great Britain and Argentina and some other Latin American countries not wanting to put their stamp on the resolution, but not wanting to go directly against the United States either, 10 states planned to abstain from it, leaving 46 total voting delegates. And that meant that the Zionists needed at least 31 votes to pass the partition, and that the Arabs needed 16 to block it. Having already secured 13 votes against the partition in some of the committee sessions, the commitment of the Philippines to block the resolution gave the Arabs 14. They needed two more. A few speakers later, the Greek delegate comes to the rostrum, and it turned out that the Zionists had been trying to bribe the Greek delegation, and rather than having the effect that they hoped, it actually turned the Greeks against them. And so they went ahead and pledged to vote against it, giving the Arabs 15, just one vote shy of blocking the breakup of their country. And then Haiti, a country that knows very well the downside of colonialism and minority rule, gave a speech and came out against it, putting the Arabs over the top. And after that, Liberia came out and promised to vote against it as well, giving the Arabs a little bit of a cushion.

Now I know I keep saying the Arabs or the Palestinian Arabs. I’m doing that to make things simple here, but it’s important to know that the effort supporting their position was mostly being led by other sympathetic states. The Palestinians still had no real or effective leadership class in their country. They didn’t have a country that had a delegation at the UN, and so they were relying a lot on support from the outside. Their society of displaced peasants and unemployed townspeople was still being led mostly by collaborators who weren’t dangerous enough to either be killed or run off during the Arab revolt by the British. And so these aren’t people willing to push that hard. The more hardline Arab leaders either refused to recognize the legitimacy of the negotiations and didn’t show up, or else they were just banned from the deliberations altogether. And some Arab representatives did testify, but even after all these years, it’s weird because after everything that’s happened, they still really just don’t seem to understand what is happening to them.

They’re going before the committee and before the General Assembly making these big moral appeals, not realizing that they are now in the world of cutthroat international politics. One delegate from Beirut in an address to the General Assembly said, quote, The Arabs of Palestine are not responsible in any way for the persecution of the Jews in Europe. That persecution is condemned by the whole civilized world, and the Arabs are among those who sympathize with the persecuted Jews. However, the solution to the problem cannot be said to be a responsibility of Palestine, which is a tiny country in which had taken enough of those refugees and other peoples since 1920. Any delegation which wishes to express its sympathy has more room in its country than has Palestine and has better means of taking in these refugees and helping them, end quote. One of the people who helped Palestine was the Pakistani representative, Mohammad Zafrul Khan. And in a Pakistani international affairs journal, a few months after all this happened, he wrote a report of what had transpired. And he said that by 1 or 2 p.m.

on that Wednesday, earlier than anybody expected, the pro-partition Zionist faction had basically no path forward. Quote, In order to win, the other side had to get 32 votes and there was no means by which they could get that number. He said 32 at this point because one of the abstentions hadn’t been announced yet. It became 31 after that. By early afternoon, the other side found that they had lost and were quite convinced in their minds that we had won and that partition was blocked. But they apparently had some other dodges up their sleeve, end quote. The Zionists ordered the delegates that were supporting their position to begin filibustering to buy time, and as the afternoon dragged on, a rumor began to circulate that the vote was going to be postponed, no longer to take place at midnight that night or even the next day, but on Friday, two days later. The man presiding over the special session of the UN was an open and ardent pro-Zionist from Brazil, and so Khan and the Iraqi foreign minister went up to him to see what exactly was going on. He confirmed that he intended to fix the time for Friday instead, saying that there were still eight speakers left. This is about 3.30 in the afternoon. He said there are eight speakers left and that they couldn’t possibly all be fit in before midnight, and so Khan, he gives an account of his response, quote, I told him, there are eight speakers, and out of them, the Iraqi foreign minister and myself were going to make long speeches, but we shall not speak. The Indian delegate also intended to speak, India under Gandhi was firmly against partition as well. Russia is speaking, and you may have one or two more speakers. That leaves you three speakers, and you can easily take the vote. He said, what is your trouble? I said, the real trouble is you are doubtless aware that the delegations are under great pressure, and we do not know which of them might fail us because efforts are being made with their governments to get their instructions countermanded.

The delegations in doubt have declared themselves clearly. For instance, Haiti, Greece, and the Philippines have expressed their case clearly, and you are now quite certain that nothing will happen to their votes, end quote. Right around that time, some representative, Khan wasn’t sure who, moved for an early adjournment to the assembly that day, and it was passed before he knew what was going on. He continues, quote, the press gave publication to very significant news. The Jewish leaders saw Mr. Truman in Washington and said, what is this? Those delegations that had never voted against you are going to vote against you now? The State Department has not done its proper canvassing.

They further said, if partition fails, the European Recovery Program bill is off. This last was, of course, not in the papers. During the interval, we talked to the delegates that had promised us their votes. For instance, I went to the Liberian delegate. He said, we as the delegation are still determined to vote against partition, but last night, when I came back from the assembly, our ambassador rang me up from Washington and tried to persuade me to vote in favor. I declined, but the trouble is that they will get on to the president of Liberia and instructions will be issued to vote against partition and then we will be helpless, end quote. As it turned out, the Zionists through their allies in the U.S. government had deputized the president of Firestone Rubber Company, they’ve got a 160,000 acre rubber plantation in the country, that they would begin to divest themselves and leave Liberia altogether unless Liberia agreed to change its vote in favor of breaking up Palestine.

The Liberian president might have had his personal feelings about what was going on there, but Palestine was a long ways away and this was a threat that would very simply destroy his country if it was carried out. You can’t take an economic hit like that in a country with weak institutions and a weak government while we know what happened to Liberia a few decades later. Mohammed Khan continued his account of the conversation, he said, quote, I said, if a telegram comes, you could just put it in your pocket and forget all about it. He replied, how long could I withhold it? The delegate of Haiti met us in the morning in the delegate’s lounge and came up to me. There were actually tears in his eyes and he said, what am I to do? I said, I have announced that we shall vote against partition and now I have received instructions to vote for partition. I said, we realize your position and are grateful to you, end quote.

During the committee stage before the General Assembly debate, Haiti could not have been clearer in their opposition to partition, but in this interval created by the postponement of the vote, it turned out that Haiti’s government had been promised a large loan on generous terms through the US government to pay for the partition. That Filipino General Romulo wrote about his experiences over these days in his memoirs. Although he had received approval for his speech condemning the partition directly from the president, he received an urgent message from his president telling him to reverse his position. He said, I have no idea what happened, but President Roxas said that for the sake of our higher national interests, he was giving instructions to our Philippine delegate, to vote in favor of the partitioning. Roxas hoped that I would understand the situation and realize that his reversal of policy was dictated only by his desire to serve our people best. I felt this public reversal of a stand I had taken was a slight. My pride was stung. I wired Roxas my resignation from the United Nations.

This particular chapter in history has been exceedingly unpleasant to me, end quote. Romulo later withdrew his resignation from the United Nations. He was the only Filipino president from the United States that could not be resisted if it wasn’t going to not do harm to the people of the Philippines. Nehru, the prime minister of India, denounced the whole process and said that the Zionists had tried to bribe the Indian delegation with millions of dollars and that his own sister had been receiving daily threats from the Zionists, warning that her life would be in danger if she were to leave the country. A Jewish-American financier, a big player in the Democratic Party and a major supporter of the Irgun, Bernard Baruch, visited the French delegation and warned the French delegation that if they abstained from the vote as they had been planning to, unless they came out in favor of the partition, that he would ensure that American financial aid to France would be withheld. This is 1947. They needed American capital to rebuild and so, after some consideration, France came off the fence in favor of the partition. France’s neighbors, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg also came out for partition.

Zionists went to work using their money and influence around Europe to ensure, in every way possible, that the vote went their way. With a 1948 U.S. presidential election approaching, allies of the Zionists asked President Truman to apply pressure to all of these U.N. member states that were vulnerable to the pressure to try to get them to swing over. The U.S. is now the dominant power in Western Europe and one on whom many of these war-ravaged countries, not just France, are counting on for money and material to rebuild and so they could swing a big stick. President Truman wrote later, So news of this effort to influence the vote starts to go around. You know, they’re all staying in the same hotels and stuff and so it starts to get out what’s happening.

And the Lebanese delegate gets up in front of the General Assembly and begs them to think about what they’re doing, to consider the effect this is going to have on the integrity and the credibility of this new international institution, the U.N. He pleaded, My friends, think of these democratic methods of the freedom in voting which is sacred to each of our delegations. If we were to abandon this for the tyrannical system of tackling each delegation in hotel rooms, in bed, in corridors, in anti-rooms, to threaten them with economic sanctions or to bribe them with promises of what we will become in the future. Should we be a democratic institution? Should we be an organization worthy of the respect of the world? At this supreme junction I beg you to think for a moment of the far-reaching consequences which might result from such maneuvers, especially if we yielded to them.” That was all for nothing, no. The final count was 33 in favor, 13 against, with 10 abstentions. And the count has become as it was only two votes more than was necessary for the two-thirds majority.

And we know today, through historical records and testimonies, we know today beyond doubt that at the very least the Philippines, Haiti, and Liberia were swayed by threats. Every single country within 2,000 miles had voted against it. I think Ukraine was the country closest to Palestine by anybody that voted for it. The powerful nations of the world had just decided to ease their collective guilt over the Jewish Holocaust, not by welcoming Jews into their own countries, that was not on the table, but by taking Palestine from the Arabs and handing it over to the Zionists. In the Hebrew Bible, the psalmist lamented the destruction of the kingdom of Judah by the Babylonians. Centuries after the Romans destroyed the Jewish homeland and pulled down their temple, the scattered rabbinic Jews would conclude their Yom Kippur services and their Passover seder with hopeful words, next year in Jerusalem. With a stroke of a pen now, the Zionists had gotten the wish for which they had prayed and fought and bled and killed for 50 years. They had their Jewish homeland.

Britain determined to end the mandate and be completely evacuated from Palestine by May 15th, 1948. The Zionists very quickly got over their victory celebration because they knew that the real work had just begun. If this was the end of the story, we might not have, even today, a situation which is one of the most terrible and bitter and intractable conflicts in the world. If it had ended here, the new state of Israel, it’s not quite there yet, but it’s coming, although it was created under bitter circumstances, might have eventually found a way to exist peacefully in the Middle East with its Arab neighbors instead of becoming a permanently militarized garrison state, as it has. And if it had ended here, the situation wouldn’t be known but, of course, it didn’t end here. The British had not volunteered for this, but they were expected by the world to keep the peace in Palestine until they left, and there were still about five months before that happened. The Zionists knew now that they had a unique opportunity to act with freedom while they were still being protected from surrounding Arab countries by British forces, who would still be constrained to their own territory. So whereas the earlier cycles of violence mostly took the form of reprisals and attacks driven by general animosity and group friction, the Zionists now began a strategically directed campaign of terror with the specific goal of cowing the Arab civilians in the Jewish zone or frightening them into fleeing Jewish-controlled areas altogether.

A few days after the vote, six Arabs and eight Jews were killed in street clashes. After that, the Irgun killed 16 Arabs and injured dozens more in a series of bombings of residential neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Jaffa. The Palestinians have very few weapons. The British had done a pretty good job disarming them from 36 to 39, and they hadn’t been armed like the Jews had over the course of the war. The Palestinians were completely disorganized, leaderless. They had no structure, no command structure, no organized peasant rebels, things like that. The British, meanwhile, are hiding in their secure areas and just running out the clock, and the Zionists are completely off the leash. The movement has come a long way since Theodor Herzl was circulating his pamphlet The Jewish State to a few Jewish bankers in 1896.

The Jewish homeland has been achieved, but the Zionist ideal, the thing that people talked about, that was debated and fantasized over by starry-eyed idealists like Ahad Ham in the early years, that ideal had been transformed. It was transformed once it left the minds of its founders and ran into the dust and mud of the real world. Ahad Ham himself had died in 1929, a sad, lonely old man. He had seen his dreams of establishing a new kind of nation that was going to exemplify those specific values that the Jewish people had spent several thousand years preserving against all odds, with a distant hope that a day was going to come when their specific world outlook could be reconstituted into a national home that would express the soul of the Jewish people. And now he’s watching his dreams reflecting on the path traveled over the years by that ideal, that Zionist ideal. The Jewish-American historian Hans Cohen wrote an essay not too long after this, and in the essay he mentions a study that came out in the journal Jewish Social Studies in 1951. In that journal article, the author Robert Welch tracks the arc of this transformation through a profile of Chaim Weizmann. And in that essay, talking about Welch’s paper, quote, Weizmann had to mediate between liberal world opinion and the often disparate wishes of his followers.

Officially, the Zionist emphasized that the Jews did not come to Palestine in order to dominate the Arabs, he’s quoting Weizmann here, and they also declared most solemnly on many occasions that no Arab shall be expelled from the country. The idea of a Jewish state was impossible because we could not and would not expel the Arabs. Moreover, the Arabs, he said, were as good Zionists as we were. They also loved their country and they could not be persuaded to hand it over to someone else. Their national awakening had made considerable progress. These were facts which Zionism couldn’t afford to ignore. To speak of a Jewish state would make people believe that in Basel in 1931, Weizmann opposed proclaiming a Jewish state as the aim of Zionism. The world will construe this demand only in one sense, that we want to acquire a majority in order to drive out the Arabs.

In a speech before the Congress, Weizmann rejected this interpretation as unfounded. We Zionists know that this is not our aim and we have always emphasized it. A numerical majority alone would not be a sufficient guarantee of the security of our national home. It would not be a guarantee by friendly relations to the non-Jewish world surrounding us in Palestine. Robert Welsh calls Weizmann one of the last representatives of humanist Zionism. A Zionism based on the assumption that the reborn Jewish nation would avoid all those national excesses from which Jews had so much to suffer among the other nations. Intolerant, brutal, egotistical nationalism would be unacceptable to Jews who had learned to know what it means. Just a few years after all this takes place, Chaim Weizmann himself had reflected on this transformation with a sophisticated understatement. He reflected on the distress that he experienced over the changed country and people he’d found when he visited Palestine in 1944. He said, quote, Here and there a relaxation of the old traditional Zionist Puritan ethics, a touch of militarization and a weakness for its trappings. Here and there something worse, an un-Jewish resort to terrorism. And worst of all, in certain circles, a readiness to compound with the evil, to play politics with it, to condemn and not to condemn it, to treat it not as the thing it was, namely an unmitigated curse to the national home, but as a phenomenon which might have its advantages, end quote. Hans Kohn commenting on that quote from Weizmann added, The evil was not only here and there. It was rapidly taking root and growing. It represented not only a break with humanist Zionism, but with a long history of Judaism. The zeitgeist, or at least the zeitgeist of 20th century Central and Eastern Europe had won out over the Jewish tradition, end quote.

Now this wasn’t quite clear to Weizmann yet, or at least that old follower and loyalist of Hadham was not ready to give up on the dream that he had been working for longer than anybody living. It was in the lead up, remember, in the hotel in 1946 that Weizmann was threatening to resign from the World Zionist Organization if the Haganah didn’t cease its terrorist activities. And so at the 22nd Zionist Congress, 72 years old, maybe aging, slowing down, Chaim Weizmann gets ready to do battle with David Ben-Gurion one last time for the soul of the Zionist movement. And he feels in his bones at this point what is at stake. And so he marshals his faculties to the speaker’s podium and he pleads with his fellow Zionists to turn away from this path that they are starting to wander down. And Ben-Gurion’s supporters are yelling at him from the crowd. They’re crying out that he’s a demagogue and they’re accusing him of favoring Britain and being disloyal to Zionism. You just imagine how that must have felt.

And he had devoted the last 50 years of his life to the Zionist cause and as he stands up to make a plea to prevent terrorism from putting a stain he’s listening to these younger people in the crowd shout out and disrespect him. People who were in diapers when Weizmann was giving everything to this cause are now out there accusing him of all people of having confused loyalties. But the old man’s having none of that. I mean, he’s on his game now. He’s up there, he’s in his element. He’s got all his strength, all his faculties working. So he just roars back at the people in the crowd. He says, He concludes his speech still with that same energy crying out, Would that I had a tongue of flame, the strength of prophets to warn you against the paths of Babylon and Egypt.

Zion shall be redeemed in judgment and not by any other means. And Babylon and Egypt, of course, were two empires which had, in the Bible at various times, violent wars. And so he says, I have a tongue of flame the strength of prophets to warn you against the paths of Babylon and Egypt. I have a tongue of flame the strength of prophets to warn you against the paths of Babylon and Egypt. And that’s the path that Chaim Weizmann now fears that his own people are about to follow. See, only Weizmann carried enough weight to challenge Ben-Gurion like this at this time. Only Weizmann could have delivered this message. And so it got people’s attention. People started talking. His plea to turn away from all this, to avoid something that could corrupt the birth of the Jewish homeland. It sparked a debate among the delegates about what exactly they were doing and what they should be doing. And so Weizmann starts to settle down, breathe a little sigh of relief, but Ben-Gurion is pissed. Ben-Gurion’s already up in his hotel room before Weizmann finishes speaking, packing his bags. He’s up there shouting and screaming and raving about how he’s going to start a whole new Zionist movement and then a few of his colleagues come in and try to settle him down. He said the old men were all cowards, Weizmann and his whole generation. They’re incapable of doing what is necessary and the only people who can do it are the revolutionary Zionist youth around the world.

They’re the only ones that had what it took to do the hard things that were called for in an hour like this. His friends sort of calmed him down eventually and they convinced him to go back down and make one final appeal to the Zionist Congress. And if the appeal failed, they would leave with him a movement that was more comfortable with what needed to be done. And so he starts to prepare to do that, thinking about what he’s going to say and word starts to spread that Ben-Gurion’s coming back. He’s going to come respond in direct opposition to Weizmann. He comes down and speaks and debates rage all night long as Ben-Gurion’s out there making angry emotional pleas and denouncing his moderate rivals as people living in a pre-Holocaust world. Weizmann’s allies and Weizmann himself are doing their best to defend their position against this onslaught. They’re arguing that things are already going their way and that coming out and announcing their goal of statehood openly or of going out and using terror to achieve it was just going to force a hasty decision by any of the big powers that are watching over what’s happening.

In the end, the Zionist Congress decided to stick with David Ben-Gurion. Chaim Weizmann, who had really been the unchallenged godfather even through the ups and downs of the Zionist movement for most of 40 years was shoved aside. His lofty ideals were not going to organize the yeshiva or prepare for its defense in Palestine. Ben-Gurion’s sweat and the blood of the Zionist military organizations was going to do that. He was there and his fellow Zionists had voted against him. Finally, publicly and never again would he challenge Ben-Gurion’s power. Now the plans of the Zionists for dealing with the Arab question now that they had a partition plan in place had gone through various iterations since the war had ended. Shaped in every instance by external events and had first devised Plan A.

That’s what they called it. That’s not me giving it a name. They called it Plan A. In February 1945 when the Zionists still had a plan B and a plan C and a plan C and a plan C and a plan C and a plan C and a plan C and a plan C people hoped that the British were going to respond to the holocaust by throwing out all their promises to the Arabs and just opening Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration. Plan A included operations that were designed to suppress any Palestinian Arab resistance, but since it assumed total British cooperation and support, Plan A didn’t mention anything about the surrounding countries. Plans B and Plan C eventually replaced Plan A as circumstances changed and then in March 1948, two months before the British Union Jack was to be folded up and sent back to Britain with the last British official, the Haganah prepared Plan D. The British evacuation had been proceeding slowly up to this point, but it was about to pick up speed. They were going to leave very quickly and Plan D was to come into force once the Zionists determined that there were too few British forces left in the country to stop them from carrying it out.

Under Plan D, the Haganah would act quickly and decisively and independently to secure not only the territory that had been designated as the Jewish partition by the UN, but that they would strike out into Arab territory anywhere that a few Jews lived or to seize any land that they determined was necessary to secure and defend what they already held. Ben-Gurion had been talking about since at least the mid1930s in letters to his son and other insiders, he’d been talking about his plans to use whatever partition the Zionists could get out of the UN or the British when they were in charge and just use that as only a jumping off point, that was just the beginning, something they would use to marshal their resources and their forces and then to acquire any other land they could get their hands on. He also did not believe that it was possible for the Jews to sustainably rule over such a large Arab population. Remember, in the Jewish partition, Arabs are still about 49.5% of the population. Ben-Gurion does not think that’s sustainable. Today, thanks to this new breed of Israeli historians, they call themselves and others call them the new historians, people who, these are Israelis who have gone into the Israeli archives, declassified Israeli archives and pulled out information that we never had access to before and we’ve got a lot more insight now than any time in the past into what happened during what would be called by the Zionists the War of Independence and by the Arabs the catastrophe. One of the most prominent of these new historians has been Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University in Israel. So Benny Morris, he’s got several thick books, details countless examples from this period of Arabs being expelled from their homes by force, of Zionists using the opportunity then to destroy the houses and burn down the villages to make sure they don’t come back.

In January 1948, the Haganah launches an attack on the village of Mansurat al-Khait under orders to kill anybody who offers resistance. They burn the village, kill the farm animals, burn the crops and trees after they’re gone, the olive trees that take 20 to 30 years to mature and bear fruit. Arab resistance, meanwhile, remains disorganized and ineffective, mostly limited to snipers taking pot shots with old rifles and raids on traffic convoys and street violence, things like that. After one Arab attack on a supply train in northern Palestine, the village of al-Husayniyah was completely devastated by a reprisal attack by the Zionists. Several dozen Arab men, women and children are killed. There are stories of Zionist death squads clearing out villages and then blowing up homes and then leaving landmines in the rubble of the homes to catch people who came back to pick through the remains of their belongings. In at least one place, an attack on the water supply seems to have been confirmed, in at least one place, but the Israeli historian Yuri Milstein tells us that in many conquered Arab villages, the water supply was poisoned to prevent the inhabitants from coming back. I almost didn’t bring that up, I cringe bringing that up, but these are confirmed incidents and you’ve got to talk about them.

Yuri Milstein, the historian, also tells us that the preceding typhoid epidemic in that same village was caused by a Zionist biological attack. In May 1948, a group of Zionists that were disguised as Arabs were arrested attempting to infect protected artesian wells in Gaza with a vial of liquid containing typhoid and dysentery. One of the men captured, David Horn, admitted to having been given that infected canteen and the mission by his commander in the Haganah. You kind of, I don’t know about you, but I wonder, I have to wonder what’s going on in the minds of the people involved in something like that. You know, it’s hard for me to believe that it was nothing more than just a simple military tactic or an act of political terrorism. Many of you have probably heard some of the accusations that had been levied against the Jews over the years in Europe, known as blood libels. You know, there were times when, we’re talking in the Middle Ages and so forth, there’d be times when a Christian child would go missing and someone would accuse the local Jewish community of having kidnapped and murdered the child in some anti-Christian ritual and that would lead to a big pogrom and violence and death and so forth against the Jews. Well, one of the more popular of these blood libels that would pop up again and again, and certainly one of the ones that’s best known today, it would pop up during plague years.

When nervous Christians who didn’t have the benefit of germ theory back then, didn’t know what was happening to them, often accused the Jews of poisoning wells to spread the disease. You know, this blood libel has come down through the centuries and is very well known. It’s often used as the very first example of what a blood libel is. And it’s impossible for me to believe that a Jew, especially a committed Zionist in the 1940s, had never heard of that. And so you have to wonder if that’s going through his head as he’s pouring a vial of typhoid and dysentery down a well used by an Arab peasant village as its main water supply. You know, did he just shut out the cognitive dissonance or was there no inner conflict? Maybe there wasn’t. You know, maybe the Zionists are just tired of being slandered and harassed and chased around.

Maybe they’re tired of being afraid of monsters. Maybe it’s time to become the monsters. And maybe it’s time for other people to be afraid of them. And so from here on, terror and depraved violence become general everyday occurrences. Young Arab men begin attacking Jews wherever they can find them, while Jewish groups continue their focused and strategic reign of terror. There are confirmed accounts of Zionists throwing grenades into crowds, of a sniper taking out a pregnant Arab woman, of packed theaters being set on fire while Jewish gunmen wait at the exits for people trying to escape. Zionist militias firing indiscriminately into crowds and launching mortars into residential neighborhoods. The Irgun was known for killing British soldiers or Arab civilians and then booby trapping their bodies to kill anybody who tried to recover or bury them, like they did to the two British sergeants that they had strung up.

Arab and Jewish snipers, both of them, were firing at anybody who was not on their team, including the few remaining British if they were caught out. You could just walk around in the street and that could be it. People are just looking at you. If you’re an Arab shooter, you’re looking to check if somebody’s an Arab, and if they’re not, you’re shooting at them. The Jews are doing the same thing. A sad irony of all this is that the vast majority of the evil tactics that we hear about today being used by groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with the exception of suicide bombing, were pioneered by the Irgun and the Stern gang in Palestine in the 1940s. Attacks were launched against infrastructure and water supplies in Arab towns and villages with the goal of trying to make that land unlivable because they knew that it would force the Arabs to leave since they didn’t have the material or the capital or the expertise to rebuild anything, whereas the Zionists could always rebuild that stuff later on with money from rich Zionists and supportive nations like the United States. The Middle East correspondent for the London Daily Herald, someone who was a future citizen and diplomat of Israel, Harry Levin, was in Palestine reporting on Zionist activities during this period, and after a while of asking to do it, he was finally allowed to go along on a typical operation carried out by the Palmach.

The Palmach is the Haganah’s kind of shock troops, and so he accompanies this squad of Jewish fighters that he’s surprised are much younger than he thought they were going to be. They claim they were 17, 18 years old, but he said a lot of them were more like 15, 16 years old, and he follows them through the hills toward the village of Colonia. Around midnight, they get in range of the village, and without warning, they begin launching mortars into it. The village starts returning ineffectual fire, mostly shooting over the heads and just missing everything, as Arabs tend to do when they fire at people, I don’t know why. And more Zionists crawl closer to the village, get within range, and start opening up on it with their machine guns. The Arab resistance begins to wane and then melt away, and so the Zionists moved into the village, and when they found Arabs still occupying a house or a structure, they’d surround it and start lighting it up with machine gun fire, and then throwing grenades into the windows until everything stopped. The Arabs who hadn’t been able to escape were killed. Harry Levin said that he counted 14 himself, but that there were a bunch more.

And then his escort was taking him away from the scene back to town in a car, he started hearing the Zionist sappers blowing up every house and structure in the village, one after another, and this is how it worked. In just six weeks, 769 Jews had been killed, 1069 Arabs were dead, and also 123 British, who for the most part were just staying behind their fences and waiting to get the hell out of here, but 123 British were killed as well, that’s in six weeks. By springtime, the Arabs had been almost entirely driven out of West Jerusalem, it was almost entirely clear of them, and a refugee problem was starting to become a refugee crisis very quickly. After Arabs were driven out of neighborhoods and villages, Zionists would immediately follow up their operations by moving Jews into those homes that had been abandoned by these fleeing Arab families. They would divide up the Arabs’ former belongings, and they’d be eating food that was still left on the shelves. That’s how quickly and efficiently this was going on. To one group who had moved into what had formerly been an Arab section of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion went down there to speak to them, and he gloated, quote, There are no strangers left, 100% Jews. Since Jerusalem’s destruction in the days of the Romans, it hasn’t been so Jewish as it is now.

In many Arab districts in the West, one sees not one Arab. I do not assume this will change, end quote. He added that what had happened in Jerusalem could well happen in great parts of the country if we hold on, and that there would be great changes in the composition of the population of the country. Only one village remained on the outskirts of Jerusalem whose citizens had not fled. And so on April 9th, 1948, about 130 fighters from Yitzhak Shamir’s Stern Gang and Menachem Begin’s Ergun, with approval and mortar support from the Haganah, approached that village called Der Yassin off the main road near Jerusalem. Der Yassin was uninvolved with any of the fighting. It had non-aggression agreements with nearby Jewish settlements, very good relations with them, and it had even recently had all of its livestock slaughtered by fellow Arabs because it had refused to allow them to operate, to use their village as a base of operations. The Zionist fighters entered Der Yassin as the village leaders were trying to explain to them that they were not partisans in the fighting, but the Ergun and the Stern Gang had not come to Der Yassin because Der Yassin was a threat.

They had come to compose a message in blood. The Zionists launched a wild attack, indiscriminately killing everybody that they could find. Umm Muhammad, and that’s probably the only Arab name I’m going to get right as I go through this part. I’ve been butchering Hebrew names the entire time, so now I’m about to pay back the Arabs for that. Umm Muhammad was 15 years old. He’s a 15-year-old boy that day at Der Yassin, and he remembered it, quote, I saw how Hilweh Zidon was killed, along with her husband, her son, her brothers, and Kumaez. Hilweh Zidon went out to collect the body of her husband. They shot her and she fell over his body.

I also saw Hayat Bilbasi, a nurse from Jerusalem who was serving in the village, as she was shot before the door to Musa Hassan’s house. The daughter of Abu El Abed was shot dead as she held her baby niece. The baby was shot too. Whoever tried to run away was shot dead, end quote. As one Jewish observer later wrote, the conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty. Whole families, women, old people, children were killed. Leahy members, Leahy’s the stern gang, Leahy members tell of the barbaric behavior of the Irgun toward the prisoners and the dead. They also relate that the Irgun men raped a number of Arab girls and then murdered them afterwards.

Mahmoud Qasem al-Yassini was also 15 years old in 1948, and he was there. He reported what he witnessed, quote, everything seemed strange. There was blood everywhere. A dead woman holding her baby reminded me of my mother, so I dashed to our house. I found my mother hiding in fear in the basement, and when she saw me she cried and started screaming. She told me to go to my uncle’s house next door through a hole in the wall to make sure that the rest of his family was still alive. When I peered through the hole, I saw horror. I could see traces of blood all over the place.

All that I could see was blood. I knew that they had all been massacred. I had lost my uncles Yusef and Mohammed Hamida, end quote. Fahimi Zaidan was 12 years old that day, and she remembered, quote, the Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Qadri, four, in the head, and my sister Sameh, eight, in the cheek, and my brother Mohammed, seven, in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed. My father, my mother, my grandfather and my grandmother, my uncles and aunts, and some of their children, end quote.

Abu Yusuf was 21 years old at the time of the massacre, and he said, quote, the Jews took elderly men and women and youths, including four of my cousins and a nephew. They took them all. Women who had on them gold and money were stripped of their gold. They took the men to the quarry and sprayed them all with bullets. One woman saw her son taken some 40 to 60 meters away from where she and the rest of the women stood and shot dead. Then they brought Jewish kids to throw stones at his body. Then they poured kerosene over his body and set it ablaze while the women watched from a distance, end quote. Another female who was there, a Ms.

Halim Aid, who was 30 at the time, she remembered, quote, a man shot a bullet into the neck of my sister, Saliye, who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher’s knife. And then Ms. Safiye Atiye reported that she was being raped at gunpoint. And I screamed, but other women around me were being raped too. Some of the men were so anxious to get our earrings that they ripped our ears to pull them off faster. After a sustained period of house-to-house murder and rape and torture and mutilation, several of the military-age Arab men were put in chains and brought back to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem to be paraded through the streets as trophies in front of a jeering crowd. And then they were brought back to Deir Yassin, executed, and thrown into the quarry pit.

The villagers of Deir Yassin, some 245 men, women, and children were murdered that day. There are reports that many, many women were raped, and that the meager belongings of the villagers were looted after they were dead, and the bodies were mutilated and placed in humiliating positions, castrated, things like that. One Haganah intelligence officer who was there reported, In the quarry, I saw the five Arabs they had paraded in the streets of the city. They had been murdered and were lying one on top of the other. I saw with my own eyes several families that had been murdered with their women, children, and old people. Their corpses were lying on top of each other. The dissidents were going about the village robbing and stealing everything. Chickens, radio sets, sugar, money, gold, and more.

Each dissident walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he had killed. One Jewish eyewitness who was there, I guess that’s what an eyewitness is, One Jewish eyewitness remembered hearing one of the Zionist fighters walking through the town counting bodies and relaying back through a radio to headquarters, minus 15 Arabs, minus 60 Arabs, and after a while his message on the radio to headquarters became, It’s too difficult to count. Word of what had happened at Deir Yassin spread very quickly all over the country. One of the reasons that it got around so fast was that the killers themselves, the actual ones who had carried this out, they were the ones spreading these stories around. They wanted people to know. One of the men who was there, who actually drew pictures of the incident that were intended for publication, he wrote, I drew a Jewish soldier pointing a bayoneted rifle at an Arab woman. I sent the drawing to the newspapers through the Arab headquarters in Jerusalem with the additional information that 600 women, 500 men, and 400 children were slaughtered at Deir Yassin. I exaggerated on purpose to frighten the Arabs.

Here’s a very common misconception that a lot of people have about how this kind of thing works, whether it’s a genocide or an ethnic cleansing operation or something like you have here. When you hear that a couple million people have been killed or driven into refugee status in Darfur or some other African war, for example, don’t imagine to yourself that the enemy is going village to village shooting millions of people in the head. That’s not what happens. What happens is you go out and you choose a few examples to make. You roll into a village one day. You start shooting until it surrenders. And then you rape the women. And when you get bored, you mutilate their faces or you cut off their breasts.

You make sons murder their fathers and their older brothers. You take the old women and cut off their lips and then you rape them and then you murder them. And then you let a few people go to spread the word and you sit back and families and villages and towns all around you flee into the bush to avoid having any of this happen to them and their children. And then you just enjoy the view because out in the bush, young children die immediately. Old folks die immediately. Pregnant women die immediately. Almost everybody dies right away. And those who don’t, at least flee the land that you’re after across some border or into some UN refugee center that’s been set up.

That’s how these things work. And so the Zionists were playing up. They weren’t denying. They weren’t trying to get away from or avoid responsibility for what had happened there. You see, they’re playing it up. And so now when they’re preparing to attack other villages and towns, they’re actually threatening the civilians there. They would set up trucks with big speaker systems and they would go around these villages and towns threatening the civilians with another day or Yassin to get them to run away. Menachem Begin, commander of the attack, publicized his group’s role in the slaughter.

He began circulating reports that the Irgun now had 20,000 soldiers in Palestine, which shocked everybody and especially the Arabs. What did it mean for them if in addition to the numbers of normal Zionist forces, the Haganah, which were tough enough, there were 20,000 of the people who had just done this out there running around? British intelligence indicated that the Irgun may have had as many fighters in the country as the Haganah. And the London Times reported that, quote, by April it had become clear that the Irgun virtually controlled the all-Jewish city and Zionist headquarters of Tel Aviv, end quote. Now a lot of that is exaggeration and propaganda spread by the Irgun. They most likely at this point did not have 20,000 regular full-time soldiers in the country, and they controlled territory in Tel Aviv and had a lot of support there. But the Times of London statement kind of implies that they controlled the government there, that they were kind of in charge of the Yeshiva, and that was not true. But it didn’t matter because this is aimed at the Arabs, and the Arabs really have no way of knowing any of that.

The goal of this is to put the Arabs to flight, make them so afraid of what was about to happen to them that they would just flee in terror for the lives of their families and themselves, and it worked. John Kimchee, he’s a British Zionist publicist and editor at the time, wrote, quote, at this moment the Irgun launched an attack on Jaffa accompanied by a flourish of ostentatious publicity. Irgun police took over the streets of Tel Aviv leading to Jaffa. Jaffa and Tel Aviv are kind of attached to each other. Irgun police took over the streets of Tel Aviv leading to Jaffa, and Irgun lorries with singing boys and girls careened around Tel Aviv. The great bombardment of Jaffa was started with three-inch mortars. This bombardment started a panic among the Jaffa Arabs. The remaining 20,000 started to leave the city by boat and by road.

The Jewish and foreign press was invited to visit and to inspect the Arab prisoners. A few blindfolded prisoners were paraded through Tel Aviv. The Irgun activities in Jaffa also extended to yet another field. For the first time in the still undeclared war, a Jewish force commenced to loot in wholesale fashion. At first, the young Irgunists pillaged only dresses, blouses, and ornaments for their girlfriends, but this discrimination was soon abandoned. Everything that was movable was carried from Jaffa. Furniture, carpets, pictures, crockery and pottery, jewelry and cutlery. The occupied parts of Jaffa were stripped.

What could not be taken away was smashed. Windows, pianos, fittings and lamps went in an orgy of destruction.” The UN General Assembly had approved their resolution to break Palestine into a Jewish and Arab partition, but that was all it did. There were no provisions for enforcing any of this. There were no provisions for what to do if the Zionists began striking out into Arab territories and driving the Palestinians who lived there out into the desert. On 15 May 1948, the last British High Commissioner of Mandatory Palestine left the country, and so now you’ve just got the organized, well-armed militias of the Zionists and the scattered and broken population of the Palestinian Arabs in this country together. John Kimche also wrote that, with the help of some British officials who were still outraged at everything the Zionists had done and what this whole situation had become, with their help pushing it a little bit, the Zionist propaganda about their strength, about the Irgun’s strength, and about the Zionist intentions of what they intended to do, it had created this unintended side effect besides just scaring the Palestinians out of their homes. He wrote, “‘This information had been passed on by the Foreign Office to the British envoys in the Arab countries, who in turn informed the Arab governments to which they were accredited. It had the desired effect among the Arabs.

It swayed many who had been hesitating on the brink of the decision whether to go to war against the Palestine Zionists or not. For though it has become a habit among pro-Zionists to assume that there was nothing but evil hatred behind the Arab decision to go to war, and that the Arab explanation that they came to save their brethren from the attack by terrorists was just a cheap excuse for the benefit of those who dared to believe it, it must be stressed that there was a great and very real Arab concern for the fate of Palestine Arabs. The concern reached fever heat when the British information was passed on that the terrorists were becoming the decisive factor in the Zionist armed forces.” The Yishuv leadership voted to declare national independence for the State of Israel as the last British ships were leaving Haifa and as Palestinian civilians are fleeing villages and towns across the country. David Ben-Gurion was named head of the Provisional Government and the very next day, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan invaded Palestine. This whole time, Arab people and Arab militaries across these borders have been getting edgy watching this happen. They’ve got refugees streaming across their borders with stories of murdered sons and raped daughters and destroyed villages and the people and the militaries in these nations are calling on their leaders to set them loose, let them do something. But the leaders for the most part are not enthusiastic about intervening. Most of these states still had ties to the British or the French who were whispering in their ear and letting them know what the situation is and they understood it. The situation was that it did not matter what any of them thought about it. It didn’t matter if it was right or wrong. This was happening. It had been, I mean the British didn’t want it to happen and it still happened. This is something that had been bought and paid for and in the Kremlin and nobody was going to do anything to stop this. King Abdullah of Jordan commanded the most significant Arab force in the region by far. The British trained and British advised Arab legion but he was hesitant to get involved at all. In fact, before everything happened, before the conflict kicked off, he had cut a deal with the Zionists to stay out of any fight that might happen.

It was only after everything was so horrifying and they started seeing everything that was happening that he eventually agreed to intervene just to save a little bit of face. But he didn’t want to get in there to try to stop something that the UN, the West and the Soviets all seemed to have blessed. Now the Zionists meanwhile, the Zionists, they don’t have an enthusiasm problem. They don’t have a commitment problem. They certainly don’t have an organization problem or anything like that but they’re in it to win it. They’ve got the same attitude and he was there for all this right in the middle of it, Chaim Herzog. He tells this story that, you know, I always love this story. It’s so short and simple and it’s just a single scene but I think it just gives you an idea of the commitment level of these people and how focused they are and then think of the difference in commitment between the Zionists and the Arab states that are supposed to be supporting the Palestinians.

So one time after a car bomb is detonated at the Jewish agency headquarters in Jerusalem in March of 48, he goes to a nearby office of a Norwegian staffer for the UN commission that’s overseeing the partition. He rushes over there, grabs this guy and rushes back. Herzog writes, only then did I realize that I was covered in dust and my shirt was soaked with blood. I took Roscher Lund, the UN representative to the agency and showed him the ruins. Already workers were laying bricks and repairing internal damage to the building. As secretaries cleaned up and workers moved silently carrying bricks, Herzog says, such a nation will never be defeated, he said. End quote. Now, you know, I don’t know if tears are really necessary there.

The Norwegians’ reaction might have been a little bit melodramatic but think about that. Think about an explosion going off, killing 13 people, injuring dozens more, blood everywhere, body parts everywhere, people everywhere and in minutes, Jewish civilians are already working feverishly cleaning debris and stacking bricks and going off and getting new bricks and making repairs to these buildings. You know, good luck. Good luck, guys. You’re not, you’re not beating that. It’s not going to happen. Not until, you know, you somehow find a way to get them to lose a little bit of that enthusiasm. It’s not happening.

And compare this to the aimless resistance and the half-hearted and reluctant intervention of the Arab states. You know, the popular narrative that a lot of people, at least in the United States, kind of buy into is that several powerful, well-equipped Arab nations enraged at the prospect of having dirty Jews in their midst immediately threw their full military weight at tiny little Israel as soon as the UN voted for partition. That’s not what happened. In reality, we only intervened after months of seeing bloody Palestinian refugee families flooding across their borders with story after terrible story of burned communities and murdered parents and children. And even then, the response of these Arab states was obligatory and underwhelming. In the event, as things start kicking off, Israeli fighters actually outnumbered the Arab soldiers. And the operations of the Arab militaries were completely restricted to operations within the portion of Palestine that had been partitioned by the UN to the Arab population. They avoided mounting operations within the Jewish zone almost completely.

So the Israeli war of independence, in other words, was not really a defensive war fought on Israeli soil against an invading enemy. It was fought, the actual combat was fought by the UN to the Palestinian Arabs. So as the Arab forces move in to the Palestinian territories, the Arab state forces, they begin to engage with the Israeli defense forces. I’ll call them the Israelis now because that’s what they are. On June 1st, the Irgun had signed an agreement with the government, the Israeli provisional government, to have its whole organization, all its men, on May 29th, the UN had ordered a ceasefire which was put into effect on June 11th. And so the Israelis were using that time to try to get through that absorption and work in the Irgun but also to bring in more reinforcements. Immigrants are streaming into the country at this point and also to fortify their positions and consolidate the control that they had over territories that they had taken away from the Arabs. Fighters and weapons were brought up to the new front with about 65,000 men from about 35,000 when they started.

The agreement between the Irgun and the IDF, the absorption agreement, stipulated that as part of the IDF the Irgun was going to have to stop any independent procurement of weapons and supplies and that it was going to have to work through the standard IDF chain of command if it needed anything, just like any other military unit. But prior to the agreement, a ship called the Alta Lena had already been chartered by the Irgun with a very large cache of weapons and ammunition coming from France. It was on its way to Palestine and set to arrive during the ceasefire. So Menachem Begin goes to David Ben-Gurion, to the provisional government and demands that some of those weapons at least go to his men out in the field because the unification of the Irgun with the new IDF has not all been worked out yet. It’s only been a short period of time and so it’s not like it’s all complete for anybody who needs supplies. Initially Ben-Gurion agreed that 20% of the weapons and ammunition would go to the Irgun units out there but then Begin requested that since the Irgun had actually worked out the procurement and the delivery of all these weapons, they had done all of it, that these weapons should go to equip the IDF units that were made up of Irgun men because the guys who were in the Irgun once they moved into the IDF they didn’t just get worked into other units to deliver the weapons to go to them. Now Ben-Gurion, his spidey sense went off here, he was afraid that Begin was still thinking of the Irgun, even the ones that had been rolled into the IDF as his own private army rather than as just a part of the military bureaucracy of their new state and he was afraid that Menachem Begin planned to use these loyalists at some point to challenge Ben-Gurion’s power so the government refused that request. In fact he demanded that Begin surrender the ship and all of its cargo when it got there. He said at a government meeting we must decide whether to hand over power to Begin or to order him to cease his separate activities. If he does not do so we will open fire. Otherwise, we must decide to disperse our own army. And so a letter was delivered to Begin informing him that the area in which the ship intended to land was going to be covered by troops and artillery and armored cars and he was ordered to give up his own headquarters. Begin ignored that summons and he was conferring with his officers on a beach near the place where the Alta Lena was waiting at the time. And while they were deciding what to do IDF units roll up and a firefight breaks out between the Irgun and the IDF. Eventually the IDF brings in heavy weapons and a lot of reinforcements and they overrun the Irgun’s positions. Menachem Begin and a few others managed to get into a rowboat and make their way out to the Alta Lena with Israeli small boats.

Begin orders the Alta Lena to make its way down to Tel Aviv where the Irgun would be able to muster a lot more shore-side support for the landing. And word starts to get around about what’s happening and a bunch of Irgun members including ones who had been brought into the IDF already leave their posts and start making their way to meet the ship at Tel Aviv. Rumors begin circulating all over the country that the Irgun was going to launch an attack on Tel Aviv. Shlomo Nachteman, a Jewish author in his book on the Alta Lena incident, he wrote that Ben-Gurion instructed the Israeli Air Force which was only a few planes at this point but sufficient for this task that Ben-Gurion ordered the Israeli Air Force to sink the Alta Lena at sea with Ben-Gurion on it before it made its way down to Tel Aviv. Gordon Levitt was a pilot who was flying for Israel during the 1948 war and the Israeli commander of the Israeli Air Force delivered that order to him and several other non-Jewish volunteer pilots when Jewish pilots refused to carry out that mission but none of them were willing to sink the Alta Lena. They were all of the opinion that they had not come to Israel to kill Jews. That’s not why they were there and they weren’t going to start now. So the Alta Lena with Bagan and his thousand or so people on board made their way down to Tel Aviv and eventually runs aground on the busiest stretch of Tel Aviv beach in a full view of beach goers and hotel guests including all the reporters and UN observers who were about to watch everything that’s going to happen from their hotel balconies.

Bagan claimed that he had not directed the ship to Tel Aviv for a coup. Remember that’s where the seat of the Israeli government is at this point. He claimed that’s not why he was there. He was there to protect himself from these siege conditions and then I would be able to communicate directly with the government and put an end to what I still hoped was a perilous misunderstanding. Well Ben-Gurion was waiting with large concentrated forces on the beach. Heavy guns were brought in and assembled and Bagan was urging the men ashore not to fight. He’s calling out to them saying don’t do this. He starts unloading the weapons and he says don’t fire.

And he shouted at them we shall not fire. We shall not fight our brothers. And so all this is kind of going on and people are kind of hesitating as Bagan’s doing this and the IDF commanders are worried that their men some of whom literally had relatives on the ship at least one I’m sure had a brother there on the Alta Lena that they were going to lose their nerve to start shelling the Alta Lena. The first gunner that they gave the order to refused. He said he would be executed for insubordination before he opened up with artillery on other Jews. The second gunner was a recent arrival from South Africa and he refused at first but then they threatened him with a court martial and so he complied. The heavy guns opened up soon the ship began to burn after a direct hit and that fire spread to the ammunition holds and got out of control very quickly and very soon the Alta Lena was ordered abandoned. Ergun men were jumping into the water to avoid being burned while their comrades ashore were going out to try to meet them with rafts and all the while these swimming men and their rescuers are being fired on with automatic weapons by Israeli forces.

Begin refused to leave the ship until the last of his wounded men had been evacuated. Eventually he too jumped into the water and he managed to make it ashore to escape. Just as during the hunting season back in 1944 and 45 Begin was not prepared to be the cause of a Jewish civil war whatever the other side had done and so he negotiated with the Israeli provisional government and secured a deal that freed the 200 or so Ergun men and eventually worked most of those men back into the IDF. The Alta Lena incident made a huge impression on everyone I mean you can imagine you’re sitting on a beach and a ship runs aground and then a bunch of soldiers show up and a battle breaks out and this is in front of UN representatives during a ceasefire when they have the official mediator there in front of reporters from all over the world this is happening. People in Tel Aviv were disgusted with the savagery with which Ben-Gurion had ordered his men to attack Begin’s men. After all they were Jews and they were Zionists and they were popular too. Begin was playing Zionist anthems from the loudspeakers of the ship while the fighting was going on. Think about how that looks people are watching and you’ve got a bunch of Ben-Gurion’s forces coming out firing artillery and automatic weapons at a ship that is blasting Zionist anthems the entire time.

The UN mediator who had been sent to observe and manage the Arab-Israeli ceasefire Count Folk Bernadotte he was particularly disturbed by the demonstration that the Zionists still seem to have rogue independent militias out there running around the country and procuring weapons through unofficial channels. He was a widely admired humanitarian and a hero of the Second World War not a combat hero he was a citizen of neutral Sweden during the war but he had negotiated the release of some 31,000 Jewish and other prisoners from Nazi concentration camps. As vice president of the Swedish Red Cross he’d actually gone in and led several rescue missions behind enemy lines in Germany. So he’s a revered figure in Sweden and a hero to many Jews. Miriam Akavia she was a Polish-born Israeli writer and diplomat she had been a prisoner at Bergen-Belsen the concentration camp and she expresses a pretty common perspective about Bernadotte. Toward the end of the war the Nazis are in full retreat and Bernadotte’s Swedish Red Cross is sending in its iconic white buses into the continent to rescue concentration camp survivors and when Akavia was found she weighed less than 60 pounds reduced by misery and deprivation she describes the day of her sad liberation this is from a later article on Bernadotte in the UK Independent quote I myself was lying on a heap of dead bodies and beside me was my sister Lucia our mother was there with us but she was no longer alive for her the war ended too late Sweden chose the weakest and sickest nothing was demanded of us they fed us, dressed us, checked us fed us vitamins and cod liver oil and sent us to pretty localities most of us to hospitals end quote and Anna Akavia her husband he was also a Holocaust survivor he describes Count Bernadotte as his savior and says that when he was found he was so thin and ill that if he had not been saved by Sweden I cannot imagine how I would have survived it meant recovery and a new life well Bernadotte is shocked by what he’s seeing in Palestine and he opened up negotiations between the two parties by demanding that this swelling mass of Arab refugees to start with they’ve got to be allowed to go back to their homes this is not how the laws of war work and then he said that the lines of the UN partition are not going to work they’ve got to be redrawn in a manner that’s more equitable and he didn’t make much headway on that this was just a starting point before he could make much headway the limited time ceasefire expired and the Arab and Israeli forces started engaging each other again on July 8th 1948 with the expiration of the ceasefire the Zionist commanders they’d already been preparing so they’re already in place to advance now on the cities of Lydda and Ramle there was going to be another truce in ten days it was already scheduled and it was going to happen very quickly it amassed its largest force up until this time and it moved very quickly into Palestinian territories the IDF arrived at Lydda and it began softening up the civilian population and the small militia that was there with artillery and mortar bombardment after a very brief battle with the city’s few defenders Israeli forces which are backed up on the city these demoralized and untrained Arab resistance fighters are easily overrun and the population just huddles in their homes and in a few mosques treating the wounded and trying to bury the dead men women and children that are scattered around no one’s permitted to leave any of their buildings and the Israeli soldiers the terrified population of Lydda had heard of the massacres and so they’re in a complete panic as you can imagine several thousand of Lydda citizens had been confined to the Grand Mosque near the center of town about three thousand or so it was said to be so full that you couldn’t actually sit down everybody had to stand up there was no room for anybody to sit down and this was on a July day in the Middle East when a British commander was in a very difficult and tensions were starting to get tempers and tensions were starting to flare people who were left to marinate in their own filth and waste like the Louisiana Superdome during Hurricane Katrina with no food, no water, no toilets sweating in the July heat and the stink of this unwashed humanity and screaming infants as they wondered if they were about to become so put yourself in that place for a minute imagine that you’re there with your child or your wife maybe give yourself a scorching headache from the dehydration and lack of sleep and stress from worrying about whether the next soldier that comes through that door is going to start shooting after some time goes by a few Israeli fighters after they’d done it they said that they had been shot at not sure if that actually happened or not but that was the excuse that they gave to their commanders and so once news spread that they had been shot at the IDF forces just went on a rampage they went berserk they smashed through the town firing into crowds shelling buildings that they knew were full of people and throwing hand grenades into the windows of homes that were rounded up leaving nothing but the old people the very young and the women any Arab regardless of age or sex that was found outside after sunset was to be shot on sight many were and so with all the able-bodied men rounded up and confined most of them were shipped off out of the town you’ve got nothing but the old people the women and the children basically left in this city this is a big city and so you’ve got nothing but the helpless remaining citizens huddling in terror with most of the able-bodied men gone and they’re just hoping that the armed men who are now prowling the streets these bands of men are not going to choose their door to kick in in order to loot or assault or rape or kill soon news of the situation reaches Israeli headquarters and the leaders are trying to discuss what to do with this mass of people Rabin was there that day and he recorded what happened in his diary as they were trying to figure out what to do with all these civilians Rabin writes quote after attacking Lida later called Log Ben-Gurion would repeat the question what is to be done with the population waving his hand in a gesture which said drive them out driving out is a term with a harsh ring psychologically this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook end quote well if he thought that this was tough on him and his men it was going to be much harder on the people that they were about to drive out the order was given to use any necessary means to quickly expel the residents and cleanse the area of the people that Ben-Gurion referred to as strangers the following day 35,000 Arab civilians virtually all women, children and the elderly were rounded up and marched out of their homes as refugees driven into the desert with only what they could carry the Israeli soldiers looted the city with abandon and they were stopping the fleeing residents to search them for valuables as they were going out the Israeli commander in charge of the city Shmarion Gutman he informs us that the Arabs were grateful to be allowed to leave thankful that they were not just massacred now while this is going on a parallel operation is being carried out in the nearby city of Ramleh leaflets and loudspeakers and radio broadcasts threaten the residents with extermination and bombings and bombardments and sniper fire got the population moving many of the current inhabitants of both cities were living in either in Jaffa or some of the other villages and they had fled to these cities and so they needed very little convincing about what the Israelis were capable of so in one stroke between 50 and 70,000 Arabs were purged some bust off to concentration camps but the majority just sent out into the desert on the 4th of July 1948 over 100,000 Arab civilians would be driven into homelessness thousands of women and children trod out into the July heat the few remaining people were elderly and disabled folks having gathered what they could carry trying to pull it on little makeshift sleds they took doors off their hinges and tried to put their valuables and their belongings on that to carry with them wherever they were going they didn’t know where they were going the road very quickly became littered with all their belongings because they were just forced to let go of them eventually they couldn’t carry them it was the Muslim month of Ramadan and so they were fasting during the day and the vast majority of these fleeing Palestinian Muslims refused to break their fast taking no food and no water even as they were collapsing under the burning sun the heat began to take the old and the sick first and the road became choked with bodies of dying men and women children began to fall from heat stroke and women tried to carry them while Israeli soldiers fired shots over their heads and at their feet to frighten them and to keep them moving some Israeli soldiers followed the train of refugees into the desert waiting to scoop up dropped valuables and taking interesting things that weren’t dropped off of people one Israeli soldier later said to begin with they jettisoned utensils and furniture and in the end bodies of men women and children scattered along the way some of the Israeli soldiers were traumatized by what they witnessed hour after hour in the litter death march eyewitnesses reported seeing babies trying to nurse from mothers who had died already in the heat the road was narrow and congested and it was choked with dust and thirsty people there were children screaming through dry throats and adults were weeping and occasional gunshots were fired into the crowd every so often we’re told a family would pull out of the column to the side of the road to bury a baby who had succumbed to dehydration or heat stroke or to say goodbye to a grandmother who could go no further and that nobody could carry as the day dragged on and the stress piled up things degenerated and people just began to go crazy there were delirious mothers abandoning their screaming babies unable to bear their screams for hunger and screams of thirst a British commander who was outraged by the scene but who was under orders not to intervene reported that the side of the road was littered with the bodies of the young and the old and that the number of dead children would never be known many of them buried anonymously in shallow desert graves again far from running away from incidents like this from incidents like Deir Yassin and Lida and Ramle the Israeli commanders considered them strategically valuable and so they actually sent out agents to spread exaggerated versions of all this into Arab communities in order to make the cleansing of strangers called for in Plan D more easily accomplished the Israelis spread it by word of mouth, leaflets, radio broadcasts and again they would circle villages and towns that were filled with Arabs and announce with loudspeakers what was going to happen to them they tell them that they would be infected with typhus and cholera and other diseases that they would be massacred they’re even going out and spreading rumors that the Israelis had possession of atomic bombs and were going to use it to eradicate cities and once again this campaign of terror had its intended effect Arabs fled in fear of genocide by a group of fanatical terrorists and assassins who seemed to have the blessing of the entire international community behind them without knowing where they were going, the people who had lived in and worked the land of Palestine for 13 centuries fled into the desert by the hundreds of thousands by the time the next ceasefire kicked in, the Israelis had driven the majority of the Arab population under their control out of their homes in certain places like in the city of Haifa up on the northern coast the Arabs who didn’t flee were caged in their neighborhoods with fences and barbed wire and kept under military supervision and all about somewhere between 700 and 800 thousand Arabs were ethnically cleansed from Palestine driven into the unoccupied West Bank or into Gaza or across the borders into quickly thrown together refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan Count Bernadotte’s view of the Zionist case as he’s watching all this go on is beginning to darken he reported back to the UN that the Arab states were reluctant to restart the fighting they were looking for a way out and he said that what violence was being initiated by the Arab states were mere incidents he called them committed by overzealous commanders or freelancing troops usually acting without orders and the Arab states were just looking for a way to get out of this and so as Bernadotte and his staff are beginning to understand what is going on and as he tours the country and just sees hundreds of thousands of destitute and homeless Arab refugees all over the place this renowned humanitarian Count Bernadotte who was chosen for his role specifically because his humanity and credibility could not be questioned by anybody, by either party he insisted that his proposal, his demand that the displaced civilians, these refugees be permitted to return to their homes when the fighting was done as required by settled international law he also recommended that Jerusalem be placed under an international protectorate some kind of an international body set up by the UN that would look after Jerusalem to ensure that Jews and Muslims and Christians all had equal rights and that no conflicts erupted over restrictions in Jerusalem the Arabs were actually, they expressed some amount of interest in this proposal but the world was not going to have to wait very long to find out the Israeli response when Count Bernadotte’s Swedish Red Cross had been conducting rescue missions in Nazi Europe Bernadotte would often insist on personally accompanying convoys of refugees he would ride with them on the Red Cross buses more than once he was mistakenly strafed by Allied aircraft and almost killed now in Jerusalem he had been warned to stay away from exposing himself to the chaos but the same thing, again he refused to send out his observers to expose themselves to dangers that he wasn’t going to face himself on September 17th, 1948 as Bernadotte’s car convoy is traveling through Jewish West Jerusalem his set of cars is stopped by a Jewish army jeep General Age Lundstrom who was in the vehicle General Age Lundstrom who was in the vehicle with Bernadotte describes what happens quote in the Katamon quarter we were held up by a Jewish army-type jeep placed in a roadblock and filled with men in Jewish army uniforms at the same moment I saw an armed man coming from the jeep I took little notice of this because I merely thought it was just another checkpoint however, he put a Tommy gun through the open window on my side of the car and fired point blank at Count Bernadotte and Colonel Sarreau Colonel Sarreau was a French UN observer who was in the vehicle I also heard shots fired from other points and there was considerable confusion Colonel Sarreau fell in the back seat in front of me and I saw at once that he was dead Count Bernadotte bent forward and I thought at the time that he was trying to get cover I asked him, are you wounded? he nodded and fell back when we arrived at the Hadassah hospital I carried the Count inside and laid him on the bed I took off the Count’s jacket and tore away his shirt and undervest I saw that he was wounded around the heart and that there was also a considerable quantity of blood on his clothes about it when the doctor arrived I asked if anything could be done but he replied that it was too late the other victim, Colonel André Sarreau was a French UN observer and he wasn’t supposed to be in the car with Bernadotte the day he got killed he had actually swapped places from the first car in the convoy in order to personally thank Bernadotte for saving his wife from a Nazi concentration camp three years earlier he was shot 18 times and died on the spot and so the ceasefire expires and the Arab states and the Zionists engage with each other again and the fighting drags on for some months more after this but with new reinforcements and more supplies being provided to the Zionists now the rest of it is mostly a mop-up operation by the Israelis when it’s all over they have control not only of the territory partitioned to them by the United Nations but they had also seized and cleaned out 60% of the territory provided to the Palestinians the UN and the neighboring Arab states are trying to manage this three quarters of a million refugees now living in squalor in these hastily built camps today there are millions of stateless Palestinians still living in these dilapidated refugee camps I was thinking about tacking on a brief summary of the major events that have happened in the time since the founding of the state of Israel and today but I think we’re going to handle that another time maybe I’ll do it in a blog post or supplementary podcast but in 1967, in a 1967 war against the Arab states Israel seized the rest of the original Palestinian territory controlling the entire thing and they placed any Arabs who were still in that territory and not in one of the refugee camps across one of the borders under very severe military occupation a condition in which those people remained this very day 50 years later everything that the British taught the Zionists during the Arab revolt from checkpoints to random searches to blowing up the homes of suspected rebels to punish their families and random arrests and jailing people without trial or explanation it’s all there all the old colonial native control methods are all there over the years, Israel has expanded even into the meager occupied reservations under which the Arabs have been forced and this has been probably the major obstacle to any peace process going forward after the Al-Talena incident David Ben-Gurion had secured control David Ben-Gurion had secured control over the early state of Israel he served as both the first after the Al-Talena incident David Ben-Gurion had secured control over the early state of Israel he served as both the first and the third prime ministers of the country but that spirit that had animated the Irgun and the Stern gang that spirit remains strong in the country and the subsequent conflicts that continued between the Israelis and the Palestinian population that it now ruled and also with the surrounding Arab states has continued to bring Israel more and more in Begin’s direction over the years after everything that had happened Jabotinsky and Begin and their revisionists were going to get the last laugh after all because in 1977 Menachem Begin was elected prime minister of Israel after he’d served two terms he was succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir the terrorist leader of the Stern gang who had personally ordered countless murders including the assassinations of the British official Lord Moyne and Count Bernadotte the bodies of the two murderers who had assassinated Lord Moyne in Cairo were eventually brought back from Egypt and buried in Israel with full military honors since Menachem Begin took power as prime minister in 1977 his Likud party that he founded has held power consistently for 27 out of the last 39 years and for 15 of the last 20 years in 2005 the Likud prime minister Ariel Sharon ordered the evacuation of Jewish settlements from Gaza and placed that city in the south and the whole area under siege now over 60% of Gaza city’s population is 14 years old or younger and the Israelis literally have it surrounded by a wall with remote control machine guns dotting the top of the wall facing inward toward the inmates the Palestinians for their part have lived under siege and occupation now for so long that I find myself wondering if their individual and social psychology hasn’t been twisted up so much that it makes this whole problem practically insoluble Hamas, the terrorist resistance group based out of Gaza is basically a death cult celebrates suicide bombers as martyrs of war when you can’t win a fight you start to celebrate losing and so they celebrate suicide bombers as martyrs in a war where they have to make their own weapons in basements and when your enemy has state of the art attack jets and tanks and satellite surveillance and cruise missiles and helicopters and nuclear weapons every so often the Palestinians will lash out and the Israelis will attack they did that recently in 2014 when they threw their forces at Gaza when it was all over 66 Israeli soldiers and 6 civilians were dead 66 soldiers and 6 civilians 2300 Palestinians were killed and almost 11,000 were wounded at least 70% of those casualties were civilians in a city that is 60% children 14 and under the level of insane hatred on both sides of this conflict has gotten so bad you’ll find videos of Arabs celebrating suicide bombers every time they take out an Israeli school bus and you’ll find videos of Israelis outside southern towns like Sderot during the 2014 Gaza war bringing food and drinks and having parties and picnics up on the hills overlooking Gaza city cheering every time an Israeli jet fires a missile into an apartment building or a power plant or a water treatment facility this is where we’re at today the long serving current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he said that Israel will never ever allow the Palestinians to have a real sovereign state of their own that it’s too dangerous and they will never let that happen meanwhile after years of persecution and hopelessness and increasingly severe Islamist indoctrination the Palestinians have it’s led to this mutated monstrous culture among the Palestinian Arabs as I speak right now we’re still going through this period that has lasted over a year where Palestinian Arabs, very often children and women are just randomly pulling out kitchen knives or screwdrivers and other things and just stabbing random Jews on the street there have been cases where it doesn’t even seem like it was planned at all there was this one case where an Arab teenager seemed to be on her way to school she had a packed school bag and everything to indicate that she was actually planning to go to school that day but then who randomly pulled out a knife and began stabbing a random Israeli until she was shot and killed and just the year between October 2015 and October 2016 there were hundreds of stabbings and attempted stabbings and shootings and vehicle attacks that one year just from these 38 Israelis have been killed, almost 600 wounded, during the same period 235 Palestinians have been killed and almost 4,000 wounded but neither the Palestinians nor their allies in the region seem any closer to giving up today than they’ve ever been the long time popular mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kulik he was once asked what ought to be done about the Arab problem and Kulik looked at the interviewer and he said and I’m paraphrasing here but he said the Arab problem we don’t have a problem problems have solutions we have a condition and conditions you just learned to deal with now the Zionists are never going to give up Israel and the Palestinians are never going to give up their fight to return Rifat Alarir in Gaza Writes Back wrote sometimes a homeland becomes a tale we love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland because of the story there are more stories in this country than anywhere else in the world in the end our stories are all any of us have if this conflict is going to end with any result other than the total destruction of one of the two sides it’ll be when somebody figures out how to tell this story in a way that allows both sides to feel that their suffering has been acknowledged I’ve brought this up to Jewish friends before and they usually just think I’m being silly but an apology might go a lot further than anybody imagines I heard an interview a while back with some US Army officers who had served in Iraq for a while and these officers their job was to go out into the country go find the families of people who were killed by mistake by US forces and to try to work out some kind of compensation for their loss when you hear about a drone taking out a wedding party or something like that these are the people who go out and find the victims families and go talk to them on behalf of the US government. This is something we started doing all the way back in World War II and one of our jeeps would run over some French farmer’s kid or something as we made our way toward Germany and so I’m listening to this and it’s interesting and then they start talking about the compensation that they would provide to these people and sometimes we had killed a goat or we had destroyed a piece of farm equipment or something and the value of those things is pretty easy to work out but other times they were talking to somebody who had lost a wife or a child because of a mistake we made because of something we did and so the interview asked this officer what kind of compensation we would typically provide for something like that and the officer said something I don’t remember, it was like $5,000 on average, something like that and so the interviewer said the same thing that everybody listening was probably thinking which is what I was thinking which is that offering somebody $5,000 to make up for killing their family member is not compensation, that’s an insult that was the first thing I thought but the officer who had done this many, many, many times over a few years unfortunately he said that it typically did not work like that he said the program was actually incredibly successful and that the people were almost always grateful but he said they weren’t grateful for the sum of money which by itself would be insulting he said what made the difference was just the fact that the suffering and the loss experienced by these people was being recognized that we took the initiative that we came to them and took responsibility and told them that we were wrong and we were sorry and we wanted to make it right the officer said that he said look everyone everywhere in the world knows that there are such things as wars whether or not they agree with the reasons behind this one or that one people know that they happen and everyone knows that in wars sometimes things happen that shouldn’t happen however much it hurts people generally get that what people want is recognition and he said you wouldn’t believe and he said you wouldn’t believe the miracles that can happen when you actually try it for any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the Arab-Israeli conflict or I guess now the Jewish-Muslim conflict it’s expanded to that for any solution to even get off the ground if there’s going to be a solution it’s going to have to begin with the Israelis recognizing what they have done to the Palestinian people with them saying look it was crazy back then ok we didn’t know what else to do we didn’t have a home and it was pogroms and then the holocaust and everything else that was going on and we were desperate and we just didn’t know what else to do but none of that was your fault and it shouldn’t have landed on you we are sorry we are sorry and then by the time any of us your people or my people were born this stuff was already happening it had been happening and then we were caught up in it you were taught to hate us we were taught to hate you and then by the time we’re teenagers I’m being conscripted into the IDF and you’re being taught how to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at me so can we work this out or what?

Martyr Made Fear and Loathing in New Jerusalem - TRANSCRIPT

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