The podcast episode introduces a series on Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by first immersing the listener in the horrific experience of a pogrom—a state-tolerated massacre of Jews. It emphasizes that for centuries, Jews in Europe and Russia lived under the constant threat of such organized, brutal violence, often with complicity from local authorities and police. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw escalating waves of pogroms, like those in Kishinev and Odessa, characterized by extreme atrocities and official inaction. This pervasive insecurity and lack of protection led to a mass exodus of Jews and fueled various ideological responses, including the radical Jewish nationalism of Zionism. The host contends that grasping this history of trauma and existential threat is crucial for understanding the motivations behind Zionism. He challenges common oversimplifications of the modern conflict, arguing that a deeper, empathetic look at this foundational history is necessary to move beyond seeing it as an intractable cycle of ancient hatreds.
Hey everybody, this is Darryl Cooper, you're listening to the Martyrmade podcast. You're about to hear episode 1 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 sub-stack page where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes available to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 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 don't forget. 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 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. Or it's been tough to come by lately because more and more employers aren't looking for people like you. In fact, your family is starting to get dirty looks and a neighborhood you've lived in for years. Your kids are going 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. They'll calm down now, right? You listen for your wife's breathing. It's deep and even. She's asleep. You've always been the warrior, but the truth is she's got a better sense of these things than you do when 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 take 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 is 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 at a bed and moving to the window. That's when you see them. Outside you see a group of people surrounding your neighbor and beating them with clubs. His children are in the street. He's in his pajamas. Their faces, they seem crazed. Your wife is at a 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 nine-year-old son and your six-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. The 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 want to run about a corner and find yourself face to face with a big man in a police uniform. Begin to tell them about the commotion on the street, about the attacks and the fires and the looks in their eyes and you keep talking to them as if he's a policeman and even as you realize that he's raising his club and bringing it down on your head and now everything is dark. You wake some time later in the street, 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 delirious and you see four men raping your wife. She's covered with blood and she's badly beaten. It seems only half aware of what's happening to her. She looks in your direction. Your daughter is being held by the arms by two drunken men and your son's lying at their feet in a bloody heap. Begin to realize that there are bodies everywhere. Your neighbors. To laughing teenagers step over a body as they come out of your house with a few valuables you had before setting fire to your home. 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 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 whether I was being just gratuitous or obscene and 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 we 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. 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. 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 Clemente 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 Bible didn't matter. A law has been written about the nature and causes of any of this.
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. Now, 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, anti-Semitism 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 and just the Russian Empire, there were at least 200 pogroms. And 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, an 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, 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 anti-Semitic 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 mained. After the first Kishenev pogrom, in April 1903, the New York Times wrote, quote, "The anti-Jewish riots in Kishenev, 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, killed 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 friendsied in 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. Now after a series of riots and revolutions shook the Russian Empire in 1905, hundreds of pogroms followed. There was a bloodbath in Odessa, Ukraine. Robert Weinberg's written extensively on the labor unrest leading up to the revolution and how it supercharts 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. We can blame them, even 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 blame the Jews for being behind it all. And so on October 19, 1905, 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. And 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 pogrom is 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, pogrom is 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, 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 pogrom as to Jewish-owned stores or Jews apartments while steering the rioters away from the property of non-Jews. As the correspondent for callers reported, quote, "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 did not happen 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, the unique plight, 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 in the military were often stepping aside at best, often actively participating. At the Odessa Program, some Jews formed up 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. Now what the best course of action was, that was a matter for debate. But many Jews all over Europe had had enough. They had it. They were done leaving their well-being and their safety and the safety of their families to the good will of others. And so between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 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 and radical revolutionary movements. They 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 and the late 1800s is 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, Rodwell O.
She sums 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 confias, and suicide bombers, seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction." 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 it just seems too complicated. Who is the time? You know, 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, the more I learned, the more astonished I became, and how far removed the real history is from the impression I'd received from the tidbits and news reports, and if you've 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 1940-80 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 the Tsar and his family or communist fighting with sticks and knives in the streets against fascists in Germany or the little bomb throwing anarchist in Italy. What do you think of when you hear the word "zionist"? Probably depends on who you are and what your background is. We all hold stereotypes in our heads. It's natural. When I say "Englishment", 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 you say that. 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 almost of an elderly orthodox Jew nodding his head, you know, 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, just a few years. "Zionism" was competing for recruits with Bolshevism, these other radical movements, a competition which Winston Churchill and, you know, maybe typical Churchillian hyperbole would later call "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 Sixth Zionist Congress in 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. You know, Zionists were very aware that they were in competition with these other radical movements for the loyalty of young Jews. So forget the old dottering guy kind of, you know, moving back and forth, forget about it. You can think of them as idealistic revolutionaries who dreamed of the liberation of their people because they're 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 gunfire into a midday market. Now, idealists or terrorists, 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 Biloum, Imz, plural, the group called itself Bilou, 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 Biloum, they issued a manifesto and put out a call to the scattered Jews of Europe. It 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 or nation? What has thou been doing until 1882?" "Sleeping and dreaming the false dream of assimilation." "Now thank God that we're awakened from my slothless slumber. The pogroms have awakened me from like charm sleep. Thine eyes are open to recognize the cloudy delusive hopes. Can't 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, thy old and spirit?" Remember that thou was to nation, possessing a wise law, a religion, a constitution, a celestial temple whose wall is still assigned the 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 have vined 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 assaulting 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 there's somewhat confusing conflation of the Turks with the descendants of Ishmael, noticed that the Arabs and the Muslims are not the enemy in 1882. The Europeans and the Russians of 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. Now this is important because again you 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." And you can see that in the Biliw 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. And to a lot of people writing this office some intractable ancient feud is also pretty convenient. See 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, "Oh, they're at it again," as if it just can't be explained. Just kind of comes and goes like a hurricane or an earthquake. And 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. You know, 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 you know, 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 mean, you 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 reached the beginning of a story. The early Zionists had no beef with the Arabs native to the place we now call it as real. 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. Now bring this up for two reasons. First, to point out that whatever dimensions the conflict is 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 and 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 overcome the hatred Muslims and Jews have for each other. While the early Zionists are talking about their brother-ish male, and soon after the most prominent Arab leaders are going to welcome the Jews as cousins, this is and always was a political conflict, with definite causes and specific grievances. In 1896, Theodore Herzl, a Jewish Austrian writer, could call the father of modern political Zionism, he 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 it worked in Europe and within the disparate communities of European Jews. It's one of the two or three most important documents in this story, 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. Quote, "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 are presents 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 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 a vulgar sport of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense." Then Herzl asks why, and an age when technology has made it possible to travel around the world and communicate over vast distances and create wealth and 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 properties 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're 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 as a question of might. I do not hear surrender any portion of our prescriptive right when I make this statement merely in my own name as an individual. In the world is 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 prejudice is against us still like 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. And quote, "Hersel knew that the biggest impediment to getting Zionism off the ground would not come from enemies of the Jews, but from fellow Jews and 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." Quote, "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, impulsure 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, overall 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 anti-Jewish feeling are innumerable, but this is not to be an attempt to make out a doleful category of Jewish hardships. The nation who's myths the Jews live are all, either covertly or openly anti-Semitic. He then says that the causes of modern anti-Semitism are different, and they have ever been in the past. In the past, he says their persecution were religious-carb. But in the modern polite, 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," "Not only because they withdraw would be opposed to the spirit of our age, but also because it would immediately drive all Jews rich and poor like 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, their rises also are 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-landing. 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 will get to in just a little bit. On the other side of the spectrum, her
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 is 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 Bouloum, he suggested simply asking the relevant powers to permit Jewish people from around the world to settle and build up the land of Palestine. Couldn't hurt to ask. And the Zionists would offer to be a useful ally to anyone who helped them. And so we 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 apologizing 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 Zionists 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 traitor had been passing secrets to the Germans. Blame 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 marshals in a humiliating manner. He was dressed down and his officers cutlass was broken in half. He was sent off to a penal colony known as Devil's Island. A French general 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 form. It was so contentious that people in France became known as Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, depending on their opinion, and everyone had an opinion. Marcel Proust even features it in the background of his novel in Search a Lost Time. It's going on. In 1898, the novelist, Emil Zola, published an open letter to the French president on the front page of a newspaper detailing the evidence, as well as the lies in the cover up by the military, and this swung public opinion in Dreyfus' favor. A civilian high court of appeals throughout his conviction, but still the army wouldn't budge. They simply tried and convicted him again. The Dreyfusards and the anti-Dreyfusards 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 antisemitism in many worse Western European Jews and convinced themselves of his 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. His drivers was shoved in and out of French courts and prisons and antisemitic demonstrations and attacks erupted all over France in Algeria. Theodore Herzl was a press correspondent in Paris during the driver's affair, and he saw demonstrations by anti-Dreyfusards chanting "Death to the Jews, Death to the Jews, Death to the Jews, In a secular tolerant and lightened French Republic, the hope of the Jews, many people fought back then." There's 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 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 ron 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 antisemitism. He wanted to appeal to the reason of the host nations as solutions to the problem. The drive as a fair change to all that. If they couldn't be safe in France, they wouldn't be safe anywhere. Herzl would later say, "In Paris, as I have said, I achieved a freer attitude toward antisemitism. Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of trying to combat antisemitism." 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. Now, 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 "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 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. Now 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 at this time usually just sort of had an attitude of, you know, what, who lives there? Natives, natives live there. What, the Chinese, just natives. And you have to remember that in the late 18 early 1900s, colonial power was still completely taken for granted as a legitimate pursuit. People still use words like "empower" 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 show 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 years. 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, it was all the rage, and in fact, this awakened ethnic nationalism was one of the reasons those empires were dying. See, a few years down the road, a Serbian nationalist was shooting 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 "neutral country" of Palestine. And so it's crazy as it seems, and it was a crazy idea, even to the vast majority of Jews when Herzl published this 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. I 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. Now the refrain from the Zionists then and now was all come on. The Arabs have plenty of land just go across the river
to Jordan. I mean, all we wanted is a little piece. And they were saying to Palestinians, your 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? After the typical European back then, the Zionists were all Europeans, by the way. And Arab was just an Arab. You know, 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 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, and a 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 Wolloon Belgians a distinct entity apart from France? Probably not. They're both a Frankus descent. They both speak French. What's the difference? Well, the Belgians and the French could 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. And 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 euro-something 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 the people will recognize from the Bible. The Arab 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 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 paid 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 very interest 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. These ones, the early Zionists were reaching out and finding support. Words 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 things 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. Struggle over the distinction would determine the character of the Zionist project and the course of history in the Middle East. Herzl was what became known as a political Zionist. An opposition to the official declaration of the Zionist organization that it would only seek 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 "their Judents stop." 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, 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. An opposition to this perspective were the practical Zionists. Practical Zionists believe that a declaration of a Jewish state, even if it was agreed to by all the powers in the world, was meaningless gesture on its own and would only provoke the local population to oppose Jewish immigration from the start. The practical Zionist 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 in universities that have benefited everybody, create industry, bring investment, build the Jewish homeland from the inside out, and eventually it won't have to be declared for it'll simply be a fact. Why provoke the local population over an empty declaration? Eventually, herzal and political Zionists were forced to admit that the practical Zionist had a point there. It was too early in the game to start arguing with the Arabs over ownership and sovereignty when the Jews only made up three, maybe four percent of the population of Palestine. But while they accepted the strategic necessity of adopting the practical Zionist public stance, the political Zionists remain convinced that a sovereign, ethnically Jewish state had to be the goal. Herzal writing in his diary after the Congress explained this real politic, "If I were to sum the Congress up in a word, which I shall take care not to publish, it would be this. At Basil, I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, it would be greeted by universal laughter in five years, perhaps and certainly in 15, everyone will perceive it." The Jewish state. This is a distinction that means everything in the Zionist 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? And even most people in favor of full open immigration are going to pump the brakes and say, "Oh, you look, you can come over. Make yourself at home. My house is your house." But you start demanding that I sign over the deed. I'm going to have a couple questions. The 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 coerce 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 spent a summer in the negative 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 Zionist were asking for help. And so the Zionist pushed the idea of Palestine was an empty neutral territory. Again, it's Herzl called it 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, "Rite's Victims," iconoclastic Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that in Palestine, quote, "The Zionists sought radically to change the status quo by 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." 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 were not very strong and from whom we shall easily take away the country if we only do it through stratagem and without drawing upon us their hostility before we become the strong and populous ones." Ashr Ginsburg represented another strand 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 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 so, 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 so, only sand dunes and stony mountains that are not fit to grow anything but fruit trees are not cultivated." Later he goes on, quote, "We are used to thinking of the Arabs as primitive men of the desert, as a donkey-like man,
that neither seas 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, greater extent on the natives, they will not easily step aside. Voices like Ginsburgs 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 and 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 nonprofit 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 nonprofit 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 are we using food from the developed world effect local production? Also, have you procured legal and financial and security services? Do you know how to get a hold of any of the celebrities? Those are the more important questions and 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. 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 a 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. Now, as a 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, who's adherence 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 this 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 destination 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. 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, divine intervention, the ancient descendants of the Jews obeyed their gods' 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 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 event 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 revolutionary live on mythology. Nothing can justify and rationalize, but emotion motivates. No revolutions ever been sparked or at least sustained through reason orgument. Mythologies like oxygen to a revolutionary, and that's whether you're talking about Marx's dialectic of history or gods 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. 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 the 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 and cities you did not build, and you've lived 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. While their lives have been hearing that story, Christian prophecies spoke of the importance of the Jews one day returning to that land and rebuilding the nation of Israel. Some British officials who would become involved in the Zionist effort, they were very specific that their reasons for supporting the cause 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. The televangelist Pat Robertson said it this way. "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 and 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 hardest hour 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." "The near political rhetoric does not account for it. Early decisions of Europeans and support a Zionism often sprang from the perspective that Robertson just described. I mean, 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. No matter what happens, we're required to support Israel and the Jews unconditionally. To these folks, it's a religious duty and 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." 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 pre-conquer 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, "they were the actually the ones who passed the idea on to certain Jewish circles in the 1840s." familiarity with old stories and ancient prophecies.
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. Now 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 and 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 and especially in Britain. In Britain, it 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 Weisman, 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." 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 Jews 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. And 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 Lucien Wolf. He was an assimilated Jew who considered himself fully British and who considered the Zionists claimed 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, 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 practiced 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 flashmobs or meetups. This is tough and so the 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. You know 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 it existed for thousands of years. The great goal of Zionist, all 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 and identity it didn't exist at the time. This was a process that was going on, this process of awakening national consciousness is something that was taking place all over Europe and had been for the last century or so in various places and this is one aspect of it. I mentioned the Rothchild family for example as being important early supporters of Zionism. Well the Rothchild's were a large family and you had some members who were devoted Zionists, others who were committed Jews but not Zionists and others who were fully assimilated and didn't have time for any of that. That was the Jewish community in Europe and in nutshell. There's always a lot of discussion about what the Zionists accomplished in terms of raising money and building things in 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 of 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. And 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. Well 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? Everyone thinks of the moral and political aspects of this story or how it turns out I'm always fascinated with how the people of 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 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 all right guys so here's what we're going to do. 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 in start our own country. Now we're not sure who these people are 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 went back to Europe when nobody came to join them. But in the first dozen or so years of the 20th century Jewish immigration 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 Fifth Zionist Congress in order to purchase land in Ottoman Palestine for settlement and development by Jewish immigrants. Now the fund was in doubt I love this part of the story by the way. See the fund wasn't just endowed by you know the Rothschilds and the Dehersh's of the world the big financial dynasties across Europe but it was also financed. We had a huge support from small donors individual families and individual people and for decades to come it would be it would be a common sight in Jewish homes all over the world they have this this little blue tin box with a map of Israel drawn on it and white kind of and change would be dropped in it 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 and then I'm gonna butcher the rhythm but here are the lyrics the blue box is hanging on the wall the blue box each penny put inside redeems the land redeems the land that's really the theme here that's something that 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 it had never died but it had been sleeping for for a thousand years and trying to bring that back together and return to the home of their ancestral fathers and and and reclaim it for their people and not just that but to to revive the spirit of of the Jewish nation you know this this animated these people it wasn't just about claiming territory and political power you know every one of these early meetings and every one of their writings there's there's there's something of this idealism and you can just feel it as it comes through now 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 Thedo Hursley dreamed of a cosmopolitan polyglot Jewish state where maybe the primary language was with German and the Jews would be sort of an aristocracy of what was really a colonial state letting the locals do most of the manual labor and so forth and allowing the Jewish elite freeing them up to focus on building income through trade and finance and industry and all the things that they sort of excelled that back in Europe but some of the Zionists worried about this approach and it's 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 master sort of exploiting a native population but there was also something deeper and their approach became known as labor Zionism because it was based on the belief that the Jews could only reestablish the deep connection to the land of their fathers by getting on their knees and working working it with their own hands digging their fingernails
into the dirt. The early 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 felt that this was exploitative and they didn't want to be another South Africa with a racial elite of sitting at the upper crust top of society using this vast underclass of laborers native to the play. 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. You know, really established that connection to the land of Palestine, Israel again. 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. You know, 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 last, it becomes a sustainable community. You know, the Zionists were going to have to convince regular Jews who just 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. There were laws against the moaning 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. What will 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. 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 Zionists offer doesn't sound too bad. That's what we're starting to see. This project like this is something that, you know, it'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 it's why competitors to Facebook, like Google plus 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. If all my friends are on Facebook, Google plus is no good to me. And so if your 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, who they're already making it work, you know, they'll be there to provide help and services and company. It becomes easier and easier every day that passes. And 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 Zionist 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 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 he tells you he's going to swim from the United States to Japan. And you don't 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 is starting to watch to see what happens. In Palestine, the Ottoman Turks are still in control. In Jewish immigration, it's not really raising too many alarm bells at this point. 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 themselves reducing any friction with the local population. You just got to remember, even the political Zionist, even the more extreme political Zionist 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'd acquiesce that point to the practical Zionist. 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. But 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, you know, 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. When this book reading Palace 9, Tel Aviv, professor Ami Ayalan, he, 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. And so I mentioned that there are a few intellectual and nationalist 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 so the locals pretty much let them be. North of the Ottoman Empire was another empire on its last legs. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of Central and South Eastern 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 and 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 galvanized and traumatized 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. On 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 had an idea of what a blood bath and a 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, "Eight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and strip Europe bare as no swarm of locusts has ever done before. The devastations of the 30 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, they were rising to prominence in the Ottoman Empire and seem to be stamping out any hope that the Zionists thought they might have had of getting Turkish assistance with their project. Meanwhile in Britain, the Prime Minister Herbert asked with he thought the whole Zionist project was almost some kind of joke. He had no interest in committing Britain to such a hair-brain scheme as he saw it. But obstacles like this were nothing new for the Zionists. The Zionist 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. 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 mobilise in defence of Serbia, an in preparation for war with Austria and Germany. As Russia mobilises, their historic enemy to the south, the Muslim Empire of the Ottoman Turks, orders a general mobilisation and signs a secret defence of pact with Germany, agreeing to come to the other Zaden 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 Austro-Hungarian empires within three months, millions of men are dead. Country sides are devastated, civilians have been ruined, whole cities are wiped out. So 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 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 in North Africa, which 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 run to 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's side. The Ottoman Sultan had a while back absorbed the title of Caliph so 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 step. They were converts to Islam who for centuries now had dominated the entire Muslim and Arab heartland. And so while you had to pay attention while the Sultan was speaking for sure, he was a powerful guy, 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, Hussein Bin Ali. A descendant of an Arabian clan called the Kresh. 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 horrible disaster. And so in 1915 the British reached out to Hussein for help. Hussein was very cautious here. He liked many others. He 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 Turks were Muslim themselves and they allowed their provinces a fair measure of self-government. Hussein 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. Hussein 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. And 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. Once here, take this gun pointed at a turret and start shooting. And so assured that the Arab lands from Syria to Yemen would once again be under Arab independent control, Sharif Hussein rallied his forces and revolt against the Ottoman Empire in June 1916. 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. This wasn't a war that was going to be one 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 in artillery shells. Just in the first months, they had big stores of it, stores of ammunition in artillery shells built up, but already in the first couple months, every country was out 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. And 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, right? 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 and it keeps escalating like that until eventually the whole kingdom is lost just because of a missing horseshoe nail. Well, 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, whatever happened 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. Well, David Lloyd George, head of the munitions ministry in Britain, was scrambling for answers in 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 Weisman. He was born in Belarus in 1874 and he 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 Theodore Herzl released his call to the Jewish people and he quickly became one of the leaders of Zionism in Britain. While lecturing in Manchester, he had developed a method of deriving acetone through a process of bacterial fermentation and new process. And 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. Weisman 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 cabinet members and generals. Weisman 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. Weisman, 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. The editor of the Manchester Guardian with whom Weisman would eventually become close friends, he spoke of Weisman's quote, "perfectly clear conception of Jewish nationalism and intense in burning sense of the Jew as Jew. What is strong is that of the German as German or the Englishman as Englishman and secondarily arising out of that and necessary for its satisfaction and development, his demand for a country, a homeland which for him and for anyone sharing his view of the Jewish nationality can be no other than the ancient home of his race." Like many Western European and British scientists, he was a sophisticated and 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. See, the way he saw it, the political Zionists focused on lobbying some powerful nation to just give the Jews a chance to be a Christian.
Jews at 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. In this way, Weizmann hoped perhaps even the indigenous population would eventually see the benefits and welcome the newcomers as neighbors, or at least accepted. The way he put it to his Zionist Congress was quote, "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." End quote. Now 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. You think about it. 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 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, decides they're acting like rebels. 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 Vladimir Avna 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. A wise man 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, a war had been going on for three years and the stress and the exhaustion of war 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 had it. Over half their divisions had incidents of "collective indiscipline" as 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 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? Neither 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 joined the side on 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, who, high and wise, had befriended before, had become the prime minister in 1916. 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. It just seemed impenetrable. You're talking about miles and miles and miles of defensive fortifications that had been built up for years. Along with the Germans divided it 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 are 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 its 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. And 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 side show. 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 so that the British forces in the Middle East could be brought up to support the Western Front against the Germans. There were factions within the Ottoman Empire, 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 Zionist got wind of it and high-amwise, been 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. And why has been 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 wise men'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, wise men 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. 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. Why has been 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. 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, "Oh, okay, wait a second. I forgot that people used to be crazy." Like if you're reading about Nicola 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 "undesirables." This is kind of like that. So 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, "In violent opposition to all this fear 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 main spring of every subversive movement during the 19th century and now it lasts 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 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. Well 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's certainly not.
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 that the Jews is 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 today the kind of statement that you expect to find in the dark, anti-Semitic corners in the internet, right? In 1917, you might hear it over tea at British cabinet meetings. Heime Weissmann seized on these fantasies, though. He encouraged their belief in the Jews' power. Harry Sacker, a close friend of Weissmann, 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 is not wholly without its compensations, to exploit it delicately and definitely belongs to the art of the Jewish diplomat." Well no one exploited it more delicately or definitely than Weisman. 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 Zionist 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 Zionist, telling him, "believe me when I say this race despised and weak is universal, is all powerful and cannot be put down." And he said that Jews had their hands "in the councils of every state, in every bank, in every business, in every enterprise." Of millions and millions of Jews around the world were not one monolithic body, but Weisman 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, Weisman was happy to let them think that. The idea was, look, do 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 clone 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, Weisman made an impression. And the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour made the case in a cabinet meeting, saying quote, "The vast majority of Jews in Russia and America now appear to be favorable to Zionism. If we could make a declaration favorable to such an ideal, we should be able to carry on extremely useful propaganda in both Russia and America." 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, quote, "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, quote, "To my mind, the Zionists are now the key to the situation. 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, "Untune that string and mark what discord follows." End quote. "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, "Whether they were to realize their aims through Turkey and Germany or through Great Britain." End quote. And so a cabinet meetings in October 1917, British ministers huddled together to discuss this possibility and they came out of the 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, it's 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. 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're become accustomed to doing pretty much what you want to do. And the decision to support the Zionist 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 rail-politique justification. The British would have had a steadfast ally in the Arabs after supporting their bid for independence, so the 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 Zionist, guys like Lloyd George and Balfour who had supported Zionist 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. Well, I've been said as much when he told his friends who were writing the Balfour Declaration to practice "safe statesmanship" but not mentioning publicly that their final ideal was a Jewish state. His friend Harry Sockard wasn't as cautious and he wrote a draft that would have asked the British government to support "the reconstitution of Palestine as a Jewish state and as the national home of the Jewish people." Well, wise men 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 reign in soccer and word the Declaration unless 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 will 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 non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." End quote. Well, it turned out that wise men and many others I and his thought the message was too cautious. Wise men 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 from my opinion on this. While the nuances between a home and a state would become very important later on, they escape most people at the time. British newspapers ran headlines like "a state 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 "the Allies are giving the land of Israel to the people of Israel." 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 Bin 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, and 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 Psych's Pico Agreement, negotiated by Sir Mark Psych's, whom we heard from a moment ago, in French diplomat, Francois George Pico, they carved up the Ottoman Empire like a turkey. That'll be my last attempted 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. When correspondence is leading up to the Arab Revolt, Henry McMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, had promised Hussein that the British would support "the independence of the Arabs and all the regions within the limits demanded by Hussein, the Sharif of Mecca." The Arabs didn't think there was much ambiguity in that statement at all, but McMahon believed that he left the specifics with enough ambiguity "to tempt the Arab people in the right path without binding our hands." 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. 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 piece. The question is who the British were lying to. Most people today tend to assume that the Sykes-Pico 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 quote, "French intentions in Syria are surely incompatible with the war aims of the Allies as to find the Russian government. If the self-determination of nationalities is to be the principle, the interference of France and the selection of advisors by the Arab government and a suggestion by France of the Amir's 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 equate the French government with our detailed pledges to King Hussein. End quote. So the British were making promises of 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. What they want is a piece of the property that British had just promised to the people living in it. In on one hand, look, it's hard to blame the British. When you're fighting a war 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 Pico 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 Zionist nor 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. And our two years partnership under fire they grew accustomed to believing me and to think my government like myself sincere. In this hope they perform 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 savv 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 of fair settlement of their claims. In other words I presumed seeing norther 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 in 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-Pico 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. 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 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 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 even weren't they weren't really concerned with the Jews per se. They saw Zionism at this point still as a fig Lee 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 favor 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 who's saying "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 he'd spent two years fighting alongside Hussein's son Faisal. Lawrence famously went about his 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 and 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 this stereotype of the Wild West and the frontier in America where calling someone a liar it's not just insulting it's a reason to start reaching for your gun. The Arabs of this time inhabited that kind of a world. The 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 that 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 who saying 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. Designism is 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 even.
Think about. After the armistice, Haim Weisman met and had a series of correspondences with the man who emerged as the leader of the Arabs in greater Syria. This man was a mere Fizal I, leader of the Arab armies and son of Hussein Bin Ali. At the urging of the British government, Weisman traveled to meet Fizal 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, Weisman 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 songs, 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 were they kidding? Countless cultures and peoples existed at some point in the past. They had their de 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, deep in their commitment to their homeland and their identity. The exile literature was among the most profound and beautiful achievements, and by we, the human race as a whole, have managed to produce. After the Babylonians were defeated by the akimid Persians, the Jews rejoiced at the opportunity to return, but they found their land in ruins, their sacred city and temple burned to the ground. But 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 and 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 is 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 the mood kneeled 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 toured Jerusalem apart. They pulled down every stone to 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. At 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, and 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 and met a mere fiesole 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 is 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 midst of ancient mythology, the Jewish people refused to forget. Wise men 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 lightheaded 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, and 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." 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 him wise men 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. Wise men felt in the marrow of his bones, what it was like, to inhabit an historical moment with 3,000 years of context. Wise men 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-sater meal with a prayer and a hope saying, "Next year in Jerusalem." Well, after 2,000 years, next year had finally arrived. The Babylonian Empire was buried. The mighty Roman Empire was an amusement park in Italy. The medieval kingdoms who had chased the Jews all over Europe were footnotes in a history book. All of them, forgotten. In June 1918, high-emwise man entered Palestine as an envoy of his people, and his people had not forgotten. West night I dreamed that I was a child, out where the pines grow, wild and tall. I was trying to make it on 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 ears. I broke through the trees and they're in the night. My father's house stood shining hard and bright. The branches and brambles tore my clothes and scratched my arms. But I ran till I fell, shaking in his arms. I woke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart. The never-against, or tear us from each other's arms. I got dressed into that house I did ride. I walked up the steps and stood on the court. 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.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ 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 on the tone ♪ ♪
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The podcast opens with a vivid, immersive narrative depicting a violent pogrom against a Jewish family to illustrate the historical trauma and constant threat faced by Jews in Europe and Russia.
Pogroms were not random riots but often state-sanctioned or ignored attacks, where authorities like police and soldiers frequently participated or stood aside, leaving Jews with no recourse or protection.
A wave of intense anti-Semitic violence, particularly from 1881-1914 in the Russian Empire, led millions of Jews to flee, facing discrimination even in safer countries, and fueled radical responses including Zionism, socialism, and revolutionary movements.
The host argues that understanding this historical context of persecution and desperation is essential to comprehending the origins of Zionism and the subsequent Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is often oversimplified.
The series aims to cut through the complexity and entrenched narratives of the conflict by building empathy and a foundational historical understanding, starting from the plight that motivated Jewish nationalism.
Summary:
The podcast episode introduces a series on Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by first immersing the listener in the horrific experience of a pogrom—a state-tolerated massacre of Jews. It emphasizes that for centuries, Jews in Europe and Russia lived under the constant threat of such organized, brutal violence, often with complicity from local authorities and police. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw escalating waves of pogroms, like those in Kishinev and Odessa, characterized by extreme atrocities and official inaction.
This pervasive insecurity and lack of protection led to a mass exodus of Jews and fueled various ideological responses, including the radical Jewish nationalism of Zionism. The host contends that grasping this history of trauma and existential threat is crucial for understanding the motivations behind Zionism. He challenges common oversimplifications of the modern conflict, arguing that a deeper, empathetic look at this foundational history is necessary to move beyond seeing it as an intractable cycle of ancient hatreds.
FAQs
The episode is the first in a six-part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, beginning with a vivid depiction of pogroms against Jews in Europe and Russia.
Pogroms were organized, often state-sanctioned attacks against Jewish communities in Europe and Russia, involving mass violence, murder, and destruction. They were a recurring horror that drove many Jews to seek safety elsewhere and fueled movements like Zionism.
Authorities often failed to intervene, with police and soldiers sometimes participating in the violence or actively enabling it by directing attackers to Jewish properties and protecting rioters.
Between 1881 and 1914, about 2.5 million Jews fled the Russian Empire due to pogroms and rising anti-Semitism, seeking refuge in places like the United States, Britain, and France.
Zionism is a radical Jewish nationalist ideology advocating for a Jewish homeland. It gained traction as a response to persistent anti-Semitism and violence, offering a solution where Jews could take control of their own safety and destiny.
The speaker asks listeners to imagine such a scenario to foster empathy and help understand why historical Jewish communities felt desperate enough to take extreme measures, like embracing Zionism or revolutionary movements, for survival and justice.
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