#2 - Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, pt. 2

Hey everybody, this is Darryl Cooper, you're listening to the Martermaid podcast. You're about to hear episode 2 of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a six part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoy this series, please do consider subscribing to my sub-stack page, where I post supplemental writings and exclusive podcast episodes that are available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 per year. It is at martermaid.substack.com and to all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this. So I hope you guys enjoy the show. Here we go. I can content to die for my beliefs, so cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No. Stay close to get. It is a place. It is a place. This episode took so much longer than I hoped it would. It took so much longer than I expected it would. I've been probably 95% finished with it for at least a month, over a month, but I was stuck. In my effort to get unstuck, I read probably at least half a dozen whole books that ended up having no bearing on the episode at all. Good books, but they had nothing to do with this in the end. Often I'll write to help myself kind of work through my thinking on certain subjects or issues. So I wrote probably 50 pages of essays and posts trying to clarify my thinking. I didn't use any of it. The history of this period, the story of the period we're about to cover, that part of this episode has been done. I wrapped that up ages ago. That's not what was holding me up. Sometimes when I study a topic or get ready to tell a story, there'll be some idea or some question that I just find myself coming back to over and over and over. It starts out vaguely, but eventually it emerges enough that I can start to make out its shape. But what can happen if you're not careful, and I'm almost never careful when it comes to this kind of thing, I'm going to have to get better at it, is that that foggy question can become a kind of obsession that ends up pulling you away from the story or topic that made you ask it in the first place. Now, I kept trying to bring myself back to the history, just buckle down and tell the story. That's why you're here, right? That's why you're listening. Because every time I would try to explain this thing that was eating at me in the context of the episode, to weave it in, it just never seemed to work. Maybe it wasn't working because it's always hard to explain something to someone who hasn't been in your head, right? They're not privy to your inner monologue, and so they don't know how you arrived at that idea. And it makes perfect sense to you until you start to explain it to somebody else, and you realize that they just don't have the background of why you think this is so interesting or important. That's part of it. But partly, I think it wasn't working because even right now, right now, as I'm recording this, the idea and the precise ways that it's important to this specific story still aren't completely worked out and elucidated in my own mind. I finally decided to just hit record and start talking when I realized, finally, that I realized I don't have to figure it out and explain it to you. I'm not a philosopher or a priest, and I'm not here to lecture anybody. You're not here to have something explain to you. Once I reminded myself of that, I just hit the red button and started talking, and here we are. You know, I'm here because I have questions. And because I hope that this might be a way to find other people interested in some of those same questions, and who might help me work through some of them. That's why I'm doing this. So that's how I want to start out this part of our story. I want to start by asking you a question. You don't have to answer it right now. In fact, even if you think you have a clear answer, I'm going to ask you to just hold on to it for now. And let it float in your mind as we start to move into this part of our story. Because it seems like a simple question. Maybe the simplest question. Many, many lives and destinies are going to be shaped by this question and by the struggle to answer it in this first part of the 20th century that we're going to be talking about. I want to ask you what it means to be a people. What is the difference between just a crowd of individuals and an army? Or okay. So what's the difference between the United States of America and just 300 million individual people living out their lives and relative proximity to each other in the middle of North America? What's the difference? And how do you get from one place to the other place? For all social mammals and human beings are ultra-social mammals. So all pre-civilized traditional human societies. Identity is determined by blood. The extended family is the social unit. Okay. The clan is what people mean when they say we. This is easy enough to understand from a biological evolutionary standpoint, right? But to make urban civilization possible. To make any of this that we see around as possible, at some point groups of people had to make this very complicated leap from identifying primarily with a kinship group, with a biological family, to instead identifying with a symbolic family. Something that can scale. See people don't just say I live in America, right? It's not just a place. They say I'm an American. But what does that mean? America is just a symbol. It's just an idea, right? It's not the mountains or the rivers or the fields or the lines on a map or the sum of those things, even. It's not even the people. If everyone woke up tomorrow morning and just forgot about it or decided that there's no such thing as America, then there is no such thing as America. It's gone. It's just an idea, just in our heads. And yet somewhere between 1776 and today, America, that thing, it became something with a sustainable, independent existence in a way, but became something like a family, a symbolic family. And us, right? Not a blood family, a symbolic family, and an identity to which people gave their loyalty, that superseded their identification with their family name. See there are more people in the United States today, I think, who will say I'm an American and get real emotional if anyone has a problem with that, then there are people in the country who will go around saying, I'm a Smith or I'm a Cooper or, you know, I'm a Jackson or whatever. We just don't really do that here anymore. And when people do, we kind of look at it as this sort of lower class throwback kind of thing. You know, there's this movie, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about and you shouldn't. I commend you if you don't, but there's this Adam Sandler movie from the 90s. I don't remember what it's called, but there's this big dumb bully, right? And every time he would bully Adam Sandler, he would yell, "O Doyle rules!" because O Doyle was his last name, right? And you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Forget it. The point is that most people today in a developed country like the United States see, when they see people clinging to a local, provincial, small identity like that, they look at it as if there's something that maybe that person hasn't quite figured out yet that the rest of us have, you know, that maybe they're hanging on to something that the rest of us have kind of let go of and transcended. You know, I don't mean that people aren't loyal to their family members. And I'm not talking about being loyal to our family members, but to the family. The family is an entity in itself, a body with its own life where the individual members are constituent cells whose interests are subordinate to the interests of the larger whole. That's what I'm talking about. And that's the state of natural man and traditional societies, but to anyone in a modern nation state it's a curiosity and it's a throwback. We see it even romanticized in something like the Godfather movies and it's still hard for most of us to relate to. It's fascinating, but it's hard to relate to. In part of the reason that the sopranos was so great was because of how it played with the fact that the kind of clan loyalty that's romanticized in the Godfather movies, it just in reality has not been able to stick in the United States. It seems out of place and an agronistic and kind of ridiculous. But why? Why? Why is that? When you look around the world today, you'll find that civil society, strong institutions, state legitimacy, these things exist almost universally in inverse proportion to the extent that people identify with the clan and give their primary loyalty to the extended family or the tribe. And again, the Godfather movies are like graduate courses on this dynamic. I'll use the book actually. There's a scene in the book, it's in the movie too, but I'll quote from the book. There's a scene where Michael Corleone is explaining to his wife why he has to follow his father and be loyal and obedient, no matter what. Now she's a regular person, you know, to whom the laws and norms of the larger society have been fully internalized. And so she doesn't understand why Michael would follow his father, even if it means running a foul of those laws. And so he tells her quote, I don't trust society to protect us. I have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they manage to con a block of people to vote for them. And quote, see in countries like the United States that enjoy strong legitimacy, whatever we think about politicians or judges or the police or whatever, the essential legitimacy of the system is usually never in question. If a terrible injustice occurs in the criminal justice system say someone is wrongly convicted by a corrupt judge and evil cops, people will call for the injustice to be corrected, maybe for the judge and the cops themselves to be punished, but no matter how egregious the injustice, you almost never hear someone claim that the system itself has no right to judge him, that our institutions have no right to expect his participation or his obedience. But to people like Michael Corleone, whose extended family is an entity with a separate existence and a primary claim on his loyalty, the national institutions of the United States are simply other entities with whom he and his family happen to have dealings. See patriotism and tribalism are natural enemies. And it's not just a binary comparison of say the United States over here on one end with its nuclear families and strong institutions and all the way on the other end Afghanistan with its tribal identities and weak institutions. No, no, no, you can trace that relationship reliably up and down the whole spectrum of nations. Go down to the European Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy, Sicily, Greece, you find countries where the extended family plays a big role, much bigger than the United States or say Britain or Scandinavia, but you find states with notorious difficulties with tax evasion and nepotism, corruption and so forth. And go up to Northern Europe, go to Scandinavia, you'll find strong institutions and families that well you wouldn't see a Swedish version of my big fat re-quetting, right? Just wouldn't. In the last few years, those countries and on the Mediterranean that I listed, they've all had huge debt and government finance problems that are directly related to their difficulties collecting taxes. Their tax collection problems can be directly traced to the cronyism and corruption resulting from this complex web of personal relationships and family connections that for many of the people in these countries are simply more real and more tangible. And more important than the state institutions and have a greater claim to their loyalty. I'm not beating up on the Mediterranean societies, by the way, because there's certainly something to be said for the deep family structures and the intense communitarian relationships you find in these places. But as we go forward in this story, it's something I want you to keep in mind is that it's just important to understand that strong family identity is an obstacle to the construction of larger symbolic identity formations like the nation state. In America, we're used to hearing a narrative that puts nationalistic patriotism and family values "over on the same side of the ideological spectrum." But that's only because the battles over in America. And we've internalized the individualist ethos and the nuclear family structures so thoroughly that that national identity and family identity are no longer in competition with each other. And the competition is over. Now you can keep sliding down that spectrum through regions where where tribal loyalty and tribal identity are more and more prominent. And in just about every single case, you'll find that that society has had a corresponding amount of difficulty establishing strong, sustainable, independent, legitimate civic institutions. Every nation at some point, if it's going to be a nation, at some point has to accomplish this gigantic task of somehow getting people to transcend their local ties of blood and instead identify with an idea, something they can't see, can't touch. And yet that idea has to earn their loyalty to the point that they're willing to leave their home, leave their blood family behind to go off and fight and die for it. And again, if you live in a place like the United States, we do this all the time. It's how we butter our bread, right? You probably take this totally for granted. You're wondering why I'm spending so much time talking about it. But that's only because this task has been so thoroughly accomplished. It was already mostly accomplished for us by the English and the Dutch and the rest before they ever even got to the New World. And today we hear about the difficulties, right? That the US is having with its nation-building adventure in Afghanistan and how what's the headline usually, something like Afghan tribalism impedes the formation of the state. And most people think of that as a sign of sort of primitive backwardness in Afghanistan. Even if they're polite enough not to say it that way. But what those people often fail to understand is that the tribalism of Afghanistan is normal. Okay, that's the default. And what you see in the United States, that's not normal. If anyone's ever told you that this is normal, they're lying to you. No matter how much we take it for granted, 320 million unrelated people living together in, you know, relative harmony with individual violent crime, but no civil strife to speak of. That is not normal. Figuring out how to get non-kin to cooperate in a sustainable way is a basic human social equation that very few groups ever solve. Doing it on this level has only happened very recently and sustaining it is a balancing act, very delicate one. In the US, right? We have, we all remember the story of the half fields in the McCoy's in the US. I think we hear it as kids. If you're not from the US, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. So the half fields in McCoy's were these two families in the Southern United States who got embroiled in this decades-long blood feud back in the 19th century. It started over something small, but revenge led to reprisal. A ton of people got killed and eventually decades later, these two families are still calling in reinforcements and hiring mercenaries and having basically military engagement, small-scale military engagement. These two families. Now the very fact that most people in the US today still know that story, I think there was a TV movie about it a couple years ago, that tells you something important about it. It's famous because the very social structures that would allow a generational family feud like that to happen have been pretty much eliminated. So it's kind of fascinating to watch on TV. That kind of tribal blood feud wouldn't even make the gossip pages in Pashtun Waziristan in 2015. It's just a part of life. And so how do you get different people who don't identify with each other at all, who may even be rivals or traditional long-term enemies, to start thinking of themselves, to start feeling themselves, to be part of a larger symbolic family. How do you get the Hatfields and the McCoys to put aside their differences and shake hands and say, well, brother, we're both Americans and there's a war on in Germany. So I guess we've got to end this fight of ours and get over there together. How do you do that? That sounds silly, but for millions of people in 1918, this was not a theoretical question. For many people living in the former territories of the empires that had just been shattered by the First World War, it was the only question. The Russian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires had just been wiped out, and their constituent peoples had already begun the process of constructing, advocating, and fighting over the identities that were going to replace them. The proximate cause of the whole war was rooted in this dynamic. You know, the war was kicked off by the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a young Bosnian Serb who wanted a Serbian national identity, apart from the broader empire. The Russian empire had been burned to the ground by its revolution, and right at this moment you've got a civil war raging between not only the revolutionaries and the remnant of the old regime, but between different groups of revolutionaries. You've got people fighting for their national independence and identity, and then you've got hardcore communists who want to throw out national identity altogether, and replace it with an economic class identity. They see national borders, national identities, is just barriers to keep the workers apart from one another. They want only an identity based on economic class. In the Arab world, in the Arab territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire, it's national identity projects, and they're starting up almost from scratch. The Ottomans, they ruled Arab lands for hundreds of years, and there had never been an Arab nation-state, not in the modern sense of the word. There were wide cultural differences between the various Arab regions, though, and so national identities began to take root along those lines. But it was not going to be easy. You know, if the 20th century taught us anything at all, it taught us that there's more to building a nation than just running a rag up a flagpole. The wars and the revolutions of the 20th century, they were about competing identity projects, as much as they were about economic arrangements, or competition for resources, or any of those kinds of things. People can live for a long, long time in poverty. They've done it all through history. People will not tolerate living very long at all, without a meaningful answer to the question of who they are. When the existing answers to that question fall into doubt, and new answers begin to be offered up as replacements, the transitions bring turmoil, and that turmoil very often turns into chaos. But the Arabs. The Arabs had already seen more turmoil in the last few decades, than most people had seen in the last few centuries. As the Ottoman Empire was falling into decline, European colonial powers had begun to move into the lands that the Empire formerly controlled. All of North Africa had already come under the control of European empires by the early 20th century. These new colonialists were barely finished unloading their ships in the first World War broke out, and they wasted no time pulling up locals and sending them off to fight in Europe. Most Arabs weren't sure what to make of the whole thing, or what any of it had to do with them. I mean, try to imagine, I'll use the example of the French in Morocco. France had only been in Morocco for about two years when the war broke out. The people in many of the outlying villages, or in the hills, hardly knew who the French were. Many of them didn't know who the French were. Yet after only two years, the French were loading up 45,000 Moroccan Arabs onto ships and sending them off to fight Germany in the trenches of the Western Front. And can you imagine how disorienting that must have been? Britain and France were both conscripting people from their new colonies and sending them off to die, very often in the front lines. Because, or why not, right? Remember, it's the early 20th century, and our thinking on many things was a little bit different, so there's no sense wasting nice young white boys if you can throw some Moroccan or Egyptian Arabs out there to absorb that first volley of German machine gunfire. So just imagine, just a couple weeks ago, or a couple months ago, you were in your village in Morocco, living your life. Now you're sitting in a European trench, covered in mud, being shot at by other Europeans and some other trench. They all looked the same to you for reasons that make no sense to you. Because a European country showed up to your home in North Africa and told you that they were in charge and would be needing you to do your duty as a loyal subject. I mean, Egypt alone sent nearly a million men to go fight or work in other capacities for the British Empire during the war, hundreds of thousands of whom became casualties. Meanwhile, on the other side, the Ottoman Empire had pressed some 300,000 Mesopotamian and Levantine Arabs into its own army, and they didn't have a choice either. Frequently, the Europeans would send their conscripted Arabs to fight the Ottoman Empire's conscripted Arabs. As you can imagine, many units on both sides objected to being sent to kill each other because some archduke was killed in Europe, and when they objected to vociferously, they were subjected to the same military discipline as French or British or Turkish troops, as if they had volunteered for this whole thing, or worse, actually, in most cases. Every First World War army executed some people for desertions, addition, or even things like fallen, or even things like falling asleep on watch. Okay, fair enough. Military has been doing that since there have been militaries. But for their colonial troops, the Allat. Well, I don't say the Allat, really the French became notorious for this in particular. They brought back the old Roman practice of decimation. If you refuse your orders or deserted, they weren't just going to kill you. They were going to kill a bunch of other people from your unit, so you could carry that with you. And again, no, you know, war is hell, right? And if you're the French army trying to hold things together as the Germans marched toward Paris, maybe you do whatever you have to do. But if you're an Arab from North Africa or Syria, being pulled off your farm because foreign powers on both sides of a war, pressing you into their armies, to fight a war that you don't understand or have anything to do with, and you're being told to go kill other Arabs with all the gusto that you can muster or else be executed as a coward and a deserter. Again, it was very disorienting for the people involved. You know, the effect of the First World War on the Arab world is one of the most overlooked aspects of the entire era. So many pages have been written about the First World War, with so many authors looking for some unique angle to present that it's really inexplicable that it's not better known. And for somebody who's kind of an amateur World War I junkie like I've been for a while, once you kind of start to learn about the effect of World War I on the Arab world and how it's trickled down into the modern era, it really just blows your mind that you haven't heard more about it. In the region of the Levant, for example, now the Levant, sometimes it's called Greater Syria, this whole area is still under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire during this period. In the Levant, the war was a total catastrophe and I know the First World War was a catastrophe everywhere, but in the Levant it was just a disaster. As soon as the war breaks out, Turkey installs just a brutal military dictator. They sent him to govern the region of the Levant and to stave off the possibility of any Arab independence movements. Even before the war, there was a lot of this in the air and they wanted to make sure that they weren't hit by anything from the inside while they were fighting the First World War. And Turkey, this man was called Jamal Pasha, but he earned the nicknames, the bloodshedder, and the butcher among the Levantine Arabs that he was sent to govern. He earned those nicknames. In addition to having a huge portion of the male population pulled up and pressed into the war by the Ottomans, the region was swept by diseases several times after the Allies brought in hundreds of thousands of colonial conscripts from India and other places. And if that wasn't enough, the Allied naval blockade combined with the interruption of agriculture caused by the war itself and then a poorly timed drought and locust infestation, a couple locust infestations actually, a few years in a row, led to a famine of apocalyptic proportions. And he's part controversial, but there is evidence that the Ottoman Empire and Jamal Pasha specifically imposed the famine on the area of Mount Lebanon, very similarly to the way that Joseph Stalin would later do in Ukraine, partly because they wanted a requisition, all available food for the war, but also possibly to suppress any chance of Arab nationalist uprising. It was a huge concern the Ottoman Empire had during this period and it turned out rightfully so. And this accusation was, this accusation was common for decades after the war, but again, it's highly controversial, along with everything else having to do with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire during this period. So I'm not telling you that it happened. I'm telling you that there is a controversy about it. If you're interested, I encourage you to investigate it on your own. So, okay, so we all know how terrible the war was for France and for Belgium, right, for Germany and Russia. But beyond the Arab rebellion, you know, Lawrence of Arabia and all that, not a lot of people even know what the Arabs were up to during this period. Well, this famine in greater Syria in particular was devastating. And don't mistake me. This was a famine. This was not a food shortage. Okay, there are pictures and they've got everything you're used to seeing and all the most infamous and horrific famines in history. Weak and bony people lying in the streets, just waiting to die, you know, skeletal children with the big, distended bellies, women and children digging in fields for insects and roots and everything they can find. I mean, everything. It's horrible. Edward Nicoli was an employee at what would later become the American University of Beirut. And he kept a diary at the time. And in it, he wrote, quote, "Starving people lying about everywhere. At any time, children moaning and weeping, women and children clawing over rubbish piles and ravenously eating anything that they can find. When the agonized cry of famishing people in the streets becomes too bitter to bear, people get up and close the windows tight in the hope of shutting out the sound. Near babies amuse themselves by imitating the cries that they hear in the streets or at the doors." End quote. Okay, now stop from minute. And try to put yourself in that place. Okay, actually stop. Take it out of his diary, pull it out of its literary context, and just imagine what must have been going on in that community, what it must have been like. Imagine being in your house and having to shut up the windows as tight as you can. and close the gaps with towels because all day and night there are people moaning and children crying in the streets because they are starving to death. They're out there moaning. Imagine lying down to sleep every night with your belly empty, with your children hungry and hearing non-stop moaning in the streets like it's the zombie apocalypse out there. A famine is a special kind of disaster and not to downplay the horror or the tragedy of any loss but say when when an earthquake ruins a city and kills thousands the shock is instantaneous. You know the suffering is acute. It happens it's horrifying and then you try to process the loss. Maybe you're successful maybe you're not. A famine is something else. It just drags on. Starvation gradually breaking people down reducing human beings who who previously had read poetry and worship God and turning them into mere creatures who hunger and no appalling tragedy or or act of just ultimate terrible depravity brings the whole thing to a big climax. No no no it just goes on and on and on breaking human beings down. There are reports of cannibalism. One Maronite Christian priest he later admitted that a man had come to him to confess that he had he had killed and eaten his children. The psychological impact of going through a period like this not only on individuals but but also on the society is overwhelming. There's a book called Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder about what Ukraine and Poland and Belarus and the other countries caught between Hitler and Stalin suffered through during that period and the first chapter of the book on the famine imposed by Stalin on Ukraine and and about what people did and how they got through that insane desperate time that chapter is so devastating to read that you can't imagine how it's ever possible to come back from it. You read the few pages on cannibalism that took place and you feel like you need a shower it doesn't leave you and and and we weren't there and we didn't go through it. We all like to believe that that we would have been the ones to hold out and keep our dignity and do the right things all the way to the end if we had to but but history tells us that hunger and desperation run deeper than human will. There's a point beyond which something far more ancient than our ideals and our and our considerations of ourselves as moral creatures takes over at least it takes over for moments but but a moment is all it needs. You know the man who confessed to eating his children and his delirious starved madness when the madness passes he doesn't go back to being a man who has never eaten his children you don't get cured of that or even if you just did something relatively less horrible like stole the last piece of bread that your neighbor had to feed his starving children because you needed to feed your own starving children when the famine passes you don't go back to being a person who can pretend that you would never do such a thing. People like to like to say that shared pain can bring out the cooperative best in people that trauma can bring people together right and it's and it's true okay we've all seen minor versions of it a week remember in the United States back to 9/11 right for several weeks after that people talk about this still today how people were nicer to each other in the streets and people came from all over the country to to help out everybody went to give blood it's true right collective pain trauma can bring people together but only up to a point and beyond that point in a place that very few of us can even imagine human beings are broken the strong right along with the week the Russian writer Varlam Shalamov he has a book called Kalima tales it's about his time in Kalima one of the Soviet Union's most infamous school logs one of the worst places in history for a human being to find himself and he wrote about this popular idea that's suffering brings people closer together he said quote if tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great whoever thinks he can behave differently has never touched the true bottom of life end quote when you've been down to the bottom that experience doesn't leave you and it's not a trauma that goes away Shalamov had spent years in that darkest place in the same book he talked about the trauma of having some of his illusions about himself and about his fellow men shattered he said quote there is much that a man should not know should not see and if he does see it it is better for him to die end quote there are things that we were never meant to see there's knowledge that we spend a great deal of energy as individuals and as as societies finding ways to avoid when our illusions and avoidances break down society itself can break down with them there are a whole libraries of books that discuss how the trauma of the war in Europe affected the outlook and the development of France and Germany and Britain even the United States for that matter but you'll read dozens of books on the events in greater Syria after the war and they'll talk about what the Zionists did and how the Arabs responded to that and what the British thought about all this and maybe how the French came in and influenced things and it's very rare that they will even mention the fact that the native Arabs in the region had just lost more of their population than England and Germany lost during the Black Death the 14th century by the time the war was over and the horsemen run their course a third of the Arab population of greater Syria was dead a third if you know much about Stalin's Ukrainian famine in the in the 1930s and how horrific it was and what it did to those people that famine killed about a quarter of Ukraine's peasant population the region of greater Syria suffered more dead as a percentage of the population than any place on earth during the first world war the survivors were profoundly damaged I mean what does it even mean to have killed and eaten your children what does it mean to have the knowledge that your neighbor did or that someone in your community did it in none of us have any frame of reference for something like that when the crisis passes you just you just go back to your life you just go back to work and go buy fruit at the market trauma can make otherwise normal human relationships very difficult we all know that right doctors and counselors often talk about how how female rape survivors will often struggle to feel safe around men or to trust them often this is something that they have to work to overcome because it stays with them well shalom off's book about the khalimagoolog it talks about this same sort of of of life long trauma in the sense that it's a sort of eulogy it reads like he's grieving for the loss of a certain kind of innocence when he says that there are things that a man should not see and if he does see them it's better for him to die he's not talking about a gory mess or some awful scene of your of your friend getting blown up or something no no he's saying that that once you've seen what men are in extremists with everything stripped away once you've seen what becomes of every ideal when men are dragged below a certain depth that below that depth is not just a wolf because a wolf can be romanticized but a worm you can not erase that vision shalom of himself was broken by that vision in Snyder's book Bloodlands he talks about the damage that something like this does to a people and to a society not just physically but morally and psychologically his subject is the Ukrainian famine again but but this is standard for any famine of this severity he writes quote the duties of parents could not be fulfilled marriages suffered as wives sometimes with their husbands anguish consent prostituted themselves with local party leaders in exchange for a bit of flower parents even when alive and together and acting in the best of faith could hardly care for children the desperate peasants holding up infants to train windows were not necessarily begging for food often they were trying to give their children away to someone aboard a train the good people died first those who refused to steal or prostitute themselves died those who gave food to others died those who refused to eat corpses died those who refused to kill their fellow man died parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did in the countryside the healthier peasants form brigades to collect the corpses and bury them they rarely had the inclination or strength to bury them very deeply so that hands and feet could be seen above the earth. Beryl crews were paid according to the number of bodies collected which led to certain abuses. Crews would take the week along with the dead and then bury them alive. They would talk with such people along the way, explaining to the starving that they would die soon anyway, so what difference did it make? In a few cases, such victims managed to dig their way out of the shallow mass graves. In their turn, the grave diggers weakened and died, their corpses left where they lay. As an agronomist recalled, the bodies were then "devoured" by those dogs that had escaped being eaten and had gone savage. So how do people who have lived through this? Who have seen their neighbors behave as starving people in a famine behave? Who of themselves behaved in such a manner? How do they smile at each other in the streets afterwards? How do they build the thousand little daily sinews of trust that it takes to create a civil society? I asked a moment ago how you get unrelated people to transcend local identities and pull together under a larger symbolic identity, as if that equation wasn't already difficult enough to solve. How do you accomplish that task with a traumatized people who have seen first hand what people are capable of when everything is stripped away? Who don't have the benefit of illusions anymore? It's hard to imagine it being possible at all, and yet these were the people crowding the streets to cheer for Amir Faisal I as he installed himself in Damascus. The people of Greater Syria were clamoring for the opportunity to be a part of the first independent Arab nation in centuries. Amir Faisal I, son of Hussein Ben Ali and commander of the Hashemite Arab forces that led the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, he waived to the throngs of enthusiastic new patriots as he entered the city of Damascus. But he knew that their fight for independence hadn't ended with the defeat of the Turks. Late in the war, it had been revealed that the British had made a secret deal with the French and Russians to divide up the Middle East along old school colonial lines. Today we call it the Sykes-Pico agreement after the British and French diplomats who negotiated its terms. According to Sykes-Pico, the entire northern region of Faisal's kingdom, all of Syria, Lebanon, today, Northern Iraq, and the northern part of Palestine, all that would belong to the French, either directly or as an exclusive sphere of influence. The British assured Faisal that the deal with the French was just a wartime expediency and that he was perfectly safe, but he knew the French weren't going to take that line down. Would the British really risk a conflict or even risk an argument with the French just to honor a deal with an Arab ally? Faisal had other problems brewing as well. In late 1917, even as Faisal's army began its second year of fighting and was pushing into Palestine with General Al-Nb to help liberate Jerusalem, Faisal learned that the British had published the Balfour Declaration, making sort of ambiguous promises to a group calling themselves Zionists, and remember, Faisal's family came from the Western Arabian Peninsula, so he had only really heard of the Zionists at this point. In the Balfour Declaration was making these ambiguous promises about establishing a homeland in Palestine for the Jews. Now Palestine, again, was supposed to be the southern portion of Faisal's kingdom. In the British assured him that the Zionists were simply looking to immigrate and live alongside the Native Arab. There's no political agenda at all, but many of the Jews who had begun to arrive, they hadn't seen to have gotten that message. He began to hear rumors that the Zionists believed that Palestine belonged to them, that they weren't talking about a Jewish home, but about a Jewish state. When he demanded further clarification of British intentions, Britain sent Heim Weisman, who was now unquestionably the leader of the Zionist movement internationally. They sent him to meet with Faisal to reassure him that the Zionists had no political agenda, no plans for a Jewish state. Now Weisman knew that Faisal was in an insecure position. He promised that the Zionists had no political designs in Palestine, and were only hoping to live and participate in a society alongside the Native Arabs. He convinced Faisal that the Zionists might be able to use their influence to help make sure that Britain kept France out of Syria. If Faisal needed any more convincing, the British diplomats or Mark Sykes of the Sykes Pico agreement, this is a highly placed British diplomat. He was openly talking about this all-powerful international Jewish conspiracy. He warned Faisal personally, "believe me when I say that this race is universal, all-powerful and cannot be put down." He warned Faisal to give the Zionists whatever they wanted, because their agents were to be found "in the councils of every state, in every bank, in every business, in every enterprise." Now Faisal had enough to worry about. This might have sounded ridiculous to him, but remember Faisal's from outside the European system. This is coming from an insider's insider that he's hearing this. Again, he had enough to worry about. These Jews obviously had enough suction with the British government to get the balfour declaration out of them, so maybe cutting a deal with Weisman would help keep them on the good side of the British Empire. It was worth a shot. The two men met as 1919 began, and the Paris Peace Conference was about to open up to discuss the terms that were going to be imposed upon the defeated Central Powers. Faisal and Weisman agreed that the Zionists would immigrate under British supervision to an area that would be now officially demarcated and defined as Palestine. You know, up to this point, there were no borders in the region. They officially marked off where Palestine would be. And their agreement Faisal would write quote, "We Arabs look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist organization to the Peace Conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper. We will do our best in so far as we are concerned to help them through. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home. I look forward, and my people with me look forward to a future in which we will help you and you will help us so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of the civilized peoples of the world." Faisal's allies in Greater Syria started getting very restless at this point. You remember Faisal's Hashemite clan was what they weren't from the Levant. They came from the Arabian Peninsula. He was asking the independent tribes of Greater Syria to accept his leadership and submit to this new state. The Syrian Nationalists had spent the war being tortured and hanged by the bloodshedder's secret police, and they didn't like the compromises Faisal seemed to be making with people that they considered a threat to their independence. They were trying to tell Faisal that he couldn't trust Wiseman's promises. The Zionists who were coming into Palestine were telling a very different story. Just after Faisal reached his agreement with Wiseman, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem at the time had a run-in with the head of the Zionist Commission. It kind of gives you an idea of what they were so worried about. The head of the Zionist Commission, a man named Manaka Musiskin, he had come for a scheduled meeting with the mayor. After the exchange greetings, Musiskin came right at him, partly to get an answer to the question and partly to judge the mayor's reaction. He came right out and demanded to know, "How is it that the streets are so full of potholes and thick with such awful dust?" I'll let historian Tom Sigev tell the rest of the story. "The mayor explained that the city engineers were unable to pay the streets with asphalt because the streets were not flat. Furthermore, asphalt is dangerous," he said, because people and animals could slip on it. Musiskin would not let up. "Certainly it must be possible to level the road bed," he said. The mayor explained that there was no money. Then the mayor asked how things were going at the Paris Peace Conference. Musiskin said that there was still no treaty, but everything was pretty much settled. The area would be put under French protection, and Palestine would remain with the British. The Arabs will not consent to that, the mayor responded. "Look, I said everything is settled," Musiskin repeated, and mentioned that Prince Faisal had already agreed to the Jewish National Home in Palestine. As far as the mayor was concerned, the Arabs in Palestine had not authorized Faisal to make concessions in their name. He had nothing against the Jews, he said. Those who already lived in the country were welcome, but the Arabs opposed the immigration of more Jews. He tried to explain to Musiskin that style was important. The Zionists did not understand Arab culture, he said, and they spoke to the Arabs in a contemptuous and patronizing way. And now this is me talking again. Keep in mind that this is only a few months after the end of the war, and Jews still only make up about 8% of the population of the country. Keep that in mind as you go forward. This is back to Sigev. Musiskin did not deny that Jews had injured Arabs. He said these things could be resolved, but on no account would the Jews concede their national demands. There was no room for compromise. We do not want war, he went on. In fact, we are doing everything to prevent war. Yet the Jews are not afraid of war, he said, if it is necessary. As his excellency knew, Musiskin told the mayor, the Jews were currently equipped with everything needed for war. A war would hurt both sides, but the Arabs would suffer more. And, quote, "Musiskin's a very interesting guy who doesn't pull punches, as we'll see more of that in a moment." Remember, as well. just blows me away that he's coming into the heir of Merav Jerusalem when there's still only 8% of the population of the country and talking like that. Shocked the Merav too. It kind of gives you an idea of how assertive design is becoming at this point. In the first decade or so of the 20th century, the Jews who were moving into Palestine were purchasing land and setting up their settlements mostly and out of the way locations to avoid arousing the suspicion of the Arabs. This was a strategy that the Zionists talked a lot about. But the announcement of the Balfour Declaration had changed things. Hyme Weisman was still calling for caution. He had the long-term vision in mind, but Weisman wasn't in Palestine. He couldn't keep a leash on everyone that was. The way the Palestinian Zionists saw it, the big bad boot of the British Empire was going to come kick in the door of Palestine and let them in so it didn't matter what the Arabs thought anymore. In American commission that was charged with looking into the situation in the former Ottoman territories, it arrived right around this time and it had a pretty standard experience. They write about how they went into their project predisposed toward the Zionist cause. Until arriving in Palestine, the American commissioners had only heard the curated version, the safe statesmanship of Hyme Weisman as he called it. But in Palestine, they found something completely different. They found Zionists with very different expectations. The commission's report is so interesting because it's an official document for consumption by international panels and all that. But it registers their shock. It finding that the Zionists in Palestine were looking forward to, well, as they put it quote, they were looking forward to a complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. End quote. And so the report denounces the Balfour Declaration. Welleson President Woodrow Wilson to oppose it, but before the report can be circulated through the wider American government and published, Wilson suffers a stroke, goes into seclusion for the rest of his presidency, and it never gets pushed. Whatever Weisman was telling Faisal, his allies in Palestine were seeing what this American commission was seeing. They were seeing Zionists out in the streets, holding parades and rallies, celebrating the Balfour Declaration and circulating pamphlets and giving speeches that were openly talking about Palestine being taken over all together and made into a Jewish state. There were groups of Zionists conducting military drills in the streets of Jerusalem and no surprise the Arabs are starting to freak out. So Faisal's allies are urging him to take this seriously, but he's got a lot of plates up in the air. Anyway, how seriously could he take it? However Mark Sykes said about the Jews' international power, they still only made up less than 10% of the population, right? What harm could it really do to throw Weisman a bone? Faisal hadn't committed to anything specific, and if the Jews really were up to something, they were still only 10% of the population. If they became a problem, he could cross that bridge when he came to it. Right now he had more immediate problems. Right now he had to deal with the French. See, it was becoming apparent that whatever the British said about the Sykes' beco agreement, the French considered the deal binding, and the French were not about to back down. In four years, the three richest countries in the world literally bankrupted themselves, producing munitions and launching them at each other as quickly as possible. More of that carnage rained down on French soil and on French people than anywhere else in the world. When the war started, there were about 8.7 million men, aged 20 to 50 in France, about 8.7 million military age males. By the war's end, France had suffered about 6.2 million killed or wounded. So when the peace was settled, France expected to get something out of it. And the Sykes' beco agreement, the British had agreed that France would get Syria, and the French weren't interested in whatever side deals Britain may have made with the leader of some desert tribes. In late 1919, the British told Faisal that they would be pulling their troops out of Syria, leaving him defenseless and seeding the territory to the French. During the war, the British had made these conflicting promises, openly conflicting promises, and they knew they were conflicting. They made him to the French, the Zionists, and the Arabs. Well, the Faisal had been fooling himself into believing that the fact that the landing question with Arab land meant that the promise to the Arabs would matter more to the British than their promises to wealthy European Jews or to the Republic of France, well, as David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time, said, "The friendship of France is worth 10 Syrians." So if the three promises made, the French and the Zionists would both get their wish, when push came to shove, the Arabs were voted off the island. If they wanted to protest, but it's our island, well, welcome to colonialism. Make yourself comfortable because you're going to be here for a while. Faisal had been betrayed, and there's no other way to put it. And looking back, most of us think what he was probably finally thinking in that moment. Of course he was betrayed. Of course the British took sides with the French and the European Jews and threw the Arabs under the bus. What did he think was going to happen? He might have been upset about it, but he also knew that he had no choice but to take the advice of the British and try to deal with the French. Any force he could muster would stand no chance against just a few divisions of the French Army. And so in January 1920, they agreed to terms which stated that Faisal would remain in power, and even that the French would not station a large permanent military force in Syria as long as French advisers were the only ones influencing policy. Well, Faisal's allies weren't having any of that. Faisal agreed to it. They weren't letting that go. Remember Faisal's Hashemite clan was again from the Arabian Peninsula, so he's expecting the tribes and cities of the Levant to pledge their loyalty to him. And more than that, he's asking them to give up a lot of autonomy and submit to a state government that he would be running. But they knew colonialism when they saw it, and they weren't. They hadn't just fought a war against the Muslim Ottoman Empire to just hand Palestine over to the Zionists while the rest of Syria became another French colony, with Faisal as their puppet. They would have been better off under the Turks. The French and British did try to soften the blow. See they knew that the world had changed in the last four years. Old school, ass-kicking colonialism wasn't as simple as it used to be. And for one thing, you had the Americans, the annoying self-righteous Americans who wouldn't stop talking about it and they didn't like it. And the British owed the Americans a lot of money, so you kinda had to listen to them, at least a little bit. And the French and the British also found that even their own populations had begun to saueron, just straight up dominating and exploiting other people. You couldn't just go around kicking indoors and barking orders like the good old days. They had just spent four years pumping their own people full of propaganda about how that was the kind of behavior that only the evil Germans engaged in. They've been mobilized nations like France and Britain just didn't do that. I mean, they're still totally gonna do that, obviously, but they just have to put some lipstick on it first. Now, the lipstick that they came up with was called the Mandate System. And a nutshell, it went like this. The former territories of the Ottoman Empire aren't ready for self-government yet. They have no natural leadership structures and no experience building institutions. And so the brand new League of Nations determines, well, the French and British decided that the League of Nations would determine that the victorious allied nations would receive mandates to act as custodians of the various territories to shepherd the people along to eventual independence. Can you, isn't that nice of them? Man, those French and British are just such sweet hearts. They're always looking out for, you know, the little guys around the world. I just, it's some mate. With all the financial problems they're having after the war, they're just gonna donate their time and resources to help the little Arabs learn the art of independent self-government. Wow. Okay, if you buy that, I recommend letting someone else handle your finances. The Arabs didn't buy it. They knew how the game worked. They've been going on a long time by this point. When the Europeans established a colony, they didn't just come in with a huge army and put a white guy in a powdered wig on the throne. Come on now, that's crude. We're much more sophisticated. Every good colonialist knows that you find some local who will play ball with you, leave them on the throne for appearances, and then control the country through him. I mean, the late 1800s, the British controlled India, a nation at the time of about 300 million people. They controlled it as if they had owned it for a thousand years. You know how many administrators they had in country pulling the strings of that nation of 300 million? About a thousand. The only way you conquer a whole country and then control it in a sustainable manner, at least reasonably sustainable manner, with a thousand administrators is by not letting the people know that they've been conquered or that they're being controlled. At the very least, you try to make it seem like it was their idea or maybe that it's in their best interest. Well, at the end of the First World War, we're closer to the end of the age of colonialism than we are at the beginning. This is how things have been going on for a long time, and people are starting to catch on. And so when the French and British showed up with their mandates, the Arabs had no illusions about what was going on. I mean, the psychs' pico agreement spelled it all out in case there were any lingering doubts. France and Britain would retain all rights of development, exclusive financial interest, and control over resource exploitation, and you would keep an Arab chief around for appearances. It was already. it down. Well, Faisal's allies had had enough at this point. He was just, he was just too willing to compromise. When time and time again, the Arabs had been taken advantage of. First, he trusted the British. Then he compromised with the Zionists. And now he's negotiated a deal with the French. And where was any of this flexibility getting them? The French couldn't care less about their agreements with the British. They weren't even bothering to pretend that this was an equal partnership. You know, the post-war French were in a, they were in a foul mood to use the understatement of the century. And they hadn't come to Syria to collaborate or take requests. They'd come to give orders. Well, Faisal's allies demanded that he renounce the agreement with the French immediately. And at this point, he had no choice. He was on the verge of facing open revolt in his own ranks. So he withdrew his agreement and demanded that the French leave Syria. That wasn't going to happen. So confrontations began to take place between local Arabs and French troops. And when violence started to break out, this just reinforced the fact of the Arabs that all this talk, all these negotiations with the French with the Zionists, they weren't negotiations at all. They were just a fig leave. They're basically just saying, look, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. As long as you do what we say, we're negotiating. The minute you try to resist, well, we don't recommend it. With mounting alarm and resistance from the Arabs, wise men and other Zionists leaders try to get out in front of the message, you know, they don't want the British government realizing that this might be more work than they thought it was going to be. The British army's chief political officer in Palestine was a Zionist sympathizer and he was doing his best to kind of conceal what was going on at the time. He knew better than most people that the British might have expressed support for Jewish immigration, but the empire had no intention of alienating the whole Arab world by smashing through Palestine to force the Zionists on them. The American Commission coming through right around, right around this time now, they were hearing from British military officers in Palestine that they were going to need at least 50,000 troops to even get the Zionist project off the ground. Most of the British government wanted nothing to do with that. Wise men had been promising that there would be no problems, that the Arabs were happy with the arrangement. The majority of the British government thought of the Balfour Declaration as a commitment to facilitate an essentially peaceful process, you know, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they didn't want the kind of trouble that was already beginning to become associated with it. So the army political officer knew that it was important to keep that illusion up. And to that end, he had been advising the British government to keep the Arabs in the dark about the plan to begin implementation of the declaration. He explained to London that there were unfounded rumors being circulated around Palestine among the Arabs about what exactly the Balfour Declaration meant. So there was no reason to arouse their opposition by making some big announcement about it. Just just started. There's no reason to talk about it. But on February 27th, a British major general who was sympathetic to the Arab cause, he let the cat out of the bag. He published a proclamation in Palestine's major Arab language newspaper that the Balfour Declaration would begin implementation immediately. And what happened next is one of those situations. There's a lot of these in history that at the time probably seemed to happen as a result of several misunderstandings and bad breaks, but looking back on it today seems almost inevitable. And the months after the British handed Syria over to the French, it's just chaos, especially in the border region between the two zones, Northern Palestine and that border with Lebanon and southern Syria on the French side. It's just chaos. So the point that it gets very difficult to even keep up with everything that's going on and what game each individual group is running on the others and who's on whose side. And I always think that if anything in any historical stories, confusing for me, if it's hard for me to keep up with, with all the sources laid out in front of me on my desk and the work of a century's worth of brilliant historians all pouring through it and giving me their best summaries of the whole situation. If it's still confusing to me, then I can't imagine how in the fog of the present moment, it must have been for the people who were trying to sort out everything that was going on on the ground in real time, back then. Okay, for starters, the French and the British are arguing over exactly where this new border between French Syria and British Palestine is going to be. As they move it north and south, the Zionists are moving with it and setting up border outposts. See, every time they move the border north, that's expanding the British zone of influence, expanding Palestine basically at the expense of Lebanon and Syria. The Zionists obviously want this for their own reasons, but the British want more territory to influence and control as well. So there's probably a strategic alliance between the Zionists and the British here thinking that, you know, if the Zionists set up Jewish settlements as far north as possible, the French probably aren't going to ask for that territory back because there are already Jewish villages there, the British are the ones who are in charge of this whole Balfour Declaration, Jewish homeland thing. So it should probably just go to the British. It was probably, you know, a strategic move between the British and the French having very little to do with the actual Arab communities in question, but it's leading to a lot of friction with the Arab communities in that region. And so you've got tension building from that. Then you've got Bedouin fighters and other Arab or regular fighters who are loyal to Faisal coming down out of the hills and out of the desert to harass the French army forces who have been who have been coming into the country, starting to pile up the French army forces for their part are barging into Arab villages and Jewish settlements, by the way, to Bivouac and camp out and take supplies. Well, to rash it up the distrust even more, it's starting to become very hard to tell which of these villages are helping the French willingly and which ones are being forced. You know, the Arabs are already suspicious of the Jewish villages for obvious reasons, suspicious that they're going to be helping the French, but that wasn't all. Some Arab Christians, mostly in Lebanon, but also in other areas, but mostly focus in Lebanon, we're siding with the French. The French had a long history in Lebanon and some of the people there, not all for sure, but some of the people there were not unhappy to see them at least. So Arab patrols began to raid and search villages, Arab and Jewish villages that were suspected of possibly providing support to the French. Meanwhile, you've got Zionist militias forming up in several towns. We mentioned this a moment ago. They're collecting weapons and training. So that by this time you've got in Jerusalem alone, you've got some 600 Jewish fighters performing regular military drills and training routines in the streets of Jerusalem. The British military is supposed to be de-escalating the situation and keeping the peace and this kind of thing drove them insane. I'm sure you can imagine how well it went over with the Arabs. The whole border region where control is disputed is just becoming confusing and chaotic again. This is not the internet age or the age of the 24 hour news cycle. Rumors and word of mouth are the primary source of information for huge numbers of people and rumors were rampant. It's hard to tell who's on whose side. Again, there are Arab villages supporting the French. French troops are using Arab villages and Jewish villages to camp and resupply. No one knows which of these villages are being compelled and which ones are collaborating willingly. There's even evidence that the British were helping to supply the Arabs and providing them with intelligence in order to undermine the French. They were allies, but the war is over, so there's a little healthy competition going on again. Although it was in defiance of the official policy of the British government, you've got British military officers on the ground in Palestine, many of whom fought alongside Faisal and his troops during the war and were sympathetic to the Arab cause, who were reportedly passing messages to him that if only he could hold on to a unified Syria for a little while, just for a little while against the French and the Zionists, maybe the French would get tired of this business and just cut an easier deal with the British, giving the British a larger zone of influence, and maybe the British would step in and recognize Syria's nominal independence under loose British supervision. This is something that Faisal allies probably would have accepted. They wanted total independence. They would have preferred that, but most indications we have today are that most of them would have settled for partial independence under the British. They at least had a good working relationship with the British, especially with the British military officers who were in country. If the average person on the ground, British, Jewish, Arab, the average person holding a rifle on watch or patrolling a road, it's just hard to know what's going on, who to trust, as you come upon somebody on the road, it's hard to know who side this person is on. Well once the border between British Palestine and French Syria is finally settled, the Zionists have a Russian Jewish military veteran named Joseph Trumpledor head on up there to take control of the settlements and reinforce the frontier defenses. Trumpledor was a dentist by training, but he had more than a little experience with this kind of thing. So he gathers up some men and some supplies and he rides up to Galilee. Trumpledor is from the Caucasus region of Russia, down toward Chechnya, Dagestan, that whole region of southern Russia. I mean, if you know anything at all about that area, the people there are just hard as nails. They just make a different kind of white people down there. It might have the single highest concentration of stone-cold badasses of any place on the planet. Honestly, well apparently they make their Jews pretty tough too because Trumpledore was just as hard as they come. Okay, the guy was an animal. I mean, how do I even describe this guy? Okay, so Trumpledore had been an officer in the Russian army before coming to Palestine, right? And the army of the late Russian Empire was notorious for suffering from terrible morale because it consisted mostly of conscripted peasants who weren't happy about being pulled off their farms and sent to fight for the Zor. But when the Russo-Japanese War broke out in the first years of the 20th century, Joseph Trumpledore didn't need to be conscripted. He didn't need to be ordered or asked to do anything. He marched right in and volunteered for the frontline shock troops. He wanted to fight. You know, he grew up just like a lot of Jews, not just in anti-Semitic Southern Russia, but Jews had to deal with this all over Europe and in the United States as well. Anywhere they were, he grew up listening to these stereotypes about Jews. Jews being these brittle little urban weaklings and unreliable cowards. And basically, he just wanted to tell everybody exactly where they could stick that stereotype and what they could do with it. That's what a huge part of Trumpledore's life was about. A lot of what his character was about. That's just who this guy was. During the Japanese siege of Port Arthur during that same war, Trumpledore took a piece of shrapnel, lost his left arm. After a brief period of recovery, he goes in and tells his commanders. He's ready to be put back on the battle line. And he's not asking to remain in service. He wants to fight. And he doesn't have a left arm. So initially, he's refused and they tell him to go home. They gave him a medal and, you know, thanks for your service, but go on home. Or, you know, if you're going to be stubborn about it, at least take an admin position or a rear echelon role. You know, we'll put you in a training position or something. But his replies famous. He's supposed to have said, "But I still have another arm to give the mother land." That could be a total legend. But nobody challenges it really because honestly, it wouldn't surprise anybody if it was true right down to the letter because it fits everything else we know about this guy. You know, sometimes you hear a line like that coming out of somebody's mouth in history and you're kind of like, "Oh, maybe, maybe." Nobody would be surprised if that was exactly what he said, maybe with a few exploits thrown in there. It's just who this guy was, okay? So you can't waste a guy like that. The Russian officers were at least smart enough to know that. And so with only one arm, they hand him a rifle and put him back out on the line. When Port Arthur finally falls to the Japanese, Trumpador becomes a Japanese prisoner of war. Now, this isn't like being a Japanese prisoner of war in the 30s or 40s, but it's still not at the top of anyone's list of desirable vacation destinations, okay? I don't know how you would handle Japanese captivity. I have doubts about how well I would fare, but you and I probably aren't Joseph Trumpador. While he was a prisoner, he goes around and seeks out and begins organizing other Jewish POWs. He finds about 500 of them. He creates an underground newspaper, starts circulating it around and it talks about Zionist news and activities. He organizes classes for these Jewish groups on the geography of Palestine, starts preparing them for the possibility of moving into Palestine. He organizes other classes on Jewish history and literature. This is all while he's still in Japanese captivity, okay? Not only one arm, but the time the war ends, Joseph Trumpador is the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russian history. He's the first Jew to ever receive an officer's commission in the Russian army. So he more than fulfilled that initial goal he had when he enlisted, because even the most anti-Semitic Russian military officers can't say anything to him. They admired him. They treated him as an equal. So after the war, Trumpador realizes that he's not going to make much of a dentist with one arm. So he studies law for a while. That's not really his speed. Finally, he gathers up a group of Zionists and leaves for Palestine in 1911. And when he gets there a few years later, the First World War rubs and no, no, no, no, do you think his glory days were over just because he was the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russian history? Please, no, no, he's just getting started. So the First World War rubs and the Ottoman Empire is not feeling particularly charitable toward Russian nationals in their territory. They decorated Russian military veterans. So Trumpador's got to get out of there. He flees to Egypt. He sets up a unit called the Zion Mule Corps to fight for the British army. Now, the Zion Mule Corps is considered to be the first all-Jewish military force since the Roman exile almost 2,000 years ago. It was under the overall command of a British army officer, but this is Trumpador's unit. The unit took part in the Gallipoli campaign against the Ottoman Empire that infamous Allied disaster. And when they arrived to the battle, it was just bananas. They're forced to land under heavy artillery and small arms fire. A guy like Trumpador, I guess, doesn't even bother interrupting his nap until the shells are a few yards away because at Gallipoli, we see the same guy that we saw in the Russo-Japanese war. He's shot through the shoulder during the fighting, but I don't know, apparently anything less than losing a limb is beneath his notice because he refuses to leave the battlefield, even under direct orders. His commander was just blown away. The British commander, who was overall in charge of the unit, later on, he wrote, "Many of the Zionists whom I thought somewhat lacking in courage, showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire. While Captain Trumpador actually reveled in it, and the hotter it became, the more he liked it." So this is. I should just stop the podcast and make a five-hour podcast about Joseph Trumpador, but I won't. Maybe later. I'll then up to the task of going up to the North of Palestine and organizing the defense of a few frontier settlements against sporadic Bedouin Raiders, okay? This is small potatoes for him. While on March 1st, 1920, that's going to be put to the test. A band of Arah militia approached the frontier settlement of Tel-Hai, they're demanding to search the premises for French soldiers. As soon as they demand entry, Zionist guard fires a shot to the air to alert Trumpador, who's at a nearby settlement, telling him to bring reinforcements as quickly as possible. Trumpador mounts up with several militia and rides to the scene. They try to deny the Arab's entry, but the Arabs outnumber them. So an Arab search party forces its way in. Now as they conducted their search, there's some confusion and controversy over what happened next. One version is that a Jewish guard accidentally fired his weapon. Another is that a Jewish woman who was in a house, she didn't know that any of this was going on and she was startled when she sees an armed Arab enter her home, so she grabs a gun and shoots at him. Whichever version is correct, the results the same. Everybody starts shooting. The Arab search party, believing that they'd come under attack, they're running through the streets until they're finally able to barricade themselves, often one section of the village. The leader of the Arab search party, he starts talking to all his people and he realizes that this has just been some kind of a mistake. So he calls out that there's been a misunderstanding and he asks the Jews for a ceasefire. Design is agreed and as the Arabs are retreating out of the village, they're making their way to the gates. One of the Jewish gunmen apparently hadn't received word that there was a ceasefire. At least that's how the story goes and so he begins shooting at the Arabs again. They return fire and they flee the town, eventually making it out to rejoin the main force. Well now they think that they've been tricked and ambushed after an agreed upon ceasefire, so they're furious. They get together with the main force and they prepare a counterattack. They also think that maybe the reason they got shot at twice is because this settlement actually is hiding something. So they launch an attack. They assaulted the walls of the compound as a Zionist fight back from defensive positions in sniperness. When finally the smoke clears and the Arabs pull back, they're dead on both sides. Although the numbers depend on who you read. The most common number is that eight Jews and five Arabs were killed with more wounded on both sides. But Israeli historian Benny Morris reports in his book "Ruchus Victims" that six Jews in "dozens of Arabs died and more were wounded." So you can take that for what it's worth. Let's just say at least a half a dozen on each side died and a few dozen were wounded. As the Arabs are regrouping and deciding how to proceed, the Zionists look at their position and they realize that it's untanimal, so they back out and abandon the outpost. As you can imagine, every single detail of this incident is controversial and emotionally charged. In fact, I should probably just put a disclaimer at the beginning of this episode to say that this is the case for every single part of this entire story. But I would still say it here because it's important. This is a watershed moment in the relationship between the two groups. This is an important point where something changes for good. Zionist historiography insists that this supposed search party was only using that excuse to harass and rob the Jewish settlement. The Arab versions often say that the shots fired by the Zionist after the ceasefire were an attack, not a mistake. Why it all started and how it proceeded is murky. No one really knows exactly what happens. But in this part of the world, back then, just as it is now, there seems to be like a force field around it that repels any kind of ambivalence or any gray areas at all. Everything is black and white. So it wasn't a week before the Battle of Tell High was being mythologized by both sides. Among the Jewish dead was the old warrior Joseph Trumpledore, shot in the hand in the belly. He had been evacuated with the rest and he wouldn't die until later on that night. And as he was bleeding out, someone is supposed to have told him that his wound was likely fatal. There are a few versions of his reply, but the most common is, never mind. It is good to die for our country. Those words would stay on the lips of Zionists for decades. They would become a slogan almost. Trumpledore was a hero, the first Jewish martyr in their fight for Palestine. And this was the first major engagement between the Arabs and Zionists. So it sent shockwaves through both communities. Up until this point, many Zionists had been in a state of denial almost about the natural antagonism between their goals and the political rights of the Arabs. There were things they just did not want to face. There had been Zionist leaders who were trying to tell their fellow Jews that there was a conflict approaching. That the creation of the Jewish homeland was not compatible with the Arabs' hopes for political independence, but a lot of people just didn't want to hear that. The American Commission had said the same thing in its report, but that report was squashed. So up until this point, Arab opposition to Zionism, while it wasn't ubiquitous and strongly felt, never knew that, it wasn't felt by Mo Zionist to be an imminent threat, requiring immediate direct action. I mean, only a few months before this fight, some Arab militias were approaching these same Jewish settlements to offer them an alliance against the French. Remember, high-emwise, but its sole Zionism defies on the first place by. But you know, telling him that the Jews were hoping to work with their Arab neighbors to build up this independent country, so some of the Arabs tried to tell the Jews that maybe they both had a common enemy in the French. The French weren't going to be any more interested in a Balfour declaration than they were in Arab independence, so if you guys really want to help build a country with us, start right now, help us stand up to the French. Well, of course, Zionist wanted no part of that. The Arabs were out on their own, but the Jews knew that they were safe under the protection of the British. So there wasn't this clear idea, among all of the Arabs, that the Jews were the enemy up until this point. Well, any ambiguity in their relationship evaporates after Tel Ha'i. This first battle, and it was really a gunfight between a couple of gangs, but we'll call it by its mythological name, the Battle of Tel Ha'i. It's really a microcosm of the entire history that follows right up to the present day. And I'm talking about the way the incident was understood and the way it was treated by each side after the actual event was over. After the battle, both sides go their separate ways, and their separate versions of what happened go with them. The Zionist brought back stories about how they were mining their own business after declaring neutrality regarding the dispute between the Arabs and the French, and then along comes this group of armed Bedouin and Shiite militia demanding to invade our homes, supposedly to search for friend soldiers. And they forced their way in, barging into houses and shouting, and naturally they frightened someone into firing the shot, which started the firefight. After we gave them a fair chance to retreat, they took advantage of an honest mistake by one of our defenders to regroup and attack our settlement and do what they wanted to do all along. Well, if I was a Zionist in Jerusalem and I wasn't there, and I heard that story from ten different people, I'd be pretty upset. But while the story of Joseph Trumpoldo's heroic sacrifice and defense of the pucky pioneers of Tel Ha'i was spreading among the Jews, another version of the story was making its way through Arab villages and towns. They were saying that the Zionist, saying that their foreign independent Palestine refused to help us defend it from French domination. When our fighters were searching one of their settlements for French soldiers, the Zionists fired upon them. When our warriors realized that the fight had been the result of a mistake, they called for a truce and asked to leave. The Zionists agreed, but once our men were out in the open again and defenseless, the Jews opened fire, and our men barely made it out before rejoining their comrades to mount a counterattack. Now here's the thing. A participant in the fight on either side can probably tell their version of the story, and not be lying at all. That's probably exactly how it looked from their perspective. Well this was the final straw for Faisal's allies in the Levant. They maintained their loyalty to him, but it was time to force the issue. So they convene the Syrian General Congress once more and officially proclaimed the independent Arab kingdom of Syria, naming Faisal as their king. Now I'm not sure how exactly they were expecting the French to react to it, but if they were hoping the French might just pack up their gear and head home, they were going to be disappointed. Without yet declaring war, the French army ordered the new government of Syria to stand down, disband its troops, and submit to French rule. We're not asking. Now Faisal was reluctant to enter into any kind of conflict with the French. He knew how this would turn out, but he was being carried along by events at this point. You know, before and during the war, Faisal's described by everyone as sharp and energetic and as this inspirational leader, and when you see old film of him, he has very quick, nervous movements, almost like bird-like movements. But in every picture I've seen of Faisal, and I could be projecting all of this, of course, he almost looks like a tragic figure. You know, there's this sadness in his eyes, and through all the various histories, you read about a guy who just seems to know the position that his people are in. He knows they can't stand up to the French, but he also knows that his people are not going to let him back down. They're not going to let him compromise anymore. They're not going to accept any more compromises, and it's hard to blame them. They're saying, "Look, look, you're our leader, okay? It was your family that made the deal to drive out the Ottoman Empire so that you could have your kingdom." Well, okay, great. We fought for you. We're your people. You've got your kingdom, and we've got your back, but do something. So once the kingdom's officially proclaimed, people are excited about it. I mean, there's energy all through Syria 11 on Palestine right around this time. You know, they're out in the streets, not just with enthusiasm, but in defiance as well. rallies and parades are being held from Aleppo all the way down to Gaza, you know, in the whole region of Greater Syria, which is now called the Arab Kingdom of Syria. The Arab Kingdom of Syria exists now, and Faisal is the king of it. Yeah, that's how international politics works. You declare something like this. You have it. It exists, unless somebody can take it from you. Well, the Arab Kingdom of Syria exists, and people are excited. Now, Palestine, the southern province of this kingdom, this was something that the vast, vast, vast majority of Palestinian Arabs were totally in favor of. This is what they wanted. So they're out in the streets proclaiming their loyalty to their new king, Faisal, and also showing their excitement at being a part of this thing. You know, this is the first independent Arab state in centuries. It is the first independent Arab nation state ever. It's an exciting thing. People are out showing that excitement, but the whole month of March is also marked by hand. Increasing tensions. When you thought it was bad before, it's getting real bad now, even sporadic violence starting to happen. And as March turns over into April, it's starting to spiral. Everybody can feel it. Countrywide demonstrations are scheduled for Easter Sunday, April 4. This is also the traditional day for the Muslim festival of Nebimusa. Every year for Nebimusa, a parade would take place. And this year, the religious celebration is going to double as a political rally, which it always, I mean, it always did do a certain extent. This was kind of wrapped up in Nebimusa. This kind of thing is an uncommon in the Arab world even today. These things are very often tied together. You'll often see public rituals like, like funerals and weddings, and I don't know, holiday festivals and so forth, turn into sectarian or political demonstrations. The Nebimusa festival was kind of born out of that tendency that it always had a political element to it. Christians would be pouring into the city of Jerusalem for Easter from all over the place, and so Muslims from around the region would pour in to kind of match their numbers and make a show of force. It almost always went off without incident, but there's always this tension in the atmosphere for Nebimusa. Israeli author Tom Sigev describes what it was like. He says, quote, "They came in from all over the country, as well as from neighboring countries. Tribe after tribe, caravan after caravan with their flags and weapons as if they were going to war." So there was always this political element to it. It was always, you know, you could cut the tension with a knife at Nebimusa, but now the dynamic had totally changed. There'd never been anything like this before. See, instead of Arab Muslims and Arab Christians pouring into the city in opposition to one another, now you had both Muslims and Christians united in their opposition to Zionism. So Zionist leaders are concerned they're terrified, actually. They're imploring the British to ban the public gatherings altogether, using force if necessary. But the British know better than that. You know, they probably understand that this will just make the situation infinitely worse. So they refuse that they're still going around the country trying to convince the Arabs that they have nothing to worry about, that they shouldn't feel threatened. You know, they start using the army to ban their traditional holiday festivals. How's that going to look? The British are usually way more savvy than that. Unfortunately, they go all the way in the other direction. In the end, the British deploy 188 troops to keep order in Jerusalem. To put that in perspective, the Ottoman Empire would usually deploy thousands. They would keep artillery pieces trained on the route of the procession during the annual Nebimusa parade. But when the day arrived, there were up to 70,000 Arabs by some counts, crammed into Jerusalem. article in the Times of London from 1920 describes what it was like. "It must be admitted that trouble has been brewing for some time. The religious festivals seem to have brought matters to a head. The Muslims have shown no hostility to the Christians, when Christian and Muslim processions on April 2nd almost met not a word of hostility was uttered. A number of Muslims came into Jerusalem from Hebron on April 4th, when the procession was approaching the Jaffa Gate. The cry went up from outside the gate, the Jews are attacking us. It is not known whether there was any foundation for the cry, but it started the trouble. The Jews seem to have been prepared for they were armed with knives." And so a riot breaks out. Moms of young Arabs attacked Jewish shops and homes, and they're fighting with Jewish gangs in the streets. Many of them head over to the Jewish parts of town, and they're breaking into homes and now attacking Jewish civilians. Locking the manpower to break this thing up, British troops instead just focus on trying to contain it. Trying to block off certain areas of town, prevent movement and isolate people, just prevent anybody new from joining it. Well, that sounds great in theory, right? You don't want armed Jewish gang going in and joining a riot in progress, but the Zionists later complained that the only effect this had was to prevent Jewish defense forces from going in and driving out the rioters, which the British just did not have the manpower to do. As their Jews in the old city found themselves shut into this area with a rampaging mob, the British weren't letting people move around the city, so these people couldn't get out, and Jewish defense units weren't allowed to go in to try to help them out. When finally the British gather enough soldiers to impose martial law, five Jews are dead, 200 are wounded, 18 critically wounded. Now to make matters worse, many Jewish men had formed themselves up into these defense units to go do battle with the rioters, right? So many women and children were left alone to route the entire event. Because they largely prevented any of these Jewish militias from actually joining or affecting the fighting at all. They identified them and bottled them up pretty quickly, so the women and children were mostly defenseless, and they suffered the brunt to the violence. Many of those 200 wounded were women and children. Many of those wounds were from sexual violence. Women were raped all over the place. There was one report of a 15-year-old Jewish girl being gang raped along with her sister. It wasn't uncommon. It was a nightmare. On the Arab side there were four dead. Another two dozen critically wounded at least, mostly by British soldiers and Jewish militias who had managed to get into the fighting. Now I don't know about you, but whenever I think about these long-term enduring historical tragedies, like the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs, something my mind does, it's always hard for me not to look back and wonder if it had to be that way. There were conflicting interests and a collision course here that really probably couldn't have been avoided, or if it could have gone differently. And if it could have, if there ever was a chance, then where were those invisible rubikans that got crossed? Those points of no return. Those moments of satism or poor judgment when something was broken that now it couldn't be put back. And now the system of violence sort of takes on a life of its own, has its own energy, its own momentum, and nobody even has to remember how the whole thing started anymore. Now it's just a, got its own energy of reciprocal grievances that doesn't even require a recourse from outside the system. I think it's likely that the Nebimousa riot of 1920 was that kind of an event. If peace had ever been an option, and it may not have been, by the way, you had very important Zionists, guys who would go on to become the leaders of the movement in the next few decades, you had these leaders up to this point before this point, telling their fellow Jews that they were the conquerors here. And that this was a situation where you had a conqueror and the people in land that intended to conquer. So I don't know how you make peace out of that, but if there ever was a chance that some of the other people, some of the more moderate Zionists, might have won through and guided this process back onto the tracks, that possibility probably died in early April 1920. After the riots, the British have made this cake and it didn't take long for them to start to eat it. They're going to get a little taste of what their life's going to be like in Palestine for the next few decades. If they thought they were going to make friends here with anybody, they're about to find out how wrong they were. Neither side is happy with the British. In fact, both sides are lobbying accusations against them. The Arabs are angry that the British seem to already be breaking every promise they ever made. And to the Jews, well, imagine, to them this just looks like an old-fashioned pogrom. At least that's how many of them were going to characterize it. A few of them know the difference between a pogrom and a riot. And maybe there's a little bit of cynicism involved with characterizing it this way. But in their defense, there was some evidence that at least a few people in the community had foreknowledge of what was going to happen or had an idea that something might happen. There was even some evidence that maybe the local authorities or some elements of the local authorities either looked the other way or maybe failed to adequately prepare for it. But some people would go much further than that. Heim Weisman and several other Zionist leaders, they just straight up accused the British Army leadership of allowing the attack to go forward. And then once it started, a failing to contain it as quickly as possible, just to make a point. And we'll get into that point here in just a moment. Well, to give you an idea of how the relationship between the British and the Zionist is starting to develop, give you one example. After Nebimusa, the head of the Zionist commission, Menaka Musiskin, we heard from a moment ago, he had the run in with that mayor of Jerusalem. He was involved in another confrontation that really shows you the budding resentment and distrust on the part of the Zionist toward the British military leadership. Usiskin had been visited by the British military governor in Jerusalem. Usis the guy that is in charge of keeping peace in the city, seems Colonel Ronald Stores. And so Stores had come to express his condolences to the Zionist leader. And he tells him when he gets there, he says, "I've come to express my grief over the catastrophe that befell us." And Usiskin kind of gives him this sarcastic, confused look as if he's not really sure what Colonel Stores is talking about. He says, "Mmm, which catastrophe?" And Stores is a little bit puzzled by this. He says, "Well, I'm referring to the saddening events which took place here the last few days." And then Usiskin lights up with recognition. He says, "Oh, his excellencies referring to the pogrom." And now again, remember, a pogrom implies that this was sanctioned or even abetted by and aided by the authorities. In this case, the British, which means Stores himself, because he was in charge of keeping peace in the city. So he's outraged. Stores is just shocked that he would say this. Stores says, "This is not a pogrom. It's impossible to call these riots a pogrom." And Usiskin, who on some level, you got to love this guy, he's very bold of nothing else. He's saying this to the British military governor in Jerusalem, remember. He says, "You Colonel are an expert in administrative matters. I am an expert in pogroms, and I can assure you that there's no difference between the Jerusalem and the country." And he follows step by step the ways of the perpetrators of the Russian pogrom. Zarnickelis also did not interfere with the pogrom. He has also oppressed us. Yet perhaps your excellency is aware of what has befallen him? In his place sits Trotsky. All our enemies in the world and in the land of Israel will also meet such an end." So you got to give him credit for being bold if you give him nothing else. You cannot take that away from Usiskin. He's telling a British military commander, well really the military commander in Jerusalem, that the British may be ought to take note of what happened to Zarnickelis II and the Russian Empire after that regime failed to protect its Jewish population. And just to remind everyone, Zarnickelis was executed in a dirty cellar with his whole family down to the little children by a couple Jewish communists. So Usiskin's got a mouth on him and we shouldn't take his words as being representative of the whole Zionist position. But he is the highest ranking Zionist in Palestine at this time. So it should give you an idea of how quickly and dramatically the relationship between his people and the British military has started to deteriorate. And while it would be a stretch to say that the feeling was mutual from the British side, the patience of the British military for the Zionist antics was starting to wear thin already. They saw the Nebimousa riots and the behavior of the Zionists in general very, very differently. Very differently from the politicians back in London even. This is to put it coarsely, but really they saw the situation through soldier's eyes, the way you might expect a soldier to see it. What they saw were Zionists moving into Palestine, agitating the Arabs, pushing them off their land, making a big show of their intention to take over the country, and why? Because they're going to come invade, because they're going to fight for it. No, they're doing it because they think that they're groveling, bought off politicians back in London, are going to make the British army do their work for them. They think they can agitate the Arabs all they want because the British politicians are going to make the British army protect them. Well, this drove the British army crazy, right? They had just spent two years relying on the Arabs fighting alongside them, watching them risk their lives for their independence. Meanwhile many of the Zionists leaders had spent most of the war supporting the Germans and the Ottoman Empire. Now that the war was over they're just switching teams and streaming into Palestine demanding that the British army do their dirty work for them. The Arabs had fought for their independence. The Zionists had bought it at cocktail parties with the British politicians. That's the way that a lot of the army leadership felt about it and it pissed them off. After the riot, the British government sent a commission to investigate the causes of what happened. Its findings were far more ambivalent, I guess we could say, than the Zionists expected. The commission reported that the immediate cause of the disruption was, of course, the violent actions encouraged and engaged in by groups of Arabs at the festival. But it didn't stop at immediate causes. In fact, most of the report isn't taken up with those immediate causes. It also had a lot to say about Zionists and about their behavior leading up to the incident. The report said that the immediate cause had, again, been the violent actions of these Arab gangs. But, that quote, "the Zionist commission and the official Zionists by their impatience, indiscretion, and their attempts to force the hands of the administration are largely responsible for the present crisis." Now this is a huge accusation and it drove the Zionist berserk, as you can imagine. But see, it's exactly what the military leadership had been going on about what had been making them so angry. See they believed that the Jews were being deliberately provocative, that they were being belligerent on purpose, thinking that if the Arabs could be incited to violence, that the British army, whatever they might have thought about what the Zionists were doing, at that point they would have no choice but to choose sides and crack down on the Arabs. The political leadership would make them do it. That was a Zionist calculation. Now, the army had called their bluff. The Zionists had been parading through the streets and performing military drills in Jerusalem and giving speeches about what they intended to do. But when the Arabs inevitably reacted to that, the British military was nowhere to be found. Not only was it not around a save the Zionists, they actually blocked and arrested armed Jewish militias who did try to save the Zionists. Now of course, the military leadership explained this as a simple tactical miscalculation, nothing on purpose, but the Zionists did not buy that at all. In fact, the commission didn't really buy that either. At least not fully. They had plenty of criticism for the military's actions. Beyond just, you know, mistakes were made. Now, the British commission, though, it was experiencing this same cognitive dissonance that the American commission had the previous year. Before they arrived in Palestine, they expected to find something completely different from what they did find. You know, as far as they had been told by British Zionists, like "Hi, myzman," the Zionists were just looking to be good neighbors. They were looking for a place to live, a society to participate in, nothing more. But when they interviewed actual Zionists living in Palestine, that's not what they found. What they found was a lot of people who didn't like Arabs and weren't shy about telling anybody who wanted to listen. And also who weren't shy about telling anyone who wanted to listen that they didn't plan on being anyone's friendly neighbor. Now this is not what the commission expected to find. It's not what they had been told. And they knew that it's not what the wider British government thought it was getting itself into or thought it was supporting. So it generates a report to detail its findings and deliver them to the cabinet. But before it can make its way up there, the report is squashed. It never sees the light of day. Just as the American report had been suppressed a year earlier, this British report on the Nebimous Sarayites is marked secret, put on the shelf and never released to the wider British government. In a very short period of time after the First World War, that a major commission has investigated this situation, been shocked by what they found. And for one reason or another fails to get that information to the British government in a way that might actually affect their policy and allow the British government to make an informed decision about what it's doing. This is a pattern that's going to repeat itself one way or another for the next two decades. The military and civilian administrators on the ground in Palestine are going to try again and again and again to alert the British government that things are not going as planned. And that whatever information the British government has, the orders they're passing down don't make any sense that they're making things worse. But for the next two decades, the Zionists and their allies in the British government are going to continue to place themselves in those critical nodes in the information flow that allow them to curate and filter the information before it reaches the British political leadership in order to create a narrative that suits their goals, that downplays the resistance and makes it seem as if the British government is maybe not getting itself into something as troublesome as they really are. As a result, the British government is going to continue to just march forward blindly and pursue to this contradictory policy, never really understanding until it's too late that the goals of the Zionists and the rights of the Arabs cannot coexist when the goal of the Zionists is to eliminate the Arabs' political rights altogether. But as much as the Nebimousa riots were an outrage and a tragedy for the Jews in Palestine, Zionists leaders also knew that it was an opportunity. This was their moment. The French had been waiting for an excuse to just take the gloves off and really knuckle down on Faisal and the Syrians, and so the Zionists make sure that they have one. They spread word around Europe, that innocent Jews are suffering pogroms and Jerusalem of all places, and this gives the French the international political cover that they need. Even the people who are sympathetic to the Arabs are having trouble getting a word in now. As stories about Nebimousa spread, the French are able to steer the narrative away from imperialism and towards the idea that they're going to protect the Jews from persecution. And so the French cobbled together a League of Nations conference to make its mandate for Syria official. It hadn't actually been put down on paper yet. Now it has been. And this gave France a free hand to declare war. Because now Syria was in violation of a League of Nations mandate, and so France could say that it was merely enforcing the will of the international community. And so in the summer of 1920, France moves in force against Faisal. Well Faisal wants nothing to do with this. Probably at the urging of the British, he surrenders without a fight and orders his men to do the same. He really got to remember we talked about this at the beginning when Wiseman met with Faisal. Faisal is not even from the Levant. Okay, he's not from the area. And his family still controls a kingdom that spans the whole western portion of the Arabian peninsula. It includes the two Muslim holy cities. So he and his Hashemite followers, whatever happens to Syria, they have a perfectly good home to go back to in other words. For Faisal, Syrian nationalism had always been about personal and family ambition. Most of the disillusioned Syrians who would rally to Faisal's banner just went back to their homes. And what else were they going to do? Faisal's Hashemite forces were by far the most capable and well-equipped Arab military force. They were the only ones who even might have dreamed about standing up to the French, and they were sitting in the capital preparing to surrender. A few of them took to the hills to try to carry on an insurgency that went nowhere. One man did do his best to mount a symbolic defense. His name was Yusuf Al-Azman. He had been Faisal's own minister of war, actually. He threw together a Ragtag group of poorly-equipped civilian militia with a few veterans to try to get between the French and Damascus, but there's no surprise ending here. He had about 3,000 Arab light infantry and they were crushed by a French army. It was about 9,000 strong. And it had cavalry, artillery, and aircraft support. It wasn't a fight. It was a slaughter. But this is what's called the Battle of Mesaulin. It's the only battle of the Franco-Syrian War, and it wasn't much of a battle, and a war that wasn't much of a war. Yusuf Al-Azman had been a former Ottoman general, so he knew the score. He knew what he was getting himself into. He harbored no illusions about what he was walking into. He knew that his chances of victory were sub-zero. But he decided to make a stand knowing what would happen so that no one would ever be able to say that the Syrians had welcomed the French into their country. Because there were already people trying to push that narrative. But as far as he was concerned, no one was ever going to be able to say that the French had been welcomed in. If the French were going to take over, they were going to have to kill some Syrians to do it. Faisal might have rolled over, but Al-Azman made a stand so that the French would be forced to show their hand as conquerors. Al-Azman himself was killed in the battle. He made the sacrifice himself, but to be honest, he probably didn't have to. The French were not shy about looking like conquerors in 1920. Just to give you one example, the commanding general of the French forces cleared up any lingering doubts future historians might have had as his army entered the city of Damascus. As his army moves in, he makes a detour to stop at the Grand Mosque. He enters the tomb of the great 12th century Muslim general Saladin. Saladin is the ruler and commander who had finally driven the crusaders from the region eight centuries ago. He's one of the most revered figures in the Muslim world to this day. He's one of the greatest figures in history period. And so as Faisal and his Hashemites are waiting around to welcome their new French masters, this victorious general first makes sure he has an audience and then he walks up to Saladin's tomb and kicks it. He calls out quote, "Awake, Saladin. We have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent." So you can't get much clearer than that. The destruction of the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria by the French through any hopes for Arab national independence in the Levant into a blender. Up until this point, Arab nationalism in the region had been focused on this larger Syrian Kingdom and all their efforts had been dedicated to rally supporting for a national identity on that basis. Palestinian Arab leaders had been selling their people on this idea of committing their loyalty to that larger state. Well that idea had just been strangled in the crib and there was no recovery. And there's nothing left even fight back against since Faisal had just given up and left. So the Arabs and Palestine who were still interested in building a national state, there was starting all over again from scratch. The Syria out of the picture, Palestine is now isolated under the British mandate. This is the point where the focus shifts to emphasize a specifically Palestinian national identity. From here on out we're done talking about Syria. The Palestinian Arab leaders now realize that they're on their own. And they know that a bunch of divided tribes will never be able to stand up to the British or to the Zionists who are now flooding into their country. Only a nation can do that. Their future will hinge on whether they can make that leap that we mentioned at the beginning and awaken a unified national Palestinian identity before it's too late. But they've got an uphill battle. When the French and British had carved up the Middle East, they broke up all the national projects that the Arabs had been pouring their efforts into. Convincing the tribal leaders to give up their autonomy, to subordinate their traditional tribal identities to this national project that had been a huge step. It had taken a huge leap of faith from all the people involved. And yet this people who were traumatized by war and oppression, disease and starvation, it allowed themselves to get excited about it, to get excited about this nation. During the war, Syrian nationalists have been tortured and executed by Jamal Pasha. They've been killed in battle fighting for this independent country. And then right at the moment when they thought they had achieved their goal, they've been sold out by their allies and by the very leader in whom they had placed their faith. So the Arabs now are playing catch up. They're starting from scratch with a disillusioned people who have already been fooled once. And two other factors are making the nationalist job even more complicated. First the literacy rate of Palestinian Arabs is maybe 10% in 1920. Back in a majority of the population is spread out over the countryside and farms and villages. Those may not seem like such a big deal. But if you're a nationalist, these are huge obstacles for you to overcome. See generally speaking nationalism, it's historically been a phenomenon that arises in literate urban societies. The tools of the nationalists are the pamphlet and the flyer, the protest placard. The soil that a nationalist grows in is a dense urban population where ideas spread very quickly from person to person. The fluid and unstable masses that you find in cities, these people are unburdened usually by old oil tees to blood and place. And it's usually a pretty simple thing for a skilled operator to get a young man with no family living in a modern city to adopt an identity that might include some strangers he's never met. It's pretty easy actually. I mean, let's think about who this man is. What his life is like. Most likely he's a wage labor of one kind or another. He spends the majority of his time and energy working for someone else, exchanging his hours for a paycheck. He's probably got a one year lease on his apartment maybe and it probably means nothing to him to move to another city or even to another part of the country. His current crop of friends he probably met sometime in the last few years and his old friends and his parents and his extended family. He sees them once or twice a year maybe on holidays. He has no inherited traditions. In fact, the cosmopolitan city to well are usually develops a sort of contempt for inherited traditions for anything old fashioned. The age of the urban bourgeois and the industrial city that was also the age of ideology. That's not some historical coincidence. The uprooted masses that unsteadily cohere in our great cities. They're a feeding frenzy for anybody with a bit of charisma with a bolt on identity to sell. But now think of the people out in the country. It's a much tougher sell out in the provinces. To begin with, the man out there is probably farming or grazing on a piece of land that has taken his family generations to build up. There are memories attached to the stones and trees and he probably lives geographically very near a large extended family whom he wouldn't even consider leaving. His large family is nested in a larger clan and then a larger tribal structure on top of that. There's a long history of alliances and feuds and victories and defeats and betrayals with all the other groups. His tribal have traditions that have been passed down faithfully from his grandfather's grandfather, probably taught to him next to the same fire in the same house on the same piece of land. This is a much larger issue that while trying not to let myself get too sidetracked by it, I want to explore it for a moment. Earlier in the episode I mentioned the economic difficulties that some of the Mediterranean countries of Europe have had recently. I talked about how partly this has to do with the various social implications of emphasizing large extended families instead of isolated little nuclear family units. See modern industrial capitalism functions best when people can be packed up and transported to wherever the great industrial machine happens to need them at any given time. It's an obstacle to efficiency if people are too attached to a place. If you're a whole family going back three generations and stretching out to the second and third cousins all live in a 40 mile radius and they've done so for years, you're going to be much less likely to just pack up your little nuclear family and move across the country for another job. It's a much bigger decision than it would be in a place like the United States for example, where most likely you move to the other side of the country as soon as you left home for college. You probably only see your grandparents at Christmas time. This plays into why those Mediterranean countries see so much nepotism in both the public and private sectors. If your nephew gets laid off from his job and it's no simple thing to move his wife and children away to look for another opportunity, you're probably going to do whatever you have to do to make sure that he gets something nearby. See modern states and economies are at war with these attachments, these traditions, any of the emotions that prevent people from becoming the portable little cogs that the machine wants them to be. The perfect worker consumer in a capitalist state is basically one who's in a nuclear family with no sentimental attachments to place, no prejudices segmenting his preferences or desires. In fact, the more homogenous and predictable his preferences are, the easier he is the market to. I mean, can you imagine how annoying it must be to McDonald's that so many people in India don't eat beef? All that extra work printing up new signs, creating different product lines. And McDonald's had its way every Hindu in the world would convert tomorrow. Modern capitalism is much as communism, although in a much less obvious and direct way, is a corrosive force. And I don't even mean that in a bad way. I'm not attaching a value judgment to it necessarily. I'm just when I say corrosive, I'm referring to the way that it slowly works to dissolve differences into homogeneity and the way that it works to create people who have tastes and fashions, but not identities. To many people in the developed urban world today, the simple question, the very simple question, who are you? Can provoke a lot of anxious sputtering? At best, maybe you'll get a few quotes from some existentialist philosopher about the fluidity of identity. If you put that question to the man that I just described from the country, from the province, the peasant farmer, the tribal herder, you better pull up a chair. He knows exactly who he is. He knows exactly where he fits. If anything, he suffers from a surplus of identity. He's burdened by its heaviness rather than not at by its lack. No traditional agrarian society will ever give us an existentialist philosopher. It just will never happen. They have no use for them. When the door to door identity salesman comes around the province, offering a shiny new national consciousness, it's a much tougher sell. That's my point. And this is the difficulty that's being faced by the Palestinian nationalists and all of the Arab nationalists really heading into 1921. The British acted more or less as a single will, so did the Zionists. To stand up to them, the Arab leadership would have to find a way to convince the traumatized and disillusioned Palestinian Arabs to come together. But now think about what a national project is asking these people to give up. A tribe has freedom. The cost of that freedom is having to remain vigilant to protect your own interests. And so asking a tribe to submit to a state essentially means asking them to give up their autonomy in exchange for making their lives more predictable, more stable. It's kind of like asking an entrepreneur to give that up to take a job in a cubicle and a more predictable, stable salary. And it's not a perfect comparison, but I'm going to go with it. It's simply not an attractive offer to many people who have a choice. You know, they listen to the offer and they say, "Okay, you know, let me get this straight. You want me to sign up for a project where other people that I've never met can levy taxes on me. They can call up me or my sons to go to war, whether we agree with the war or not. They get to regulate how I use my life." land and how I buy and sell, they get to tell me where I can travel, where I can live, or anything else that they decide to vote and pass along. And best of all, if somebody harms me or my family, I have to go to you and trust that you're going to make it right. And if I retaliate myself, then I'm a criminal. And exchange for what again, what am I getting out of this? Just so that we can have the resources for grand scale projects and an army and a political system to stand up to great nations, couldn't those things just as easily be turned against me? This is the way a lot of them see it. I mean, this is why I quoted Michael Corleone from the Godfather earlier. You know, he said, I don't trust society to protect us. I'm not leaving our fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they con some people into voting for them. It's exactly what he's talking about here. Leaving aside the deep ties of loyalty and identity, forgetting all that for a moment, from a strictly practical standpoint, the tradeoff is just not that interesting to a lot of people who have a choice. And remember that on top of all this, the Palestinian Arabs have stumbling blocks that are unique to their historical moment as well. Now, their recent history with states has been with the Ottoman Empire and the European colonialists. So their impression of what states are and how they relate to their people, it's been formed by recent experiences that were sub-optimal, it will say. You gotta remember that for most of human history, the state meant something very different than it means to people living in Luxembourg in 2015. A state was basically what you had when a group of warriors established their dominance over a region and then claimed the right to tax that region's peasantry, a tax farm basically. When two states went to war over a territory, you know, a king might say that he was defending his people, but he meant it in the way that he might have meant that he was defending his cattle or his crops. The idea of people belonging to a nation and that nation's will is embodied by the state, that is a very new idea. And the Arabs in 1929-1921 had no experience with it at all. Now the Zionists are in the early stages of their project as well, right? But there's a huge difference, okay? Huge difference. See, they're coming from countries where the idea of state legitimacy is very familiar. They've got very recent experience with how this all works. And that is just, you can't overstate. It's hugely important. I'm going to take a more familiar example from many people listening at least. Think about it like this. When the American colonists came over and declared their national independence from England, they were creating a new national identity from scratch, right? But again, the people doing it, they were children of a culture whose family structures, whose ideas about government and about the relationship between the individual and his family and the larger social body were already well developed in this direction. They were deeply ingrained. There's this great book. It's called Albion Seed and it's about the stages of migration out of Britain into the new world. And it's fascinating because it gets into all this. It talks about how the local cultures of various regions of the United States were determined to a large degree by which region of the British Isles the major ways of settlers came over from. The Eastern Seaboard was settled by English Puritans, right? And they came over with firm ideas about education and business and government. And the culture of New England is still influenced by those ideas even today. But the southern, agrarian, and western ranching cultures of the United States, very different. They were influenced by the influx of people from the northern borderlands, the Scotsman and Irish and English borders who were much more independent, much more accustomed to relying on their local clans. Back in the British Isles, they lived far, far away from the centers of state power. So they got used to making decisions at the local level. And when state power did come around, it was experienced as more of an unwanted intrusion rather than just a natural fact of life, the way it would have been for somebody in London, say. And so it's no coincidence that these were the people that formed the bulk of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. They carried the same relationship to the national government, the same loyalty to the local rather than the general. And so all of this transferred over, all these cultural biases and structures transferred over into a people who had more loyalty to their state, whoever they lived, to the local rather than to the overall union. I mentioned earlier the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoy's. What were the Hatfields were an English family from, I think, way up in New Yorkshire. The McCoy's were Scots Irish and their American incarnations lived all the way down on the Kentucky West Virginia border. That probably wouldn't have happened in Boston. You can think of the Zionist kind of like the Massachusetts Puritans in this sense, in at least. They're starting up a new identity project, but they're doing it with people who are almost exclusively urban, highly literate, and who are coming at this with recent experience of living under state governments and institutions. So they have a huge head start, and they're able to act with a unity of will and speak with a common voice that, you know, it's far from completed this early stage and we'll get into the divisions in a moment, but it's light years ahead of where the Arabs are at. And after Nebimousa, that common voice of theirs, it is screaming at the British government about the conduct of the military in Palestine. Now the military had its defenders, and the Zionists certainly had their critics in the British government, but they also had powerful allies. David Lloyd George was still the prime minister in Britain, and he had been an ardent Zionist supporter for years. And so the British government responded to Zionist pressure by replacing the military administration in Palestine with the civilian government. To serve as the high commissioner of this new administration, the British appointed Herbert Samuel, an assimilated British Jew, and a long time committed Zionist. Now the commanding general of the outgoing military administration thought this was manned, as he warned London that this was a dangerous move that would only further confirm to the Arabs that the British were working with Zionists actively to displace them, and he wasn't wrong about that. The Arab response to the appointment of Zionist as the high commissioner in Palestine was basically what you would expect it to be. I mean put yourself in their position, imagine how this move looked from their perspective. At every turn the British seemed to say one thing, and then do another, that they would speak and soft and reassuring tones to convince the Arabs that they really had their best interest at heart, and were still with you, but then they would just drop another surprise on them. And then they would speak to them reassuringly again, and then another surprise, with the appointment of Samuel as high commissioner, just seemed like another one of these surprises. And Hyam Weisman did actually brag to an American audience right after this time that he had been personally responsible for Samuel's appointment. So the Arabs paranoia isn't completely unfounded. You know, it's that old cliche about, you know, you're not being paranoid if they really are out to get you, that's not the last time I'm going to say that about the Arabs. Now Samuel himself though, is a very interesting guy. He's one of my favorite characters in this story actually, and I don't think he's probably the most obvious choice for that title if you ask most people. You know, his story isn't as exciting as the story of many others that we're going to talk about or that we have talked about, but he's interesting to me because in him we sort of get a picture of the ambivalence of the whole Zionist movement. Of a Zionist movement that will force people to make hard choices between their political aspirations and their commitment to certain moral principles, principles that they really do hope. These things are going to come into conflict and in Herbert Samuel, we get to see him play this tug of war in one man. He's also become taken by Zionism at an early age. Someone wants to describe him by saying, this is a bit of a paraphrase, but it really encapsulates what he's all about. They said that he was a guy who was completely average, completely unremarkable, but he caught people off guard because he was not either of those things when it came to Zionism. He was a principled man, but not outspoken about it. And he might have passed his entire career in the British bureaucracy, just as a faceless nameless man without ever making his way into our history books, if not for his passionate commitment to Zionism. And again, he caught many people off guard because of this. He didn't seem like a formidable man. People weren't looking out for him, but when it came to Zionism and apparently only Zionism, he was as single-minded and committed as anyone. But he wasn't one of these radical, revolutionary Eastern European or Russian Zionists either. He was very circumspect and disciplined. He always kept the long view in mind. He was thinking a century ahead, not a year ahead. And this will end up putting him at odds, as we'll see, with Zionism and Palestine who don't share his patience. Before the war, Samuel was often the one in the position of trying to push Weisman to be more assertive, to demand more. But once he got to Palestine and as he started to become more aware of what would be actually necessary to establish total Jewish control over Palestine, he began to moderate his message. He understood as a high-ranking member the British power structure that the British government was already beginning to reconsider the Balfour Declaration. After Nebimousa, the British military had become more convict. than ever that the Balfour policy was bad for Britain, just bad altogether for Britain, and some people in the British government were beginning to listen to what they had to say. One British military officer had written back to the foreign office, for example. He wrote quote, "The antagonism to Zionism of the majority of the population is deeply rooted, and it is fast leading to hatred of the British. And it will result if the Zionist program is forced upon them in an outbreak of very serious character necessitating the employment of a much larger number of troops than is it present located in the country." The British hadn't built the greatest empire in the world by being sentimental, and many people were already questioning the wisdom of alienating the Arab world over this minor issue, just how a lot of people saw Zionism at this time. Most people, in fact. Back in the first episode I quoted Heim Weisman saying that there was no such thing as a British German, Russian, or American Jew. Only Jews who happened to be living in those countries. Remember that? Well Herbert Samuel did not agree with that at all. He was committed to Britain. He loved Britain. He was committed to doing his job as a British subject and as a British official. He was committed to looking after Britain's interest in his capacity as high commissioner. And this is something that some of his fellow Zionists who did agree with Weisman's statement saw as just basically as betraying his own, as treachery, as far as they were concerned, he had no obligation at all to the British Empire. Those are not his people. We're your people. But even besides his loyalty to Britain, you know, again, Samuel has a very circumspect. He has a long view in mind. He understood the design as needed the British Empire. And so once he arrives in Palestine, he immediately sets to work trying to do some damage control, trying to try to upgrade their image a little bit, but there are Zionists in Palestine who are going to make this very difficult. When he took office as high commissioner, what he found were Zionists celebrating that one of their own was finally in charge. And we got this now, you know, they were expecting him to just come in and run a rough shot over the Arabs. You know, like it's the 1860s and you're the British colonial empire doing an old school style. A few of the rising Zionists leaders were already starting to call for the Arabs to be forcibly transferred out of Palestine at some point in the future. Remember, the Zionists are about 10, 12 percent of the population right now. They're already starting to call for this. Some of them are. So Samuel will find himself conflicted as high commissioner. You know, again, there's that ambivalence. Not only in his loyalties to Britain and Zionism, but also because he was a man of liberal principles who would find himself under immense pressure to ignore those principles when it came to the Arabs and Zionism. And again, he, it's fascinating because in Samuel, we get to see this ambivalence work itself out. Before he arrived, Samuel said in response to those people who were calling for forcible expulsion of the Arabs, he said, quote, any movement of that kind must be absolutely voluntary and conducted without any form of pressure. There will be the most equitable and sympathetic treatment of the Arab populations of that country. If we were to go to Palestine to oppress other people, it would be an unspeakable disgrace. End quote. And later after he had spent some time in the country, he wrote quote, some thought that a national home for the Jews must mean subordination, possibly spoliation of the Arabs. I did not share that view. If I had, it would have been impossible for me to accept the office of high commissioner. All my life, a convinced liberal, for 10 years of minister and a liberal government steeped in British principles of administration. I was the last man to take a hand in any policy of oppression. End quote. Now just hold on for a minute because I can hear you out there. Okay. Don't be too cynical. All right. I would never tell you how to feel about somebody. This is entirely up to you. But for me, of all the people in this story, Samuel is actually a guy that I believe when he says that. Now I really do. As far as I can tell, he does mean what he says in that quote. Now, but at the same time, those words don't necessarily mean exactly the same thing they might mean to you or me in 2015 either. I do believe that he meant what he said. But today we're working with completely different assumptions about about liberalism, about about things like what constitutes oppression. As he said, he was steeped in British principles of administration. Now he meant that in a fully positive light in the most progressive way possible in 1920. But in 1920, those principles had had what most of us today would consider a dark side, I guess. There's a technique to administering a colonial government among the foreign people who don't necessarily want you there. And the British, the British wrote the book on it. And so as the civilian administration under Samuel settles in, they start doing what the British did better than anybody in the history, probably. Just getting a feel for the divisions and rivalries, learning everything they can about, about who's allied to whom and which tribes don't like each other, who can be bought and who can't. Who's nursing old grievances that they can take advantage of. And on the other side, Samuel immediately makes a point of touring Arab villages all over the countryside and going to different towns and speaking to leaders in local groups and listening to their concerns. You know, he's trying to change the image both of the British and the Zionists here. And he's making some headway actually. See, Samuel understood the deep underlying truth about a nation being an entity that is united by a common enemy. That's something that Theodore Herzel, the father of political Zionism, had said, we'll get into that more in a moment. But, but Samuel understood it on some deep level. And the British Empire is a whole understood on some level. You know, the whole strategy of the British Empire with regard to its colonies was to deprive them of this common enemy. You know, just don't give them that. Don't give them that uniting factor. The strategy is to slide into the spaces between, exploiting divisions to make sure that the only enemies the Arabs saw when they looked around were their traditional enemies, other Arabs, other tribes, and make sure that they don't perceive the British as a threat to their little tribe and especially not as a common threat. And if you can get all the little tribes to see the British as a possible ally that they can use to get over on their local traditional enemies, even better, that's the best thing possible. And the British were brilliant at it. While the two most powerful families in Palestine were the Nasha Shibi clan and the Hussein clan, they were both based in Jerusalem. And these two families hated each other's guts. Okay. They had for years. They hated each other. And when they weren't fighting directly, you know, with violence, they were competing with each other for honor and reputation and influence in the country. Everybody in Palestine, every Arab at least in Palestine, if they weren't directly beholden to one of these families or enemies with one of these families, they at least had a very strong opinion on the Hussein Nasha Shibi rivalry. Okay. Everyone did. Well, this just makes things easy for the British. When they get in there and they see the Hussein Nasha Shibi hatred, I mean, they're just looking their chops. This makes things very simple for them and they set right to work. So you remember the mayor of Jerusalem earlier, the one that had the confrontation with the head of the Zionist commission, Menaka Musishkin? He was a member of the Hussein clan. Well, he had also been the mayor when the Nebimousa riots broke out. And so at the urging of the Zionist, the British pulled him out. They took him out of office and replaced him with a member of the Nasha Shibi clan, his most hated enemy. I'll let you use your imagination for how this went over with the Hussein's. See, colonial empires by the way, they used to love this trick everywhere you look. It doesn't matter. Not just the British everybody. They all used it. They love this trick. It's very simple. You go into a territory, you find whoever is out of power at the time and not happy about it. And then you take them and put them in charge. Now, they won't have the legitimacy to lead the population because everyone's going to see them as your stooge. So they kind of become dependent on you to maintain their position. Often after you put them in power, they use the opportunity to start taking revenge for anything that happened to them when they were out of power. And the Nasha Shibi's definitely started trying to do that. Listen to the increases the animosity towards them and make them even more dependent on your support. Which makes them look even more like your stooge, which isolates them even more from the population, which makes them more dependent on you see how this works. If the twists and turns of British strategy get confusing, don't worry about it. The whole point was to tie up a society in so many confusing knots that it spends all its energy struggling against itself. So that no one ever puts it all together and realizes that they're being played off each other by a larger threat. That's the whole point. The British ran this play again and again all over the world to make sure that different groups in their colonies were directing their hatred at each other rather than coming together and directing it at the British. It works like a charm if you know what you're doing. Okay. And the British, the British sure as hell knew what they were doing. They were the best. They were the best. There's no other way to put it. And second place is not close. They're intuitive understanding of how power and identity were linked was just light years beyond any of the other colonial empires of the day. It's light years beyond where American counterinsurgency experts are today and we study the British and our war colleges. Okay. Now keeping up with all the moves that the British make in any of their colonies and in this story here, it can get extremely confusing and it would take all day if we started getting into the detail so I'm only going to focus on the most important aspects. The two families that we already mentioned, the Husseinis and the Nasha Ceebes, are central to what the British want to do in Palestine. There are other notable families that the British will deal with at times but none of them are as prominent as these two and most of the other moves that the British will make with these other families still has to do with the Husseinis and the Nasha Ceebes in one way or another. Okay, so the Husseinis clan is outraged, it being ousted from the mership and replaced by a Nasha Ceebes but Herbert Samuel is very savvy. Okay, he doesn't stop there. Next he installs a Husseinis, the grand moofd of Jerusalem. This is the most important Muslim office in Palestine, really the most important religious official in the country. When that grand moofd dies just a few months later Samuel calls his brother Haj Amin al-Husseinis out of exile to take his brother's position as grand moofd. Now Haj Amin al-Husseinis, he had been in exile ever since he was accused, probably rightly, of helping to rile up the crowd during the Nebimousah outburst. So now you've got the Nasha Ceebes controlling the political side of the house and you've got the Husseinis controlling the religious domain and the British are going to encourage these two families to use their respective spheres of influence to hopefully neutralize each other, divide up the Palestinian Arab population and neutralize one another. And the Husseinis and Nasha Ceebes don't disappoint the British. After being given a membership and partially in exchange for the membership really it was part of the deal. The Nasha Ceebes began to advocate for compromise with the Zionists. Now once they do this the new grand moofd the Haj Amin tries to capitalize on it by taking a hard public stance against Zionism and he tries to portray the Nasha Ceebes' Zionist collaborators. Now the British and the Zionists don't discourage this perception. In fact they do everything they can to encourage it. For example in the Husseinis set up a political party in December 1920 the British helped the Nasha Ceebes set up a competing party and then the Zionists start pouring money into the Nasha Ceebes party without even attempting to conceal it. They want everyone in fact to see where the money's coming from. And again this may seem counterintuitive at first but you have to get into the British colonialist head a little bit. The way they saw it since the Nasha Ceebes controlled the political institutions. The British and Zionists were happy to undermine their credibility by allowing them to look like collaborators. If more people went over to the Husseinis side that was okay. The Husseinis didn't have any actual institutional power outside of the bully pulpit of the religious institutions. Following this same line of thinking the British often do some things that you know at first glance seem maybe a little counterintuitive from the outside but you really have to get into their heads and understand how the British are looking at the situation. For example they encourage Haj Amin to use his position as grand move to try and stimulate Muslim identity in Palestine. Well why would they do this? See up to this point joint Muslim Christian associations. Muslims and Christians working together had been the most effective organizers of opposition designism. And the British reason that if the Muslims could be radicalized even just a bit then the Christians might be alienated and that alliance might be broken apart. And the Christians being isolated would have no choice but to reach out and depend on the British for support. So to this end the British helped establish a supreme Muslim council under the leadership of the grand move. They diverted tax revenues to this council helped it set up Sharia courts and set up offices and several villages and towns around Palestine to take charge of you know marriages and other Muslim legal matters things that the British really didn't think of as that important but gave the grand move to be something to occupy himself with and a way of exercising a certain amount of authority. At the same time the Zionists work to undermine these Muslim Christian associations by covertly funding groups that were only for Muslims. Now if you're thinking to yourself that I don't know this sounds like a plan that could backfire you're exactly right. If backfires exactly like you think it's going to okay the plan works too well basically. They got what they wanted. The Arab Christians feel alienated by the increasingly insular you know Muslim majority but they also awaken something else something they didn't intend and they didn't expect. They had planted the seeds of a new kind of militant Islam a new kind of political militant Islam that that hadn't really existed before in the country and that would prove more durable and far more dangerous than any of the problems that they thought they were solving. Now if this whole pattern seems eerily uncomfortably familiar it should. In our own day the state of Israel has employed the exact same strategy to great effect tolerating and it times encouraging Islamist groups as a counterweight to secular nationalists who may Israel wittingly or not helps pain as collaborators. The most recent assault on Gaza in the summer of 2014 was launched just three months after the Islamist group Hamas and the nationalist party Fatha agreed to end their eight-year long conflict and create a unity government that was not a coincidence. The fact that this pattern is still repeating itself a century later is a little bit of a spoiler for this story. It tells you that to this day the Palestinian Arabs have not been able to overcome the combination of internal divisions and external obstacles to form a united Palestinian national identity. Now compare this to how the Zionists are doing at the same time. The Zionists while they're still in the early stages of building their own national identity you know we mentioned before that they're at least coming from a European culture that has a deep and recent history with this kind of thing. It makes all the difference in the world but that doesn't mean that it's a simple matter. You know it's not easy under the most favorable of circumstances and the Jews are dealing with obstacles that most nationalists never have to deal with. The first and most obvious is that they don't even have a national homeland to start. You know they started a nationalist movement before they even had a place to live. Think about that. But believe it or not that's not the hard part. At least I would argue it's not the hard part. I mean getting some territory always takes work but at least there's a long list of historical examples you can draw on if you're trying to figure out what you're supposed to do. Right? We all know how to acquire territory even if it's difficult. Well the Zionists had very rich and very influential backers pushing the big bad British Empire, the greatest empire on the planet at the time to get them a piece of land. So it was going to take some doing but they at least had that part figured out. They knew where they were going with it. The second obstacle they faced is much more subtle. It's so subtle in fact that not even all the Zionists see it and not all the Rothschild money or British military strength in the world can help them with it. To understand the ambition of what the Zionists are trying to do, of the scale of the difficulties that they're facing with this project. I always find myself coming back to one thing. I always come back to the fact that in the beginning diaspora Jews who lived in different countries couldn't even speak to each other. I don't mean they were on speaking terms. I mean they literally cannot speak to each other. In English, Jew and Ukrainian Jew, they can't communicate with each other because they don't speak the same language. You know this part of the story what I'm about to talk about, it's another one of those issues like the Dreyfus affair in the last episode where there are 10,000 books written on the couple paragraphs that I'm about to talk about. Where it's so fascinating there are so many angles and connections that that I have to ruthlessly force myself to keep it short because I'll get carried away. You know I'll find myself ranting four hours from now realizing that everybody's turned me off and I haven't made it out of 1920 yet so I'll try to keep it short but please just bear with me because I love this part of the story. So designers are trying to draw together this community right? They're trying to get people who have lived for generations and foreign cultures to identify with each other to see that they are a culture under themselves. Now this isn't something that you can just impose from the top down right? In the beginning of this episode we talked about some of the difficulties inherent in this project. You know it has to be compelling enough for people to feel it. They can't just think it. It has to hit them where they live. You know they have to be willing to sacrifice for it to subordinate their other identities to it. The Arab Nationalists are engaged in this same project and facing some of the same obstacles but at least all the people that the Arab Nationalists are working with all speak Arabic. Enough of the Hebrew language have been preserved to allow rabbis to recite memorized passages from the Torah but no one spoke it. Jews spoke the languages of the countries that they'd settled in. You know Hebrew was just a sacred language used in religious rituals sort of like Latin is today in the Catholic Church. Well except that at least with Latin enough of it's been preserved that you could speak it if you wanted to. You couldn't do that with Hebrew. You know only the memorized syllables of the sacred passages have been preserved without any memory of the syntax or or the linguistic structures which underlay the language and related the parts to the whole. Now all this wasn't particularly interesting to Theodore Hurrah's only original political Zionist. You know they just weren't that interested in it. I said that it was so subtle that many Zionists didn't see it. The political Zionists didn't see the importance of it. Now they weren't against it but their concern was you know their concern was finding a place to call their own to get the Jews out of Europe. That was the more immediate concern. That's the political Zionists were focused on but there were others you know coming from slightly different places relative to one another but but who are of one mind and being more interested in reviving Jewish culture than in just drawing borders around a piece of land and calling it Jewish. Now most of them still favor the creation of a Jewish political state eventually but but they were focused on the role that it might play as a spiritual center of the Jewish people around the world. The leader It's sort of the guiding light of this brand design is an ash or Ginsburg. He's better known by his pseudonym a hot HOMM. Now HOMM he didn't even wish to see the diaspora Jews migrate to Palestine not all of them at least. You know, he felt that the Jewish people had been a moral and ethical beacon in the world that they should remain out in the world That they might be able to reclaim that position as a moral and ethical beacon if if the Jewish people wherever they lived in their various countries were able to look to Jerusalem again You know sort of sort of the way that Muslims looked to Mecca that this might spark a Jewish revival by being a center of scholarship and pilgrimage He wanted to rebuild the Jewish presence in Palestine less to be a political home for ethnic Jews than to be a spiritual home for Jews around the world So these cultural Zionists they saw nationalism as a sort of as a sort of backdoor You know to reconnect Jews to to their Jewish heritage to Judaism and Jewish history Of the same mind was another Russian a friend of a hot HOMM's a man named Elias Arbenyuhuda And that's who I want to talk about right now As a young man Benyuhuda was on track to become a rabbi as his parents hoped and he was pursuing his studies to that end when he was exposed to early Zionist writings Now Benyuhuda was a brilliant linguist. He was already speaking his native Yiddish, Russian, French, and German fluently When in his early 20s he departed the rabbinical path and left to study in Paris Now at one point during his stay in Paris he met a Jewish man who was visiting from Jerusalem Had lived there for a long time and he tried to engage him in conversation See before the Zionist migrations to Palestine ever began there had been a small religious community of Jews from all over the world Who lived in Jerusalem and mostly survived undone nations from abroad? It's a little commune in Jerusalem of Jews from all over the place now since these pilgrims often spoke different languages They would use scraps of rudimentary Hebrew to try to communicate with each other You know, but it was it was more of a really simple pigeon language and a functional language on its own It had scraps of other languages as sort of thrown in and yet Benyuhuda found that he was able to communicate basic ideas well enough To hold a conversation with this man from Jerusalem in Hebrew and a light went on that marked one of the milestones in modern Jewish history At that moment, Elias our Benyuhuda decided that any Sustainable revival of Jewish culture and identity had to include a resurrection of the Jewish language Not Yiddish but the real language of the Jews Hebrew He devoted his life to this project There were many people in the early days who thought it would just be easier to teach everyone Russian or German or Yiddish, but but he knew that they were not seeing the whole picture Okay, Benyuhuda knew that it couldn't just be about drawing lines on a map and a few government buildings and an army After the Roman Empire fell the building still stood you know, and there were writings and people who could tell you how the whole thing ran What the public offices were and how to conduct various orders of business and and people tried again and again and again to jumpstart the Roman Empire and get it working again But there was just something missing All the buildings and uniforms and documents and offices and people were all still there But it was like a corpse of a man who only just a moment ago I've been walking around and talking but is now just laying there in an amendment You know, there was something vital that it departed and you can keep a body on artificial life support for a while But but you cannot fake life once the spirit has gone out of it Now Benyuhuda somehow knew that a bunch of Jews walking around Jerusalem speaking German or Russian would never be an Independent and vital organism could only ever be a Frankenstein monster just just waiting to run out of Jews Now look I don't want to give the wrong impression. Okay, don't mistake me a lot of people contributed to the revival of modern Hebrew All right besides Benyuhuda, but but he provided the motive and ideological drive and direction insisting upon it when many people did not see the point You know if anyone is most responsible for the revival of the language It's Benyuhuda. This is one of the most extraordinary parts of the story if you ask me and and putting this part in here You know, I was looking for parts that I had to cut out because this thing's long enough as it is and I just could not bring myself to get rid of this portion I really do think it's too important With everything that's about to happen with everything that's already happened leading up to this point The revival of modern Hebrew gives you a taste of how committed some of these folks were in and what was really going on Not just in their heads, but in their hearts You know a lot of people look back at the early part of the Zionist story and they see they see colonialist plotting and disregard for other people and violence and racism and deception and and all of those elements exist They're all there and you do the the history of disservice if you ignore or downplay them But but you also do the story and everyone involved in it on all sides of disservice if you ignore The very real idealism and and the romantic heart that was beating at the center of the Zionist movement in these early days I mean here we have a group of people who set to work reviving a dead language. Why? Because it was important to them. That's it. They didn't have to But they did and they didn't just make it up either They did their best to puzzle out the syntax and the structures of ancient spoken Hebrew to to try and determine how they might have said words It didn't exist in the days of the Roman Republic You know that effort had about as much accuracy and successes you would expect from something like that But the point is they took the time They put the work in they didn't have to but they did And now a language that had literally zero native speakers left in the world zero It was a museum piece like like 10,000 other dead languages that will never hear of people's whose names will remain forgotten And this language became the language of the Jews in Palestine I mean this is gonna take me off the tracks a little bit But have you ever seen one of those action movies where you know a hero is getting beaten down by the bad guys about two thirds through the movie He gets captured or something and they haven't tied up in a chair maybe and The bad guys are beating him up and kicking him and punching him and there's always this cliche scene where they're where they're kicking him and beating him And he's holding on to a picture of like his wife or his daughter or his sweetheart back home And it keeps getting knocked out of his hand and he isn't even defending himself because he keeps just doing everything He can to get that picture back and trying to keep his eyes on it and he gets it back and gets kicked again And it flies out of his hand and he crawls in the dirt after it and just as he gets a hold of it He's kicked again. I know it's kind of a silly picture, but it kind of reminds me of that It really does For thousands of years the Jews are just getting kicked around as they move from place to place to place And the memory of how it all started Of why people are kicking him in the first place of where they came from and who they are It almost faded away It was almost going at the end of the 19th century As everywhere they went people were just trying to beat it out of them, but they held on Barely, but they held on And they get kicked again. So what let them kick you just stay focused on that thing pick up the picture And if they kick you again and again Just stay focused on the image of that thing you love because if you lose that it doesn't matter if they stop kicking you This is the only example in history of a language dying out Gone to the point of having no one left in the world who spoke it And then being reconstructed and revived so that today millions of people speak it as their first language Language is a huge part of having a sustainable culture Because we think and approach the world through language and so not only the vocabulary But also the deep structures and arrangements carry implications for fundamental aspects of how we relate to the world Into our society and to ourselves You know some critics have pointed out that that modern Hebrew is no replica of the ancient language That it carries the natural biases and structures that an interpretation by European Jews who spoke European languages would be expected to impress upon it Basically that it was influenced by the languages from which they were approaching it, but but I don't see how that's a criticism at all The centuries of wandering are a part of the Jewish heritage An important part, erasing that memory in some vain attempt to turn back the clock 2,000 years would just deny a very important and vital part of who they are If the language we speak shapes how we perceive ourselves and construct reality Then you could say that the mind of the modern Hebrew-speaking Jewish person is is built out of the materials picked up through his people's years of wandering Today's Hebrew speakers carry the cultural memory of of the prophets and the rabbis yes, but but also of the diaspora in their language And that language creates the internal structures of the Hebrew speakers consciousness Now this is cultural Zionism and it provided the charge for that first wave of Zionism in the late 1800s before political Zionism had even been formulated Cultural Zionism was a revivalist movement at heart. It was forward-looking. It was an idealistic movement that wanted to create something important even sacred Early political Zionism was more reactionary Instead of trying to get people motivated to sacrifice for this great thing It instead took the tried and true path the reliable path of giving them something to fear And reminding them that they all had a common enemy As Theodore Herzel we mentioned this earlier told a British commission on immigration in 1902 Herzel said quote I will give you my definition of a nation and you can add the adjective Jewish a nation is in my mind an historical group of men of a recognizable cohesion held together by a common enemy. Then if you add to that the word Jewish you have what I understand to be the Jewish nation end quote. And his interviewer asked him quote, what would be the common enemy in this case end quote and Herzl didn't hesitate the anti-Semite. His very definition of a nation was a group held together by a common enemy. The Jewish nation he was trying to rally was to be held together by anti-Semitism. If one were to ask him what then was left of Jewish identity if you remove the anti-Semite Herzl would have answered simply and quickly that there was no danger of that. Now a hot arm he saw the danger in this way of thinking and he took a stand against Herzl and the political Zionists from day one. You know he started a publication in opposition to the political Zionists the same year that Herzl called the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Now don't be mistaken okay. Hamus from Russia he was well acquainted with the suffering of his people in Russia in Europe. He just saw that that their movement had to stand for something not just against something. He knew that if Jewish identity became all about getting away from suffering, getting away from darkness rather than being drawn towards something positive that their identity would just inevitably end up being shaped as a negative by the suffering and darkness that they were running from. If the Jewish nation needed the anti-Semite to stay alive, it would find ways to make sure that anti-Semites remained in steady supply. You know but there's a reason that human societies throughout history have not been able to follow the path that Ham laid out and have come together around terror and rage. Theodore Herzl would have asked well he did ask really it was his central question. Do you see the supply of anti-Semites running out anytime soon because I don't? Now many of the political Zionists that were following Herzl were secular socialists and even atheists who cared very little for any of the religious and cultural considerations that Ham believed should be central to the Zionist program. Ham, on the other hand, listened to the political Zionists and to him they just sounded like European colonialists who wanted to shove their way into a territory, you know, use money from rich European bankers like the Rothschilds to build it up and then get one of the imperial powers to give them enough guns and soldiers to hold on to it. They didn't seem to particularly care if the Jewish state was very Jewish at all. Well, Ham and his followers were saying that they wanted a Jewish state, not just a state full of Jews. He'd been traveling to Palestine since the first wave of Jewish immigration years before the idea of Zionism and even entered Herzl's mind. And he knew that the political Zionists were in denial about the difficulties that they were going to face once they arrived. You know, you got to remember Herzl had never been to Palestine when he wrote the pamphlet that got the whole movement started. Neither of them. Well, Ham had been going back and forth trying to rally Jews around this idea of reclaiming their cultural and religious identity for years when the drivers of Fair happened and all of a sudden Zionism became cool and Herzl called the first Zionist Congress and all that. You know, he was an old veteran of this. He had watched the early Zionist settlements found her and eventually fall apart partially because the Jews that arrived were not respecting the people that already lived there. They were creating tension and helping to foster a situation where the settlements were inorganic, you know, unnatural. They were like isolated space stations that were reliant on aid from elsewhere because they fostered no relationships with the people around them. In an essay written way back in 1891, six years before Theodore Herzl called the first Congress, another part of which I quoted in episode one, "Hum tried to alert his fellow Jews to what he was seeing in Palestine." Ham wrote, quote, "We must surely learn from both our past and present history how careful we must be not to provoke the anger of the native people by doing them wrong, and how we should be cautious in our dealings with the foreign people among whom we returned to live, to handle these people with love and respect, and needless to say with justice and good judgment. And what do our brothers do? Exactly the opposite. They were slaves in their diasporas, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts as always happens to former slaves. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty. They trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and then even boast about their actions. There's no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency. Our brothers indeed were right when they said that the Arab only respects he who exhibits bravery and courage, but when these people feel that the laws on their rival side and even more so if they're right to think that their rival's actions are unjust and oppressive, then even if they are silent and endlessly reserved, they keep their anger in their hearts. And these people will be revengeful like no other end quote. Now when a hot-hom wrote this, there were still very few Jews living in Palestine. So the incidents that he's referring to were isolated, but it was the approach that worried him. It was the carelessness and the aggression that that the British as we just saw a few decades later would blame for helping to instigate the Nebuchadnezzar riots. Well, Hayam Weisman was the man who helped bridge the gap between the two Zionists camps, between the political and cultural Zionists. He was a great admirer and a follower of Ham. He passionately embraced the goals of the cultural Zionists as his own. At the same time, he knew that Herzl was right about Europe. He knew that Herzl was right about the world. The world didn't want them and why would it? People said that Jews were foreigners, that they were interlopers and you know what? We are foreigners, we don't belong in their countries, we belong in our homeland and nowhere else. The cultural and political Zionists battled over the approach and the focus of the movement throughout the pre-war period with Weisman often serving as the go between peace maker. After theodore Herzl died in 1904, political Zionism moderated a bit as Weisman pushed an approach that still retained the political Zionist emphasis on establishing political power but focused on creating an independent and sustainable Jewish culture in Palestine. Things like building a university were near and dear to Hayam Weisman's heart. At the same time, another group began to gain prominence in this group would very soon come to dominate the entire movement. In the early days, you know, I think we mentioned this one before, the Zionist community in Palestine was dominated by Jews from the Russian Empire and they carried the same emphasis on leftist economics and class unity that there was creating chaos in the old empire. To a significant degree, these were the same people. They moved back and forth sometimes between movements. Now, for a while, they all came in several flavors. These leftist Zionists from full on communists to agrarian socialists, to something like what we would think of today as social Democrats, but eventually all of those flavors were collapsing to one as labor Zionism largely due to the will and power of a man who arrived in Palestine in 1906 at 20 years old. If you fly into the state of Israel today, chances are you'll be landing at the airport bearing his name, David Ben-Gurion. David Ben-Gurion was born David Green in the Polish city of Plants. 200 miles from a high-em wise man was currently growing up. He was 11 years old when Ben-Gurion was born. And he's really the man who, for me and for most people, really captures what a Zionist in Palestine was. And I say specifically in Palestine because as we go on, there are going to be Jews all over Europe and in Britain and the United States who were Zionists, committed Zionists, who were actively supporting the movement, doing work for, dedicating themselves to it, but they have a fundamentally different character than the Zionists that are in Palestine. The Zionist project never could have gotten off the ground with these people, without their fundraising and lobbying in Britain and the United States. For sure, they were very important to the movement, but that was fundamentally different work than facing the daily realities of building the Jewish homeland in Palestine. For that, you needed a different kind of Zionist. Ben-Gurion fit the bill for it as if he'd been designed in a lab. He's a short guy, maybe about five feet tall and an inch or two taller, but kind of stocky. He's pubnacious. He's got this, he's just an ordinary guy, very sure of himself. He just does not let people get in his way though. And he seems to have unlimited energy. When he arrived in Palestine, he has a full head of hair, but very quickly he went bald and he's more remembered for having a shiny bald head with just two ridiculous white tuffs of hair exploding out from each side above his ears. You just imagine a short, stocky guy scowling as much as you can possibly screw up your face with a shiny bald head and two giant tuffs of white hair exploding above your ears. That's Ben-Gurion. Now, Ben-Gurion's social Zionism drew on the same kind of vulcish, romantic ideas that were popular in Central Europe in the early part of the 20th century. He was a secular guy, but his ideas about the relationship of people to a given spot of land were almost mystical. He was obsessed with making the negative desert bloom. It was just his big idea and never really succeeded at it, but he believed that working the land was an act of fundamental value that was necessary for the drifting Jewish people to once again become rooted in their home. So while Theodore Herzel was interested in creating a sort of bourgeois industrial state, and while Haat-Ham would have said that the diaspora should turn their hearts towards Jerusalem to pray, Ben-Gurion would have said that if they want to be a Zionist, they should move to Jerusalem, pick up a shovel and get to work. Now, but while David Ben-Gurion was not driven by the spiritual motives of Haat-Ham, you know, I don't want to be mistaken. He didn't settle for the reactionary political Zionism of theater herdsil necessarily either. In fact, anti-Semitism didn't really play much of a role in being Gurean Zionism. In his memoirs, he would later write, quote, "For many of us, anti-Semitic feeling had little to do with our dedication to Zionism. I personally never suffered from anti-Semitic persecution. Plants was remarkably free of it. Nevertheless, and I think this is very significant, it was Plants that sent the highest proportion of Jews to Israel from any town and Poland of comparable size. We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape, but for the positive purpose of rebuilding a homeland. Life in Plants was peaceful enough. There were three main communities-- Russians, Jews, and Poles. The number of Jews in Poles in the city were roughly equal, about 5,000 each. The Jews, however, formed a compact, centralized group, occupying the innermost district, while the Poles were more scattered, living in outlying areas, and shading off into the peasantry. Consequently, when a gang of Jewish boys met a Polish gang, the latter would almost inevitably represent just a single suburb, and thus be poor in fighting potential than the Jews, who even if their numbers were initially fewer, could quickly call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. Far from being afraid of them, they were rather afraid of us. In general, however, relations were amicable, though distant, end quote. So that's David Bingerian for. He's telling you about his hometown, and he's sizing up the various communities fighting potential. That's what this guy is all about. Before arriving in Palestine in 1906, he'd already been arrested twice for subversive activities during the 1905 Russian Revolution. That was as a 19-year-old. You get the idea when you read about him, that if you decide to pick a fight with this guy, you better pack a lunch. That's something that a lot of people, a lot of Arabs and British, and even other Jews are going to learn, and it's something that a lot of them are going to learn the hard way. Now, Bingerian's politics and economics, while he was a leftist, it always took a back seat to his Jewish nationalism. A strict socialist preached class unity, but Bingerian was, let's say, a nationalist first and a socialist second. But in 1921, the Jewish left in Palestine was heterogeneous. There were still all types of leftists. There were hardcore elements aligned with the Russian revolutionaries who sought to create a Soviet Palestine. And these often classed with other Jewish groups as much as they clashed with the British or the Arabs. Back in the first episode, I mentioned that Trotsky had attended some of the early Zionist meetings, but that he eventually rejected Zionism, because he rejected nationalism period. The Bolshevists, especially back in 1921, they rejected all national identity. They thought that that was just a way to keep the workers of the world divided and at each other's throats. It was something that the elites used to divide people up and make them think that they have enemies and other workers in other countries. But the Bolshevists rejected all that. There were Jewish communities in Palestine who had the same idea. They would often pass out flyers in Arabic, telling poor Arabs not to be fooled by the false divisions of Arab, Jew, Christian, Muslim, and all that. Arab workers and Jewish workers should be united in opposition to their oppressors, whether they be Jewish, Arab, or British. No. This is the kind of anti-nationalism that brought the communists into conflict with every nationalist movement in Europe. And it did the same thing here in Palestine. Despite often supporting more or less the same leftist economic policies, the Zionists saw the communists as a significant threat to their project. OK, they were trying to build a national Jewish identity. And here were a group of Jews saying that all national identity should be thrown out. Ben Gurion's labor Zionists had begun to militarize after the Nebimousa riots, but it wasn't only the Arabs they were preparing to fight. Clashes began to occur between the communists and Ben Gurion's socialist, but nationalist labor Zionists. It all came to a head about a year after the Nebimousa riots. On May 1st, 1921, the communists had been distributing flyers in Yiddish and Arabic, announcing their plans to establish a Soviet Palestine. They also announced their intention to hold a march from the city of Jaffa to Tel Aviv to commemorate May Day. A group of labor Zionists led by Dave and Ben Gurion organized a counter-march to confront the communists in the streets. Now, Ben Gurion's group was well organized. And when they saw the communists the next morning, they attacked. The huge fight ensues, and the British police rush in, but they're very quickly overwhelmed. They're just aren't enough of them. Muslim and Christian Arabs from the nearby neighborhoods take up sticks and go to help the police against a group of communists who have been pushed to a sand dune. That fight goes into a huge riot, and just as it had during the Nebimousa Festival, the cry goes out that the Jews have come to attack the Arabs. Within a few hours, violence in the city becomes general and soon spreads to nearby towns and villages. Arabs took to the streets and attacked Jewish shops and homes, thinking that they were under attack. Many innocent Jews were targeted, but the fact that there were actually organized Jewish militia units running the streets and retaliating against the Arabs seemed to reinforce this idea that there was a planned attack by the Jews. As always, in times of chaos, the worst of the worst seemed to find room to operate. Jews who weren't even involved in the protest marches were set upon and killed by Arab gangs. There's a story of a 14-year-old Jewish girl being chased down and beaten to death with iron rods. Several women were raped and mutilated. Herbert Samuel called in reinforcements to attack the Arabs. They used British gunboats and bombers and armored vehicles against the mobs. And British soldiers used machine guns and aircraft to fire into Arab crowds. And this opened the way for Jewish militias to organize their own retaliations. Now these Zionist militias attacked Arab civilians and the reports of each side's attacks on the other can hardly be told apart. Quote, "Jews were shot and stabbed in the narrow lanes. Atrocities were committed by both sides. And some Arab women lying wounded in the fields were seen to have their breasts sliced off by Jewish colonists." There are vicious people in the world. They exist everywhere, but they tend to just collect like sewer water in conflict regions like this. The problem is that when people feel threatened, they lose interest in discerning the intentions of individuals on the other side. How nuanced are you really going to get? Think about it. If a riot occurs in people from the other side, beat a 14-year-old Jewish girl to death with rods. Or if you're an Arab who hears about Jewish colonists slicing off the breasts of Arab women, how likely are you to care that it was only a few psychos on the other side doing it? You're just going to want them all to get out of here. These problems didn't exist before they came. You know, again, the worst of the worst have a way of dragging conflicts down to their level. You see it in just about every single asymmetric and irregular war. The most ruthless and brutal elements do something that enrages the other side. And then the most brutal elements from the other side returns within atrocity of their own. And that escalates the conflict even more. And with every new outrage by the other side, the most aggressive, the most militant elements on your side gain more and more followers and seem to make more and more sense. The riots went on for a week. When it was over 47 Jews had been killed, and 48 Arabs were dead. Hundreds were wounded. The Jaffa riots sent another shockwave through the British administration and the Zionist movement. Only this time, some of that shockwave started to be felt in the upper reaches of the British government. Since the Nebimousa reported being suppressed, most of the British government continued to believe that things were going well in Palestine. When the Jaffa riots broke out, they seemed to come out of the blue for most British officials. They were shocked to hear that in the wake of the disturbance, British police found hundreds of rifles, tons of explosives, infuses, and hundreds of bombs, which had been smuggled into the country by the Zionists. They didn't know what to make of that. The government sent an investigative committee to go look into the incident. And the report at Generated just shocked the British officials who received it. Just like the suppressed Nebimousa report, the report on the Jaffa riot states that the immediate cause of the violence was the attack on Jews by groups of Arabs, but also just like the Nebimousa report. The committee stated that the more general causes had to do with the Arabs, very real fear that they were being pushed out of their country by the British at the behest of the Zionists. Now, most British officials just did not know what to make of this. You have to remember, this is a backwater at the time. It's not the center of geopolitics the way it is today. Had the British repeatedly said that they had no intention of displacing the Arabs? Had the Zionists said all along that they only wish to make a home alongside the Arabs in Palestine? Why were the Arabs being so paranoid? Well, the committee said if the Arabs thought Zionism meant losing their homes, it's because that's the message they were getting from the Zionists themselves. Whatever the British government thought, the Zionists seemed to believe that the British had agreed to help them take Palestine from the Arabs and establish a Jewish state. Now, the high commission of Herbert Samuel, if he had any lingering doubts, became firm in his belief that it was madness to hope that the Arabs were ever going to agree to be ruled by European Jews in a Jewish state. Until now, he had kind of hoped just like high and wise men had kind of hoped. And he would continue to hope it after this. He's not in Palestine. He doesn't have to deal with the reality of the way Samuel and some others do. He hoped that the Arabs' nationalism wasn't really that deeply felt. And that maybe they would eventually give it up when they saw that the British and the Jews would be bringing a lot of money and wealth into the country. But after Jaffa, he realized that this was never going to happen. The Arabs' desire for independence was just as strong as Zionists. So now he imposed limitations on Jewish immigrants. announcing that the number of immigrants would be limited, determined by the ability of the country to socially and economically absorb them. He began to push measures for a by-national state, one which would include and be jointly governed by both Jews and Arabs. He thought this was the only practical way forward. Samuel was speaking directly with other high-ranking British officials, and he knew that the inflexible insistence on an all-Jewish state was becoming a danger to the Zionist project as a whole. And his officers around Palestine were telling him that the Arabs were beginning to wake up. They were beginning to realize that they were facing an existential threat. And so partly to alleviate the fears of the Arabs, but also partly to reassure the rest of the British government that no mixed messages were being sent, Samuel went out of his way to make the British position very clear. About a month after the Jaffa riots on the occasion of the King's birthday, Samuel gave a speech in which he stated plainly that, "The British government has never consented and will never consent to a Jewish government being set to rule over the Muslim Christian majority." He continued in that same speech, saying that the Balfour Declaration only meant, "that the Jews should be enabled to find here their home within the limits fixed by their number and the interests of the present population." Now this shocked the Zionists. Samuel had dedicated his life to Zionism for many, many years. He had done as much as anyone to move the Zionists cause forward, but they abandoned him after this. Outside of a hot hams, tiny and shrinking circle of idealistic cultural Zionists, no one shared Samuel's concern for the welfare of the Arab population. What was he talking about? They weren't interested in sharing the land, and they weren't interested in sharing the government. They thought Samuel had lost his mind. Didn't he know that the world was filled with vicious anti-Semites, with hate lurking in the hearts of even those who professed to be tolerant? Didn't he know that the only way that the Jews would ever be safe was when they had a state of their own, with their own government and their own army, including the Arabs would defeat the entire point? I think it's important, probably, at this point, to remember that while Herbert Samuel was an assimilated upper-class British Jew, with a comfortable life in Britain, who hadn't really had to deal with the kind of anti-Semitism that some others had, most of the Jews in Palestine were from Russia and Eastern Europe, where things had been much, much more difficult. And there's a cultural divide here. Samuel's probably never had to deal with what some of these Russian and Eastern European Jews have. They had a more immediate sense of the threat, and they lacked Samuel's commitment to humanitarian and liberal principles. Arthur Ruppen, one of the founders of Tel Aviv, a day after the speech, he wrote, "Herburt Samuel, who was a sort of god to the Jews in Palestine only yesterday, has now become a traitor to the Jewish cause in their eyes." He was called a "Judus" by one member of the Zionist Commission. I mean, can you imagine he's devoted his life to this cause? Almost universally, the Zionists in Palestine and Abroad as well were uncompromising. They were completely dismissive of Samuel's attempts to address the Arabs' concerns at all. They thought he had lost his mind. The Jewish elected assembly in Palestine issued a declaration saying that, "The true contents of the promise of the British government do not allow for the incidental interests of the present population of the country to affect the life and historic aspirations of the Jewish people." And, "You know, I told you we were going to get to watch this ambivalence. These two forces play out in one man, and this is really where it happens." Samuel's steadfast determination to hold on to his liberal principles is not just with outrage, but with incredulity by the Zionists. They just have no idea what he's trying to do. They don't understand. You know, I should say, by the way, that when I use the word "liberal" here, it's not in a modern American connotation, associating it vaguely with the Democratic Party and whatever passes for leftist politics in the United States. Everywhere else in the world, liberal has a more general meaning. When people speak of Herbert Samuel's liberalism, they're talking about his commitment to principles like equal treatment under the law, individual liberty, participation in government, things like that. Now, most Zionists were just dumbfounded that Samuel would extend these principles, which were fine in London or Paris or New York, that he would extend these principles to the Arabs. You know, the way they saw it betraying his own people in the name of a principle that the Arabs were manifestly incapable of even understanding made him a sentimental, full at best, and a traitor at worst. The writer John B. Judas in his book, Genesis, about Harry Truman and the development of Zionism in the United States, he describes the dynamic of this period. He says, "British Zionists took a condescending view of Samuel's efforts. Harry Sature summed up the prevailing opinion." And this is Harry Sature. One may guess that Samuel's somewhat old-fashioned liberalism is peculiarly sensitive to the appeal of a majority. There has probably always been within him something of a conflict between the Jew, desirous to help in the creation of his national home, and the liberal haunted by the phrase self-determination. Now back to Judas, Sature was, in effect, writing off Samuel's attempt to adhere to the principles of democracy as old-fashioned. As Zionist publication in Britain, the Jewish Chronicle put Samuel's efforts in an even stutter context, and now quoting from the Jewish Chronicle, "Imagine the wild animals in his zoological gardens, springing out of their cages and killing a number of spectators. And the commission appointed to inquire into the causes of the disaster reporting first and foremost that the animals were discontented with and hostile to the visitors who would come to see them. As if it were not the first business of the keepers to know the habits and dispositions of the animals, and to be sure that their cages were secure." End quote. "For the second time in a year, Jews were dead at the hands of Arab rioters. That much was true. And for the second time in a year, a British investigation had found that the Jews had provoked the incident with their belligerence and hostility toward the Arabs. 47 Jews were dead, and the British responded by saying that the Zionists needed to dial back their rhetoric and moderate their expectations. With Samuel seeking reconciliation and compromise with the Arabs, Zionist leadership decided the British could no longer be relied upon to fight their battles for them. They would still use the British for whatever they could get out of them, but they couldn't depend on them. Slowly and quietly, but surely, the Zionists began to prepare for war. After Jaffa, denial became a luxury that fewer and fewer of them could entertain, and those who had preached war all along began to take control of the movement. While High and Wisemen would keep some of the goals of the cultural Zionist relevant, a hard-hum and his followers were pushed to the margins in the 1920s. While Samuel worked pointlessly for compromise as the Zionists would never agree to, and Wisemen continued to tell the British government that relations were improving, behind the scenes Bengurian ridiculed those who thought that there was any room at all for compromise between the Jews and the Arabs. He told one Jewish committee, "Everybody sees a difficulty in the question of relations between the Jews and Arabs, but not everybody sees that there is no solution to this question. No solution. There is a gulf and nothing can bridge it. I do not know what Arab will agree that Palestine should belong to the Jews. We as a nation want this country to be ours. The Arabs as a nation want this country to be theirs." There were others who were even more frank than that, Moshe Shertok, who would be Bengurian's kind of right-hand man over the next several years, and who would eventually be Israel's first foreign minister. He hadn't even sharp-redged Bengurian. A bit earlier than this, he had written, "We have forgotten that we have not come to an empty land to inherit it, but we have come to conquer a country from a people inhabiting it, that governs it by virtue of its language and savage culture." Recently, there have been appearing in our newspapers, the clarification about "the mutual misunderstanding between us and the Arabs" and "common interests" and "the possibility of unity and peace between the two fraternal peoples." But we must not allow ourselves to be diluted by such elusive hopes, for if we cease to look upon our land, the land of Israel as ours alone, and we allow a partner into our state, all content in meaning will be lost to our enterprise." Now, when one of the most important Palestinian Zionist leaders is writing that, it becomes pretty clear that the Arabs probably aren't being paranoid enough. In the last seven years, the Arabs of Palestine have just been just smashed over and over and over, they've been smashed, years of oppression, war, plague, and starvation. And if a third of their population dead after the war and the rest traumatized beyond measure, they think they've outlasted the disaster and they're ready to move forward only to have the French and the British come in and tear apart their hopes for independence. And now for three years since the First World War ended, they've watched the Zionists flood into their country, loudly announcing their intention to take it over. You know, there are people who will say almost as a dogma, almost no matter what, that violence is never justified, that whoever throws the first punch in any fight is always in the wrong. Well, it's hard for me to go through the history of the conflict between the Jews and the Arabs and pretend that things are that simple. You know, if you're a father or a mother and your children are immortal danger, what would you do to get them to safety? Would you hurt someone? someone else to protect the ones you love? I hope that you never have to make that decision, but that's exactly the decision the Zionists were facing. If you were a Jewish person living in Europe or Russia, this danger was palpable. It was real. Dead children and raped wives and mothers were not just bad dreams. They were something real that you had to think about every time you locked your doors and went to sleep at night. How far would you go to keep your children from being murdered or your wife from being raped? The great tragedy of human life is that we sacrifice the people we could be to the people that we have to be. What if keeping your child alive means becoming a child murderer yourself? We can say that that's a false choice, but what history has shown us again and again is that more often than not, this is what our choices are reduced to. You're a soul for your child's life. Or what about on the other hand? Is there ever a point when violence, brutal, irrational, terrifying violence becomes the only reasonable course of action? You know, imagine you're in your home and you hear a knock at the door and you open the door and it's a homeless man and he explains that he's hungry and cold and has nowhere to go. He says that he once lived in this house long, long ago when he was young and he knows that this is a strange request, but is it possible that you might have a corner where he can sleep and keep warm? And so you feel bad and you agree and you let this man into your house and you let him make a bed. But now imagine you come home to find that he's invited several of his friends to live with him in your house. Now you're a little concerned because you have kids in the house, but when you try to talk to him about it, he just ignores you. In each day, you come home and you find that he's invited more and more and more people. Imagine that his friends are treating you with contempt and beginning to talk about throwing you and your children out of the house altogether. When you confront the original man and ask him, what do you think he's doing? He tells you simply what I told you, I used to live in this house. It's my house. I told you that. And now you're finding that his friends are changing the locks on doors and knocking down walls to remodel the place. You come home and find your children put out on the lawn because they've been moved out of their bedrooms. And so you call the police, but the police seem to have some kind of relationship with these people so they do nothing. They tell you to relax. You have nothing to worry about. Before long, you come home to find that you've been moved out of your bedroom into a closet. So you call the authorities. You call the FBI, the CIA, the US Army. And they all tell you that there's nothing to be done since you know, he did used to live here a long time ago. At what point do you put a body on this guy and throw him out of your house? Is it always wrong to be the first one to get physical? Is that it? Is that all there is to it? Or is there ever a point when the only option you have is to hurt somebody? And these are all insane questions, ridiculous, insane questions. They're questions that if you live in some place like Los Angeles and the United States, like I do, you can't ever imagine having to contemplate. But these are the questions everyone in Palestine is about to have to contemplate for the next several decades. Everything up to this point has been nothing but a prelude, just the early rumblings of something over the horizon that that well, when it comes is going to give us one of those rare glimpses behind the curtain of the world. And it's going to show us that insanity and murder and brutality and nihilism are not always mistakes. They're not always aberrations. Palestine's about to show us that in the absence of better choices, these four things can serve as the foundation of the world. Only it's a world where every value is turned upside down. Where rape is called love, where every murderer is a hero, and every mangled corpse is lifted up as a murderer. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]