#4 - Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem, pt. 3

Hey everyone, this is Darryl Cooper and you're listening to The Martyr Made Podcast. You're about to hear episode 4 of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem. A six-part in-depth series on the early history of Zionism in 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 available to subscribers only for just $5 a month or $50 a year. It's how I'm able to do this, so to all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you contributing and helping me out. You can find the sub-stack at martyrmade.substac.com. I hope you guys enjoy this one. 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 somewhere. It is a place. I'm going to go. Late one Friday afternoon in 1924, the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Jacob Israel Dehan, was walking back from his synagogue to his home in Jerusalem. It was about golden hour. The afternoon was already beginning to turn over into the evening. The Jewish parts of the old city were already beginning to shut down for the Sabbath the next day. The streets had already begun to empty out. When Dehan stopped in front of this nearby hospital, it just lost in thought. A lot of it happened since he arrived in Palestine and he had a lot to think about. Ever since he did arrive in early 1919, at that moment, that high-envi�tsman is in Paris discussing the Zionist plan with a mere phisel, the Arab leader. Ever since that moment, Dehan had attracted attention. He had come from Amsterdam. He was one of the few very, very few non-Russian/Eastern European Zionists in Palestine. Up to this moment, virtually all of them come from the former Russian Empire and he is one of the few that don't. So Dehan is a poet and a writer of some notoriety. If you were in European literary circles, certainly Jewish literary circles, you knew his name, at least. He came in with that first wave of enthusiastic post-war Zionists. Coming in after the First World War, after the Balfour Declaration was issued and just ready to get to work and he shared their excitement. He could say he embodied that excitement, that enthusiasm. He told the high-envi�tsman in a letter that he was "anxious to work at rebuilding land, people in language." He capitalized those three words, "land, people in language." So Dehan had always been one of those guys who was possessed of that occasional mix of wandering mind and limitless energy that when they combined seemed to just churn out interesting people. And Dehan's trip to Palestine wasn't his first adventure. Dehan was a homosexual and an age when that could still get you put in jail in a lot of countries. And he wasn't shy about it. He wrote about it. He moved away from his family's Jewish faith and identity in his early years and then he fell in with some Bohemian writers and made his living teaching, you know, primary school and writing fiction and poetry that at the time was just beyond scandalous. It's pretty steamy even by today's standards. You can imagine how it was taken back then. If you're in literary circles, he was a pioneer. You know, he was pushing boundaries and stuff, but you can imagine how a lot of people felt about him. In 1912, he made a trip to Russia. This is the Russian Empire where he went in his first hand, something he'd only ever heard about before. The miserable state of the Jews and the pale of settlement in Ukraine, the rest of the Russian Empire. He'd heard about their mistreatment. He'd never seen it. And so he returned with a renewed sense of his Jewish identity, which he had abandoned it for a while, but he came back and he couldn't deny it anymore. He got to work and wrote this scathing book about the conditions in Russia's prisons and he formed a committee whose purpose was to pressure Russia's allies to get Russia to improve the situation. This is something that we have NGOs and everything all the time today. This is not something that was common at all back then. The humanitarian organization, Anastasia International, actually referred to D'Han as one of its precursors because of this. Now by the time D'Han came to Palestine in 1919, he is just on fire with passion for the Zionist project. He's been described as a "fidnatic" during this period and you can read quotes from where he's, you know, repeating party line anti-Arab remarks along with other hardcore Zionists. But that was when he showed up. Once he got there and started to look around, something began to change in him. Very quickly he became alarmed at what he saw as mistreatment of the local Arabs by his fellow Zionists. He started to sound a lot like a "hadham" talking about that. And the tone of his language and the tone of his writing began to change. He fell in with the Orthodox community and began to speak out publicly against the behavior of the Zionists in Palestine. He began to join other Orthodox Jews in denouncing the Zionist plan altogether. They didn't like the idea of establishing a secular political state in the midst of an Arab country. They all looked forward to the reestablishment of the kingdom of Israel, but they believed that that would come in God's time. That was a prophecy. That was something that they would await possibly in the next life. The idea of man sort of jumping the gun and deciding to hammer it out himself to a lot of these Orthodox Jews seemed a little bit like building a golden calf. His 1920 and 1921 brought Arab riots. Dehan wrote sympathetically of the Jews who suffered, but he also blamed the hard-line Zionist for provoking the Arabs. Soon he was going outside normal Zionist channels and power structures altogether, meeting with Arab leaders and trying to negotiate separate agreements on behalf of the religious Jews who only wanted to gather in Palestine to worship and had no political designs. At a time when Zionists were doing everything they could to squash internal differences and present to United Front, Dehan's independence earned him a lot of enemies. Then in 1922, the British Lord Northcliffe, the tabloid tycoon who founded the Daily Mail, he stopped in Palestine for a while on his way to India. He met with individuals and delegations representing several interests. He met with the British administration, the Arabs, the Zionists, the Orthodox community. He was meeting with them and he eventually ended up spending some time in a train car, several other people, and Dehan. A British military officer, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Francis Sterling, he was also there. He described the scene in a memoir about his time in Palestine. He said quote. About this time Lord Northcliffe visited Palestine in the course of the world tour which he had made not long before he died. I was deputed to take him around the Jewish colonies in my district and spent the most interesting day with him. He was a sick man, quarrelish and irritated by official them, but was quite obviously pleased to be taken round by someone whom he already knew. At Roshonla's eye on that we were entertained to a grand kosher luncheon and speeches were delivered in Hebrew. Northcliffe in reply made a speech which left most of us gasping. He told the Jews of Palestine some home truths which no one hitherto had dared voice. He said that they should realize that they could not always be guarded by British bayonets and that their future status in the country depended on how well they cooperated with the Arabs, whose guests after all they were. Judging from the faces of those who understood English, his speech was not very welcome. And Norman Bentwich, Bentwich is the British attorney general in Palestine who had to translate it into Hebrew, had a hard time toning it down to render it less unpalatable to the audience. And so Dehan's in this train call right after Lord Northcliffe gives this speech and he sees an opportunity. Heary has an important member of the British upper class, a newspaper man on top of that who seems to see the importance of treating with the Arabs. So he's not going to miss the opportunity. He speaks up and he begins to tell Lord Northcliffe about what he sees as the daily outrages of the Zionists in Palestine. Not only toward the local Arab population, but maybe closer to Dehan's heart toward the Orthodox religious community and toward the non-European Jews. Lord Northcliffe apparently likes what he hears. He immediately signs him on as a correspondent. And Dehan now begins writing occasional articles back to Europe, usually detailing misbehavior by the Zionists in Palestine. On that hot June afternoon when Jacob Israel Dehan stopped for a moment on his way home from the synagogue, he had been preparing for an upcoming visit back to London, where he had been asked by the British government to come deliver the Orthodox case against the Zionist goal of a Jewish state. As he stood in front of the hospital pondering this path that had brought him from being an ardent hard core committed Zionist just a few years ago to now being called "vokesparator," traitor to his own people by the Zionists in just a few years. It's the same word they used for Herbert Samuel, a man interrupted his day dreaming by asking him for the time. As he reached into his pocket for his watch, the other man reached into his own pocket and pulled out a revolver. He shot Dehan three times and left him to bleed to death in the street. The murder of Rabbi Jacob Israel Dehan is usually considered the first Zionist political assassination. No serious attempt at the time was made to find or capture the killer. The killer was a 21-year-old Zionist militia officer, Avraham Tahomey, was his name. At the time, the Zionists tried to spread rumors that Dehan had been killed by the Arabs because of his homosexuality, but years later in an interview Tahomey said very plainly that he carried out the killing on the orders of Yitzhak Benzvi, a Zionist leader who would become the second president of the state of Israel later. He shrugged off any idea of regret over the incident, even decades later. Dehan stood in the way of Zionism. He was causing problems for the movement, so Dehan had to die. It was as simple as that for him. See, things were changing in the Zionist movement. High-invitesmen was still at the center of the movement worldwide, having almost single-handedly gotten the British to destroy the Ottoman Empire and issue the Balfour Declaration. He carried a lot of weight and he was a revered figure, but he had rivals now. Respectful cooperative rivals working toward the same general goal, but they had different visions of what Zionism should be all about. As respected as Yitzhak Benzvi was, the fact that he was not in Palestine was a huge factor. He was off in the halls of power in Britain, Europe, and America, doing things that maybe nobody else could have done for the Zionist movement at this time, and without which the movement would have been impossible. But still, after the riots against Zionism in 1921, we discussed that in episode two, there was a need for strong Zionist leadership in country, and he wasn't there. The Zionist community traumatized and galvanized by the violence, leaders who were more suited to the hard day-to-day realities in Palestine began to take control of the movement. These leaders, guys like David Ben-Gurion, who we spoke of also in episode two, he was the leader of the Zionist left, and these leaders in Palestine were more in your face, and rough and tumble, rough around the edges than Yitzhak Benzvi was. Their approach was reflected in the approach of the Zionists who followed them. After the British took control of Palestine, after the First World War, many Jews who were newly liberated from an incredibly oppressive situation in the Russian Empire were now streaming into Palestine, full of enthusiasm for the Zionist project, talking about people who had been subjugated for years, and they're coming in now with a lot of energy. Most of these people, though, were walking into a situation that they knew very little about, the vast majority of them. This is one of those details that gets lost in all the others, but it's really a hugely important detail. The vast majority of the Zionists coming in were young men with no families. That's probably the most volatile and dangerous species on the planet, a young, unmarried military age male, basically. They were revolutionaries who chose Jewish nationalism over communism and other movements, but they were revolutionaries. Drawn from the same pool of candidates who were feeding those other movements, who were holding guns in the Civil War in Russia and destabilizing countries all over Europe. They were cut from the same cloth. Now, if you're a guy who is even weighing your options and you're thinking, "Maybe I'll go follow this Trotsky guy and roll with the Bolsheviks," or "Maybe I'll go try this Zionism thing." If you're even having that conversation, chances are you are not a pacifist, and these people were not afraid of a fight. I can just hear everybody's cortisol levels going crazy right now. Oh my God. Did he just repeat the Jewish Bolshevik conspiracy blood libel? Everybody settle down. All right. Just settle down. Leaving that entire discussion aside, that's not what I said. So take a breath. Okay. Call off the anti-deformation league. It's not what I said. For anybody who doesn't know what I'm talking about, there's this line of thinking that associates the communist revolutions in Russia and other places with the Jews. It'll become very relevant to this story later, and so we'll deal with it later. For now, the point is, that's not what I said. Most Jews weren't involved with any of these movements. Zionism included. They were just families going about their lives. But of the ones who were getting involved in these movements, movements to overthrow ancient monarchies to move to another continent and build a country from scratch amidst unwelcoming locals, these people shared certain characteristics. Their first instinct was not to back down from a confrontation, and they didn't faint at the sight of blood. Okay. These were revolutionaries coming in. Tens of thousands of them. Now, these Zionists, again, almost exclusively young single men from the former Russian Empire at this point, begin streaming in a Palestine with no idea what's waiting for them. You know, if you remember, they can't go to Google Street View and take a look around. They can't go to TripAdvisor to get vacation reviews online back in the 1920s. These are mostly working class people from an underdeveloped part of the world, and most of what they know, they know by word of mouth. And we all know how that works, right? We played the telephone game when we were in elementary school. And it starts off, you know, with the message, I left my keys on the kitchen counter. And by the time the message is passed through 12 people, it's morphed into some diatribe about how the new world order Jewish communists have manipulated the Islamic world into doing 9/11 except that 9/11 is a hoax, which also is apparently part of the plan. You know what I mean? Like the message just gets completely twisted by the time it gets the other side. I mean, as for that message, go look at any YouTube comment thread. Okay, and you'll see what I'm talking about. You'll see how this whole process plays out actually. It's almost like there's some natural structure in our language where all conversations, if you stay in them long enough, are drawing like gravity down to the same place. It's like the Jewish Zionist, New World Order 9/11 hoax conspiracy is like this black hole sucking in any discussion that doesn't take care to just steer completely clear of it. You will get sucked. Like I don't even, it's like a ditch or a drain where all the dirty water eventually collects. And if any conversation goes on too long, it's just circling that drain getting closer and closer. Okay, what am I even talking about? Okay, so, you know, I mean the sad thing is I'm half serious about this. Go look at any YouTube video. Some take longer than others depending on what the video gives a starting point, but it's like a law of nature. You know, it starts out, oh, this Taylor Swift video is amazing. And then it's all good for a while. Yeah, it's great. We love this video. And then someone comes along and says, oh, I sure wish they made music like this more often. And that seems pretty safe to say, right? But when you're a grizzled, jaded veteran of internet horror, like I am after all the research I've been doing for this project, you just shudder as soon as you see that comment. You know, doing this podcast, I've been punching lines like Zionist Rothschild conspiracy into Google for months. And so I've seen it all. Okay, I've seen all of it. I've been working at this for so long and it's brought me across so much of this kind of thing that I'm like one of those bear grills or crocodile dundee guys who can sense the pressure and the air until it's going to rain next month or whisper in a kangaroo's ear and make it pregnant or something. Like it's really ruined humanity for me to be honest with you. Everyone's happily discussing their Taylor Swift song and I'm already reaching for my rifle and checking my canned food supply because I know what's coming. I know what's coming. See, I know that as soon as somebody says they should totally put out more music like this. That's it. it's all over at that point. 'Cause next, it's, why don't they put out more music like this? And then, well, the record industry, what it used to be, and then, well, we all know who runs the music industry, and then you're off to the races. By the time you get there to watch your Taylor Swift video and scroll down in comments on how much you love it, it's just 50 pages of hate comments about how the Jews are behind the fake moon landing and stuff. It's weird. Okay, this is ridiculous. Okay, I imagine I won't leave any of this in. This is me breaking the fourth wall and telling you that, but I guess we'll see. I made it three episodes before running this podcast off the rails, so we'll see how it goes. Anyway, back to the story. Here we go. So, oh, the telephone game. So the Zionists are coming in, mostly with very limited word of mouth information. Much of it propaganda being actively promulgated by the Zionists to make people think it's a little bit easier and better down there than it is. As far as many of these people knew, they were heading into a country with no more than a few scattered natives. And if the natives got restless, the British Empire was right there ready to bring the hammer down, turn the place into a Jewish state. So when they came in, these young military aged single males, these revolutionaries, when they came in, they didn't come in quiet. I mean, they're Europeans. You know, you always have to remember that throughout this entire story. We're talking about Europeans. They're Europeans in a non-European country in the early 1920s. What do you think is gonna happen? I mean, is there a single solitary story for hundreds of years before this time that starts off with Europeans landing in some other part of the world and just came in acting all cool and respecting the locals and everything works out great? Is there one story like that? I'd love to hear it. I'm not one of these people who gets all preachy about colonialism. Any more than I would get preachy about Genghis Khan or Zerxes, who's a different world, I get it. But at the same time, the things people do get annoying and preachy about, they did happen for the most part. I don't get preachy because I accept that it was a different time, but it was an actual thing that happened. And so when the Zionists showed up after the war, they came and kickin' down the door and wavin' their flags. Well, a whole lot had happened in the last few years since the war ended and the Zionists had kind of been slapped back to reality. The assassination of D'Han was a part of a new strategy or really it was a return to the old strategy, the original strategy, which we talked about in episode one. The assassination had been carried out by the Haganah, the military wing of the leftist labor Zionist movement. The Haganah had been founded in the summer of 1920 after the British were, depending on who you ask, either unprepared, unable or you ask the Zionist unwilling to adequately defend Jewish colonists during the Nebimus riots. After the Jaffa riots a year later, which began after a fight between two leftist Zionist groups and left 47 Jews and 48 Arabs dead, the Haganah's role was expanded as David Ben Gurion asserted control over the disparate groups making up the Zionist left wing. Before Jaffa, the Haganah had been tasked solely with defending Jewish settlements from possible Arab attacks. After Jaffa was still used for that, but it was used more and more to enforce conformity within the Jewish community, often to intimidate and bully other Jews and even other other Zionists who wouldn't tow the party line. David Ben Gurion needed to enforce discipline among the Zionists because in the early years of the 1920s, the movement was not looking good. The British were beginning to realize that this whole balfour declaration thing, it was going to be a lot more troubled than they thought. Maybe this thing that they had so cavalierly committed to during the war, during the frenzy, desperate years of the war, maybe it was going to be more trouble than it was worth. And there had always been some people saying this, there had been a small but hardcore, highly motivated group of military and political officials who had never liked any of this. You know, the British Empire was not a kingdom of saints by any means, but in the early 20th century, they still took things like honor pretty seriously, especially in the upper class. Here's a perfect example during the First World War, an army made up mostly of soldiers from the British Ros was making its way up the Euphrates River, fighting Ottoman forces and it got itself surrounded by an Ottoman army. And they're locked in under siege and they can't get out and their time is running short. So the British leadership looks at all the options and they decide there's nothing they can do to break this siege. They don't have any forces in the region that can get there quickly enough. They don't have enough prisoners for an exchange. They don't have anything that they can offer. And so the chief of the British war effort, Lord Horatio Kitchener, he makes an executive decision. He decides to send a group of military officers to go find the Ottoman commander and offer him a bribe. A ransom basically in exchange for letting this British army go. And British military officers were so aghast at this cowardly, dishonorable act that none of the senior officers would do it. They were fused out, right? They didn't want their name on something like this. They didn't want it on their record, even if it was being ordered from all the way on high, they refused the order. T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, he ended up having to be on the negotiating team, very small group that went in and did this despite just being a second lieutenant at the time because everybody else refused to do it. And even then, Lawrence only very obliquely mentions the incident and any of his writings. We kind of have to put it together from everything else that we know that was going on. And that's how ashamed he was of this. And that's how a lot of them felt. The British, especially the British military officers, they took this kind of thing very seriously. So the people who had been in the Middle East who had worked with the Arabs during the war, many of the British officers in Cairo and Delhi guys like T.E. Lawrence, you know, they had never liked this idea of deceiving these people. They didn't like the fact that the Zionists seemed to be intent on achieving their goals through deception. Here's actually another quick story to illustrate how strongly British military officers felt about this kind of thing. Just before the end of the war, October of 1918, T.E. Lawrence was called to Buckingham Palace for a private audience with the king with King George the Fifth. Okay, this is a captain and the British army's very low ranking guy. He's been called for a private audience with the king himself. This is very rare that this happens. Lawrence had been watching all the backroom dealing between the French and the British and the Zionists over the Arab future. And it concerned him. And so he hoped that maybe he had been summoned to come give a presentation to the cabinet and the king on what might make the most sense for the future boundaries of this new independent Arab state. The people had fought for their liberty. They had made a deal with the British they earned it. That's what he thought. But that's not what it was. It turned out that he was going to be knighted for everything that he had accomplished during the war. And this should have been a huge deal for him. It should have been a huge moment because he had dreamed about receiving this honor becoming a knight since he was a boy. But when he arrived to the palace in that October 1918 to a ceremony just for him, which was very rare. Again, most knighting ceremonies during this time were done in large ceremonies with several recipients, big audience. When this is just for him. And when he arrives after everything is set up, everybody's in place. And he was told to go forward to receive the honor. He refused to accept it. And he said that directly to the king. Now he's on the far end of this pro Arab movement in the British government. But the point is that there is a movement. And they were very emotional about the whole thing. Design is could count on the unwavering support of a handful of important British officials like David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill, guys like that. But the violence of 1920 and 1921 created an opportunity for the pro Arab British officials, few as they were to get a word in. Both Weitzman and Ben Gurion realized that in their revolutionary excitement right after the war, their fellow Zionists had begun to lose the plot a little bit. The earliest Zionists back in the late 19th century, they knew that they were going to have to use deception to take Palestine away from the Arabs. In the first episode, we quoted one prominent Zionist pioneer from the late 19th century, that first Ilya, that first wave, writing to a friend, quote, we shall easily take away the country. If only we do it through strategies and without drawing upon us the Arabs hostility before we become the strong and populist ones end quote. Well, I invite men had always taken that idea to heart. That was the guiding principle of his entire strategy, but he wasn't in Palestine to control the Zionists who immigrated after the war. And these were a different kind of people. Weitzman was a sophisticated British Jew at home, you know, cocktail parties entertaining members of parliament. But most of the Zionists showing up to Palestine again, we're really rough around the edges. You're talking about revolutionary young Jews coming from Russia and Eastern Europe, different world. Well, after the battle for declaration was announced, and the Zionist thought that the British Empire had basically given them a blank check to do whatever they pleased. These brash young revolutionaries, Zionists, they just discarded strategy all together and completely ignored high-enviations calls for safe statesmanship. Again, they just came in kicking down the door. Now the British are trying to reassure the Arabs that you know settle down guys you're not under any threat. Everything's cool. We're just here to help you develop your country. Get things started. These nice Jews just looking for a place to live but there were little signs that were beginning to cause a lot of anxiety among the Arabs. For example after the mandate was in place in 1923 the British declared that English and Hebrew as well as Arabic would be the official languages in Palestine. And so all the official signs and so forth were posted in all three languages and a lot of the Arabs are looking at this and wondering exactly what's going on. Talking about some plaques that were being prepared by the postal department that were going to be posted in various towns and villages. A British office, a Serliu tenant Colonel Sterling who we mentioned before actually. He complained quote, "These notices read posts and telegrams and the wording was in English Hebrew and Arabic. The Jewish elders in one colony refused to put up their notices because they bore an Arabic inscription and another they put them up but only after effacing the Arabic wording." So these are the kinds of arguments people are starting to have and they seem petty but in an environment where nationalist fervor is strong on two sides these are not small questions. You know the British are telling the Arabs don't worry we're here to help. The Arabs are saying okay well if that's true then why are we declaring Hebrew and official language in our country when the vast majority of Jews here don't even speak it. And some Zionists are saying that having Hebrew is a national language wasn't good enough. They didn't even want to see Arabic at all in their towns and villages. Zionists are printing up and publishing maps where towns that have been full of Arabs for hundreds of years are renamed in Hebrew or they're given the name of some ancient Judean town. The British start putting together committees and having Zionists and Arabs argue over all this stuff. What town should be called and so forth. Whether they should be named in accordance with Jewish or Arab or Muslim traditions and these cultural issues the British love it. The British are happy to leave the Arab leaders sitting in committees arguing with Jews over what a village or a hill should be called. This is just perfect as far as the British are concerned. This means they're not demonstrating over the British occupation of their country or over the overall Zionist project and that was good. But in the context of everything that had happened, you know, in the last thousand years and very recently, like when you when you think about incidents like that French general in the earlier episode the one who took Syria from Faisal, he made a point to stop by the tomb of a Muslim hero, ancient Muslim ruler Saladin, the one who had had driven the last crusaders from the Middle East. He made a point to stop by his tomb to kick it and announce that the crusaders had come back. They come back to take what was theirs. When you put this kind of thing in that context, these little squabbles are starting to become very important to a lot of people. I mean during the first World War as the British general Allen, he was making his way up through Sinai towards Syria, the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Prime Minister at the time, he was quoted saying that he wanted Jerusalem for Christmas and that could be kind of innocuous, I guess you could say it's a figure of speech. But in his memoirs, he wrote of the capture by British troops, quote, of the most famous city in the world, which had for centuries baffled the efforts of Christendom to regain possession of its sacred shrines and quote, and that's the word he used regained it to Christendom. So he is explicitly placing these events that they were talking about in the footsteps of the crusaders. And maybe these were just for show and you know, morale speeches, just figures of speech, but as a rule, Arabs have a very long memory. Okay, and they did not take this kind of thing lightly. Even back before the First World War, I think this is the first part of the first decade of the 20th century, very, very early, in the predominantly Muslim town of Hibran in the West Bank, a team of American wildcatters had come through surveying the area for oil and as they made their way through, they would leave a little, little mark, quick little mark and white chalk on stones and houses sometimes to kind of mark their path of where they were going through. And they would leave these white chalk marks just a chip in the shape of a little cross. Well, the Muslim population of Hibran started seeing these crop up everywhere and interpreted them in the vein that David Lloyd George is talking about here. They thought that they had been marked for imminent conquest in conversion to Christianity and they nearly rioted over it. The Americans actually had to bail some local sheeks had to come in to calm people down. The political situation is extraordinarily tense. And so these little squabbles over the Muslim Jewish or Christian character of the homeland is something that the Muslim population of Palestine is becoming very sensitive about. And you can say they were paranoid and a lot of people will say that there's this deep paranoia in the Muslim world about this kind of thing. But at least back then it was not groundless at all. You know, maybe the mostly illiterate peasantry didn't know much about politics, but they all knew what the crusades were. And then in addition to the political considerations, you had huge cultural issues happening. The entry into a conservative Arab country where the Muslims out in the countryside are very conservative, but even the relatively more liberal Arab Christians who lived more in the cities were more educated, extremely conservative by any measure of what we would think of today. So you've got the entry into a conservative Arab country of thousands and thousands of kind of belligerent Europeans, European revolutionaries. And this is resulting in a huge clash of cultures. And British officer Sterling writes about this too, he wrote quote, it was fascinating to watch the first beginnings of the colonization schemes of the Jews who got down to work with a courage and determination which were beyond all praise. The first batches of immigrants were mostly from Poland and Galicia, lamentable specimens of the human race. Yet these very same people in the next generation have produced fine examples of young men and women. But the impact on the Arab mind of Russian and Polish customs was disastrous. The Jews who had little or no inhibitions thought nothing of the practice of mixed bathing in the nude. The Arabs with their strict rules of sexual conduct regarded such behavior as this as the very negation of elementary decency. How was it possible they would ask for the British to inflict such people on their country? And quote, and then right after that Sterling actually writes something very interesting, he says quote, I am convinced that but for the Balfour Declaration, the Jews would have obtained all they wanted in the Holy Land with little or no opposition. The Balfour Declaration however, coupled with the attitude of the Jews caused the Arabs to fear an eventual Jewish domination. For while it stated that the British government favored the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, the Jewish interpretation of it, which was openly preached, suggested that we favor the conversion of the whole country into a national home for them. The Arabs not unnaturally took alarm and quote. And so when the Arabs finally lashed out in 1929-21, the Zionists had expected that the British were finally going to stop pretending that they were being neutral, take the gloves off and definitively take their side against the local population. That's what they expected. That is not what happened. The British killed quite a few Arab rioters during those, during those dust ups, but they were neither prepared nor able to just come in and smash up the Arab population of Palestine to hand it over to, you know, at the time this Ragtag group of Eastern European and Russian Jews, they were not prepared to do that. Well, this had come as a huge shock to most Zionists. Even though the British had always been perfectly clear publicly about what the Zionists could expect from them. Behind closed doors, Zionist allies in the British government, guys like David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Arthur Balfour, they had allies in the British government, high ranking allies who were telling them behind the scenes, don't worry about what we say publicly. We're going to get to your Jewish state. Don't worry, don't worry. And that's the message that ended up at the end of that big long telephone game, becoming the baseline expectation Zionist had of the British. So when the British failed or refused, if you take the Zionist narrative, refused or failed to go all out and smash the Arabs during those two riots, many Zionists felt completely betrayed. And so different groups within the Zionist movement after that had different ideas about which direction to go. For a short time, there was a brief resurgence by the more moderate, peaceful wing of the Zionist, the cultural Zionist left under a hot-hom and peace-oriented groups popular in the US like British alone. They were they were looking for reconciliation with the Arabs and finding a way to get in with them and convince them to take the Jews in and build a society together that didn't last very long. It didn't last long because this is the point where David Ben-Gurion really steps up and takes control of the movement. And he had to. You can't overstate the precariousness of the Zionist position in 1921, heading into 1922. They were at a crisis point. After the Jaffa riots, and especially after the French came in and crushed Faisal's little Kingdom of Syria, Jews around the world, you know, these are a lot of socialists, minded people, a lot of people with who like to think of themselves as ethical, humanitarian kind of enlightened people. And they didn't necessarily want to be involved with this colonial French government coming in and smashing up these native peasants. They didn't necessarily want anything to do with that. And so and so Jews around the world, especially in Western Europe and the Anglo-Sphere, many of them started to have second thoughts about this whole Zionism thing. Arab resistance and British suspicion were problems for the Zionists and they needed to address that. But none of that would mean anything if the Zionists didn't address an even deeper problem, which was that after the Jaffa riots in the Franco-Syrian war, Jews stopped coming. Around the world, the Jewish community was already very far from unanimous about Zionism. This was a very controversial thing still within the Jewish community. There were a lot of Jews out there that they thought that they were well on their way to making a life and the countries that they lived in. And they thought the Zionists coming in and saying, Hey, we're not part of those countries. We're we're our own country. They didn't they didn't like that. And so it's already controversial all over the world. You've got Jewish revolutionaries leading bloody socialist and communist revolutions like they are in Russia. And so this is the context in which many Jews in places like France, Britain, and the United States were evaluating Zionism. They saw it as another one of these revolutionary movements and you know, not like they were equating it with the Bolsheviks or anything, but they saw it as another one of these revolutionary movements. So there's some trepidation there. You know, sure, the communists in Russia talked a very idealistic game, but the world was now watching how that was playing out. You got maybe 10, 11 million people dead in the Russian Civil War. And now for all the idealistic talk about building a new Jewish homeland in Palestine already, the Zionists have started a fight already. They've got a European colonial power coming in and smashing up this much weaker native people. And so a lot of Jews around the world are kind of recoiling from it at this point. The Zionists are actually facing a real recruiting problem in the early 1920s. Well, this is when the British made a let's say a counterintuitive move. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here. What they did is they put three dedicated hard core Zionists essentially in charge of the British mandatory government in Palestine. The high commissioner we mentioned before, that was the British Jewish Zionist Herbert Samuel. The other two highest offices in the country were the chief colonial secretary and the attorney general. And the British appointed a Jewish person and a Christian that the officer sterling described as fanatical Zionists into these two posts and fanaticals probably the right description. Sterling describes one of the appointees Sir Windham Deeds like this quote, the chief secretary was a man of a different kidney, a soldier, an ascetic with a strong strain of religious fanatism. Sir Windham Deeds brought great powers of concentration and industry to bear on his difficult administrative task. He was an ardent Zionist and once told me that, okay, you ready for this? And once told me that he hoped that by as much as he could assist in the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, then by so much would he hasten the second coming of the Lord and quote, okay, now only in this story do you get this kind of stuff, you know, the chief colonial secretary of Malaya does not fervently believe that he's doing God's work and trying to bring about the end of the world only in this story and in this place do you get this kind of thing. And what's crazy is that this is still a huge factor in the geopolitics of the Middle East today. Back in 2010, I think it was, there was a Pew research poll that had 48% of Christians in the United States and 83% of the country self identifies as Christians. So we're talking about maybe 41% of the entire population responding that Jesus Christ would either definitely or probably have returned to earth, bringing about the end of the world by the year 2050. Now, I'll allow for some fudging of those numbers and maybe move them a little bit either way, but anyway you slice it. We've got tens of millions of American voters. And more people around the world, although this kind of thing these days is kind of centered in America, tens of millions of American voters who believe that the return of the Jews to Palestine is the first step to kickstarting the book of Revelation. The second step in that process is that the Jews make everybody hate them on the way in kicking off a world war almost everybody dies horribly and then Jesus comes back in the world ends. I mean, I try to think back to how those meetings must have gone in the 1920s when you're an Arab official who has to meet with somebody like Sir Windham needs to press your people's claims. How does the meeting go when you're an Arab asking that your national rights be respected and the guy you're talking to literally believes. And I mean literally literally believes that it's his religious duty to help the Zionist take your home away from you. And to give an idea of, you know, how callous toward your feelings he might be, remember also that this guy also believes that in the process of going back to their homeland, the Jews are supposed to piss people off so badly that half the world attacks them. Now even if you're a person who does believe this literalist account of biblical prophecy and there are a ton of you out there. So I'm sure there's a few people listening. Even if you're a person who believes that who believes that you've got a religious obligation to give your unconditional support to the Zionist, I will bless those who bless my people of Israel. I mean, if you believe that unconditionally you still have to admit that that puts the Muslim population in the region in a pretty tough spot. Lieutenant Colonel Sterling also wrote about the Attorney General whom we mentioned a little bit earlier near the beginning. Quote, Norman Bentwich, the Attorney General, was a clever lawyer and the most open exponent of Zionist faith. In this man's hands lay the making of the laws and the adjudication of concessions. His faith being what it was, how could he possibly be considered impartial by any Arab and Palestine? And quote, and when you put it like that, he's writing with a little hindsight, it does seem like a terrible idea, right? I mean, if you're trying to pacify the Arabs and convince them the rights aren't any danger, then putting three Zionists in charge of the British administration in Palestine seems like the opposite of what you should do, right? And it turned out that it was a terrible idea. But as far as I can tell, I'll take up for the British a little bit. It seems like it was more a case of the British just getting a little bit too cute, a little bit too clever for their own good. Rather than a cynical ploy to just put Zionist in power in Palestine, you've got guys like Charles Ashby, a British architect and development coordinator cross the Jordan River and trans Jordan at this time. He spent 15 years in Palestine and trans Jordan. And he wrote about how at the time they all thought this was a brilliant idea. And it seems like he's being sincere. And that doesn't make any sense, but you got to understand that at the time they had a problem that they thought this might solve. See the Eastern European and Russian Zionists that were in Palestine. And that's virtually all the Zionists in Palestine at this point, or from Eastern Europe and Russia. These people were out of control in the years right after the war. And they were freaking people out. And both the British and the more careful Zionist leaders like High Invitesment, they wanted to find a way to get these people under control. The leading Zionist group in Palestine was a Zionist organization. And it was run by guys like Menaka Musishkin. You remember him? The guy we talked about in an earlier episode, dressing down the British military governor in Jerusalem. And then harassing the Arab mayor of Jerusalem, telling them that the Jews are ready for war. And the Arabs better be careful. You remember that guy? So, so they got to get these people under control. And High Invitesment just as interested in doing that as the British are. So, Vitesmen suggest to the British that look, instead of creating a conflict with the Jews by censoring or banning the Zionist organization, which was being considered at the time. Okay, the British were serious. I mean it when I say that this was a crisis moment. You got to remember that after both the Nebimusa and the Jaffa riots, the British accused the Zionists of trying to purposely provoke the Arabs to force the British to fight for them. So, High Invitesment says, look, instead of banning the Zionist organization, why not give the actual colonial government of Palestine over to some British Zionists? The guys in charge, although Zionists will still be British subjects, they'll still be under British control. And since the colonial government's going to be the most powerful and well-resourced institution in the country, then maybe if we put Zionists in charge of it, it'll usurp the position and legitimacy of these Eastern European and Russian Zionist leaders. Maybe it'll usurp the position legitimacy of the Zionist organization as the institution that Zionists look to for leadership. Maybe they'll start looking to the British government for leadership. And now it may have just been a clever way for Vitesment to get the British to do this. He does brag about it to an American audience a little bit after. But in theory, that makes some kind of sense if you want to talk about it like that. Maybe it made some kind of sense, but it just seems like if only the British had taken a moment or listened to somebody who was taking a moment to imagine how all this must have looked from the perspective of the Arabs, they might have set themselves a lot of pain. They might have realized how this was going to turn out. I mean, remember everything that's happened. The Arabs make their deal with the British during the First World War. Agree to put themselves on the line, really put themselves at risk and revolt against the Muslim Ottoman Empire. It was not that bad. In exchange for a guarantee that an independent Arab government would be set up over Arab lands after the war, the British promised it explicitly over and over. We all know what happened with that. It gets tossed out for the Sykes Pico deal with the French and for the Balfour Declaration to the Zionists. When the Arabs try to set up their kingdom anyway, the French crushed them. The Arabs issue petitions to the British and American governments demanding that at the very least, if the British are going to be there fine, but at the very least, the Zionists, this group of people who are openly demonstrating their intent to take control of an Arab country and who are already running military drills around their country, at least keep these people out of the country. And the British promised over and over were still on your side. We got the Arabs' best interest at heart, but when it came time to make decisions, they refused to stem Zionist immigration at all. When the Arabs and Jerusalem and Jaffa finally rioted in 1929-21, they thought maybe they got the attention of the British. Commissions were held, investigations took place, and they all determined that the Arabs had acted out of a legitimate fear of the Zionist real intentions. So the British promised the Arabs had nothing to worry about. And now what happened? Now the British had gotten rid of the military government, which was full of people who knew the Arabs, who'd fought with them, and mostly had their interests in mind, and replaced it with a civilian government whose top positions were all held by Zionists. I mean, how does that look? The Arabs are beginning to think that all the British are doing is putting them off for another few months, another year, just keep kicking the can down the road, trying to distract and confuse them while the Zionist project continues a pace under the surface. The Arabs had so naively and uncritically trusted the British during the war. I mean, they really did. It was childlike in a way. The leader of the Arab people, Sheree Fusain Ben Ali, he once scolded his son, Faisal, for doubting the intentions of the British. He told him that the British Empire was a wise and honorable government, and that they would keep their word to the Arabs and don't. I don't want to hear that talk about the British out of you again. This is something you took place. And now the Arabs were on the other side. They're beginning to doubt everything that comes out of the mouth of the British government or the Zionists. Well maybe it made some kind of sense, but in any case, it, well, you know, it didn't work out. Obviously, we know that, right? The first part went, oh, right, it went as planned. The new high commissioner, Herbert Samuel, he comes in and his mandatory government starts reaching out to the Arabs trying to calm them down. And he did his best also to moderate the aims and expectations of the Zionists. He came in and started trying to tell these Russian and Eastern European Zionists that, you know, maybe we need to settle down a little bit. The British government isn't fully committed to coming in and taking this place over, but unfortunately for the British plan, the Zionists in Palestine did not respond the way they were supposed to. When Samuel's administration came in trying to extend an olive branch to the Arabs, rather than taking a cue from the British administration, the Zionists just turned on Samuel, called him a traitor, called him a Judas. Now, Samuel in his own mind was just trying to take a long view of the situation. He was trying to be pragmatic, trying to get his fellow Zionists to accept the fact that this was not going to be an overnight process. This wasn't going to be the Russian revolution because the fact was that even after the big burst of post-war immigration, Jews were still only about 11% of the population in a country that now knew they were coming and knew what the Zionists were planning and were dead set against it. Samuel wasn't abandoning the principles of Zionism for from it, but he stopped talking about a Jewish state and he tried to get everyone else to stop talking about it as well. He was saying, "We got to stop freaking people out. There aren't enough of us here and there aren't enough people coming. We can't just come barging in like this." Immigration, yes, settlement, development, yes, talk about all that, but his fellow Zionists needed to reset their expectations about establishing political control over Palestine anytime soon. Samuel thought it might take a century to build up a Jewish majority in Palestine at the current rate of population growth that probably makes sense. So for the time being, Samuel thought, "The Jews are just going to have to bite the bullet and share the place with the Arabs." This kind of accommodation was far more than not only the Eastern European and Russian Zionists, but even Vitesman had in mind. He didn't want Samuel to go this far. Instead of Samuel usurping the authority of the Zionist organization by doing this, instead his new openness to the Arabs delegitimized the British mandate government and the eyes of the Zionists altogether. As I mentioned a moment ago, David Ben-Gurion had started to come around to Samuel's understanding that the full frontal strategy was doing nothing but galvanizing Arab resistance and alienating the British. He was with him on that. But unlike Herbert Samuel, Ben-Gurion was absolutely uncompromising on the question of Jewish national sovereignty over the country. Nor did he ever even consider a state in which Jews would share power with the Arabs. It was out of the question. Jewish Zionists like Samuel and Vitesman and the American Zionists as well at this point, they were a more liberal and humanitarian group in general than the Eastern Europeans and Russians who were actually in Palestine, living the Zionist life. You've got these international supporters who were a little bit more enlightened, but the people who were there, the foot soldiers in Palestine, these people are coming from some of the Stettles in Eastern Europe and Poland and some backwards places. Totalitarian countries and they don't share all those principles. As far as David Ben-Gurion, as far as most of the Zionists in Palestine were concerned, they were not sharing this country. This was their country, period. They didn't care that the Arabs made up 88% of the population. That was just a historical mistake and now they were here to rectify it. Zionist approach over the last few years was based on the assumption that the British were going to act as unconditionally loyal henchmen for them. That's what they thought. They thought that their leaders like High and Vitesman had the British in their pocket back in London. Well, that had turned out not to be the case and so the strategy had to change. And under Ben-Gurion's leadership, it started to change and he took the labor Zionist, the whole Zionist left and whereas before they had been a little bit of a bull in a china shop running around Palestine, he took them all and turned them inward. Looking to an approach that Anita Shapiro calls evolutionary Zionism. It summed up by the slogan, "One more acre, one more goat." Just chip, chip, chip, chip. With British support, the Zionists would focus on building a state within a state, beginning to construct institutions, parallel institutions that will operate alongside the British mandatory government. The Jewish agency had been infused with massive new sums of money from American Zionists after the war and so they would put that money to work, buying up and developing new Jewish land. Just don't make a big show of it. Buy up land, build it up, bring in more Jewish immigrants, buy up more land, build it up, just keep doing that. When the Arabs who were being pushed out, make a fuss, let the British crack down on them, use the Haganamalisha to defend yourselves when you have to, and then just get back to work. And if Herbert Samuel wants to negotiate, let him, let him negotiate. We'll even come to the table, stopping short of compromising on anything that might endanger the future Jewish state. Now but this doesn't mean that the Zionists stop putting pressure on the Arabs or stop antagonizing them all together. The Zionists actually use this really interesting and effective kind of two-pronged strategy. All the big stuff, land acquisition, immigration policy, control over the holy places, all this stuff the Zionists would determine to work behind the scenes. Quietly. But at the same time, they made a point to dispute every little inconsequential detail about Palestine's identity in daily life. There are a ton of these accounts of committees and debates that are being put together by the British, for the Arabs and the Zionists to argue over what certain landmarks or towns should be called, stuff like that, and the Zionists would just push the Arabs on everything. There are various times where the Zionists were insisting that 100% Arab towns, towns with a 100% Arab population, be renamed into Hebrew. And that might seem unnecessarily antagonistic, kind of counterintuitive too, but it was kind of brilliant because it kept the Arabs tied up in these endless, stupid arguments over second-order details of their situation. The idea was just to let the British all the Arabs to sleep and don't do anything to wake them up. And then one day, one day when they do finally wake up, we'll be ready. There won't be anything that anyone can do about it. But now not every Zionist was content with this approach. It's a smart strategy, but there are certain things that just aesthetically didn't appeal to people of a certain constitution, to a small but very highly motivated right wing of a Zionist movement. All this seemed just kind of almost cowardly. Like we're going to win our homeland through deceit, through deception. It almost reinforced those old hated stereotypes about the crafty, sneaky Jews. They had to listen to that for centuries in Europe and they hated it. It was the kind of thing that drove the old one-armed warrior Joseph Trumpledor absolutely insane. And it was also the chip on the shoulder of one of Trumpledor's admirers and colleagues, a Ukrainian Zionist named Zev Jebatinsky. Now he was born Vladimir Jebatinsky, but he followed the Zionist custom of adopting a Hebrew name and he chose Zev, which means wolf, and it fits him perfectly. It's probably helpful at this moment, say 1922 into 23, to think of a Zionist movement as a kind of triangle. And at the apex of the triangle, you've still got high invites. He's still the recognized leader of the movement, and he's a revered figure in a lot of ways. He's the international leader steaming around a secure political and financial support for the movement. But below him, just below him, were the two men on the ground in Palestine. David Ben-Gurion representing the Zionist left and leading the numerical majority of the Yashuv. The Yashuv is what they call the Zionist community in Palestine. And then you've got Zev Jebatinsky over on the third point of the triangle, leading the small, but very motivated and very effective Zionist right wing. Ben-Gurion offered a measure of public respect and deference to Weizmann. And the two men worked together in a productive, if a little uneasy relationship. Remember, Ben-Gurion, as we mentioned, he was uncompromising on the Jewish national principle, but he had accepted Samuel and Weizmann's advice to tone down the rhetoric and focus on building the Jewish state from the inside out. He got that that was a smart strategy. But Jebatinsky and his followers did not like that at all. He was Jebatinsky, who, along with Trumpledoor, organized the Jewish Legion to fight alongside the British after the announcement of the Balfour Declaration. He was always a fighter. After his friend and colleague Joseph Trumpledoor was killed, and then the Nebimousa violence broke out. During that riot, Jebatinsky was leading Jewish gangs running the streets and juries sworn to protect unarmed Jews. And also going and executing reprisal attacks against Arab civilians. So it goes both ways. But, you know, I get the critics. The critics don't like the fact that he went and was executing reprisal attacks against innocent Arabs during the riot. But this is a guy who's a soldier. You know, he's a warrior. He was the one defending Jews during the riot. And yes, he led people going too far. After the riot, he was arrested by the British and sentenced to 15 years in prison before being released in a general amnesty by Zionist High Commissioner Herbert Samuel. Upon his release, he gets right back to work preparing for war. Because this is how he sees the Zionist task. The American Zionist publication, the Maccabin, did a profile on Jebatinsky in 1923. And they use language that probably belongs in a romance novel or something. They said, quote, "Jebatinsky is the perfect specimen of the virile, self-contained, combative, and creative type. He is a strong-willed fighter with clear elemental concepts, an endless belief in his own powers, and an unquenchable confidence in the strength of his speech and pen." End quote. That's a little over the top, but he's a pretty remarkable guy. His break with the mainstream Zionist movement came after the British made the decision to split off the territory east of the Jordan River from the Palestine mandate and make that trans-Jordan. After the French had deposed Faisal and Damascus, Faisal's brother Abdullah, he was an ally of the British, and he began making preparations to take a small force to Syria on a suicidal attack against the French army. The British didn't want him to do that. So to dissuade him from throwing his life away, and more importantly from making trouble for the British with the French, the British offered to give him the new kingdom of trans-Jordan. We just called Jordan today, and to install Faisal as king of Iraq. So Faisal's brother Abdullah is going to get trans-Jordan. Faisal is going to be put in charge of Iraq. After some initial unpleasantness that we might get into a little later, these things were accomplished. And by 1923, Britain's Hashemite Arab allies were in control of the kingdom of Hijaz, encompassing the Muslim holy cities on the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and the kingdom of Jordan just to the north and the kingdom of Iraq if you keep going from there. Only a few years later in 1925, a very conservative clan of Hardy Desert dwellers under the leadership of someone named Abdul Aziz, Ibn Saoud, would conquer the Hijaz and unite the Arabian Peninsula into the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. So 1925 is the year that that came into being. Faisal's grandson in Iraq would be murdered along with his family in 1958, ending the Hashemite monarchy in that country. And so today only the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan remains. The current King Abdullah is the great grandson of the first king of trans Jordan. Well today Jordan's been around a long time, right? We're all used to it. It's a part of the international order, a UN member and all that. But when the British first made the decision in the early 1920s, Zionists were furious. See, they considered the whole big area that they called Greater Israel to be theirs by right. The Greater Israel that they envisioned included all of Jordan and a decent chunk of southern Lebanon in Syria. Once the French took over Lebanon in Syria, the Zionists accepted that there was nothing they could do about that. But they didn't expect the British to cheer off the area east of the Jordan and take that away from them. They didn't like it, but Ben Grian invites them and accepted it. They looked at it as something that they couldn't control. It had to happen. They didn't like it, but they accepted it. Given all the variables currently in play, that wasn't the hill that they decided they wanted to die on, at least not right now. And by this point, Jewish immigration was already slowing down. So they saw no point in starting a fight over land that they couldn't even fill up. But the Zionist right wing did not accept it. They couldn't accept it. This was a matter of principle for somebody like Zeb-Jabitinsky. Zeb-Jabitinsky broke from Ben Grian on, and invited the revisionist party, referring to their rejection of any revisions to the territory of Greater Israel. And so just as Ben Grian is trying to put the pieces back together with the British and Alay the fears of the Arabs, Zeb-Jabitinsky begins publicly criticizing the British administration and riling up his nationalist followers. After leaving the mainstream Zionist organization and forming the revisionist party, Zeb-Jabitinsky forms the Baytar paramilitary youth organization. This is a right wing militant organization dedicated to preparing for what he saw as the inevitable war over Palestine. Ben Grian's evolutionary Zionist program of one more acre, one more goat, a Weitzmann's goal of securing British and American diplomatic and financial support, and a hot homestead hope for a spiritual home for Judaism. These were all completely secondary considerations to Zeb-Jabitinsky. Even the Zionist leaders in Palestine who considered who other people considered hard-line, they were being far too optimistic about what lay ahead if you asked Zeb-Jabitinsky. They were fooling themselves into believing that the Arabs could just be bribed off their farms with factory jobs, or that the people would blindly follow their self-interested and selfish tribal leaders forever. Zeb-Jabitinsky did not expect that. None of the grand plans of the Zionist left would mean anything, Zeb-Jabitinsky said, "If the Jews didn't first see the most important responsibility of all," which according to Zeb-Jabitinsky was "learning how to shoot." The Baytar youth movement was named after the last Jewish fort to fall in that final Saddle rebellion against the Roman Empire, and Baytar was also an acronym for the full Hebrew name of Jeb-Jabitinsky's friend and colleague, the Zionist martyr Joseph Trumpledore. Zeb-Jabitinsky wrote a Baytar anthem, and it really captures what he and his movement were really all about. Beyond just their political and territorial goals in Palestine, the Baytar anthem goes like this, quote, "From the pit of decay and dust with blood and sweat shall arise a race proud generous in cruel. Even in poverty a Jew is a prince, whether slave or tramp you have been created the sons of kings, through all obstacles and enemies, whether you go up or down, carry the flame to Kindle. Never mind. For silence is filth, worthless is blood and soul for the sake of the hidden glory to die or conquer the hill." That line never mind, that's another tribute to Joseph Trumpledore. Remember his supposed final words after being shot at Tel-Hai, never mind, it is good to die for your country. Jeb-Jabitinsky's focus was on rallying the self-esteem of these downtrodden Jews. Insofar as he agreed that the Jews had enemies, in Europe and in Russia. He agreed with that and he agreed that creating a home in Palestine was necessary to make the Jews safe. As far as that went, Zaev Djabitinsky was in lockstep with a Zionist left, but he resented their approach. This idea of a persecuted and harried people fleeing oppression and then sneaking into Palestine under the flag of one of their less enthusiastic oppressors, the British Empire. He didn't like it. Zaev Djabitinsky was an admirer of guys like Benito Mussolini, huge inspiration for him and he would seek to affiliate his group with Mussolini's Italian regime actually. The revisionist party in Betar Youth Movement, they drew on the same chip on your shoulder, no one better try and push us around reactionary reach for self-worth that drove all of Europe's fascist parties. Betar spawned chapters all over Europe who began training street fighters and militias in a very similar mold to the fascist black shirts in Italy or the brown shirts in Germany. They had it all. The songs and the slogans, the uniforms, the military drill, the training, right down the line. Betar members even adopted the black shirt uniform specifically an imitation of Mussolini's fighters. So they knew what they were doing. That's what this is. And so as soon as Herbert Samuel back in the early 1920s begins making noises about compromising with the Arabs on some kind of a power sharing agreement, they started talking about maybe a shared legislative assembly or something. Zaev Djabitinsky immediately said no way, no way. Already he was calling for a Jewish military solution in preparation for the day when the British found out what designers were doing and pulled back on their commitment to the Jewish home. 1923 he's always already talking about that. Herbert Samuel worried that a military solution to their problem would just turn the Jewish homeland into a garrison state under permanent threat from its Arab neighbors. But Djabitinsky said that the Jews are going to be under permanent threat no matter what we do. The Arabs are never going to be okay with this and the designers needed to recognize that. He wrote a letter. He published a letter to all of his fellow Zionists putting his view out there and I'm going to quote it length because Djabitinsky's attitude here in 1923 he's in the minority. But as time goes on, I think I've mentioned a couple times the hardest core elements in any movement, in any conflict, have a way of sucking everybody else into their own vortex. And as we go on and the Zionist movement starts to veer onto a course maybe a little bit different than was envisioned by Theodore Herzogler, even High Envyczman, understanding where Djabitinsky's coming from really helps you understand why the Zionist movement went in that direction. He says quote, "There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves in the Palestine Arabs, not now nor in the perspective future. I say this was such conviction not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionist, I do not believe that they will be hurt. My readers have a general idea of the history of colonization in other countries. I suggest that they consider all the precedents with which they're acquainted. And see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonization being carried on with the consent of the Native population. There is no such precedent. The Native populations, civilized or uncivilized have always stubbornly resisted the colonists irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage." And then he goes on very frankly and again, quite honestly, to equate the Zionist relationship to the Palestinian Arabs with the relationship of the Spanish conquistadors to the Aztecs and the Inca. And with the European conquest of the North American natives, he continues quote, "Our peacemongers are trying to persuade us that the Arabs are either fools, whom we can deceive by masking our real aims, or that they are corrupt and can be bribed to abandon to us, they're claimed to priority in Palestine and return for cultural and economic advantages. I repudiate this conception of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally, they're 500 years behind us. They have neither our endurance nor our determination, but they're just as good as psychologists as we are. We may tell them whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable, but they know what we want, as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive jealous love of Palestine as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico and the soof of their rolling prairies. To imagine that they will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the conveniences which the Jewish colonists brings with them is a childish notion, which has at bottom a kind of contempt for the Arab people. It means that they despise the Arab race, which they regard as a corrupt mob that can be bought and sold and are willing to give up their fatherland for a good railway system. There's no justification for such a belief. It may be that some individual Arabs take bribes, but that does not mean that the Arab people of Palestine as a whole will sell that fervent patriotism that they guard so jellously. Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs and Palestine are doing and what they will persist in doing as long as they remain a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of Palestine into the land of Israel. Some of us have induced ourselves to believe that all the trouble is due to a misunderstanding. The Arabs have not understood us and this is the only reason why they resist us, but there is no misunderstanding. Colonization carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab. Colonization can only have one aim and the Palestine Arabs cannot accept the same. It lies in the very nature of things and in this particular regard cannot be changed. Zionism can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population behind an iron wall which the native population cannot breach. That is our Arab policy, not what we should be, but what actually is, whether we admitted or not. What need otherwise are the Balfour Declaration or of the mandate? Their value to us is that outside power. Great Britain has undertaken to create in the country such conditions of administration and security that if the native population should desire to hinder our work, they will find it impossible. And we are all of us without exception demanding day after day that this outside power should carry out this task vigorously and with determination. In this matter, there is no difference between our militarists and our vegetarians except that the first prefer that the iron wall could consist of Jewish soldiers and the others are content that they should be British. Two brief remarks. In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answered this. It is not true. Either Zionism is moral and just or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually, we have settled that question and in the affirmative, we hold that Zionism is moral and just and since it is moral and just, justice must be done. No matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Ahmed agree with it or not, there is no other morality. In the second place, this does not mean that there cannot be any agreement with the Palestinian Arabs. What is impossible is a voluntary agreement. As long as the Arabs feel that there is the least hope of getting rid of us, they will refuse to accept this hope in return for either kind words or for bread and butter because they are not a rabble but a living people. And when a living people yields and matters of such a vital character, it is only when there is no longer any hope of getting rid of us because they can make no breach in the iron wall. And quote, say what you want. And I can hear you out there as I don't care, say what you want. This dude is not playing games. Okay. In the early 1920s, the Socialist and the Zionist movement are not too interested in this message. They really don't want to hear it for the most part. Again, the revisionists are very small minority in Palestine but after those two riots and after time vitesmen in Ben-Gurion start to take the path of quiet, evolutionary Zionism, a lot of Zionists, especially a lot of young men, which is what most of the Zionists are at this point. A lot of the Zionists felt like the leadership on the left was kind of retreating, like the riots happened and then they kind of shied away and they didn't like that. So more and more people start listening to Jabotinsky's message. Many people had been happily deluding themselves about what was possible. And Jabotinsky was the loudest voice telling his fellow Zionists that their project was not going to be clean and easy, that there was no clean and easy way to do it. The Nebimousa riots, the Jaffa Rites, these were not mistakes. Nothing went wrong. They didn't happen because somebody messed up because of a misunderstanding or because the Zionist hadn't been sufficiently sneaky about what they were doing. No, these riots happened because they were always going to happen. Jabotinsky's essentially saying, look, we are not immigrants. Okay. We are invading this country in the people here doing what any people would do when they're invaded. You people need to accept that and get used to it. The mainstream Zionist left, boy, they hated this. They're trying to allay the fears of the Arabs and calm down the British and get them back on board. And so they marginalized Jabotinsky throughout the 1920s, essentially for vocalizing things that they preferred to keep private. And because his association with fascism placed him and his followers on the opposite side of this ongoing battle between right and left that was being waged across Europe at the time. Now they marginalized him, they pushed him aside, they didn't like him, they were annoyed by him, but the thing is they needed him. Unlike the European conflicts between fascists and the left, at the bottom of the conflict between labor and revisionist Zionists was a common commitment to the Zionist project. When push came to shove, Jabotinsky's beta-tower followers were the shock troops that the mainstream Zionists called in to defend them, or to exact revenge after Arab attacks. It's nice to be in denial, but you have to have somebody like Jabotinsky's followers over here on the side that you can talk about and be in violent, you can talk about how we don't believe in that kind of thing. You keep them off to the side and protect your own conscience and keep yourself in denial and then every once in a while when your denial starts to boil over, you can call those reserved troops in. That's really how Jabotinsky's followers were in the 1920s. From 1923 to 1931, Betar would grow to enlist over 22,000 people. In just three more years after that in 1934, it would more than triple its membership over to 70,000 Jews, drilling, training, preparing to fight. The substrate of common identity is something that the Arab leadership completely lacked at this point. You know, Ben Gurion, Jabotinsky, they had all these huge disagreements. They didn't like each other. They worked at cross purposes a lot of the time, but they had that common substrate of identity that kept them focused on the same goal overall. Well, the Arabs just didn't have anything like that. You know, the Zionist leaders were rivals with each other. Competing Arab notables were enemies with each other. In general, the people that these leaders would have to mobilize, the peasant population in Palestine, they're not the easiest people to motivate politically. The Arabs are a huge disadvantage relative to the people coming into their country. I guess this is kind of a good time to mention this. I've kind of been portraying the Zionist as this group of plucky underdogs with big dreams, you know, and to a certain extent that is a valid image. I don't want you to completely lose that. I mean, they're taking on an almost unbelievably ambitious project and their success is far from assured. But then you might have been asking yourself a few times in this story so far. If that's the case, why are they acting so cocky? Why is Monaco Musiskin dressing down the British officer and charge at Jerusalem in the Arab mayor of the city? What makes him think that they can get away with coming in and announcing their plans and disrespecting the locals? Well, part of it is what we've talked about. They had the wrong idea about what the British were willing to do on their behalf, but there's something else. And to be honest, I feel like I've probably handled this a little clumsily because somebody could probably say that I've been a little misleading up to this point. So let me correct it. What you need to understand about the Zionist, what I should have emphasized more and what you have to keep in mind for the rest of this story is that the Zionists are not just a bunch of immigrants trickling into the country and sort of trying to figure it out as they go along. No, they are an organized revolutionary movement. Zionists in Palestine, the people who are actually immigrating and moving there, they're just the frontline troops of an international organization with the financial backing of some of the wealthiest families and individuals in the entire world, as well as the support of major European nations. They've got people all over Europe recruiting young Jewish men and bringing them to training centers that they're setting up in different parts of Europe to prepare them for their move to Palestine. I mean, we mentioned the Rothschild family a couple times. Many of them were financial backers of the Zionist project. It's a big family, not all of them, but many of them were. This family was the most important financier of the war effort against Napoleon. A Rothschild bank bailed out the British Central Bank in 1825. They financed the Brazilian independence movement. They were a major lender to just an astonishing number of major rail and other infrastructure projects in Europe and in the Americas, as well as the Suez Canal project. This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can imagine this is where all those conspiracy theories come from because they're such a far reaching and powerful clan. But the conspiracy theories might be a little nuts, but this family is no joke. That part is true. They're just one backer of the Zionists. They've got major support from the Hirsch financial dynasty, the incredibly wealthy Warburg banking family. The Zionist and Palestine are just the tip of a very long, extremely powerful spear. The Arabs have nothing to remotely compare to this. We're talking about a tribal society, a peasant society, which is only just starting down that path of establishing their own national concept, their own national institutions. The simplest way to put it is the way Jabitinsky did. This is a colonialist situation. Just like the Europeans have been going into pre-modered societies in Africa and Asia and the Americas, none of these societies had reached a point in their development where they could resist being exploited and dominated by these wealthier, more organized colonialists. That's what was going on here. Remember, this is before the development of all the big oil discoveries in the Middle East. So you don't even have any rich Arab oil shakes who maybe could be using some of their money to push back. None of that exists yet. These people are peasants and tribesmen and they're dealing with the greatest empire in the world and a highly organized, well-resourced European nationalist movement. See, there are different kinds of movements. You have resistance movements and protest movements and political parties and so forth. In a country like the United States, with an absolutely dominant, transcendent state power overseeing the competition between groups and where the groups are working from a common substrate of shared identity, these movements compete over interests. The interests of the middle class, the interests of the poor, the interests of the bourgeois, the state and civil service class, if you're in a country with an independent bureaucracy. Without the overwhelming power of the state, setting the boundaries of what can be achieved, as far as the advantage that one group can achieve or exploit at the expense of any other, without that these groups would descend into a state of total war. Every group has a set of core needs and demands on which it cannot compromise without ceasing to be an independent group and losing its real reason for existence. When you live in a place with a strong state, you've got an overarching power, one of whose main functions is to assure everybody that those core needs and demands, those are secure, those are off the table, don't worry about that. You guys can all play by the rules in your competitions with other groups and so forth because even if you lose, we guarantee that your downside is limited. In a place like the United States, the presence of state power and the presence of self-regulating norms that sort of set a floor on what each group can lose to each other, that's what enables people to argue over interests. If you lock two boxers in a shipping container, let me put it this way, if you lock two boxers in a shipping container and tell them that the winner is going to get a million dollars and the loser is going to die, then you're going to come back in the morning and find a mess all over the walls and the ceiling and the winner is going to have chunks of the other once stuck in his teeth. Now, if you tell the two boxers instead that the winner gets a million dollars, the loser will get half a million and we're all going to be watching in order to ensure that the stakes remain just that extra half million and nothing more. Then the two men are probably going to fight a clean fight in accordance with the rules of boxing. Limited warfare is something that is really only possible under conditions of high trust in that common agreement on established norms. In other words, when the parties are able to know that they are just fighting over interests, like the various political groups and movements in the United States are competing for their interests rather than fighting to defend the deeper core of non-negotiables. This was possible in 18th century Europe and the United States Civil War as brutal as they were in a lot of situations. In the US Civil War, for example, 650,000 dead, horrible, horrible wars. Brutal as it was, there would be no genocide afterwards and everybody knew that. So the Confederacy could surrender once it was determined that there was no way forward to victory. The downside was limited. But when you're talking about a revolutionary movement like the Bolsheviks in Russia, like the Zionists, they are not competing for interests. Part of the reason Zionism took hold when it did in the late 19th century was not only that the situation of the Jews was difficult in many places. It had always been difficult. No, it was the ramping up of their difficulties in the East combined with the sudden emergence of some other places like the United States and Britain and eventually the Soviet Union that weren't such bad places to be for a Jewish person. And that created an existential. panic among people who were committed to this Jewish national identity. Okay, to the Zionist, the allure of assimilation was almost as dangerous as the threat of annihilation. If they go all the way, the end result is the same either way for the Jewish national concept. I mean, I'll put maybe I'll try to put it like this. If the pogromists had killed every last Jewish person on the planet, right, we would consider that a nightmare, a crime, a horrible, horrible atrocity, but it's important to understand that, you know, it's something we know intellectually, but sometimes doesn't fully sink in. That can happen. Okay, it's happened to thousands of people, thousands of groups throughout history. That can happen. It's important to understand that that can happen when there is no floor on the consequences of losing. If all the Jews were exterminated, that's happened to the Aboriginal people on the island of Tasmania at the hands of the British. If all of them were killed, we recognize that as an absolute tragedy, right, nitrosity. Europeans arrived in Tasmania in 1772, and by 1830, the number of these people who had persisted for thousands of years with a common threat of language and culture. And less than 60 years, the number of these people went from about 5,000 to just 72. In the middle period, they had been used for slave labor, exploited for the sexual pleasure of the settlers. They'd been tortured and mutilated and killed when they resisted. I mean, there was a time when hunters, they used to turn in the skins of indigenous Tasmanians in exchange for a bounty. As a British author, John Gray writes a little bit about this quote, "When the males were killed, female survivors were turned loose with the heads of their husbands tied around their necks. Males who were not killed were usually castrated, children were clubbed to death." Now, I'm not doing this just to be morbid and gratuitous. Our tendency to think and experience the world in terms of narratives is kind of the natural way that we tend to perceive events in the world in terms of a narrative. And that leads us to imagine that a balancing of the scales is going to eventually occur. Because that's how stories work. There's an arc, there's a resolution, and we kind of tend to think of the world in those terms. Our religions construct mythologies that put the creation of the world and in the life we're living in terms of this arc. Well, because we think like that, it gives us this impression that there's something eventually is going to balance things out. That there's going to be a Gandhi or Che Guevara that's going to come along at some point to redeem these Tasmanians against the British, right? But that is not the world we live in most of the time. And I'm bringing this up because in order to understand existential panic, in order to understand how single-minded people can be when they feel threatened, it is really important to understand what it really means to be threatened. We establish societies and build city walls so that a version of justice can reign within them. But justice is not a law in nature. Nature is just empty bellies and bloody claws. It's laws are murder, brutality, and madness looked at through a human lens. I think that's how Werner Herzog put it. I mean, the point is you've got to understand what can happen, what the stakes are. Because most of us today we don't live with stakes. The decisions that we make, the stakes are very low. We think we lose our job. It's a nightmare. How about the end of your people? We can't even conceive as something like that if you live in the developed world. John Gray writes Little Morrie says, quote, "When the last indigenous Tasmanian male, William Lanner, died in 1869. His grave was opened by a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, Dr. George Stokall, who made a tobacco pouch from his skin. When the last full blood indigenous woman died a few years later, the genocide was complete." That's what can happen. When we judge appropriate responses to situations, we don't judge the Donner party by norms intended for the peace and bounty of everyday civil society. Their decisions were made under infinitely higher stakes. Things can get really, really bad in this world. What happened to the Tasmanians is a utterly horrifying historical and human tragedy. But what is it that makes us recoil from a genocide like that so violently? I would suggest it's not just the misery and the killing. 10,000 murders take place in the United States every year, but it doesn't occur to us as being an intolerable atrocity twice as horrible as the 5,000 murdered Tasmanians, because there's 5,000 here and 10. We don't think of it that way, and that's because something more fundamental has been lost in the Tasmanian case. Individuals are born and they die, but bloodline, the constellation of symbols, the language, the ongoing project of a people with a particular way of being in the world, creating new members of the bloodline and passing that on and teaching them how to be in the world in the same way. That is something that had persisted in it all for thousands of years with the Tasmanians. Now it's gone. It's gone and it can never ever come back. That cultural complex will never exist again. It's gone. Well, if you're a Zionist in the late 19th or 20th century, yeah, I'd to worry about violence, but from the standpoint of the tragedy that Tasmanians, the exact same horrifying effect could be accomplished if the Jewish people of the world encouraged by their growing acceptance in many countries, accepted the implicit offered fully assimilating, just be absorbed into the stream of their larger neighbors in the nations where they made their homes. If all the Jews just became British and kind of forgot what, you know, about their Jewish heritage, or they just became French and American and German, if there's no Jewish people at the end of that, to the Zionists, that's just as bad as every one of us being killed. If they forgot their religion and discarded their cultural traditions as the many Jews embracing communism had done, by the way, if they stopped practicing any kind of endogamous marriage practices and just were absorbed into the bloodstream of their larger neighbors through inner marriage, then one day many years in the future, we would be reading about Jews in history books, the way we read about the Sumerians or the original Egyptians and the Tasmanians. There are many people today who question the whole value of worrying over questions of identity. What does it matter if your group persists as a separate idea? You know, they think that that whole way of thinking is part of the problem in our world. Just marry whoever and speak whatever language makes it easiest to communicate with people right around you and yeah, you can have traditions, but you know, you can have them the way people have a favorite football team. Don't get too attached. Come on, let's take it so seriously. These are the words, the people who talk like that. These are the words of people who have been at the top of the mountain for so long that they've forgotten what it ever means to be threatened. To design us and really to all identity groups, a world in which their group no longer exists as a separate line of human development and as an identifiable way of being in the world is not even a world worth existing at all. Any nation in the world, if they have a nuclear arsenal but are facing a Tasmanian extermination, would turn the entire world into a radioactive disaster before it allowed the last of its people to disappear. Any nation would do that. That's the same as saying that a world without us is not a world worth having. That's what that's basically saying. Well, for most of the history of the last millennium in the Jewish diaspora, the only thing that they had to worry about was violence. There was a lot of it and they had to worry about it. The violence and oppression was awful, but there was never a prospect of the destruction of the Jewish people because of the pogroms and so forth. The simulation was not an option since they were held apart by the people around them. They weren't being welcomed in, but things were beginning to change on both sides of that equation. You know, the idea of forgetting about some old idea like your Jewish identity altogether and just becoming a random American guy named Ben Goldstein who watches the game and goes to work and whose children wouldn't even think to consider themselves Jewish in any meaningful sense. This was something that suddenly was possible for the first time in Jewish history. And on the other side, on the violent side underneath the surface of the tolerant, democratic and socialist regimes in central and eastern Europe, both the depth of animosity and the capacity for grand scale ultraviolence were reaching levels unprecedented in the history of the world. A revolutionary regime like the Zionists is fighting for the non-negotiables. They're fighting to carve out some little piece of ground where they might plant in water some of those last few dried seeds of their historical culture and then to defend those fields in which they grow at all costs. That's who the Zionists are. This is what the Arabs have to contend with. The Arabs by comparison are. and underdeveloped, disorganized, mostly peasant tribal population with nothing like the resources or the social focus, the collective will of this motivated group of revolutionaries. They're just completely outgunned. They had neither the wealth, the connections, nor the experience to influence foreign public opinion the same way the Zionists were able to do. It's a really good illustration of the steep hill that the Arabs had to climb comes from this story when the Zionists and the Arabs both sent delegations to London to make their case before British officials. Contrast these two cases, it gives you a good idea of what the two sides were dealing with when it came to the British. A few years after this period, Haim-Fight'sman had arranged for David Ben-Gurion to come to London and meet with British politicians to discuss some of the Zionist demands. Ben-Gurion was supposed to meet with the British Prime Minister, but in the event his plane ended up being delayed. The Prime Minister waited and waited and waited. British Prime Minister pacing around waiting and Ben-Gurion never showed up. The next day, Ben-Gurion finally shows up, no damage has been done though, and the Prime Minister invites David Ben-Gurion and his entourage to breakfast at the Prime Minister's own residence. For their stay in London, the Jewish millionaire Israel's Seaf put a brand new, domler automobile at Ben-Gurion's disposal. The Prime Minister entertained them, showed them around his art collection, and by all accounts, the two men basically spoke as equals. The Prime Minister asked Ben-Gurion if the Zionist kept a list of British officials who were not friendly to Zionism, which Ben-Gurion provided, and the Prime Minister took down that list so that he would know who to avoid and freeze out. After the two men came to an agreement, Ben-Gurion was supposed to depart for the Zionist Congress being held in Switzerland, but he missed his flight, and so the British Prime Minister himself calls around at different airlines to negotiate a cheap ticket for Ben-Gurion. After that fails, he tries to get the Royal Air Force to charter a special plane for him. Eventually he decides against that, and he puts Ben-Gurion on a train to Switzerland, but as the train passed through France, Ben-Gurion didn't have a French visa. And so the Prime Minister called the French ambassador in on a Sunday morning and had him arrange a French visa on the spot for the Zionist leader. Now contrast that with what happened when the Arab Senate delegation had made their case to British officials. Three Arab ambassadors arrived, and they waited out in the hallway for the Prime Minister for three hours as people just walked by, hardly noticing them. At long last, one of the Arabs stopped a British man who had passed by them several times and asked if he knew whether the Prime Minister was going to be available today. The man said, "Well, I'm the Prime Minister's secretary. Who are you?" They told him and he was surprised because they were dressed in suits and ties for their meetings, and the secretary had walked past them because he expected the Arab delegation to be wearing desert flowing robes and turbines and so forth. He asked him again to wait, and then finally he told him that since so much time had passed, the Prime Minister would no longer be available. And his schedule was packed for several weeks out, but don't worry, I've arranged for all of you to meet with one of the Prime Minister's top advisors. So, the Arab ambassadors were shuffled into another waiting room where they waited another 45 minutes for the British Prime Minister's advisor to arrive. Finally, at long last, he arrives and they sit down to make their long prepared presentation to this British advisor who was to hear their case and relay it to the Prime Minister, and who do you think was sitting across the desk listening, but high emphites men? That's who they had to make their case to. So, you can get an idea of how different they're being received. A British official who was deeply involved in the region throughout this time period, Michael I and I.D.'s. He left behind a great diary and several good articles. He was actually the director of development in Transjordan right across the border for a while. He was sympathetic to the Zionist cause, but looking back on it a few years later, he wrote very frankly about what was going on during this time. I'm going to go ahead and quote him at length here too because he does a really great job of summarizing the situation from about the time after Jaffa in 1921 through to the late 1920s. He says quote, "The strategy the Zionist had to follow was as unique as their situation. They could win only if public opinion in England and America could be convinced that it was right that they should win and be willing to help them. Only if that public opinion could also be convinced at each critical point that it was wrong for the Arabs to resist." The Arabs had no doubt of ultimate Zionist intentions. British officials on the spot saw it clearly enough. Even before the mandate was announced, the chief administrator in Palestine wrote a report that the Zionist quote, "appeared bent on committing the temporary administration in Palestine to a partialist policy before the issue of the mandate. It is manifestly impossible to please partisans who officially claim nothing more than a national home, but in reality will be satisfied with nothing less than a Jewish state." End quote. Now back to iron-eighties. In those early years, the belief had to be sustained in England that a national home did not mean an exclusive national state. The Arabs were up against stiff odds. Officially a Jewish state was not intended, but while the Arabs saw the tongue in the Zionist cheek, the British public did not. Why were the Arabs shouting and demonstrating? Were they accusing the British government of acting in bad faith? The Arabs were in truth protesting against a colonizing purpose which was officially supposed not to exist, but did in fact exist." Now I mention this a little bit in episode one. I have a few friends who are really hardcore supporters of the Palestinian cause, and they have a lot of harsh words for the British, as you can imagine. When they hear stuff like the quote I just said, they scoff at it a lot of times. Kinda like, "How would the British not understand what was going on?" That sounds like a ridiculous excuse. I hear this a lot. But what you have to remember is that this is the early 1920s. There's no internet, and the vast majority of British policymakers have never met an Arab or even a non-British Jew. They have no idea what's going on in Palestine. And all they can do is go off of what they're told. Well, how are they getting that information? If you're a British policy maker and you hear those evoke coming up on an issue concerning Palestine, you look around Britain for someone who knows about Palestine and who do you find. Usually they found that I am a policeman. So all of the information that the vast majority of the British public, as well as the British leadership, is getting is either directly from the Zionists through propaganda, through publications like The Guardian, whose editor was a committed Zionist and worked directly with vitesmen on public relations planning, or else they got it through a regular government chain of information. And how did that government chain of information work? Well, Michael Ionadi's lays this out too. He says, "It was undeniable that the Zionists had means of reaching public and parliamentary opinion in England, which the Arabs did not command and never learn to create. Consequently, the main channel opened to the Arabs in Palestine itself, transmitted through the local administration to the colonial office. This would reach the Secretary of State for the colonies at times of crisis when Palestine affairs demanded the attention of the cabinet as a whole. There was thus only one member who had direct contact with the full weight of Arab argument and pressure, the colonial secretary himself." The other members, for the most part, had no direct knowledge of affairs within Palestine itself, but were open to the persuasive influence with the Zionist organization was able to bring to bear through the press and parliament by personal pressure upon ministers. The Zionists chose shrewdly when they decided that Great Britain should be entrusted with the task of bringing the state of Israel into existence, a democracy whose government could be pushed by a public and parliamentary sentiment, which is highly susceptible to propaganda, was the best choice." There might be people out there still choking on the idea that the British government is enacting policies that most of the cabinet and parliament know nothing about. Like it's a disavowal of responsibility, but honestly, there's probably no other way to run a global empire. Certainly not back then. Remember the U.S. Congressman Charlie Wilson? They made a movie about him with Tom Hanks, Charlie Wilson's war, not a bad movie. Basically, it's the story of this obscure congressman and a few of his committed allies in the intelligence community who were able to almost by themselves conduct a private war against the Soviet Union when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the late 70s and through the 80s. How is that possible? Well, think about it. You're a congressman from Montana or something, called to vote on some money for weapons to go to the Afghan fighters. You made it to Congress talking about farm subsidies. What do you know about Afghanistan? If you're one of the rare statesmen who actually takes the time to question it, instead of just following the party line, you ask around to see who knows about Afghanistan and who do people send you to. They send you to Charlie Wilson. He tells you all about it. What are you going to argue with him? He's an expert. You don't know anything. You're going to take his work for it and you don't have time for this. You've got to vote on Lama sterilization at three o'clock. You got to go. So you see how it works? I mean, it's not corruption or evidence of a broken system necessarily. It's just a feature of massive democratic bureaucracy that special interest groups have always been able to find outsized influence because of the difference in commitment between them and the people who oppose them. When it's a cause with two hardcore constituencies, maybe as a policymaker, you can kind of step out. Take a risk. got somebody back. backing you up at least. Maybe you risk upsetting the fossil fuel industry if it's going to get you a bunch of votes and financial support from the green energy and environmental groups, right? But sometimes there's a huge delta between the costs and benefits of supporting one side or other of a question. If you're a British politician back then, you're going to make a lot of rich and powerful enemies if you made any noises at all in support of the Arab position. And what would you get out of that? You have no Arab voters, the Arabs have no pull in your country. Anthony Crossley, a member of the British House of Commons, he did take the risk and put himself out there to take the Arab side. He contrasted the two positions for his fellow MPs in a speech he gave. Quote, "There are no Arab members of parliament. There are no Arab constituencies to bring influence upon their members of parliament. There is no Arab control of newspapers in this country. It's impossible to get a pro-Arab letter in the Times. There are in the city, speaking of the financial district in London. There are in the city no Arab financial houses which control any amounts of finance. There is no Arab control of newspaper advertisements in this country. There are no Arab ex-colonial secretaries." So now imagine if you're an Arab leader who wants to logic and plain to gents the Zionist behavior or just the general policy of the mandate. Your only option is to send it through the chief secretary for Palestine, apocalyptic Christian Zionists, servants or windom deeds. He would put a chop on it and then send it up through Zionist leader Herbert Samuel's mandate administration to the colonial office where it would land on the desk of the secretary of state for the colonies, long time Zionist ally Winston Churchill. It's like some kind of Kafka story where you get into a dispute with your neighbor in a small town and the police, the judges, the teachers at your kids' school, the paperboy, they're all from your neighbor's family. You just have nowhere to go and no options. The League of Nations mandate itself contained language written by the Zionists. It actually instructed the British and this has the force of international law and instructed the British to consult with the Zionist organization on all matters concerning Palestine. There was nothing in it about consulting with the Arabs who made up 90% of the population. At one point high commissioner Herbert Samuel proposes to create an Arab agency to consult with his administration and also to be the representatives of his policies to the Arabs. But whereas the members of the Zionist organization were chosen by Zionists to represent them, the members of the Arab agency would have to be chosen by the British and approved by the Zionists. A decade and a half later in the mid-30s, a British journalist and official who was living and working in Palestine at the time complained that quote, "It was one of the peculiarities of the Palestine administration that there was no British official whose duty it was to act as intermediary between Arab opinion and the high commissioner and to whom the Arabs could speak freely and confidentially." A peculiarity? Remember, this isn't the 1930s he's saying at the mid-30s. And so at that point the British will have been in charge of Palestine for 20 years, 20 volatile contentious years, and there still isn't a single British official whose job it is to keep track of how the Arab population is feeling and to relay their concerns to the government. Well, what do you do? And I'm not even asking this rhetorically, I want you to think about it. What do you do if you wake up one day and you find that you're the unfortunate protagonist in a Kafka story? What do you do if you're an Arab who in the last few years has experienced war, mass starvation, plague, the collapse of a centuries old social order, the destruction of your national project by European powers, you thought were your allies colonization by a people who are openly declaring their intention of displacing you. And then when you try to go through the official channels of the occupying British government, when you try to make your case, everyone you meet with is either allied with or is himself part of the Zionist movement trying to just displace you. What do you do when you hear that high and vites minutes personal friends with the British Prime Minister several of them with American Supreme Court justices, advisors to the US president that while Arab leaders are waiting months for a meeting with a British colonial official, a minor official, vites been able to call the Prime Minister of Foreign Secretary over to his house for dinner. How do you deal with that? And what would you do? The British member of parliament, we quoted in the House of Commons a moment ago, Anthony Crossley, he put it very frankly, he said, only by violence can the Arabs even get a hearing. Well, after the riots in 19, 19, 19, 21, they'd finally gotten their hearing, they got someone's attention, but it wasn't the kind of attention they were hoping for. It was the kind of attention they probably should have expected, but it wasn't what they were hoping for. The extent that they were hoping for anything. Most people, you know, I'm going to say this again, I've said it 20 times and I'm probably repeating it to myself because I have to keep reminding myself in order to make it possible for me to try to imagine what it was like for people in the time. But you got to remember there is no Google, there's no internet, there's nothing like that. Most people in Britain and America and everywhere else, they're going about their lives without giving the remotest thought to this little postage stamp a territory in the Middle East called Palestine, not even the remotest thought. So they have no idea what's happening on a day to day basis. It wouldn't even occur to them to think about it. Any more than it would occur to most Americans today to wonder what's happening in Ghana today. It just wouldn't occur to you. It's not part of your world. And so the only time that they would ever hear about the place is when the Arabs lashed out. When that happened, the Zionist machine kicked in and made sure that everybody in Europe Britain and America heard about it. They heard about how these vicious Arabs were attacking innocent Jewish settlers in the Holy Land. They were great at it. The British guy Michael Ionides, he talks about this as well. He wrote quote, "In literal terms, the Zionists were steadily changing Arab-owned land into Jewish-owned land, instead of increasing the Jewish population. The Arabs were on the defensive against this continual movement. There could hardly be a case to which the word defensive applies more exactly. Yet by the nature of things, Parliament and the public in England only became conscious of what was going on when the growth of Jewish lands and population aroused violent opposition from the Arabs. The initiative in firing the first shot must always lie with the Arabs, and this would be an offensive action. The British government would necessarily have to resist the Arabs and defend the Jews. The Arab action, although of an essentially defensive nature, therefore always appeared to be offensive in the eyes of the British public. In Zionist action, which was of an essentially offensive nature, always appeared as defensive. To the British public, the Arab method is like a man who jumps out into the road in front of your car every now and then shouting and waving his arms. He may have the best of reasons for claiming your sympathy and earnest attention, but what do you do with the chap who obstructs the highway and endangers life and limb? Arab opposition became inevitably identified in the British mind with agitation and violence. This was the Zionist great asset, the command of words. Zionist propaganda was brilliantly and selectively adjusted to all sections of public opinion in England. The public was divided in its sentiments, in favor of the Zionists and in favor of the Arabs and several clearly identifiable groups. In favor of the Zionists were a body of Christians, brought up to believe in the divine inspiration of the Old Testament and its promises for the Jews to return to the Promised Land. To these, as to the Zionists themselves, the right of the Jews to return was absolute, and temporal considerations such as the existence of any non-Jewish population in Palestine were irrelevant. These beliefs were to be found in all the political parties. I do apologize for quoting them in such great length, but he just did a great job of breaking down the imbalance of influence that these two parties could hope to bring to bear on the British government and later the American government. I spent a lot of time on this section because going forward it's going to become very important to understand that what we're going to be talking about here is a wealthy, well-organized international revolutionary movement with a tremendous amount of leverage over the world's greatest colonial empire, Great Britain, systematically moving in on a society still in its very early stages of development, in which lacks the organization, the resources, and the institutions to really resist or even really understand what's going to be happening to them. I don't intend on getting political as I'm telling this story, I've tried scrupulously to avoid it, and I want to keep things confined to the period we're talking about, but there are times, and this is one of them where I'll bring up connections to the contemporary situation because it's relevant to understanding the roots of the contemporary situation. The public relations pattern, Ionites was just describing, and the huge public relations deficit the Arabs have in the West, is something that largely defines how people today, especially in the United States, perceive this conflict. Unless you're an activist for one side or the other, and you're just a person who's got a job or goes to college or goes to school, and that's what you do. - I must hear it. a committed activist to one of these two sides, you probably never give a second thought to Palestine unless it's in the news. You notice when it's in the news, but that's there, like when else would you think of it? And the only time it seems to make the news is when the Arab population gets frustrated and violence starts popping off. If the only time you hear about a situation is when one side starts becoming violent, it can be very easy to think that everything is just daisies and roses in between the outbursts and then every once in a while a terrorist decides to get all exploding and something happens. When the first you hear about it every time is when Palestinians start shooting and your television anchors framing violence from the other side as the quote "Israeli response" it's always an Israeli response in the US media. It's never a Palestinian response to what's happening to them. It's an Israeli response to the initiation of violence by the Arabs, that's how it's always presented. And our media usually treat the Arabs like a mindless volcano that just sort of sits dormant for a while and you can kind of build your life around it and hope that it doesn't blow up. But then every so often for no discernible reason at all, it starts rumbling and decides to explode. And now the Israeli military has to respond to this initiation of violence by the Arabs. And what usually happens, what usually happens, you turn on your TV, it's CNN, one of those talking head shows. And there's a pro-Palestinian person coming on TV and trying to talk about the conditions that the Arabs are being forced to live under and the crimes being committed by the other side that never make it onto western news channels. And then the other, what are the other talking head just accuses them of making excuses for the violence and then the 20 seconds is up and they're on to the next story. You hear the same line every time. The pro-Palestinian person says, look, I don't condone terrorism, but it's nevertheless important to what stop. When the other side has already gotten you to preface your argument with, I don't condone terrorism, but they've won the argument. They've taken the center of the ring on that one. This is something the Zionist had mastered in Britain 90 years ago by the 1920s. The Arabs started out way behind the curve and not only have they not been able to catch up the nature of how this dynamic builds on itself and the accumulated frustration and reactions after having no voice at all for so many decades has only dug them deeper and deeper into the whole. This is more a commentary on the way the narrative shaped in contemporary media rather than a comment on either the two parties in this conflict, but I hope I've made it pretty clear by this point that in my mind, the roots and causes of everything that happens in this part of the world are incredibly complicated. It's not a story of one side being good or evil. I hope I've made that clear and I hope it's the impression you're getting. I have received a few emails from people on both sides who think I'm completely in the bag for the other side, but I hope that the majority of you are getting something else. So now in addition to the fact that the riots of the early 20s did nothing to help their case with the British public, it also failed to deter the Zionists from doing what they were doing in Palestine. In fact, all it did was just refocus them. Herbert Samuel, the Zionist high commissioner, he'd been trying to negotiate in good faith, trying to bring the Arabs to the table and talk to them, but it was going nowhere. Herbert Samuel would come up with an idea. He came up with the idea of a legislative council that would have included the Arabs. The idea was that this would be a sort of national assembly, kind of like a legislature, that the British would hold ultimate power, but this would be a national assembly, including both Jews and Arabs that would debate and vote. And then the British administration, although it reserved the right to act unilaterally any time it chose, it would take the decisions of the council into account. And it was seen as something that would eventually prepare the country to be handed off to local people to rule. But the Arabs couldn't accept the national assembly on the term Samuel was proposing. Even though the Arabs made up 90% of the population, the council would have given the Zionists in the British and none votes to override the Arabs on any decision. And then once you acquiesce to that, now you've legitimized it. Now that's the baseline for all future expectations and negotiations. Well, eventually the Arab leaders actually agreed to the arrangement, even though it was completely weighted against them. They agreed to it just so that they could establish something, anything to provide a national venue in which the Arabs could voice their concerns. But then the Zionists rejected it. They rejected it even though it would have afforded them vastly more official power and influence than their numbers would have married if it were just a strict representative system. And they had to reject it with their ideology they had to reject it. Even though the deal itself was totally weighted in their favor because at the core of Zionist ideology was the conviction that the Arabs had no actual rights over Palestine. They have the right to live there under the dominion of this Jewish state, but they had no claim to political rights. Coming to a power sharing arrangement with the Arabs would have legitimized their claim as people of Palestine. And the Zionists were very, very careful to avoid agreeing to anything that might have been interpreted as an admission that the Arabs had any right to be in the land of the Jews. This was the pattern for years and years all through the 1920s and it was by design. Year after year proposals would be made, compromises would be offered, the sides would talk, talk, talk. But every offer the British put forward would have left the Arabs with a minority vote in a country where they were still 80 to 90% of the population. Very difficult to accept anything like that or even to take it seriously or believe that the other side is negotiating in good faith. And again and again, the Arabs would come back with a proposal of their own for a Palestinian government in which everyone would be represented according to their population and every time the Zionists rejected it. This is what the Arabs would always ask for by the way. Up until the very, very edge of the crisis point, the Arabs only ever asked for a representative government. They just wanted people to vote on representatives and then everybody could participate. Zionists, Middle Eastern Jews, Arabs, everybody. And people would represent you in accordance with your numbers. That's what a representative system is. Well, that was something that Zionists thought was a great idea just as soon as they became a majority in the country. Until then, they wouldn't agree to anything that would legitimize Arab authority or Arab participation in the government of Palestine. When any Arab leader attempted to start an independent political movement, the British undermined it by supporting opposition movements. We talked about that. Or if somebody started a political movement, somebody got frustrated and looked like they were going to do something, the British and Zionists would offer to make concessions at the negotiating table and get them back there and kind of break that momentum and then pull back. Overall, the reason they were able to get away with this is that the impression you get from the Arab notables, the urban Arab tribal leaders for the most part in your way is that they really don't mind the situation that much. It's not affecting them. They kind of like having the British around. The people though, the people, especially in the countryside, they're suffering. But Arab Palestine, to this point, hadn't really yet been able to develop that sense of common purpose that would give the leaders a sense of responsibility toward the people as a whole. And so as the Arab tribal leaders waste their time talking and squabbling amongst themselves, jockeying for status, whatever, the only community organization with the clout or the resources to reach the villages and to provide a channel for Arab voices became the Supreme Muslim Council funded by the British and under the command of the Grand Muthdi of Jerusalem, Hajj, Amin al-Husayni. Now this was something at the time that the British didn't actually have a problem with. The Grand Muthdi didn't have any real power to begin with. The British had given the Mership of Jerusalem. This was the other, I guess, major political aspiration that an Arab might have. They gave the Mership of Jerusalem to one of the leaders of the Nashe Shibi clan, but they totally neutered that office. It was powerless. So they figured that once they tied up the Hussainis in a politically impotent religious office, the two families would keep squabbling over symbolic titles and power and prestige and so forth so that the British could focus on important stuff, like building their oil pipeline for Mosul and Iraq to the Palestinian-Port city in Haifa. Along with their oil interest in Persia and control over the Suez Canal is a route to India. The pipeline from Iraq to Haifa was the other really major British interest in this region. So both the British and the Zionists are helping to empower religious organizations like the Supreme Muslim Council in Palestine. They're funding them. They're helping promote them, hoping that they would undermine attempts to build secular political identities. And up to the late 1920s, it was working beautifully. Now, little two beautifully as we'll see. See a concept? It's hard for us to understand how they could be so silly, but that's because we know what happens in the 20th century. We know what happens on September 11th, 2001 and so forth. We get that now. But back then, to these guys, a concept like Jihad was still foreign to them. Think about the European experience with religious fundamentalism. It could be disruptive for sure, right? It divided your country and it undermined the secular political order. Europe had been torn apart by it. Well that was bad if it was happening to your European country, but in Palestine, that was exactly what the British and the Zionists were shooting for. They wanted the country broken up and had each other's throats. But in the absence, and this is where the rub comes, in the absence of any other feasible political institutions at all, any other channels that might allow the people on the ground who were being hurt by all this to voice their concerns and to get any kind of redress and the absence of any of that, the Supreme Muslim Council under Hajj Amin and the mosques in the moms around Palestine under his command, they sort of became the default roundling point for a population that didn't really have anywhere else to go to vent its frustrations or to have its voice heard. The tribal leaders seem so feckless and self-interested and while they're over there accomplishing nothing at the negotiating table with the Zionists, life is getting worse and worse and worse for the average Palestinian Arab family. And so they look around at their options for leadership and they don't find much. At least the Supreme Muslim Council is doing something, they're building mosques, they're refurbishing landmarks, they're giving some people jobs. At least they've got the resources to help poor families with marriages and funerals. See the Muslim religious infrastructure was really the only social infrastructure that had any kind of reach throughout the country. The Grand Mufti and the Muslim organizations, they seem to be the only ones capable of doing anything at all, of exerting any influence or acting cooperatively in any direction. So as time goes on and we pass through the mid and the late 1920s, more and more Palestinian Arabs are beginning to come together under their religious identity. Now identity here means something specific. I'm using it in a specific way. It means that we're talking about symbols with which someone consciously identifies on a moment by moment basis. All the Muslims in Palestine were Muslims before this time, no one's converting or anything like that, and most of them were devout Muslims. But since almost everybody in their lives was Muslim, probably for the peasants, everybody they ever saw on their life was a Muslim. It was just taken as a given. It wasn't something that you would think of as a differentiating identity marker. Just like most of us walk on two feet and have two eyes, but it wouldn't spring to mind right away if someone asked you to tell them about yourself. You wouldn't say, oh, well, I have two legs and two eyes. It wouldn't, it's not part of your identity. You don't think of it that way. It's totally taken for granted where there's an internal reflection of this dynamic too. These people were Muslim kind of in the same way that they had two legs or two eyes, not thinking consciously about it on a daily basis, even as they pray five times and go to the mosque and do all the things that Muslims do. I put it this way because I think I'm doing a poor job of this in a place with a basically homogenous population and culture where most people around are all the same. If you ask somebody why they pray five times a day facing mecca, that person would probably say, because that's what we do. That's what my people do. But when that society starts getting fractured into different sections so that it's no longer homogenous. Now when you ask that person the same question, he's going to say, because I'm a Muslim, all of a sudden he's a lot more aware of his Muslim identity because there are a bunch of non-Muslims running around the country knocking things around. Well as other groups start to move in, you run the risk of blurring the boundaries of your own identities. In Western Europe, Britain in the United States, Jews were facing this and the Zionists, this is one of the things they were worried about, right? Jews were becoming assimilated into their societies in greater numbers than they ever had before. And so in Palestine before this period, it was tribal identity. That's what they would come together around because that set them apart from each other. Gave them something to hold on to, to know who they were and what their roots were and all the things that go with identity. But when you've got Arabs and Jews now in the same country, what's to stop? If you're somebody who cares about Arab nationalism or Jewish nationalism, what's to stop the Jewish working class and the Arab working class, for example, from beginning to feel that maybe they're an identity group, the working classes, regardless of our ethnicities or tribes or anything like that or religions, the working class are an identity group. And we've got more in common with each other than we do with the elites in our own societies. Many people consider this a very worthy goal, the basis of socialism. And until David Ben Gureon kind of shoved them aside, there were communist Jews in Palestine who were trying to do exactly that. But if you're a Zionist, somebody committed to this Jewish national idea, to the idea of the Jewish people of keeping that in existence as an identifiable social group, then the idea of there just being a working class, a proletariat identity, and of that identity muddying the boundaries that keep an idea like the Jewish people meaningful, that's a huge problem for you. The 20th century is essentially a story that starts out with the old social order and traditional hierarchies being wiped out. And then of the new upstart identities, pressing their claims and competing with each other for sunlight. Is it going to be class identity? Is it going to be ethnic national identity? Which direction people end up going off and comes down to just historical accidents? Since identities are kind of like memes, I think. They can go viral. And the more momentum a particular identity picks up, the more attractive it becomes to others. Well, if you're an activist fighting to establish your particular identity story is the preeminent one in a given domain, how do you maintain coherent definitions of your group? Of who exactly is us and who is not? Generally the way you do that is by telling stories. So we've always done it. You help people their history. Usually it's a history that places them at a critical moment. We're always in that critical moment, it seems like. In order to prevent the boundaries of your group from becoming blurry, to firm up those membranes, you might tell stories that demonize the other groups, to frighten people away from them, make it harder to leave your group and go join another one. Or maybe stories that lie in eyes your own group, which make people proud and make them not want to leave. Stories that condemn traders and apostates and deserters, stuff like that. These are stories and myths designed to preserve the integrity and coherence and cohesion of the group. In a crisis, you rally around the identity markers that are available to meet your needs in that given moment. The Palestinian Arabs are in a crisis, but due to the undermining of local institutions and the lazy banality of their leaders, they're lacking any secular political identity projects. They don't have a strong political identity, but the need to organize and resist something happening to them is still there. So, over time, they almost automatically start seeking out something else. That's something else is Islam, of which now they're more aware than ever, thanks to all the non-Muslims going around the country knocking stuff around. In many ways, the formation of a symbolic identity is like a magic trick, or like a hypnosis, actually, where the trick is to cause the attention of a large group of people to fix as one on an outside object. And that experience of shared attention has this effect where it starts to melt away barriers between people. As if all those minds facing the same direction with similar thoughts about the object of their focus, thoughts that are reinforced by these myths and hero stories and histories, it's if all those minds facing the same direction start to merge together to a degree. And what's the easiest way to draw people's attention to the same thing? And then hold it there. We all know the answer to that. We can probably find the answer in human prehistory, where the first bits of language were probably what? Warnings of impending danger. Nothing gets a pack of our proto-human ancestors to all face the same direction and jump into a similar emotional state than one of the members of the group yelling whatever cave noise they had for tiger over there. Well, we don't usually run into tigers today. We have different issues. So to pull off this trick and fix people's attention like that, we've got to create our own monsters. Terrorists over there, the Soviets over there, the Jews over there. As we move through the world, we're going to be able to see the truth. through the mid into the second half of the 1920s, things start to come together in a way that sends this process into overdrive. Now, I've said a few times, I think maybe without explaining that life had been getting worse from any Arab families, and I should probably dilate on that. We're kind of at the midpoint of this whole big story right now. After we reach this sort of peak on the roller coaster, we've kind of been click, click, click, click, you know, going up, and we're about to tip over into a free fall with hell at the bottom. Okay, so let me take one moment to just talk about a couple things because it's important to understand everything that happens going forward. Just as it's important to understand the real threats against the Jews to understand why the Zionists would do what they did, why they would take such drastic actions. It's also important to understand exactly how life had been getting worse for the Arabs as a result of all this and exactly why they were upset about it. Because there's a lot of misconceptions around this and I think that it affects the way people perceive some of the basic aspects of the conflict. To clear that up, it means we have to talk a little bit about the real estate market. Well, the Ottoman Empire, British mandatory Palestine, real estate market anyway, very quickly. I'll try to make this brief, but it's very important. I promise it's very important. By 1925, virtually all Zionists land in Palestine is being purchased by the Jewish National Fund. You remember them? They had the little blue and white box and people would drop coins in it and so forth. Before 1925, the Zionists were just accumulating land in a haphazard manner. The idea was that land acquisition should be driven by new arrivals, basic common sense, right? We have 80 Jewish immigrants coming in next month and we got to find a place to settle them. So who's selling? Okay, you, all right. That's where you guys are gone. Let's go. That's how it worked. But after the rate of Jewish immigration started to slow down in the early 1920s, Zionists needed a new strategy. The initial idea was to flood the country with this wave of Jewish immigration as quickly as possible. Time-vitesmen had fantasies of 5 million Jews showing up right after the First World War and just settle them wherever you can find room. Go, go, go, go. That clearly was not going to happen. It quickly became clear that the flood was not going to last. Meaning the Zionists were not going to be creating a majority through immigration anytime soon. Now, they didn't have people, but what they did have was money. Okay, and those two things are kind of related. Things are going really well in New York and London and a lot of other parts of the world. It's the, it's the Roar in 20s. People are making a lot of money. A lot of that money is making its way into the coffers of the Jewish National Fund, but it's also giving Jews around the world a reason to not want to pack up, stop what they're doing, go, move to Palestine. And so they don't have people. They got a lot of money. And so they decided that if the Jews don't get it yet, if they're not ready for our message yet, fine. Let them stay in Britain or America or Poland or Germany and live out their little lives. Fine. We can wait. In the meantime, the Zionists were going to focus on buying a land and preparing the ground for that day when the Jews of the world finally realized the danger they're in. When that day comes, the Zionists will be ready. Okay, he's sitting here in Palestine and this little Noah's Ark that they built for everyone. From now on, the Zionists will be pursuing a policy of colonization without colonists. And the acquisition and holding of land is going to become their primary strategic weapon of war, pushing Palestine closer, closer, closer to that edge until the day the final crisis comes and everything breaks down. This land buying spree was creating a tremendous amount of disruption and pain for the Arab peasantry in the Bedouin no Meds. A great deal of the land in Palestine was not owned in anything like the way we think of owning a piece of real estate today in the modern developed world, nothing like that. The ownership arrangements were set up under the Ottoman Empire for the most part and that was just a different world altogether. So different, it's hard to relate to in a lot of ways. You're talking about an empire that had only relatively recently gotten rid of its standing army of foreign slave soldiers. Okay, it's a different world. Well, the Ottoman Empire was gone, but many of the ownership arrangements carried on more less intact. It was closer to feudalism than it was to capitalism. It wasn't full feudalism, but maybe you could say that the system resembled something like the landed gentry system in Britain, something like that. And many people hearing this story often reach a point where they say, "Way, we will get hold on. What is this about design is buying land?" I thought we were talking about occupation, colonization. You mean to tell me that the Arabs are just like some guy who sold his house and then changed his mind six months later and demanded his house back? And when the new owner wouldn't give it back, he threatened to burn down the house. Is that what's happening here? The answer is no. That's not what's happening. And to understand why the Arabs would be so upset at what was happening to them, it's necessary to understand the differences between an American buying a house and 2015 and design this buying Palestinian land in the 1920s. We don't really have too many peasants today. And so most people in developed the world have kind of totally lost a clear idea of what they even are. In this case, and in most cases, peasants are subsistence farmers, meaning they're scratching out of basic living, their subsistence farmers who have for centuries been held and treated as people of the lowest social standing. Most didn't own their own land, although there were a few prosperous peasants who had bought and expanded their farms. That was not the majority. The Arabs of the countryside though, the felahine is the Arabic word. Most of them had been scratching out a living on the same piece of ground for a long, long time. Meaning very simple lives that didn't extend much beyond their immediate vicinity. Just as in Europe and other places, the peasants never had any say in who ruled them, right? The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. That was the peasants lot, not them in Palestine. And they had very few legal protections against higher born people. For a long time in the Ottoman Empire, just as in many other places, the peasants didn't even have the option of owning any land. All land is held at the pleasure of the Sultan and he can distribute and take away ownership whenever he wants. Well, when some Arab or Turkish notable becomes favored and received rights over a piece of land from the Ottoman state, that guy's not going to all of a sudden move out of a lepo or Beirut or wherever he lives and go try his hand at farming. No, there are already people living on that land. They've been living there for generations. And so instead of taking any direct interest in the land, they would just keep the ancestral farmers on his tenants who would pay a rent, either in money or a portion of their crops. So in other words, land ownership under the Ottoman system was just essentially the right to collect income from the peasants in that area. That's what land ownership meant. When you read something like Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, right, you'll hear someone say that Mr. Darcy is a suitable bachelor with an income of 5,000 pounds per year. Well, the story takes place in the early 1800s in England, right? So when they say that he has an income of 5,000 pounds, they mean that due to his high birth, he's been given power over in a state whose peasants are required to pay him 5,000 pounds every year. That's what that means. What was going on in the Ottoman Empire is not a perfect match to that, but it's close enough to get an idea of how things were working. In the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire introduced some land reforms that allowed peasants to hold their own land, but very quickly became clear that that was just a way for the Ottoman Empire to know exactly where everyone was in order to pull them up for conscription or extra taxation. And so there were wealthy and politically connected notables who had sent out agents to persuade the frightened peasantry, people who were afraid of getting pulled up and sent off to some war by the Turks. Go out and persuade these people, look, just sign over your land to me. I'll give you a contract in perpetuity, right? A forever contract stating that you will never be deprived of your right to stay on this land and work it as you have for generations, as long as you pay a little bit of rent. So a lot of them took them up on that offer. These are a subjugated people. You have to remember that this is an empire. The Turks had conquered the Arabs and the Arab peasantry were a subjugated people. They were afraid of things like being pulled up by the Turks and sent out to the frontlines of their wars. And then the First World War comes along and it's just a bananza for the worst kind of land investors. During the war, the Ottoman Empire pulled up some 300,000 Arabs from the Levant and Mesopotamian. This is a very lightly populated area. That's a lot of people. 300,000 Arabs to go fight their war for them and most of those were peasants. And they were killed very often. The widow, she was out of luck. And so the large landholders would swoop in and take advantage of this confused and grieving widow, maybe offer her a little money to feed her kids and take care of them for a while and exchange for title to the land. It's ugly stuff, but this is what happens. During the great famine of that war, you'd have politically connected individuals in importing food from other parts of the empire and bringing it into this starving area to take advantage of the mass starvation to consolidate their land holdings. Their stories of fathers signing over their family farms were just enough nourishment to last a week or two for their kids. You know, that's what happened. It happened. It's dark shit, but it happens in every famine. Just like after hurricanes, the United States, we have gas stations gouging people with exorbitant prices and then we'll have those really nasty human beings going around trying to take advantage of devastated families with insurance scams. So I can't even put my mind into the state of somebody like that, but similar things go on in famines is the point. In the Ukrainian famine coming up in the early 1930s, there are just so many horror stories of the Soviet secret police who were enforcing the famine, going around to peasant houses in the countryside, searching them for food, beating and executing people if they find even a grain of wheat and then pulling out a loaf of bread and offering it to the family to fill up the bellies of these starving children if only the farmer's wife will prostitute herself or if only the family would give up that heirloom that had been in the family for generations for this loaf of bread. It was an absolute nightmare. It was a nightmare. Well there were things happening in the Levantine famine of the First World War as well. A lot of the land in Palestine was held by these large politically favored landowners who most of the time had never even set highs on their property. They lived off in Damascus or Aleppo or Beirut or Istanbul. They didn't come down here. The powerful people jockeyed for status and traded land rights back and forth. The peasants had no role in that. They suffered what they had to and the only thing that changed for them was who happened to be receiving their rent when the collector came around. So now if you're a peasant family and you've been living on this piece of land for generations, your great grandfather built this house and planted those olive trees that took 30 years to mature. And throughout that time different notables would swap land rights here and there and you would just pay your rent, hope your crops were abundant, take care of your kids, try to live your life. Just like your father and your grandfather and your great grandfather. Now all of a sudden the First World War is over. Your country is being flooded with these white Europeans stomping around the country, kind of belligerent like they like they own the place, both from Britain and then the Zionist from Russia and Eastern Europe. Look at all these white Europeans coming in and they're coming around telling you that this is their land now and you're going to have to pack up and get lost. Your great grandfather built this house but they explain that they paid off the landholder or some guy that you've never even heard of living off in Beirut, some other distant city. So it was theirs now and you got to go. How would you react to that? You remember this is not the United States in 2015. It's not like you lose your farm and so instead decide to go back to school and become a computer programmer. Okay, no, these people are peasants, they're subsistence farmers. They're not educated. Their family has only ever formed this land. That's what they do. It's tied up into their very sense of self identity. So when these people are driven off their farms, they didn't just lose a place to live and they didn't just lose their means of providing for themselves. They lost a whole way of life. The only way of life they'd ever known or even really imagined. And the Zionists were ruthless about making sure that there were no Arabs left on land they purchased. That was one thing they were ruthless about. The rules of the Jewish National Fund were very clear that any land purchased on behalf of Jews could only ever be owned by Jews, inhabited by Jews, worked by Jews, not only right now but forever. This is really the main thing that is so different from anything we might think of seeing today. If a Mexican immigrant comes into the United States and buys a house in Arizona, that's great, he now owns a house in the United States. But that piece of land does not suddenly become Mexico when he buys it. That's not how it works in any country in the world. But that's exactly what was happening in Palestine during this time. Once the Jewish National Fund got its hands on attractive land, that land was gone forever to the Palestinian Arabs. Gone. One more acre, gone. They were forced to vacate. No one but Jews were allowed to work on the land. Even traveling through it was trespassing and the Arabs began to learn pretty quickly that traveling through rural Zionist land was a good way to get shot at. So that evolutionary Zionism, one more acre, one more goat. Every time the Zionist gobbled up another acre that was one more acre that would never be available to the Arabs again. It was against the bylaws of the Jewish National Fund to sell the land back to a non-Jew. It was illegal to do that. If a Jewish man had an Arab wife and his children were half Arab and that man died, his land was taken away from his widow. Jews only, that was the rule. It's the rule today with the Jewish National Fund actually. How would any people react to that? The Zionist also used other means to exclude the Arabs. David Ben Gurion controlled the Zionist labor collective called the Histodrew. Remember most of these guys are socialists. This labor union labor collective called the Histodrew controlled 70% of all Jewish labor by 1927, 70%. Hugely powerful. And he used the power of this union to put pressure on any Jewish employers who were hiring Arabs. Much of the time put pressure is not strong enough language, very often it strays over into bullying and harassment. The British officer I've already quoted a few times has a story about that. Lieutenant Colonel Sterling, he wrote about how a prominent Jewish farmer from outside Jaffa had come and asked to meet with him in secret after dark. He thought this was very strange. This Jewish farmer had lived in Palestine for a long time, long before the disturbances of the last few years. And he was asking Sterling for help with the problem. And so Sterling wrote quote, he explained how as a small boy, he had been brought to Palestine by his father, one of the biggest landowners of the village. Growing up there, he had made numerous friends among the little Arab boys of his own age. On his father's death, he had taken over the property and naturally continued to employ his boyhood friends, his herdsmen, plowmen and teamsters. That morning, however, the Jewish agency had ordered him to dismiss all his Arab employees to engage some newly arrived Jewish immigrants. What should he do? If he dismissed the Arabs in the summary manner, suggested such a bad feeling would be created, they might well burn his crops. Apart from this consideration, they also happened to be his friends. The Jews who had been proposed to him knew nothing about farming. End quote. Remember, this was a Jewish farmer that had owned his own land for a long time. So it wasn't even Jewish national fund land, and they still forced him to get in line and cut his Arab friends loose. There's a lot of internal enforcement going on. You see, in an established state, we use violence to prevent this from happening. That's what we do. If someone comes into the country and buys a piece of land, and then all of a sudden he says this land is his sovereign territory and no one else can ever own it or use it. In fact, it's not even part of the United States anymore. It's its own little territory. Then we would send in men of violence, either the police or the military, he has needed to correct his little misunderstanding. If he says white people only allow him this part of the country, we're going to tell him, yeah, you can't do that. You can't do that. I'm not going to let you do that. And if you keep it up, then eventually those men of violence are going to come around and pay you a visit. That's how we deal with that. Well, if you're in Arab and British mandate Palestine, what are your options? You go to the British, the mandatory government are all Zionists. They don't care. They know what's happening. They're okay with it. They see it as their job to help facilitate it. And what else is there? Your tribal leaders are basically worthless. Very often they're the wealthy landowners who are selling your farms and getting you evicted, so they don't care. And sometimes this is something that's very frustrating to me. Sometimes I'll hear people say that the Arabs almost deserve to lose their land to the Zionists because the Zionists were effective and united and the Arabs were just so venal and self-interested they couldn't organize and cooperate to defend themselves. And that's how history works. But that's committing the biggest history sent in the book, I think anyway. Yes, the Arab notables were sleazy and self-interested group. But we're talking about 0.001% of the Arab population. The vast majority of the people in Palestine had no voice at all and nobody was speaking for them. The Giant Jewish National Fund would buy up another tract of land from a distant land lord or from a farmer who would fail to crop and now that land is gone. That's the new normal. Suddenly, there were shanty towns cropping up outside of cities like Haifa filled with thousands of destitute Arab farmers who had been evicted from farms that they had lived in for maybe 100, 200 years. they had no idea. other way to take care of their families. Suddenly, these people who would live the traditional way of life, sometimes for centuries, these are simple people, remember. Of a type we don't even encounter too often in modern life. Suddenly, these Europeans show up, and your way of life that it existed for hundreds of years, given you a measure of dignity and independence. Now that's all gone. And you're living under a dirty tarp on the outskirts of Haifa in this dingy, shanty town, watching your grandfather shitting a hole in the ground while you and your sons go into town, hoping, hoping against hope to find some low wage medial work at the British port or at some other operation run by the British of the Zionist. You walk through the city from your filthy, hovel outside the city. You're just totally disoriented. You have no way of even beginning to understand what has happened to you. What's happened to your country? And you see that there are apartment slums now filled with Arabs who used to be farmers living tend to a room. When you get to the nicer parts of town and start to see the businesses, a lot of them are inhabited by these new Europeans who came over with more money than you had ever seen in your whole life. Often the evicted Arab farmers would actually return to go see their former homes, and they would find that the buildings had become totally run down in the trees that all died, and the land was just left to the weeds and it was nature was taking it back because the Zionists had purchased it even though they didn't have anyone to live on it. They'd made you leave even though they didn't have anyone to live on it. Well, sometimes desperate Arabs would just suck it up and they would ask, look, there isn't anyone living here. Why don't you just let my family come back, we'll work the land, we'll pay rent like we've always done, we'll pass it up to you, we'll just be able to take care of ourselves. Why should the land just sit here doing nothing and being retaken by nature? It's happened a lot, actually. But every time they were told no, we don't hire Arabs and Arabs cannot live on Jewish land. So how long would it take for you to want to find the people that did this to you? As you're sitting there kind of on that chain link fence holding onto it with your fingers and looking at your former home, the house, your great grandfather built, and now your great grandfather, your grandfather is shitting in that hole in the ground in that shanty town outside of Haifa. And it's just the whole place is going to shit because it's falling apart because there's nobody living there. They made you leave and there was nobody to even live there. Now badly would you be looking for some kind of an explanation of what was happening to your country? Well the Arabs were very close to reaching the end of their rope by the late 1920s. They have nobody speaking for them. Nobody except the imams. One thing that's important to understand too is that for all their talk about a civilizing mission, please know that the British empire does not play games in the territories it colonizes. Okay, these dudes are not playing games. Depending on how the rhythm of this story goes, if I have a little time going forward, I'll talk a little bit about what they were doing in places like Iraq right around this time. It was not pretty. In Palestine during these years, this is an occupied territory. Okay, there aren't that many soldiers in the country, but this is an occupied territory. They're right across the border in Egypt. If you were in Arab or a Muslim and you didn't like what was going on and you started talking about it on the street corner or holding meetings to talk about how the British should pack up and go home, you were going to get arrested. Okay, you might get disappeared. You couldn't just speak your mind like that. That's not how it worked. This is an occupied territory. You couldn't even travel around the country to create support for a movement or anything like that. You had to have permission to travel around the country. One of the other reasons that the religious leaders were able to start building up more and more of a base was that their people had permission to travel around because they had to do things like officiate weddings and funerals so forth. I remember a long time ago when I was doing my first dose of heavy research on this subject and I had been reading this huge amount of stuff. A dozen books by this point. Hundreds of articles and diary entries and papers. I was pretty immersed at that point. I had read all that and I came across a line in a paper about an Arab leader who's going to emerge a little bit later in the story and it put out there as a sort of offhand comment that he was able to start building a following because as a marriage official working for the Supreme Muslim Council, unlike most people, he had permission to move around the country from village to village and I was blown away. Blown away. Because I'd read a fair amount by this point. It was the early part of my research but I'd read a fair amount enough to give me a general idea I thought about what was going on and nothing. None of the stuff I had read up to that point had even given me the slightest idea that these people in Palestine, the native Arabs, you know, the books I was reading would talk occasionally about how they would rise up or they would be a riot and it would just sort of stayed very generally that they were upset about the presence of the Jews in their country or that they were upset that their national hopes were being thwarted. Generalizations, but when you think of a bunch of people who finally get to the point where they're ready to start burning stuff down, it makes a huge difference to your understanding the situation. If you know that these people who had just been living their lives in their land for centuries, all of a sudden have these Europeans showing up and now they're not even allowed to travel around their own country without permission. And so yeah, let's talk about the religious leaders. This is a good time to talk about the religious leaders and it'll prepare us pretty well the segue into the real climax of the story at top of the rollercoaster I was talking about before we tip over. The religious leaders are able to move around the country freely. Okay, they've got jobs to do. They have to officiate funerals and marriages and do other things that have to do a sharia law. So they use that opportunity or it kind of happened by default really, they were able to start building up a following among all the new disaffected people and all these frustrated nationalists who were tired of their tribal leaders. They were able to start collecting people around them. Your religious leaders had a much greater freedom to speak their minds. Okay, if you're an Arab nationalist out on the corner talking about running the British out of town, there's a good chance you're going to end up missing. But if you're a religious leader, speaking in a mosque, saying that it's unacceptable to have foreign powers ruling over Muslim lands, the British might not like that. But they're savvy enough to know that they've got to be a little bit more careful with you. They start yoking up religious leaders, just speaking against them. Now they're running the risk of making people in all the Arab countries in which they're interested, starting to think that maybe they do have a common enemy. And so the mosques basically became the only places where you'd be allowed to meet up in groups and actually vent your grievances about what was going on. To try to control the narrative inside the mosques and to make sure that things never got beyond that venting stage, the British employed the Grand Muthdi of Jerusalem, Hajj, Amin al-Husayni. We've spoken about them several times. He's the most important Palestinian Muslim religious leader. The Grand Muthdi is the highest Muslim office in the country. And the British were playing Husayni, playing the Grand Muthdi the same way that they've been using the Nasha Shibis on the other side, playing off the Husayni's paranoia and distrust of the Nasha Shibis and playing off the self-interest of the Husayni's themselves to keep the Grand Muthdi in line. The British had also funded the operation of the Islamic waf, which is sort of, I guess it's a sort of mix between a religious charity, a public works and a social welfare organization. And a country that really didn't have too many other institutions performing those functions. And then after funding that, they gave Hajj a very free reign to operate that waf. What wasn't long before the Grand Muthdi Supreme Muslim Council was pretty much the only Arab network in the country with any kind of cloud at all. Or there was providing any kind of meaningful voice or any kind of services for a people who below the surface being watched by an increasingly complacent and comfortable British administration were watching their whole world slip away. These are people who had once had the dignity of self-sufficiency at least, who were now having to deal with being pushed out into run down shanty towns and begging for work from the people who were evicting them. All the tribal elites were living fine meanwhile. They're collaborating with the British and the Zionists and accomplishing nothing. As meanwhile, one more farmer, one more family, one more acre, one more goat is gobbled up by these new people. And even though he continued to tell the British that everything was going fine, he wanted to keep his job, the Grand Muthdi wrote in his journal in 1928, quote, "Although the surface of the waters is now quiet, the deep waters are in a very troubled condition. I regret to see the wicked fire of a warrants is blazing under this layer of ashes." The tribal leaders have been squabbling for years accomplishing nothing while the people suffered and more and more Muslim preachers are beginning to speak out about the leadership. They're saying enough is enough. You're from this tribe and he's from that tribe because you can't get along. No one is organizing to defend these people from what's happening to them. How about you forget your stupid tribes for a minute? How about you're both Muslims, huh? How about that? How about you have a religious duty to defend Muslim lands. What do you think of that? That's what they were starting to say, and that message was starting to gain a lot of momentum. Seeing any divided society facing conquest or oppression, survival rests on whether or not the disparate groups can unite to resist their discipline-focused opponent. If the Native Americans had been able to find some basis to unite under a single banner to work together and repel the Europeans, I wouldn't be writing this from Los Angeles right now. Even with the losses incurred from the diseases, the Native Americans gave us a tough enough time without having any overall organizational structure at all. Instead, just as the Spanish did the Aztecs and the Incas, the Europeans were able to play different groups off one another, even using one group in combat against another group, doing everything to make sure that they don't realize the common threat that they are all under. With your that society under threat, you're going to look for something to rally around. Something that can serve as common ground for your people who have traditionally been rivals, for your people to recognize their common interest. The return to Palestine and the Jewish National Project was the response of some Jews who felt their community faced an existential threat and who needed to find some kind of flag that would allow Jews from Ukraine, England, America, Germany, wherever, to all come together. For the Arabs, again, the secular political channels were all being closed off from neutered, and so the only people speaking out were the Amoms, and a lot of this was going on in these new slums inside rundown mosques or out in the countryside, and the British were mostly oblivious to it. They weren't in the slums, they weren't out in the countryside in these villages. They're talking to the Arab notables in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. So as they grow complacent, and the Zionists start to feel a little more secure, the 1920s have been pretty quiet, right? We're up to the late 1920s. The last real riot was in 1921, starting to feel kind of secure. Maybe things are getting a little bit better, but Palestinian nationalism was slowly beginning to find its footing. It was slowly beginning to find its firm basis in jihad. As the 1920s wore on the Zionists did begin to feel safer, more physically secure, but many of them were starting to feel very anxious about the future of their project. See, things were better than ever in most of the world if you were a Jew. Better than it ever been. Jews had been elevated to all the top professions in Germany. They were making money in London and New York. Things were getting a lot better in a lot of places. And if you're a Zionist, somebody who's trying to convince all the Jews of the world that there's anti-Semites around every corner and they all better come to Palestine to escape, that's bad news for you. Even out in the east, Eastern Europe and Russia, after an initial outburst of terror, horrible outbursts of terror that I didn't even mention, tens of thousands, at least tens of thousands of Jews killed in pogroms right after the First World War in the former Russian Empire. But even out in the east, after that initial burst, the situation in Russia had become almost completely reversed for the Jews. The Russian revolutionaries in the early Soviet governments were so heavily populated with Jews that it became a common thing for people to think of the Bolshevik movement and Soviet Communism as a Jewish revolution. There were even Zionists that thought of it that way. That definitely goes way too far. It was not that, especially since a major point to the Soviet Communists was the denial of nationalism altogether in favor of class warfare. But still, that idea, that conspiracy idea is rooted in something real. And it's rooted in this astonishing number of Jews in the Russian Revolution and this early Soviet government. Life for Jews in the Soviet Union was really different than it had ever been before. In some ways, many situations had just become again, completely reversed. Jews used to hide from anti-Semitic peasants and talents people in places like Ukraine. Now Joseph Stalin made anti-Semitism punishable by death. Instead of fearing pogroms from the surrounding people, it was now the surrounding people who feared retribution. Stalin's horrific, brutal, terrifying secret police employed Jews for between 40 and 50% of its officer corps. And for more than half of its generals throughout all the 1920s into the late 1930s, 40 to 50%. And we're talking about a population, the Soviet Jews that make up about 4% of the total population. I mean, Asian Americans make up about 4.8% of the American population. So you'd have to imagine it being like 50% of the FBI was Chinese. Six out of nine Supreme Court justices were Asian. Two thirds of the house and Senate were Chinese. I for one welcome our new Chinese overlords. But there's such a small part of the American population that you'd have to wonder what exactly was going on. How is this tiny little group that was a real thing and there are good explanations for it, non-conspiratory explanations for it. We've talked a little bit about, but it was a real phenomenon. And I'm bringing it up here to point out that things are not so bad in places where previously they had been really bad. After the mid 1920s, there were fewer Jews in the Soviet government positions, but their presence in Stalin's secret police was totally dominant until the late 1930s. So the Soviet Union's another place where suddenly it's not all that bad to be a Jewish person. Things are looking up. But again, if you're a Jewish nationalist trying to get everyone to see that they're not safe in their home countries and they have to hurry up and pack it up and come to Palestine, things getting better is not the most desirable thing. And that wasn't just cynicism. It wasn't just that the Zionist wanted things to be bad so that their project wasn't it. It was the Zionist did not buy what was going on. They looked around Europe and Russia and they said, look, I know things seem okay now. They've seemed okay before. Okay, they've been looking up before. These people will turn on you. Things are easy right now. The stock markets booming, people making money, but they won't always be easy. And when things get hard, you'll see these people are your enemy. They are your enemy. And you need to get out and come help us in Palestine while you still have a choice. That's the way they thought about it. They did not buy it. But all through the 1920s, that was not a message. It was resonating. A lot of Jews did not want to hear it. A lot of them were getting irritated with the Zionists. They were trying to shut them up like, dude, things have been going pretty well. If anything is going to piss these people off and make them turn on us, it's going to be you running around ranting about them being our enemies. Shut up. And these conflicts are going on in the 1920s. Just as the Arabs are trying to find a way to rally their people to come together and stay focused, the Zionists are trying to do the same thing. And they're having struggles with their own. You why do this if things are actually getting better in the rest of the world? Why do any of this? That was a question that the true believers had to answer convincingly to keep others on board and attract new people. Well, that's exactly the kind of thing that Zaev Djabitinsky was put on this earth for. Okay, he wasn't a diplomat like Weitzmann or a technocrat like Ben Gurion. No, he was a soldier and he was an inspirational figure first and foremost. I mentioned before, just like his friend Joseph Trump, or he carried a chip on his shoulder. He hated the stereotypes of Jews, these little weaklings. He spoke to the need. This is what he did. He spoke to the need of an oppressed people, people who had been beaten down for so many years. He spoke to the need of these people to stand up and demand that they be treated with dignity. There wasn't enough to figure out a way to be treated with dignity. You had to demand it. It's about standing up. There were a lot of young Zionists who had always lived their lives in a world where being a Jew meant staying in the shadows, it meant hiding, it meant being ashamed, it meant being looked at as untrustworthy, defenseless, pathetic for Jews like Djabitinsky. This was intolerable. Zionism was as much about standing up and declaring yourself as it was about escape or survival. As Ben Gurion invites men, you can say the leaders of Zionists left in middle, respectively, were keeping their mouths shut and their noses to the grindstone, Djabitinsky came in and filled that vacuum by getting out there and getting people excited about the deep historical and mythological moment that they were all involved with. You didn't find himself the Palestine. That's another big difference between him and Ben Gurion. The Baytar paramilitary youth organization he founded was originally founded in Latvia, but it spread to countries all over Europe and then into Palestine as a way for hardcore nationalist Jews to come together and organize their efforts. If Ben Gurion was a builder, hammering the different pieces of Zionist project into place as I do a hammer motion with my hand for some reason, Djabitinsky was a planter. Going around dropping seeds all over the place. and then letting them grow to see what happens, not as much micro management as Bangerion would have done. And that becomes a problem later. Jabotinsky and the revisionist would use every slight or perceived indignity, anything they could latch onto by the British or the Arabs to get their people fired up. The relative quiet from the left, from Bangerion and so forth, the relative quiet over there made it seem to many Jews like the revisionist were the only ones standing up for Jewish dignity. They were the only vocal group demanding official concessions from the British and the Arabs. When the riots happened, it was Jabotinsky's fighters who were the main force going around protecting Jewish neighborhoods. Jabotinsky began to use the holy places to increase his standing relative to the other leaders. You know we weren't going to last long in the holy land without bringing those into the story. His people started to push for greater Jewish access to their most holy place, the wailing wall in the old city of Jerusalem. When he started to do this, the Muslim population in Palestine already starting to fall in line behind these imams preaching jihad finally starts to really take notice. It really starts to take notice in a collective way for the first time. You can think of what's about to happen like a kind of vortex, okay, all around or a bunch of Zionists, bunch of Arabs and they're just sort of milling around going about their days. As tensions rise throughout the decade, the people on the ground, they don't like each other. You know, they don't necessarily get along, but their leaderships for the most part are not giving any shape to those feelings. They're not providing any real vent. The mainstream Zionist leadership is doing the evolutionary thing, keeping quiet, not making a stink. The Arab leaders are happy to just keep chugging along accomplishing nothing. So no one is providing inspiration or moral leadership. So there's this vacuum. And right in the middle of this big group of Zionists and Arabs are jabbitinsky in the revisionists and the grandmuthdi Hajj Amin Al Hussein, religious followers, using the holy places of Jerusalem to suck everybody else into this vortex. By 1927-1928, we've got sporadic fights breaking out around the old city in Jerusalem, right around the holy places. And it's just taken place right at that time when the Arab leadership is offering to accept the representative government that would actually give Zionists their disproportionate number of seats. They're feeling a little more confident. 1927-Morjou's left Palestine then showed up. And so they were starting to think that maybe just being displaced from their country and completely run out is probably not in the card. There's still only 15% of the population after all this time. Let's just accept the representative government, give them a few more seats, and we'll work from there. Well, right as the Arab leadership is being conciliatory like this, starting to feel a little bit more secure with everything, fights are breaking out around the holy places among the people on the ground. By the end of 1928, the two sides are purposely antagonizing each other all the time, trying to show up their opponents and to show their own people that there really is a threat. Just went back and forth. Jabitinsky and his followers would say something or do something that they knew was going to be provocative. And when the Arabs inevitably obliged them with a provocation of their own, Jabitinsky would point to the inaction of Ben Grian and the mainstream Zionist leadership. And he would say, "Who are you going to follow?" We're not just doing this for a piece of land, right? We're doing this for Jewish dignity and Jewish pride. Are you going to let the Arabs treat you like this? Are you going to let them insult you like this? Are you going to follow somebody who's going to let them get away with it? And the grand most he was doing things just as petty. He would order noisy construction projects right around the wall where Jews would try to pray. Very petty, but this kind of stuff was working on both sides. The common people on both sides were starting to pay attention. They were starting to actually feel insulted, starting to actually say, "Yeah, we do want to follow someone who's going to stand up for us." Ben Grian and Wightsman are becoming furious, which Jabitinsky and his followers are like, "Would you please shut the hell up?" We've been working on this for a decade. You're going to ruin it. Would you please shut up? And he's starting a fight that could unravel everything that they've been working for for the last decade. But Jabitinsky's not just doing this for notoriety. You know, he's not doing even doing this because he's trying to rise up to the ranks of the Zionist leadership, except in so far as he thinks he'd be a better leader. He's not doing it for self-aggrandizement or anything like that, though. He's a true believer. And personality-wise, he's a match for someone, even like Ben Grian. So he doesn't back down, and he keeps it up. And now that tense working relationship that he's had with the mainstream Zionist leaders by the late 20s is starting to turn into more of an active hostility. By 1929, the Grand Muftiha Jaminah Hussein is just over the top frustrated with all the other Palestinian Arab notables. He thinks they're completely useless, completely bought off. And so he starts looking elsewhere for support. If the Nasha Shibis are bought off by the British, if the Khalidis are collaborating, fine. Let him collaborate. He starts looking outside Palestine for help. He tries to internationalize the Palestinian national cause. And he was in a unique position to do that. Any other tribal leader couldn't go to the leaders of trans Jordan or Egypt or Saudi Arabia and call on their loyalty to support his cause. They didn't know him anything. They didn't care. But as the leader of Palestine's Muslim community, the Grand Mufti was able to call on them to do their duty as Muslims to protect the holy places if they were under threat. And so he started playing up that threat, promoting himself as the staunch defender of the Muslim holy places. He held conferences and rallies and he's going around telling everyone in, you know, typical Arab hyperbolic rhetoric, you know, we'll never let the crusaders or their Jewish allies take away our holy moss. That kind of thing. And right as he's doing that, Jabetinsky and the revisionists are making this a very easy case to make because they're becoming more and more vocal and belligerent about Jewish rights over the holy places. So the two sides are feeding on each other. It's almost as if they were working together on this. They weren't. But if they had been, I don't think they could have made it work anymore perfectly. There are two sacred Muslim mosques up on a hill in Jerusalem called Mount Mariah. This is the temple mount to the Jews, the noble sanctuary to the Muslims. It's in the middle of Jerusalem's old city and it's, you know, there's no other way to put it. It's one of the most incredible places in the world. Every time I've been there, it blows me away more than it did the time before. Familiarity does not lessen the impact one bit. And once you know a little bit about the history of the place and where it stands in the minds of so many people throughout history, it just hits you that much harder. On that hill, the centerpiece of that site is the dome of the rock. It's this beautiful mosque with a big golden dome. The place is sometimes called the Golden Dome, built in 691 AD. And just to the southwest of that is the Al-Aqsa mosque. And this is believed to be the place where the prophet Muhammad was transported after his famous night journey into heaven. And Muslim tradition holds that the prophet had originally instructed his followers to pray facing this spot in Jerusalem because there were still idols in Mecca. And they did pray there until he reoriented them toward Mecca in the 17th month of his ministry when they finally cleaned the place out. So this is an important place to these people. But contrary to what you might expect, and despite the memory of the Crusades, and despite the competing future plans for the site between the religious Muslims and the religious Jews, up until the 1920s, most people said that Palestine's Muslims were pretty laid back, relatively laid back, when it came to the sites around the sacred hill. An American journalist arrived in Palestine right around this time, a guy named Vincent Shehan. He left behind some amazing diaries and articles that do a great job of giving us a real feel for what things were like as the Rohan 20s came to an end in Palestine. Shehan wrote about the Muslim holy sites when he first arrived. And his impressions, he said, quote, "The dome of the rock was not visited by Orthodox Jews because it was regarded by them as the holiest part of their temple, and they feared to tread unwittingly on their holy of holies. But Zionists, most of whom without religious feeling, used to visit it as I did out of an ordinary aesthetic interest. The Muslims made no objection to such visits. In this and other respects, the Muslims of Palestine were less jealous of their holy places than Muslims elsewhere. I had never been allowed inside a great mosque in Morocco or Persia, but here a place far holier to the Islamic world was open to me or anybody else all day long. The same was true of the mosque of Al-Aqsa, once a Christian Basilica, and of the other parts of the site. It would be quite within the facts to say that the Haram-e-Sharif, that's the Noble Sanctuary, the Al-Ghaz Sanctuary, in spite of the religious traditions that made it one of the three holiest spots in Islam was treated as a public monument like St. Peter's in Rome or the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The more I learned about the tradition of the place, the more I was surprised at this," end quote. She had had come to write about Palestine and its Jewish communities that were growing. He was being funded by Zionist publication in the United States. But he hadn't come for any ideological reason. He wasn't attached to Zionism in any way. He just needed money and he was a writer. And he came into Palestine pretty much blind. And this isn't what makes him such a great source to this period. You can read his diary and see his opinions and understanding kind of unfold as he experiences different things in the country. When he got there he didn't know what the Zionist organization was. He never heard of it. He knew almost nothing about their project or about the country, really at all. But he had heard in America that Zionist groups were throwing money around to get people to write about their cause. So we got a hold of them and proposed that they pay for him to head over and write about what they've been doing. So they meet with him beforehand, they give him a big advance and they send him over. And he really has no idea what to expect other than the quick briefing that he got from the Zionist, which was obviously very curated. But as soon as he shows up in the summer in 1929, right away he gets a little taste of what he's walked into. Upon his arrival, someone comes to him a few days later, gives him an Arabic newspaper and points to a story announcing that an American named Vincent Shehan, it's him, had arrived in the country to write about what was happening and that he was in the pay of the Zionist. Now, Shehan didn't realize that there was a dispute going on here, so he had no idea what to make of this. He was in the pay of the Zionist, but he hadn't really known what was going on. So he didn't think that he was going to come in and be considered the agent of one side in a political dispute. And so he thought about it and give the guy credit. He called up the publication, Pangphus, Tripp and told him to keep their money. And he needed the money and in his diary that same day he wrote, quote, "Tuesday was distinguished for me by a thing I had never done before. I gave away $1,500. The way of it was this. That morning an Arab newspaper made a sort of attack on me, saying that I was in the pay of the Jews. This gave me much food for thought. It depressed me chiefly I decided because there was truth in it. Although I've always said I will not allow my opinions to be influenced, how can I be sure? I finally decided that I couldn't do it. I wrote to wise call, both in New York and Zurich and told him that I didn't want any more money. This relieved my feeling somewhat, although God knows how I shall get along without that money." So pretty solid guy, right? $1,500, a lot of money in 1929. For a writer doing an article, that's a lot of money today. We could probably use a few more journalists like him. So anyway, she hand shows up in late June and right away that article gives him a pretty good idea that there's something deeper happening in this country. His second sign that something was going on was that his decision not to accept the money, it wasn't taken lightly. It enraged the Zionists. And now it was they rather than the Arabs who were treating him like a potential suspicious enemy. Having only been briefed by the Zionists before he came and probably because of the usual American view of Palestine as the land of the Bible, she hadn't expected to come here and find a Jewish country. But when he first came into Jerusalem, he wrote something different. He said, "That was the first impression I received of Wal Jerusalem in the early days, that it was in Arab city. It was his Arab, his Cairo, or Baghdad, and the Zionist Jews, that is, the modern European Jews, were as foreign to it as I was myself." It was when he was on his way to Tel Aviv in a car a few days later that he really began to understand how serious things were getting. Before they left for their trip, he was staying in the house of a Jerusalem Zionist and his host and he had watched these three little babies playing in a crib and she had apparently was quite taken by them. So nothing happens for a while, but later on in the car ride, the Zionist, Gershana Gronski, he says to she hand quote, "This Zionism, those who oppose us oppose this." And he's talking about the babies because they were talking about that before. And she hand, this kind of came out of nowhere to him, he didn't know what he was really talking about. And he's kind of thinking, "Appose us." Like, what is this guy talking about? "Appose who, what do you mean?" And so she hand asked what he means. And Gronski says quote, "I mean that these are our standards. Those who oppose us want to see the children of this country brought up in filth. As you can see in any Arab village, this is the whole Zionist problem right before you. Those babies in their cribs end quote." Now apparently she hand let it go for a little while, but he was stewing about it. He couldn't keep it in. So later in their journey, he says to a Gronski quote, "You know perfectly well that this isn't the problem at all. I'll tell you what the problem is if you think I really don't know." And so a Gronski says go ahead and she hand says to him quote, "The problem is not one of higher or lower standards. Any fool knows that higher standards of living are preferable to lower standards of living. Nobody could oppose Zionism if meant simply the improvement of the conditions of life in Palestine. The opposition to Zionism so far as I can tell is based on the fact that Zionism proposes to settle or colonize a country that is already inhabited by another people." She hand writes about the incident in his diary that day he says quote, "He began to argue that the Arabs had no feeling of nationalism, that they were a mercenary people with no race or national principles, that they could not oppose Zionism and would not oppose Zionism as long as they were paid." I said that I had known Arabs in other countries, not Palestine, and that I simply didn't believe it. I said, now he's quoting himself, "If you want to take those babies at Mark and Hoff as the symbols of the Zionist problem, there is one way in which you can do it. Think of them as a problem of life and death. One fine day if the Zionist program continues, those babies will have their throats cut by some angry Arab. It's happened in other countries and it will happen here. Are you prepared for that?" In fact, it was diary says, "He balked at the question for a long time, denying that the Arabs could get so angry, denying that the colonies were weak and defenseless, denying that there was a state of conflict around them. Finally, when he couldn't deny anymore, he said flatly, stubbornly. All right, if some have to die, they will have to die. Zionism cannot stop and cannot fail." The argument went on for many hours and was resumed again today. I got rather excited. I should never have talked in that way, but I see it more and more every day as a political problem, and I couldn't allow him to put it into such terms. I'm coming or have already come to two conclusions that the difficulty of Zionism is essentially one thing only. It's attempt to settle a country that is already settled, and second, that the Balfour Declaration guarantees only one thing, the permanence of the British occupation of Palestine." From this conversation through the rest of his stay in Palestine, she hand becomes a kind of a free agent, and because of that, he's one of the best accounts from this whole period. Only since we have not only prepared articles, prepared writings from him, prepared later after he had time to reflect, but we have his diaries that were written as the events were happening day to day. In that conversation that he had had with Agronsky, Agronsky was repeating the same kind of denial that we always hear Zionists like Heimweitzman constantly using. They just keep telling themselves in any outsiders who express concern about what they were doing, that it was all okay because the Arabs didn't have the capacity to really understand what they were losing. They didn't have the national idea like that. She had it spent so much time around other Arabs that he doubted that, and so he traveled around the country, and he was trying to figure out if Zionists were right. Maybe these Palestinian Arabs are just different, or if they're not different, then how the British and Zionists could continue to looting themselves about something that seemed to be inviting disastrous consequences down the road. He wrote in his diary, quote, "I still knew nothing about the Arabs of Palestine, but I could see them all around me everywhere. And if my long experience in political journalism had taught me anything, it was that one people did not like being dominated or interfered with, and it's home by another." The Zionist comments on the Arabs took a form that seemed to me invariably stupid in Palestine or elsewhere, the form of underrating your opponent. Your ordinary Zionists would say in so many words, "We don't have to worry about the Arabs, they'll do anything for money." I knew no Palestine Arabs, but unless they were far different from the Arabs I'd known in Morocco, Iraq, or Persia, this could not be the truth. My acquaintance with the Arab world in general suggested to me that the answer could be found in Islamic religious feeling. In the stage of culture represented by most Arab countries, feudal, pastoral, or at any rate pre-industrial, religious feeling still dominated the acts of life to an extent unknown in the West. I had never known in Arab who was not devout. I had known Muslims who broke the stricter dietary rules of the prophet, indeed many, but I had never known a Muslim who did not regard the central doctrines of the Islamic faith with fierce, exclusive devotion. Then she began to run into Zionists like the young student, Khayim Halevi. Halevi's a perfect illustration of a lot of things. He left behind a lot of writings that give us insight into what was driving the type of young Zionists that Jabbatinsky was appealing to. To what was driving the young Zionist, that Jabbatinsky's message that, you know, he said "other than ourselves who have broken away from the Jewish people." from the majority, everyone else has forgotten to be insulted." That message was powerful and was reaching a lot of people. This kid, Haim Helevy, is a perfect example. Jabitinsky said that the left under David Bengurion and Vitesman, they did nothing but talk. Nothing but talk, talk, talk, talk. In Jabitinsky said, "Behind the elegant words, one feels no sense of urgency." This was a message they resonated with young Zionists like Haim Helevy, writing to his parents after the British police had torn down a little structure that some religious Jews had built onto their wailing wall. Listen to the emotion in this letter to his parents. The Israeli historian Tom Sagev writes a lot about Helevy in his book, One Palestine Complete. He says, "He found it very difficult to concentrate on his work. My brain and my heart, he wrote to his parents. My mind and my feelings were preoccupied with the horrible acts carried out by the British. My heart hurts too much, and the wound is not yet healed, so it is impossible for me to evaluate the matter. But the incident significance, he wrote, went far beyond the wall itself." And then Sagev continues, "Helevy wrote to his parents something that the public would only understand later. The conflict in Palestine was about the hatred between two nations." Quote, he's quoting Helevy, "They hate us and they are right to hate us because we hate them too. Hate them with a deadly hatred." He said, "This was the truth he insisted behind the Zionist movement's nice language and goodwill. Believing that the Zionist dream would mean pushing the Arabs out of the country, Helevy believed that one day, quote, nothing will be left of them." So things are getting ugly because Helevy isn't alone in feeling that way. Sagev writes more about it. He says, quote, "Helevy imagined that the Arabs in the English were laughing at the Jews for their weakness and nothing infuriated him more. Ridicule was much worse, much more painful and disgraceful than the Arabs' hatred," he wrote, quoting the Roman Emperor Caligula and saying, "Hate me but fear me." In general, Caligula was insane, Helevy thought, but in this case, he expressed a profound truth. The Jews had lost their dignity. Quote, one of his letters to his parents, Helevy said, "Upp until now I could meet an Englishman or an Arab and look in straight in the eye. You were worthy opponents. He hated me and I him and we fought each other. Now that's not the case. I would blush on meeting a non-Jew. He has seen us at our worst in our weakness and I no longer see hatred in his eyes." This little puppy, the Jewish she should, knows only had a squirm and barclow that he cannot arouse hatred. He's not worth hating. For Helevy, the events at the wall were, quote, "the most horrible defeat of our Zionist government," and now continuing in Sagev's book, "Helevy comforted himself with dreams of revenge. History knows no mercy," he wrote. It does not understand politics and diplomacy. It will avenge this nation, whom they, the top men, humiliated and scorned. It will avenge the people who became pawns in their hands. His parents apparently had a difficult time identifying with the force of emotion that Helevy conveyed. That is the distance from the exile to the land of Israel, he wrote. Writing about Zionists like Hayam Kavariski, who was trying to mitigate tensions with the Arabs and trying to get the revisionists and the religious Jews to knock it off, Helevy wrote, quote, "this warm, this detestable provocateur walks into the streets of Jerusalem, and nobody goes up to him in Jaffa Street to give him a slap on the face that will make his ears ring." No one. So what can we say? Are we a nation, a living nation? No, we are not. We're a dead carcass, decomposing, rotting, stinking, a carcass with which everyone does as they wish." And if you accept that there's any truth at all in the idea that Francis Fukayama likes to repeat, that history is a record of man's quest for dignity, then when you read stuff like that, from Hayam Helevy, you know something's got to happen. You don't feel like that guy feels for very long without either giving up or blowing up. Helevy joined a group called the Committee for the Western Wall. This is a right-wing Zionist group that started openly discussing a split from the mainstream Zionist left. Helevy wrote some more to his parents. He said, quote, "Yes, we should rebel against the Zionist executive in the national council. We should come out against them and defy their order to hold back. We should shout and make the earth shake. Blessed be the ones whose blood still throbs in boils, who raise their voices against their leaders and say, 'Make way,' because in its thousands and tens of thousands, the nation is going to redeem the wall, which you sold in your apathy and abandoned in your politics." Now you can see why the Zionist right-wing, again, although it was much less numerous than the socialist wing, was so effective. A handful of men like Zaev Djabitinsky and Hayam Helevy, with that much energy and emotion, can set the tone and dictate terms for masses of people who are more focused on the day-to-day. They'd had enough sitting around. They'd been doing it for a decade, they were tired of it, enough of evolutionary Zionism. It was time to make some noise. Helevy quoted a verse from the Psalms to his parents, he said, "There will be action. I cannot do otherwise. It is time for the Lord to work, for they have made thy law void." So this is the environment that the American Vincent Sheehan came traipsing into with no clue what was waiting for him. This is what had been building up. For a few weeks in the country, he's starting to put the pieces together and he's starting to realize that he's walked into a hornet's nest. He's interviewing people on all sides, walking around, talking to people at every level of society. He's not just talking to the official leaders of the various parties, the way the British were doing. He was beginning to realize that nobody, not Zionist, not the British, not even the Arab leadership, really, who spent about as much time hanging out with dispossessed farmers in their shanty towns as a rich person in the US spends hanging around poor people. They have no idea what is coming. They have no idea what's happening in the alleys and corners and shanty towns around their cities. On August 14th, 1929, this is a day on the Jewish calendar called, well, it was the eve of a holiday, if you want to call it a holiday, called Tisha Bay, which is a day set aside in the Jewish calendar, more than the many tragedies and disasters in Jewish history. Most of all, to remember and mourn the destruction of their temple by their Romans. On that day, she and was in his room working on an article and someone came pounding on his door. It was a servant from the hotel, breathlessly telling him that a lady was waiting to see him downstairs. She and wasn't prepared for any visitors, so he throws on a gown some slippers, goes down to see what this woman wants. Turns out it's a Jewish American woman that he had met previously through the guy he was speaking to earlier, Gershana Gronski. And she asked him if he would go with her to the wailing wall because she had been instructed to go there at a certain time this evening and write about what she saw. She and wasn't quite getting it, so she told him that there was going to be a bust up at the wall. Bust up is what she called it. She said she'd come all the way from Tel Aviv just for this. In his diary from that day, she hand wrote, quote, "She said the word had been passed round and hundreds of halutesum, that's the Hebrew word for pioneers." So this means the people from the colonies outside of Jerusalem, outside of the major cities. These are the people roughening out in the sticks, in other words. That hundreds of halutesum were coming in during the afternoon and evening from the colonies in Tel Aviv, ready to fight. I couldn't believe all this. She said the halutesum would be armed, three quarters of them, and that it would be a good thing if there was a route the wall to show that we are here, she said. I didn't believe a damned word of it. Too fantastic. But I told her I'd be ready to go along at five o'clock if she would come back. She said there wouldn't be any trouble until sundown and five o'clock would do. I went along with her when she came back. She said a route would be a very good thing for the Zionist cause. A route whose world Jews would increase contributions to the new agency." And she and the woman get to the wall, they were already police everywhere. They were at every nearby intersection and little clumps and there were about 20 of them arrayed at the wall itself. Obviously, word had gotten around and not all the Zionists supported this kind of thing. So they probably had a lot of Zionists telling the British and the police to show up and keep these people from getting out of hand. There were people starting to show up and they were milling around. But nothing was really happening so she handed sides to duck into a nearby hotel for a beer. He stays there for a little while. When he returns about an hour later just before seven, everything was different. In his diary the next day he wrote quote, "There was a dense crowd made up chiefly of halotsum in the little area in front of the wall. A Yemeni Jew was chanting the lamentations from the book, while four other Yemenis sat around him weeping and rocking themselves back and forth. These seemed to me to be the most sincerely religious manifestations present. They paid no attention to their surroundings but only to their lament." the rest of that crowd was spoiling for a fight." The Grand Mofty's house is near the old city. Down the road, just a bit, not far from where all this is happening, she hang goes there and finds a group of Jews demonstrating in front of his house, and demonstrating all down the street toward the wailing wall in the mosques. There started to be some pushing and shoving in various places. One Arab Christian is supposed to have yelled at the crowd and got an ass whipping for it. The British finally picked him up and hustled him off. Soon the young men in the crowd, these young Zionists, these holots, they start to make their position and their intentions pretty clear. Shehann says, "A young Arab guy in white clothes tries to walk through the area, takes a little bit of abuse. For whatever reason, he decides to walk back the way he came through that area again, and he gets jumped." Shehann says that other than a handful of people, the Arabs were completely invisible. They just were shut up in their houses and not making a peep. Probably because the British knew about this and told the grandmoofty to put it down to all his people that they had better stay inside. This would not have been easy to pull off. You got a bunch of rowed Zionists from out of town who have come flooding into Jerusalem and are demonstrating and making trouble literally right next to the wall of the Al-Aqsa mosque. But they stayed in their houses, the Arabs did. A little later shehann writes, "Jews parading again today, extreme provocation, but the Arabs are doing nothing. Small army of Halutzim passed a half an hour ago on their way to the wall with a flag. The Zionist national flag I suppose, but I couldn't see what it was. It was furled." Shouts and cheers came down from there. The whole thing makes me very nervous. The young heroes who passed a while ago were guarded heavily by police, mounted police officers in front of them and behind them, with policemen on foot marching alongside them. The material for an awful three-cornered fight. What an exhibition of in-bacility this whole thing is. And if it weren't for the British police, I think there would be terrible pogroms. Two days later, the Muslims responded and they came out in force. The Jewish holiday had passed and now it was the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad and they were going to make their presence felt. Now probably you've got women and children on both sides who wish everyone would just knock it off, but unfortunately they aren't the people who get to decide things like that. The crowd of young Muslim guys rushed in and chased off any Jews prying at the wall. They pulled up the little rolled papers from the crevices in the wailing wall and tossed them away. They took the religious scrolls that people had been using and tore them up. This isn't a bunch of hardcore Islamic fundamentalists who just can't stand other faiths, so they're coming to get rid of false heathen texts. Now this is just a bunch of angry young guys who saw a big crowd of other angry young guys yelling and acting tough. And so they're coming over to say, "Oh, oh, oh, oh, really? What do you think about this? Take that." And a little bit of it? That's all this is. This is two groups of increasingly rowdy young men, mostly young men. The rowdeous guys from each side. Remember, most people are staying home. These are the rowdeous groups from each side, the ones who were shown up to this. And they're flexing and trying to humiliate and provoke the other side like a couple of street gangs. On August 17th, the day of the Prophet's birthday demonstrations, a 17-year-old Jewish kid was playing soccer with his friends and the ball was kicked into the yard of an Arab family. So the family has a little daughter, a small girl, and she picks up the ball and decides she wants to play her own game. So she puts the ball under her dress and is kind of trying to play keep away. But the Jewish kid wants to play his game and he's impatient. So, you know, she doesn't want to let him have his ball back, but he's getting kind of annoyed, finally decides enough of this and just tries to take it back. Well, the girl's father comes out of the house, sees a Jewish guy who's 17, so he's young, but he's mostly grown up, grabbing at the close of his little daughter and the situation goes about the way you might expect. The father and several of his friends attacked the boy. And eventually one of them hit some over the head with an iron rod. Cracking his skull, he was also stabbed and then it takes a few days, but the boy finally dies on Tuesday, August 19th. And this sends a Zionist over the edge. At his funeral the next day, crowds Zionists are pushing the limits of what the British can keep under control. She hand wrote in his diary on Friday the 23rd quote, "Two or three thousand of these heroes gathered in procession on the occasion of the funeral. They paraded with flags and tried to head their march toward the Jaffa Gate into the Arab city. Feeling has been running so high among the Arabs that anything might have happened. Government apparently decided to keep the Jews out of the Arab part of town at any cost. Police barred the way therefore and the Jews made a rush at their cordon. Police beat them back with clubs. About 25 Jews were injured." So, from the early days, when we had Zionists celebrating the British Empire as the second coming of the Okimine Persians, rescuing the exiled Jews and restoring them to their homeland, now we've got crowds of Jews rushing and fighting with British police at the temple mound. They're turning on the British. And the British on the ground are beginning to return the favor. But the Arabs are beginning to really hate the British too, so they're caught in this vice. Because sure, they might say they don't condone this kind of behavior from Zionists, but none of this would be happening if it wasn't for the British. So the British are starting to take it from both sides now. They're starting to become jumpy the way you would expect police and soldiers in that position to be. Later that same day, August 23rd, this is after she had had finished the diary entry I just quoted. He goes back to his room for a while and then he heads back out to see what's been going on. He gets outside and someone tells him that the Grand Mofti had just recently passed by, and his way to address some of the crowds outside the walls of the old city. Now she had been around for about two months at this point, so he took this as kind of a big deal, because Haja Min was not known for giving public appearances. He was kind of an introvert. He wasn't that guy out giving big speeches all the time. That's not the kind of leader he was. Well, he's the most influential Arab in a city that seems like it's on the verge of going nuts, so she and decides to follow the crowd to where they're gathering to see what the Grand Mofti has to say. As he's going, their him and his companion are passing groups of young Muslims who are chanting, "Islamia, islamia." And he realizes that a lot of the people he's seeing, a lot of the Arabs he's seeing are from out in the countryside. They're not from Jerusalem. The Zionists had brought in reinforcements from the colonies, and now the Arabs had come back with reinforcements of their own. It was as if the Temple Mount or the Noble Sanctuary, it's like it was a magnet pulling in all the built up disparate grievances, all the anger and anxiety from the last decade, from all over the country on both sides. It was drawing in all of it and concentrating it on that part of the world, that very spot that had drawn in the passion and rage of men for thousands of years, pulling them in like a vortex and then sending them at each other's throats as they fought for control of the one ring, which is what I heard someone refer to the walls of the old city as one. I think that fits pretty well. At the same time that all the pent up Arab fear and rage was collecting around the sacred precinct, the indignation of the European Jew. This long-a-pressed, abused people, a people perpetually in mourning, always adding a new tragedy to their cultural memory. It was as if the Temple Mount was sucking them all in, amplifying their outroage and having always been the weaker party, the mistreated one, the victim. The Grand Mofti makes his way down to the old city and he appears before the crowd, calls for them to settle down. He's trying to calm people down, but there was a British observer there and he said that the Mofti's presence seemed to have the opposite of a calming effect. She had never made it to the Mofti. He gets caught standing around and gawking at all these country Arabs as he calls them, and they're getting more and more worked up. She hand looks around and sees that on the other side of the square where he's standing, there are row of houses belonging to some Zionists who had come from Georgia. Suddenly the crowd began forming in front of those houses screaming and chanting. Between this giant crowd and the little row of houses are only six British police officers mounted on horseback. It starts to dawn on them now that something's about to happen. But like any good, maybe dumb reporter, he's just standing around gawking at everything until finally as it's building up and things are getting more and more out of hand and rowdy, finally an Arab from the city grabs him physically and throws him into a doorway. Stand here, stand here, the Arab told him. For God's sake, these fellow heen will kill you. The Arab stood in front of them in the doorway between them and the passing crowd, telling the crowd to move on, move on, there's nothing to see here, but they weren't bothering with him. They made a direct line for the line of British police and rushed it. The police apparently tried to fight back pretty violently. They only had trunchens though and they were way outnumbered. Pretty soon they had to back out and at that point you've got a crowd of really, really pissed off young dudes with sticks and clubs and knives and whatever else you can wield with a human hand completely free and heading toward a cluster of houses where a bunch of George and Jewish colonists made their homes. You know, it can be really easy I think in the developed world. It's easy for me anyway. With our Delta Forests and Navy SEALs and attack helicopters and aircraft carriers it can be easy to forget what war is. At the bottom of everything war is nothing more than all right you know what I've had enough of this. Go find the men in your group and tell them to get ready because our men are coming to see you and we're gonna find out how this problem gets solved. That's all war is. You get your men together. Our men are coming to see you. There's no British Army in Jerusalem okay. That's important understand there is no British Army in Jerusalem. They're often Egypt. When you run off that police unit try to imagine this. When they run off that police unit that big group of pissed off Arab men is probably the strongest force in the city right now. There's nobody to stop them from doing anything that they want to do. And on August 23rd 1929 they decide to do some things. She Han starts to hear some crashing and screaming from the other side of the crowd and so he runs with a British friend up a hill where they had seen some British police. Up this hill was a mostly Jewish neighborhood so when she Han got up there he found a huge crowd of revisionist Jews, young rowdy men getting ready for war with the crowd of Arabs down below. There are six more British police up here and she Han says that they clearly have no idea what to do. They've got hundreds maybe thousands of angry Zionists up here. Hundreds maybe thousands of angry Arabs down there. Six guys trying to hold down an entire neighborhood of people who are getting angrier and angrier with every passing moment. She Han wrote in his diary quote, "We told the police what had happened and one of them set off toward the Georgian houses. It was clear that the police were hopelessly inadequate. Where we stood in the area on the top of the hill a mob of Jews and all the stages of terror, fury and despair were assembled. They were held back by some of their own people but a short time before one of them had thrown a grenade at some of the Arabs coming up the hill and had killed two." And then almost as suddenly as the mob had come together the Arabs down at the bottom of the hill just dispersed into the alleyways and it seemed to be all over. She Han with some trepidation makes his way back down the hill and he found smashed up wood and glass broken shop windows and he wandered over to the houses of those Georgian Jews and as he walked up all he saw were a few broken windows. But then as he got closer he saw the broken door. He saw the trail of blood smeared down the front steps where a body or maybe a couple bodies had been dragged out of the house. Based on what he had seen the last few weeks and especially what he had just seen at the top of that hill where a bunch of young Jewish guys had to be physically restrained by everyone else from running down to suicidely fight this gigantic crowd of fellow-heen she Han knew this was not over. This wasn't close to over. Writing later he reflected quote, "The Jews of Jerusalem outnumbered the Arabs two to one. It was a matter of common knowledge that the Jews possessed firearms. The Arabs did not." Under these conditions it seemed likely that the Jewish superiority in numbers and equipment as well as their organization and centralization would enable them to do great damage among the Arabs for a day or two if they so desired. And from what I had seen and heard in the previous week I thought this was probably the wish of a good many among them. Therefore on the first day of these troubles the word massacre not only didn't occur in conversation but never even crossed one's mind. The first casualties we were told had been Arabs killed by Jews. The Jews were an armed majority in the city. The Arabs were a minority armed only with sticks and knives end quote. For obvious reasons a lot of Jews came to live in Jerusalem so when he's talking about a minority and majority he's talking about specifically the city where this is all happening. I'm not sure if his numbers are exactly right when he says that they outnumbered the Arabs two to one but they did outnumber them and it may have been that he was referring to all the people who had come into the city from Tel Aviv and the colonies as well. Maybe they outnumbered him two to one at that point. She hand was surprised that the Arab mob had suddenly dispersed the way it had just as quickly as it had formed and he writes something that could probably be a tagline for this whole series of podcasts. He says quote "when I got there the Arab mob had vanished so little time is required to accomplish the most irrevocable acts" and quote. Friday night and that weekend and for a week after that every hidden bit of stored up resentment and rage was spilled out onto the streets of Palestine cities. The British were completely unequipped to handle the outpouring of a decade's worth of pent-up rage. They had 292 policemen and about a hundred soldiers in the entire country. Something the Zionist would later point to is more evidence that the British were not interested in protecting them. The Grand Mufti did try to stop the violence. Obviously he had played a role in fostering the feeling that was leading to it but now he's trying to stop it. He didn't intend for this to happen but he lost control of this Frankenstein monster that he'd been conjuring. He'd been a thorn in the side of the Zionist but he'd always worked with the British to prevent the frustrated Arab peasants from becoming violent. He and his brother along with their bitter rival, a he'd not just see me, they all came out together and it didn't denounce the violence and to call on people to stop but Hajjimin had lit a fuse connected to something much larger and much more explosive than he realized and even he couldn't stop the explosion from happening. Jerusalem did explode and the cry went out all over Palestine that the Jews were finally making their move that they were slaughtering the Muslims in Jerusalem. Israeli historian Benny Morris in his book Righteous Victims describes what happened. "The most trying days were August 23rd and 24th. A number of Jews were killed at the Jaffa Gate while British policemen made only half-hearted rescue efforts, none open fire. Rioters ran up Jaffa Street, assaulting pedestrians and destroying shops. They shot people in looted houses for several days during which British police patrols briefly showed up, traded shops with the snipers and moved on. Outside the area horrible maskers took place in the two most devout Muslim towns, Habran and Safed." Rioters broke into the Ashivin Habran and murdered the lone student they found there. The following day a mob attacked Jewish homes slaughtering the inhabitants who tried to fight them off with sticks in knives and quote "One Zionist who is there," recalled quote "right after eight o'clock in the morning we heard screams. Arabs had begun breaking into Jewish homes. The screams pierced the heart of the heavens. We didn't know what to do. They were going from door to door slaughtering everyone who was inside. The screams and the moans were terrible. People were crying help help but what can we do?" End quote. The head of the British police in Jerusalem saw a young Jew running for his life followed by a crowd of Arabs waving sticks above their heads. Some groups of Zionists broke loose and started going into Arab neighborhoods for revenge and three Arabs were murdered. As the cry went out that Muslims were under attack by the Jews who wanted to take away the holy places this is what we've been talking about. This is what we've been waiting for. Arabs started heading into Jerusalem and other cities from their rural farms. The peasants start making for whichever city is closest. The city of Hebron in the West Bank today was home to about 20,000 Arabs and about six to eight hundred mostly religious non- Zionist Jews. These were Middle Eastern Jews who had lived in Hebron for centuries and had nothing to do with Zionist movement. But things had changed since Nebimousin Jaffa in the first part of the decade. What had started out as a dispute between Zionists and Arab nationalists had morphed into a religious fight between Muslims and Jews. The police chief in the city of Hebron, a guy named Raymond Kaffirata, he had served in the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish Rebellions. Then he mostly spent his time in Palestine ever since then. He was only 32 years old and seemed to have been a pretty laid back guy who'd rather talk about football than whatever the latest drama was in Palestine. His friends would call him Kaffirata. So Kaffir had only recently taken over in Hebron and he had no intelligence network, no real lay of the land. By the time the violence breaks out over the Western wall in 1929, he's in Hebron completely unprepared. He's the only British officer in the city of 20,000 people. The police force he commanded was made up of himself, one Jewish officer, and all the rest are Arabs. The first murders of those Georgian Jews and the Arabs with the grenades were taking place in Jerusalem around noon. But now it's around 2.45 p.m. and Kaffirata hadn't seen anything too out of the ordinary in Hebron. Just to be safe, he stationed three of his men on the outskirts of the city, discerching coming vehicles for weapons though. As news started to spread about what was happening in Jerusalem, Arabs began to queue up at the Hebron bus station so that they could go to Jerusalem to defend their mosques. Kaffirata went in front of the crowd and lied to them, just said that the whole disturbance and Jerusalem was over. Nothing to worry about. Things had just been blown out of proportion. Everybody go back to your houses. He shut down the bus for the day so that no one could go join the fight. Then walking back to the station, the police station, Kaferata sees a rabbi running toward him with his daughter and their hysterical. Kaferata thought that they were running back and forth in the streets shrieking for no reason. He couldn't understand why they were so excited. They came and they asked Kaferata, "You got to protect us." Kaferata was trying to get him to settle down, trying to explain that they had nothing to worry about in Hebron. Everything seemed to be fine. That's when the stones start coming in. Kafer and the two Jews had attracted a crowd of Arabs who now began pelting them with rocks. At around 4 p.m., a large crowd of Arabs forms around a Hebron school. This is the eschiva that Ben-i-Morris talked about. It began throwing stones and vandalizing it. In the building, there was just one sexton and one student. The 24-year-old student was hit in the head by a stone that came flying through a window and so he decides to make a break for it. It doesn't work out. The Arabs surround him. He tries to run back into the school but it was too late. They snatched him up, stabbed him to death. Satisfied for the moment, they dispersed and the Jews from the area came to collect the student's body and start to get a funeral ready. Kaferata had been in the game a while. He knew what funerals often led to in these circumstances. He knew what it led to earlier when that little boy got killed over the soccer ball. He ordered that the funeral be restricted to only six people. That's it. Everybody else stay home. It seemed that they'd been able to keep things from degenerating into chaos in Hebron. Kaferata was relieved at that but instead of going home, he decided to just sleep in his office at the police station just to be safe. He gets up early the next morning and around 7am, August 24th, 1929, Arab crowds began to form in the streets once again, more organized than before, as if they'd been making plans the night before. A few dozen Jews had gathered to sleep in the home of a prominent rabbi hoping that their numbers would provide some safety. One of them was a Polish tourist while Grzyski in Palestine to see the country and visit his brother. It was the Sabbath and prayers were set to begin. Grzyski's there and he looked south the window and he sees several cars packed with Arabs bearing sticks and swords and knives and daggers driving off in the direction of Jerusalem. As the vehicles passed the house, Grzyski claims that some of the Arabs were drawing their fingers across their necks as if to slash the throat. Kaferata also saw the cars of Arabs leaving for Jerusalem but at this point he didn't have the forces to stop them and in any case he was happy to see them go. Maybe we just get rid of all the violent ones. Let him go to Jerusalem, there's more forces there, they're better able to handle this than I am. Kaferata ordered all the Jews to stay in their houses. He took his police around a worn and round up any rowdy Arab mobs but he just didn't have enough reliable officers to keep order. By 8.30 in the morning, things are moving very fast. So by 8.30 in the morning, groups of Arabs had started to form up to throw stones at Jewish houses. Kaferata saw that several Arabs were trying to break into one Jewish house and so he took a few men to go drive them off. This is when things finally snap. Before he could get there, two Jews emerged from the house and tried to escape and Kaferata watched as one was clubbed a death by a stone and the other was stabbed to death. Back in the house of that rabbi, the dozens of Jews, including Grzinsky, they huddled to conduct their religious service, trying to focus on that while the sounds of carnage are going on out in the street. Finally Grzinsky tells everyone the Arabs are coming. He's looking out the window, they're coming and so they stop the service and Grzinsky writes about this. He says quote, "We went to reinforce the door and ran around the room like madmen, the shrieks of the women and the babies whaling filled the house. With 10 other people, I put boxes in tables in front of the door, but the intruders broke it with hatchets and were about to force their way in. So we left the door and began running from room to room, but wherever we were, we were hit by a torrent of stones. The situation was horrible. I can't describe the whaling and screaming." Now stop and imagine what it must have been like to experience this. You're in a house with a few dozen other men, women and children, and the house is surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of enraged people. They're trying to smash their way in and no matter where you go, stones are coming in through the windows like machine gunfire. And the Arabs are outside shouting, the women and children are screaming and it's just madness. I can't imagine what it must have been like for them. Grzinsky didn't know what else to do, so he grabs his mother and hides with her behind a bookshelf. The rest of the Jews just hide in rooms or in the shower. And Grzinsky wrote, quote, "Suffocating, we sat on top of one another and heard the sounds of the Arabs singing as they broke into the room and the shouting and groaning of the people being beaten. After about 10 minutes, the house grew still except for some stifled grounds. Then there was gunfire, apparently from the police." End quote. Police Chief Kaffirata's facing absolute chaos at this point. He's running around the city with no ability to get a handle on this thing. He orders his officers to open fire on one crowd of Arabs and then he himself shoots two more Arabs that are looting a Jewish shop. Tom Sagev's book, One Palestine Complete, his chapter on the Hibernol riots is really great. There are a lot of good sources on it, but he does a great job of bringing the human aspect out. In one passage, he writes, quote, "A screen came from one of the houses. Kaffirata entered the house and later described what he saw, an Arab in the act of cutting off a child's head with a sword. He had already hit him and was having another cut, but on seeing me he tried to aim the stroke at me, but missed. He was practically on the muzzle of my rifle. I shot him low in the groin. Behind him was a Jewish woman smothered in blood with a man I recognized as a police constable named Isah Sharif from Jaffa. He was standing over the woman with a dagger in his hand. He saw me em bolted into another room shouting an Arabic, 'Your honor, I'm a policeman!' I broke into the room and shot him.' The Jews are completely unprepared for all this in Hibernol. You know, again, Hibernol's Jews are native to Palestine. They lived there for generations and many of them couldn't stand the Zionists. And up to this point, things had generally been okay with the Arabs in these type of Jews. Rachel Graziani was a young Jewish girl in the 1929 riots in Hibernol. In an oral history, she remembered, quote, "Father looked through the window and saw a mad mob of Arabs, and he moved us away from the window and pushed something against the door. They didn't succeed in getting through the door, and then with the belief that they were friends and would do nothing to us, he said, 'I'll open the door if you take anything you want and don't hurt me one.' And he opened it. They pulled him outside and leading the mob was his friend from work. Later, when the British took us away, I saw my father downstairs murdered. I will not forget that. I remember my mother holding my brother only a few months old and an Arab tried to stab her. And my mother said, 'Are you not afraid of God? He won't forget that you were going to kill a woman in a boy and he left her alone.' My grandmother, who someone tried to rape, she was beautiful, but she was also strong. She also said, 'aren't you afraid of God and the Arab left her alone as well?' It was a horrifying scene. We went up to the roof and hid there. We heard the screams. We heard everything. We were like terrified rabbits hiding.' And, quote, "As reinforcements finally start to arrive, Kaffirata is fighting to get things under control." Kaffirata himself killed at least eight people that day. Back in the rabbi's house, Grzinski's waiting to come out from behind the bookshelf with his mother. He was cramped back there, sweating, listening to the eerie silence out in the room. And when he sure that all the Arabs are gone, he decides to come out. He writes, quote, 'I barely managed to get out of my hiding place. It was difficult to move the bookcase because of the bodies that lay piled up against it. My eyes were dark from the side of the dead and wounded. I was overcome with terror and trembling. I could find no place to put my foot. On the sea of blood, I saw Elias Ardan with his wife. My friend Dubnakov, a teacher from Tel Aviv, and many more. Almost all had knife and hatchet wounds in their heads. Some had broken ribs. A few bodies had been slashed and their entrails had come out. I cannot describe the look in the eyes of the dying. I saw the same scene everywhere. In one room, I recognized my brother's wife, who lay their half naked, barely alive. The entire house had been looted. He was full of feathers and there were blood stains on the walls. I approached the window and saw a policeman. I asked him to send a doctor. That same moment some Arabs passed by carrying a dead man on a stretcher. When they saw me, they set the stretcher down and threatened me with their fist. I returned to my hiding place and then a moment later I heard voices. They were the voices of the wounded who had gotten up and also of people who had been miraculously saved by hiding in the shower room behind the toilet. Apparently the Arabs had gotten as far as the toilet and killed one of the people there. I recognized my brother among the injured. He had a hatchet wound on his head and a large bruise on his forehead, probably from a rock. I threw water on him and he stood up, but he died of his wounds a few hours later. Dubnakov had apparently died of suffocation. His murdered wife lay next to him. I again approached the window and asked for doctors because many people could have been saved with prompt medical help. One of the policeman outside answered me in Hebrew. "Soon," he said. About a quarter of an hour later, some cars came to take us to the police. We began taking care of the wounded. Jews later reported that many Arabs had actually risked their lives to protect them. Rivka Sonumberg was an eight-year-old girl in Hebron in 1829. And she remembered that before the riots, her family had had good relationships with their Arab neighbors. This came completely out of nowhere for them. They would share in each other's holiday feasts and celebrations and celebrate each other's births, things like that. When the mob came to her neighborhood, it was their Arab landlord, an in a man named Abu Shaker who rushed to their home and stood in the doorways they hid behind him. We heard what he was saying to the mob while he stood at the entrance. She said, "Abou Shaker told the marauders that they were going to pass through that door to murder the Jews over his dead body." We heard what he said to the mob while he stood at the entrance. They wounded him, but they didn't go into the house. There's a story of Arab families in Hebron harboring Jews and defending them with swords against the mob. The family of a man named Haj Isah El-Korriyeh, they saved 33 Jews by gathering them in from the surrounding area and insisting that they hide in his cellar. The mob formed at his house and I want you to imagine this scene. This old man, he was in his seventies, along with his wife and his four teenage and adult daughters hiding 33 Jews in their cellar in a crazed mob of enraged human beings, many of whom have beaten and raped and murdered people within the last few hours are assembled outside his door. They know that you have the Jews and you'd better bring them out or else. And this old man, this badass old man standing in the doorway with his, the badass women of his family standing behind him are denying the mob entry in the mob is shouting, and screaming. They're screaming today as a day that is holy to Muhammad, anyone who does not kill Jews is a sinner. That's what they were saying. But this guy, this elderly man, Haj Isah El-Korriyeh joined by the women of his household. Despite getting roughed up, he stood him down and saved 33 lives. It said that almost every Jew in Hebron that hadn't taken refuge in an Arab house was killed. This is what happens when an enraged group of young men is not trying to break anything. They're not trying to make a point when they finally lose it and they're going around trying to kill everyone they see. Of the 600 to 800 Jews who had lived in Hebron, there were 68 dead, 57 wounded. The 500 who survived mostly did so because they were taken in by Arab families. It wasn't the whole city doing this. That's important to understand, but it doesn't have to be. How much damage can 500 angry, violent, 18 to 30 year old males do if there is no one to stop them? Because that's all it takes. The 500 who survived mostly did so again because they were taken in by Arab families. How much damage can 500 angry, violent, 18 to 30 year old males do if they've leapt off that edge and there's nobody there to stop them? In Hebron, most of the European Jews who had lived there were killed. The ones taken in by Arabs were mostly the Middle Eastern Jews who had lived in the city for 800 years. Nobody took in the couple's irons that were there. The dead Jews were buried in a mass grave and Hebron was evacuated of its entire Jewish population. This was the first outbreak of violence between Muslims and Jews over that sacred hill in Old Jerusalem, but it's going to be far, far, far from their last. In fact, the last fight over that hill still lies somewhere off at an inconceivable future as I record this in 2015. People are killing each other over it right now. Last count, I think we were up to 11 Israelis and 68 Palestinians killed in this latest fight over the Al-Aqsa mosque. And one of the major Palestinian organizations, the one formerly run by the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, they're called the Al-Aqsa martyrs brigade. The event site just described where the beginning of the story and the end is still not in sight. When it was all said and done, 133 Jews at 116 Arabs were killed in a week of horrific violence. The ineffective British response was interpreted again by the Zionists, not as an aptitude or unpreparedness, but as evidence of their sleeping antisemitism. The British thought this was just plain ridiculous, but perceptions everything. Just as they had after the Nebimousin, Jaffa writes at the beginning of the decade, Zionists believed that the British had purposely held back because they sympathized with the Arabs. They felt that maybe the Jews had it coming. The widespread brutality of the 1929 riots galvanized the entire Jewish community in Palestine. Galvanized a lot of the Jewish community around the world. Until that moment, many of the old Jewish families who had lived in Palestine for generations held no truck with Zionists. They had more in common with their Arab neighbors than with these atheist, European, socialist pooring it, and they offered them to be the source of the problems they were facing. But after 1929, it didn't matter anymore what they thought about the Zionists. They could see that the Arab Muslims, enough of them at least, had become convinced that all the Jews were their enemies. Zionist idea had been held together among European Jews by focusing them on the implacable threat of the Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, and anti-Semite. The Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews had no experience with that, so it didn't resonate enough to overcome the gigantic cultural gulf between themselves and the European Zionists. But again, after August 1929, the various communities of Zionists and non-Zionist Jews had their common enemy. And from now on, all Jews in Palestine would be Zionists. Whether they considered themselves that or not, they were on the Zionist team. And it's like how they say it is in prison, right? Or how it is in movies, at least. You show up, it doesn't matter what you agree with or not. You got to get with a gang. Because from the day you arrive, whether you have a problem with anyone else in there or not, there are people who already have a problem with you. Terror has a way of drowning out nuance. And I said earlier, conflicts tend to allow the worst to the worst to dictate the terms and drag everyone else down to their level. Because I'll emphasize again, this was not a case of every Arab taking up arms. Okay, there were hundreds of thousands of Arabs in and around the towns where the violence was occurring almost completely unchecked for a week. It's easy to get the idea that all of a sudden every Arab started attacking every Jew. And the people living through it probably felt that way, but that's not what happened. When that happens, we get a situation like Rwanda in 1994 where the estimates put the death toll at 800,000 in six weeks, primarily at the hands of civilians using machetes and mailer weapons. But it really doesn't matter what it looks like in hindsight. After we've gathered all the sources and reviewed the evidence, it doesn't matter that some Arabs risk their lives to save Jewish families. Is it only a fraction of the population was involved in the violence? It doesn't matter. Tom Sagevin's book Quotes a Letter Written to the High Commissioner by the Surviving Jews of Iran, describing what they had witnessed. Quote. 68-year-old Rabbi Myarchistel and 70-year-old Rabbi Zvi Drabkin, along with five younger men, had been castrated. Baker Noah Imramin had been burned to death with a caracene stove. The mob had killed pharmacist Ben Zion Gershon, a cripple who had served Jews and Arabs for 40 years. They had raped and killed his daughter as well. Yitzhak Abu Hanna, 70 years old, had been tied to a door and tortured until he died. Two-year-old Monachem Segal had had his head torn off. The letter detailed other acts of rape and torture. There are photographs of hands and fingers that had been cut off, perhaps for their rings are bracelets. Now the real theme of this series, I've said it from the beginning and I'll bring up the question again. What would you do if you lived in Hibernol with your family, with your children? There are many people who favor the Arab side who will say without hesitating, "I will wouldn't have been there. The Zionist had no right to be taking away the Arabs land in the first place. You hear this today all the time because it's not wrong. The thing about a fight like this, if one side was just completely 100% wrong, then it would have been over a long time ago. The fights that go on and on are the ones where both sides have a point. Right now, in 2015, again, there's a ton of violence happening. All centered around Israeli restrictions on Muslims accessing the Al-Axamaq. And we've been seeing a lot of Jewish soldiers and civilians being stabbed around the country. They're being stabbed because the Palestinians for the most part, they don't have real weapons. So they're stabbing people with screwdriver and kitchen knives and surprise attacks, driving people over with cars. And that's so awful. But pretty frequently, you'll hear someone say, wait a minute, we're talking about someone being stabbed outside Habran. Habran is territory illegally occupied by the state of Israel, declared illegal by the United Nations. Now, I'm not saying they should have stabbed him, but what's he doing there? Are we supposed to make it into a crime? If an American soldier gets stabbed in Afghanistan, he's part of an occupying force. And look, you know, on some level, that's absolutely correct. It's completely correct. That's why some people said it in 1929, and that's why some people, they still say today because there's some undeniable truth in it. But again, this is one of those places where I have to ask you, what would you have done? How would you react? All right, maybe you shouldn't have been there. Fine, shouldn't have been there. But what if you were? What if you were in one of those areas of Russia or Ukraine where Jews were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands after the First World War? And in your desperation, you would pack up your family and move to Palestine. Maybe you shouldn't have moved there. Maybe you had no right, but you didn't know what else to do. And now you're here. And as soon as you show up, you find out that a bunch of people already suspect and fear and hate you. And maybe you're a very compassionate and understanding guy. So you take a look at the situation and you're empathetic and you say, well, I can understand why they would be worried about this or angry about some of the things that have happened. I get it. Sounds like the Zionist story here before me. We're kind of assholes to be honest. Let's say you're totally understanding about it hypothetically. And then this happens. Maybe you escape. Maybe it's not your wife raped. Maybe it's not your kids getting their heads torn off. But you realize now that whatever the reasons, whoever's fault it might have been, this rage is real. And if that mob had come upon your wife or had come upon your children, they weren't going to listen to you explaining that, you know, you were never really in favor of some of the things that the more belligerent Zionists were doing. They're not going to care. Any more than an Iraqi insurgent would care if he captured an American soldier and the soldier tried to explain that actually his Facebook wall shows that he has very nuanced views about the Iraq war. What would you do? I can tell you what the Zionists did. The Zionists went absolutely ballistic. They would have a brief flirtation with the idea of backing down and accepting a compromise. But it very quickly became apparent that that was not going to happen. Guys like Jabitinsky were not going to let that happen. The riots caught the British completely off guard. All at once they realized that the relative calm of the last decade was only on the surface. Several commissions were ordered because that's what the British like to do anytime anything happens. Several commissions are ordered to investigate the Palestine issue and all of them found the same thing. The cause of the violence was angry Arabs, but the Arabs were angry because they were getting pushed off their land. The reports of these various commissions resulted in a white paper issued by the British that altered the Palestine immigration policy to say that it could only take in a number of new immigrants that wouldn't disrupt the economic and social life of the people already living there. If you have to evict the family of Arabs to move a Jewish family in, then no, too bad. Can't do it anymore. The white paper put an end to the Zionist practice of refusing to hire Arabs and then turning around to say that they needed more immigrants because they didn't have enough workers. Now the British were saying no to that. No, you don't get to decide you only want to hire one ethnic group when there are thousands of unemployed Arabs in the country ready and willing to work for you and then come to us and say you don't have enough workers. There are plenty of workers hire an Arab, but the Zionists were not prepared to do anything like that. The Zionists denounced the British and called out individual British officials by name began threatening some of them. One Zionist writer wrote that the hatred for the Jews for the English is now greater than the hatred they had for Russia. If you know the history of the Jews in Russia, that's saying something. The police officer at the very beginning of this story who had ordered that structure to be torn down from the wailing wall to kick all this off, he counted at least three attempts by the Zionists to murder him. The British officials in the country, including the new High Commissioner John Chancellor who had just arrived, they laid the blame for the entire affair on Zionists, and especially on the revisionists, and especially on Jabotinsky. Even David Bengurion said that he blamed Jabotinsky more than he blamed the Arabs for everything that happened. Tension between the British and the Zionists reached a fever pitch. It's getting to the point now where the British soldiers and policemen aren't even allowed to play soccer with Zionists because they're always fighting. But fine, fine the Zionists say, if the British and Palestine don't like the Zionists, that doesn't concern us. We've got other means of getting our way. The British and Palestine are happy that immigration has been restricted to the caring capacity of the country. They think it just makes sense. They're tired of the Zionists, getting the Arabs riled up, and then them having to come in and clean up the mess. The High Commissioner, John Chancellor, he called the whole Balfour Declaration a colossal blunder. But okay, if we don't have a Zionist in charge of the British administration anymore, that's fine too. If the mandate authorities won't play ball, the Zionists would just go around them. Just after these riots in August, 35,000 Jews marched in New York City demanding that the American President put pressure on the British government to do more to help the Zionists. And that worked perfectly. America's leadership knew almost nothing about what had been going on in Palestine. But President Hoover responded to pressure from American Zionists and began pushing the British to do more for the Jews. After a vigorous press in lobbying campaign by the Zionists, the British Prime Minister Ramsey McDonald, this is the one that hosted David Ben-Gurion earlier and went through all that trouble to get him a French visa and so forth. He wrote to High Envitesman personally, to clarify, is the word he used, the policy of the British government. He was viewed by the Zionists as essentially an apologetic retraction of the brief limitations imposed on Jewish immigration. And that's essentially what it was. The British were apologizing. The British Empire was apologizing to this little group of revolutionary Jews. The Arabs called this the black letter, the Macdonald letter, the black letter, and it's not a bad name for it from their perspective. The short sigh of relief that the Arabs were able to breathe on the publication of that white paper limiting immigration. That was the last relief of any kind that the Arabs of Palestine would get from that moment to our present moment. By all accounts, the Zionists had actually scared the British, the mighty British empire into revoking the white paper. It was High Envitesman who pulled it off as usual, just as he convinced the British during the war that they needed the help and the vast resources of international Jewry. Now he tried to frighten them into thinking that they ran the risk of alienating these powerful Jews around the world. It seems to have been a complete bluff. I don't think what, Vitesmen, I don't think anybody thinks Vitesmen had that kind of polar that the Jews around the world had that kind of unity they didn't. But Tom Sagev writes about how remarkable it was that this was actually pulled off by Vitesmen and how exasperating it was for the British officials in Palestine and especially for the Arabs. Speaking about the white paper policy to limit immigration Sagev wrote, quote, "The new policy had been adopted after several discussions in the cabinet, as well as the preparation of countless position papers, memorandums and drafts. From the British point of view, linking immigration to the Arab as well as the Jewish economy and making a statement of equal support for Palestine's Arabs was a logical move. Yet within a few months they had disappeared. The Zionist had won again. The government's panic retreat from the white paper reflected fear. McDonald had been intimidated by the Jews, Chancellor, the High Commissioner in Palestine wrote to his son, and he was right." I invite Semen was very pleased with himself as you can imagine. It's a big achievement for him. He wrote in his diary that the attack had been successfully repulsed, like a general surveying of Victoria's battlefield. But that would be his final personal victory. If the Jewish people around the world thought that the Zionist had become like a paranoid broken record running around trying to convince everyone that the sky was falling, even though things were clearly getting better everywhere, that was all about to change. Two months. after the Western Wall uprising, global financial markets began to tauter and then finally collapse. It would be a little while before people realized it, but the Great Depression had just begun. The opportunities that had drawn Jews to places other than Palestine were beginning to disappear. The prosperity that had kept people preoccupied on things other than finding someone to blame for their troubles that prosperity evaporated as well. The language 1920s are about to run into the buzz saw of the 1930s. And if you think things are tense right now, the floodgates are about to open up as a torrent of destitute, terrified Jews comes pouring into Palestine, with more desperation and determination than ever. The United States and Great Britain had closed their borders to Jewish immigration, fearing the infiltration of Communists, loyal to the Soviet Union. Other countries had taken notice of the Jewish presence in the Soviet regime and taken matters even further, including one central European leader of a nation who felt the kind of enraged indignation that I am a levee displayed in those letters to his parents only on a mass scale, and ready to be mobilized by the right person. In early 1933, at all Hitler, the sworn in is Chancellor of Germany. Stop out of the car and enter a black-dust in my heart. My face is bloody and there I tease in my eyes. And all I can think of is what's buried underneath. Surely I rose under this concrete. My hands are sweaty as I pick myself up alone. I gather with the left of my pride and I float towards my home. To these layers I'm still asleep. And life wakes me up with a batch on my sleeve. We'll espy over in who is willing to blame. And will cannot stop dreaming. I'll bake my dreams, be calm, wings and fly away. And I have covered every ring to buy emotions. But I got more anger at me than all the waves of the ocean. And I can try and save the things to make you stay. But I can't take back what he has taken from me. And healing has come so damn painfully. And now I refuse to let anyone get close to me. It's flashed by the slums weed to my every bone. I'm damaged you seeing case you wanna go. Bake my dreams, be calm, wings and fly away. Start away. Start away. Bake my dreams, be calm, wings and fly away.