Bible Historian UNLOADS on Netanyahu's Origins, Mossad, & Israeli History | Dan Hummel

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Yeah. In the 20th century out of the 19th. But just for some historical context, because I always throw this around all the time, but there's a huge story in the middle of this involving Martin Luther and all that. When the Protestant Reformation, I think it was, happened to where they split, Martin Luther led the movement, and they split off from the Catholic Church. That was back, I want to say in the 15th century, correct me if I'm wrong. 16th century. 16th century. What led to that and how was it set up differently? Obviously we know they're different. Sects today, but like what, back at the beginning, what were the key differences between what became the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church? Yeah, I mean, so Luther, Martin Luther's the guy that sort of kicks this off. He nails his 95 theses to a wall in Wittenberg. That's sort of the beginning of the Reformation. His big concerns were about corruption in the Catholic hierarchy, in the church hierarchy. And then he was really worked up over this idea of, well, now I'm forgetting the term. Not tithes, but. Not tithes, but. Something involving payments? Yeah, involving payments for getting rid of your sins in the next life. Oh, I know. Maybe we can. Yeah, that's on the tip of my tongue. I know what you're talking about. Maybe Dee can find it. Yeah, yeah. The thing that the 95 thesis, the thing the Catholic Church would make people do. I want to say it starts with a C, but I'm not. What's the term for what the Catholic Church. Indulgences. It's not a C. Indulgences. Yes, that's it. So this was his big issue, was that indulgences created this perverse sort of incentive to basically pay your way into heaven. So he. I mean, Luther himself doesn't intend to start, at least at the beginning, a different church. He wants to reform the existing church. His critiques are not well received by the hierarchy of the church. And then the whole snowball effect happens, and you start getting. You know, distinct Lutheran churches. And then you get people like Calvin and Zwingli, who are the other two big sort of reformers, a few decades later. And they end up developing a very strong critique of the Pope and of the church hierarchy, and then of these distinct theological teachings of the church. And you have the Thirty Years' War happening, and so you have basically a permanent split by, you know, the 17th century. What were the biggest theological differences outside of like indulgences and stuff like that, that they had with the Catholic Church that they didn't like? So a lot of it was around church authority and who got to decide church policy. So the idea that the Pope, who's in this apostolic succession all the way going back to Peter in, you know, the disciple of Jesus, and with that, the Pope had the authority to decide on bishops, to decide. To decide church policy. That is something. And then people like Calvin come along and really are, you know, introducing new theological ideas like predestination, like total depravity. These are sort of the key concept in Calvinism, which Calvin claims are going back to people like Augustine. So he's not saying, I'm coming up with new things. He's saying, I'm recovering things that between in the last thousand years have been obscured by the church. A big part of this, too, is that the Bible is becoming translated into the vernacular languages like English and Luther translates the Bible into German. And this is another sort of hierarchy thing. But the idea is like every Christian should be reading the Bible now. Every literate Christian should be reading the Bible. Through the Middle Ages, that was not most Christians. Post-printing press now. Right, right. Post-printing press. Most Christians, you know, the serfs and the peasants could not read. This is one reason why there's such beautiful stained glass imagery. In cathedrals, it's because that's how you would learn the stories, is someone would show you a picture of the Bible story instead of you personally reading it. And of course, the services were in Latin, and most Christians didn't know Latin. Oh, so they're just running with it. Yeah. Like, all right, assuming this is right. That guy said it, so here we go. And there's a very, you could say it's a very communal understanding of Christianity. It's not up to you as an individual to sort of discern based on your own reason if this is right. It's like, I was born into this. My community is part of this. So the Reformation and the Protestants really, you know, flip that on its head and say, each of us needs to grapple with the text. Each of us, you know, this is Luther's famous, when he's sort of on trial, he says, you know, here I stand, I can do no more. Like, it's like, I'm an individual. This is what I believe in my conscience. I can't do anything else but follow my conscience. So a lot of Catholic historians and sort of apologists today will say, like, you know, everything wrong, you know, simplified, but like everything wrong with our modern culture of libertine vices and sins, like, it all goes back to Luther and sort of the sort of original insight of Luther is that, like, each one of us has our own conscience that we must follow. Now, of course, Lutherans wouldn't say that. They'd say, in this context, this is a much better reform of how we should engage the Bible and Christian tradition. That doesn't mean you can go off and do whatever your inner self tells you to do. Right. But you can see the logic of where, when someone like Luther does that, how different people get inspired by that move to take it in other directions that Luther wouldn't have intended. And that's the thing. So it splits, but then it splits more over the next decades when it has sectors of Protestantism now form, which then continue to split over time. So it gets farther and farther away, technically, from what, say, the Catholic teaching of Christianity is, and that's where we are today. Right. But I got you off this because you were explaining how that. was a part of some of the interpretation that led to Christian Zionism in the 20th century. So let's go back there. Right, right. So yeah, and America is a largely Protestant country in the sense that its leadership has been mostly Protestant through most of its history. And certainly in the early 20th century, that was the case. Well, they killed the first Catholic. Say more? No, no, JFK. Oh, JFK. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I'm just saying. Okay. Yeah, though they, what was it, Al Smith ran in 1928. He was close. He was close. He was close. He would have gotten his head blown off, too, probably. Maybe. So in the 20s, the people who were coming up with this idea of Judeo-Christianity tended to be Protestant, though not exclusively. And the idea was that there's some unique genius to the Hebrew Bible in particular, so the Old Testament, that is that, without that, we wouldn't have our modern culture. Now, the term Judeo-Christianity, it includes Jews, but it also includes Catholics. So that's a big move there, is Judeo-Christianity. It's not Judeo-Protestant. It's Judeo-Christian. And the history of anti-Catholicism in the U.S. is a really big history as well. So throughout, up until really the 20th century, it was, I mean, you mentioned JFK is the first Catholic president. It was very difficult to get ahead in public life if you were Catholic in the U.S. Is that because it was largely viewed as like, I don't know, a mainland European religion as opposed to like an Anglican? You mean, you know, the Anglo roots of the country pre-immigration here? Some of, yeah, that's part of it. I mean, part of it was the sort of ethnic politics of who's Catholic and who's British and Protestant. The idea, too, and Kennedy had to deal with this, was Catholics, you know, in theory, listen to the Pope, and that's a foreign leader. And so can we trust, you know, a Catholic to. Foreign influence in U.S. politics. Right. Can't have that. That was the original. That goes back to, yeah, the. The early founding era and debates over could Catholics be, you know, be governors and be senators. So that's a long history, too. And this Judeo-Christian concept moves past that and says that the deeper unity of these, of Judaism, Protestantism, I guess you could say Orthodox Christianity, though there aren't many of them, and Catholicism is this ethical tradition that is rooted in the Old Testament and is where we get our individual rights and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Do we know the person who invented that term? I don't think it is. We know the organization. It's called the International Council of Christians and Jews, and it was founded in the 20s for this very purpose. I don't. It was founded by a bunch of people, both Jews and Christians. So it said it appeared in 1821, in 1821, in a letter by English Anglican missionary Alexander McCall to describe a Jewish person who converted to Christianity. German. theologian Ferdinand Christian Barr used the German equivalent in 1831 in the theological context, and the modern political meaning of a shared religious cultural tradition was popularized in the late 30s and 1940s by interfaith groups and thinkers like Paul Tillich and George Orwell to fight fascism and totalism. So I guess what I'm getting at with the question too is like now there's been this, you know, people are starting to pay attention to the actual meaning now, like why do we say that? But there's been this accepted verbiage for decades now in America where people say, this is a nation found on Judeo-Christian values. When, you know, no disrespect, but like George Washington never heard that term. You know, Ben Franklin never heard that. Those early, so the 1820s and 30s, those are not, the term then is being used, and that term's been around, but it's being used to describe a convert from Judaism to Christianity. Way different concept. That's right. Than the Judeo-Christian tradition. That's right. So, yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that it's, history can do this. It's very interesting. Things you were born into and take for granted, you realize were only around a few decades before you were born, and it sort of, you know, can make you look at things anew and understand that like, oh, things I thought were settled were only settled, you know, for a little while before I came on the scene. So this idea of Judeo-Christianity at the time in the 30s was seen as a very liberal and progressive idea, because it was inclusive of more people, and it was opposing communism, which for American liberals was, you know, people like Woodrow Wilson or FDR was a big part of how they understood what they were about as well. And today it's seen more as a conservative value. Like, it's actually like a limiter. It's like we say Judeo-Christian to say it's not Buddhist or it's not Hindu or something like that. That's a much different use. Now, you could say it had the same implication at the time, but in the 30s, there was no sort of conversation about including Hindus or Buddhists. It was about being more inclusive of the big traditions in the U.S. already. So it took on that different meaning. And this is also, to get back to Israel, most of the Christian Zionists in the 1930s were not fundamentalists and people interested in prophecy. They were people who came out of this more liberal interfaith world. People like Reinhold Niebuhr was a major theologian. He was a major theologian in the 20th century. He was at Union Theological Seminary, which is sort of like the citadel of liberal theology. He was a theologian who wrote in the 20s and 30s about. He was basically a sort of Christian Marxist in a way. He ended up really rejecting communism. But in the 20s and 30s, he wrote a lot about class in America and how this was the big thing the church was missing was that the poor are not getting Jesus like they should. And he ended up being very concerned about the Holocaust and about anti-Semitism in Europe. And so in the 30s, he's writing about the need for Jews to flee Europe and go to Palestine as an ethical sort of. And as Christians in America to support this as an ethical obligation. Now, to go back to what you were saying earlier, I don't know if this is the right way to put it, but to go back in the history a little bit, you have the Dreyfus Affair in the 1880s where famously a French soldier who was Jewish was tried for crimes that he wasn't guilty of. And there was a lot of, I guess, fomented anti-Semitism that they were claiming came out of that. And so you end up getting, I guess, like the World Zionist Congress at some point there. These guys like Herzl are trying to figure out where you can set up a Jewish state. At some point, I want to say in 1904, it was a Jewish state. It was a Jewish state. They vote on whether or not they're going to do it in Uganda. Unfortunately, they voted no. I say unfortunately, because they ended up picking the most controversial piece of land on the face of the earth. No matter where anyone picks to start any kind of country, somebody's going to lose. So there's always going to be some sort of issue. I mean that respectfully. But when they end up landing on Palestine through these things like the Balfour Declaration in 1907, through these movements of people saying, "Jews, we're not going to do that. We're not going to do that." Jews should flee Europe and head to Palestine to set up a state there. They're doing it on the land where you have the convergence of the world's three very well-known religions. I don't really see a scenario where that wasn't going to cause a problem regardless of who it was, no? Yeah, certainly in hindsight, we can see that. One of, if not the most common DMs I get on Instagram are many of you asking me what my favorite books are. Well, today's your lucky day because if you use the link in my description below to join my newsletter, I'm going to give you my top 10 book recommendations right now. Also, if you'd like to join my clipping community for a chance to make money producing content from the show, you can do so via the Discord link in my description below. And finally, you can join my Patreon for early uncensored releases of the full episodes via the Patreon link in my description below. As always, please take one second to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I really appreciate that. Also, the like button's a big help and you can join my newsletter via the link in the description below. I think at the time, someone like Niebuhr, who was a liberal, you could say, but he had a lot of blinders. And one of them was he did not appreciate that there were already a lot of people living in Palestine. I mean, this was one of those myths or misunderstandings that a lot of Americans had at the time, which was that largely Palestine was a land without a people and the Jews were a people without a land and that those things would- Palestine. Palestine was a land without a people. What about the people that were living there? Yeah. So for someone like Niebuhr in the 30s, he would say, there's enough room. We have a moral, ethical crisis happening in Europe. Jews, which are part of this sort of civilized European culture, are being rounded up. And he sort of saw before a lot that the Holocaust would probably be the logical conclusion of that. And so let's get them back to their ancestral homeland and deal with the fallout. The fallout at another time. There's also a lot of what we call now Orientalism at that time, which was the understanding that Jews had money, were civilized, were Western. The locals in Palestine, whether Jewish or Arab, were- Whether Jewish or Arab. Since the first century after. There's been a continuous existence of Jews in the- But they counted them in what they view it as like not as civilized as- Yeah. Because the Jews who were, you could say, the native to Palestine tended to be more religious, if not Orthodox, and did not speak, spoke Hebrew or spoke Arabic and lived- So they viewed them as less than? Yeah. They viewed them more as natives than as Western Jews from Western Europe. So that's interesting though. But you use that word, they viewed them more as natives while sharing the same religion. That's a part of what they're claiming is like the biblical prophecy that they should be back to this land. So the people who are the natives who share that religion that they think is a biblical prophecy is going to be back at this land are actually the people that are going to be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. The big boys are here now. Get out of the way." That seems a little backwards to me. Well, again, a lot of blinders. Now, someone like Niebuhr isn't thinking in the prophecy mode as much. He's thinking in the ethical mode, but he. I guess I mentioned the sort of local Jewish population to say the concern for someone like Niebuhr was much more about finding a place for civilized European Jewish citizens to find a safe place in light of antisemitism. And his idea was that there would become two states or there would be a way to work out a one state. That's something Niebuhr. Niebuhr until later on was not necessarily committed to in the first place. And I think it's important to think about that. I think it's important to think about that. I think it's important to think about the political Zionism in the sense that Jews had to have a political sovereign state. He thought they should have a place where they would not be persecuted, basically. Yeah. I mean, I've always thought that any groups, and it's hard to come up with an arbitrary number, but let's say any groups around the world of a culture that exist in a large number, I'll use the example of the Kurds. I think there's 33 million of them. It's wild to me the Kurds don't have a country. It's wild to me that the Jewish people don't have a country. It's wild to me that the Kurds don't have a country. It's this weird thing, though, like I was saying a couple of minutes ago, to where if you're going to do it, though, someone has to lose. And then how do they lose? And what are the methods used to lose? And how messy does that get? And then also how controversial is the land you're looking at, like we were saying? And this is like a perfect pipe bomb of having all those factors come together. Because I mean, I've heard over the years, Benjamin Netanyahu, make the argument where he's like, you know, they'll say to him, well, you know, there was a there was a Jewish community that was always there in the Holy Land over the years, never left for sure, as you just laid out. But you know, they, the last time they were there in large groups or had power over the land was say, maybe like the sixth century or seventh century AD. And then obviously, they get it back in 1948. And he's like, well, it's like you get kicked out of your apartment. And then you get kicked out of your apartment. You come back, and you say you are a squatter. And you remove them from the apartment. It's like, yeah, that's a lot of fucking apartments, though. That's a lot of generations for that apartment. It's like 1200 years. So, like, I don't have an answer for you. But at what point do you just accept that, like, maybe it's not ours? Because Because I do have to say, I'm living on land that I don't even have any family that was here prior to 1890 or 1900. And secondly, there were other people here in 1400, 1500, 1600. And then people came in and set up a new country. I'm glad they did, but somebody lost. So where does this game end to where you get to say, hey, you know, these are the people here now. You can't just kick them out. Yeah. Well, I think the I think the answer that a lot of American Christians gave in after the Holocaust was. Prize Picks Packs are here. Rip digital packs and get real basketball, football and Pokemon cards. Sell cards instantly for cash or ship them home. Prize Picks Packs gives everyone the opportunity to pull the one of one Cooper flag rookie card worth $8 million. And a Pikachu illustrator card worth $2.8 million and packs as low as just $1. Download Prize Picks and use code SPOTIFY. To get $25 instantly and bonus packs when you buy your first $5 pack. Prize Picks. Run your game. 18 plus eligible areas. Terms apply. Collect responsibly. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business from designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond. Shopify can help with everything you need. With Shopify on your side. Turn your big business. Business idea into. You know, this is this will be the solution to the problem of. Solution. That's a tough. Yeah. The solution after the final solution to. And we're really way is really connected to the Holocaust. So we've talked about the sort of liberal religion, more interfaith. We've talked about the Judeo Christian concept. I think the third thing that sort of reorganized. As Jewish Christian relations is the Holocaust and and the recognition by people like neighbor, but many other people, the Catholic Church had a major statement in in Vatican two in 1962 really revising how they talked about the Jewish people and they had been talking about him for centuries. This is not just a theological questions is a political question too. And so the idea is the Holocaust was such a uniquely horrible event that. The Jewish people need to have a land where they have the ability to protect themselves from any future Hitler and the the argument that Zionists were making was give us Palestine and that'll be the land. And that was from the eminence of maybe this is a strong way to put it, but one place to draw the line of when that process may have began is 1917 with the Balfour Declaration. Is that fair to say? That was one of the legal claims. Right, so that so that this is part of the the history of the Arab Israeli conflict is is dueling legal claims over sort of who gets what and which authority are you following? So if you're following, yeah, if you care about what the British Empire says, then the Balfour Declaration matters to you because that was issued by Lord Balfour, the foreign minister at the time, you know, if you don't care about what the British Empire says, which was what many Arab Arab countries or. Arab peoples, there weren't even countries at that in 1917. That's not really that big of an authority for them, but a number of the Zionists who ended up founding Israel were British. And so there is a deference to the British legal system. That means, yes, they point back to the Balfour Declaration as one of the the sort of legal documents that justify what they're doing. But but they'll they'll at one point appeal to that and another they'll appeal to the Bible and say, you know, the places this is why, by the way, archaeology becomes important. To, you know, the places that are still around in at that point, Palestine are named. Usually they're named for you mentioned there was a lot of time between when Jews were there and 1948. So they were named they had Arabic names or Turkish names based on the Ottoman Empire or British and German names because both of those countries were imperialist and had like things in the Middle East. And what the Israelis want to do and the Zionists want to do is say. Let's name these after like let's get back to the Hebrew name, the name that in the Bible is, you know, way older than even the Arabic names that came out in the seventh or eighth century. So this is where the archaeology gets important again, because if you can make a credible claim that this place's original name was Hebrew and not Arabic, that does lend some sort of argumentative weight to the claim that the people who speak Hebrew. Are the ones who are the original, you know, owners of this land, and so that that's part of the whole post Holocaust thing, but the bigger one would be the overwhelming moral weight on. Western Christians that many of them feel for being complicit in the Holocaust, and that's one of these big arguments that comes out right in the late 40s and then just expands a lot in the 50s and 60s is it wasn't just Nazis that committed the Holocaust. It was confessing Lutherans and Catholics. Like most of the soldiers weren't just Nazis and many of them weren't Nazis. I mean, they weren't part of the Nazi party. They were part of the German military. What did they do every Sunday? They went to a Catholic church or a Lutheran church, and those are the people that could justify, you know, murdering six million Jews. And that is sort of the biggest problem for Christians, Christian theologians in particular, to say, how could that have happened? Like how, how badly have we screwed up? Our teaching around Judaism and and part of the solution there is to rethink the idea of statehood and the Jewish people to go back to Augustine to say, maybe Augustine had it wrong. Maybe the Jews aren't destined to just be guests in other people's countries and for the people of the time Israel seemed like the state of Israel seemed like a almost like a post-colonial like a decolonizing or post-colonial cause. But now we. Associated the exact opposite that Israel looks like settler colonialism in the forties, fifties, there were dozens and dozens of countries being created out of the breakup of the European empires, and they all had moral causes. They all had reasons why the people in, say, Kenya or Algeria or Lebanon, why those people said, like, we need to throw off the shackles of our European oppressors in that period. It seemed like the Jews had a very powerful moral case that. They got to do that, too, not just in the larger cause of the Holocaust. Yeah. And it's it's definitely clear that that helps put things over the top for sure, because there was a lot of the world like even in the West where, you know, the US government's like, oh, shit, weren't we turning away boats from Cuba and stuff like whoops, sorry about that. And then, you know, you had other governments around the world that were expressing the same kind of thing. So naturally it coalesces that way. But as we were saying, the process. Began long before that, because you did have a clear set up of like kibbutzes forming in the 1920s and 1930s and developing a real mathematical percentage community there, such that when it actually does get across the finish line in 1948, they already had a lot of people there. Yes, yeah. And I mean, this is all also filtered through, you know, the years 1947 and 48 are very complicated. And really what ends up. Happening on the other end of that, which is that you have a state of Israel, a huge dispossession of Arab Palestinians that are now refugees in places like Jordan and Egypt. You know, that was what I mean, some of the scholarship goes back and forth on this, but that does not seem to have been the the master plan by anyone in, say, 1946. Like no one could have orchestrated all those events. You had the U.N. being created in 1945. Suddenly the U.N. becomes the mediating. Sort of institution to decide this thing, you have multiple studies, sort of information studies commissioned by the U.N. to understand what is going on on the ground. How many settlers are there? How many natives are there? Where are they located in the country? And then you have in 1947, you have the British saying we're giving up, like we're getting out. And then you have these votes in the U.N. that are, you know, to create. Two states to partition the land into two. The Arab nations reject those and the war starts and then the war has its own logic that leads to the situation at the end of 1948. But all of that is being, you know, is very contingent on the people on the ground and the decisions being made. But it's being interpreted by Americans in these ethical terms as well as like, well, you know, it might be very, you know. Very messy war with a lot of war crimes happening and everything. But like the Jews and the Zionists are sort of morally in the right category because of the recency of the Holocaust. And that's a lot of the way that that that conflict is interpreted by American Christians. Yeah. And that's what's wild to me, the cognitive dissonance. They're removing belief systems, removing whether you think you're right or wrong about the afterlife. Because, by the way, Christians in this case are talking about people that they disagree. With things on religion about. But when you start to see scenarios where one human life and another human life are not treated as equal. i don't care where it is we've had problems with that in this country obviously well documented as well there's just something about that that is inherently evil to me and it doesn't mean that the underdog's always perfect or anything like that no one is and there's and there are every group of people has evil within it's just human nature and what it is but you know when you see such a continued campaign as we have for so long since 1948 of israel constantly saying the government of israel saying we're being attacked we're under threat or whatever therefore you know we're going to kill all these people i'm not saying they've never been under threat i'm not saying they've never been under attack they certainly have but when they use that as an excuse for every single thing they do and then that results in things that are directly say anti-christian values you and yet you'll get major i would say radical american christians who are holding governmental positions where by the way we're supposed to have separation between church and state in this country like a mike huckabee and stuff like that or a senator like ted cruz who then not only they don't even turn a blind eye to this they know what's happening and they're like yeah not a big deal there's something about that that is so anti-values of jesus christ that i just can't wrap my head around i mean i don't know if i'm crazy or not but i i feel like i'm not and i feel like a lot of people out there probably agree with that yeah you're articulating yeah it's a very common uh particularly since 2023 i would say um you know what what i can do as a historian is is just try to you know um get back in the heads of the people in the 40s and 50s through today people like cruz and huckabee let's do and um and you know be uh try to have some uh project some empathy in the sense of trying to understand their perspective that does not condone what they view but but see how they got there but see how they got there and that's where you know one one of the famous uh so you know most americans in in 1948 knew almost nothing about uh zionism israel the middle east and so they often you know interpreted those things news they'd read or from some, you know, pop culture. And so there was a very famous book right around that time called Exodus by a Jewish author that was about, so Exodus is the story in the Bible where the Jews, you know, escape Egypt, but it was being used as a metaphor for escaping Europe and entering the promised land again. And in that, in Exodus, it turned into a big Hollywood movie. The, you know, the protagonists are like downtrodden refugees from Europe, survivors of the Holocaust who are being scrappy and they're the underdogs. Like in that story, they're the underdogs. You look at a map and, you know, Palestine's this little thing. It's, it's surrounded by Arab countries and kingdoms. And so that, that was a perspective of a lot of Americans who didn't do a bunch of extra reading or didn't have a deep historical understanding was Israel's the underdog. And, and the survivors of the Holocaust, I mean, they're like the ultimate underdog. You could hardly think of a, so that's the, that's the vision of Israel, largely in American culture. Really, I mean, for some people still today that, and this would be where the Huckabees and the Cruzes or the pastors like John Hagee, they continue to frame modern, like 2026 Israel within a Holocaust, post-Holocaust frame. And so that is still, the, the dominant way they think about it. For other Christians, for other Americans, the 67 war is where that, that changes and they see Israel just sort of dominate its neighbors. And so that's the six day war in June, 67. Yes. So, so from 48 to 67, there is no peace in 48. There's a bunch of armistice agreements. And so there's a, there's a Suez war in 56. There's a lot of sniping across borders. In 67, it's pretty clear. That there, there's a very sort of charismatic leader in Egypt called Gamal Nasser. He's the dictator there. It's pretty clear that he's trying to rally a, a, a war of the Arab nations around Israel to attack Israel. And so in, in May of 67, there's a lot of military buildup in Jordan, in Syria, in Egypt, and Israel is sort of convinced that they're going to attack. And so they decide to surprise attack on, I think it's June 6th. The morning of June 6th. And they are, are unbelievably successful. They basically destroy the Egyptian military, air force before it can get off the ground. And they sort of have this, this, this, some people thought it was miraculous, six days of just total domination of their enemies. And so by the end of the war, there is a significant amount of land that Israel is now occupying. Yeah. It took a lot of the Suez, right? They took the whole Suez. They took East Jerusalem. They took, the West bank. A lot of the things that we're still debating come from, from that war. They took the Golan Heights. And, and then the idea from 67 on was that there would be some type of ultimate, or this was the idea by Western diplomats, but there'd be an ultimate land for peace trade. So Israel would give back that land. And then there'd be some big peace agreement with the Arab countries that happened in the seventies with Egypt. So that was the deal in 79 or 77. start. Jimmy Carter. Anwar Sadat. Yeah, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, who's a sort of really interesting figure, but he's like the first right-wing Israeli politician. Yeah, he was in the Irgun. He was, yeah, all intents and purposes a terrorist during the 30s. And it's him who's making peace, which is sort of blowing people's minds in the 70s. But that was the basic deal there was Israel would get back the Suez and Egypt would sign a peace deal. And by the way, there's interesting, there were settlers in the Suez that had moved there in the 70s. And so that was one of these big things where on the right in Israel, it seemed like Begin had been a traitor because he not only made peace with an Arab country, but to make the peace, they had to dislocate settlers from the Suez. And that, you know, in the right wing, this is like our sacred calling is to settle this land from the Nile to the. That's the problem. It's like, it's never enough. Right. You know what I mean? And like, to call him. A traitor to that kind of cause would be nuts when you look at his history. Yeah. Yeah. He certainly didn't understand it himself to be. He saw it as like a part of a bigger strategy to normalize relations. And so this is the war where after 67, because Israel is now the occupier overseeing hundreds of thousands of, you know, in the West Bank and elsewhere of Palestinians, that idea of an underdog really starts becoming complicated. Yeah. And I. They're blending together in my head. I believe it was in Ronan Bergman's book, Rise and Kill First. I read that in, I think like the spring of 2023. He talks about the complicated. I'll take that for some more water for you. He talks about the complicated relationship between the Jewish community that had been in Palestine before and then during the Holocaust, and therefore, mark safe from the Holocaust, if you will. And the, those who came out of the Holocaust, the Jewish community that had been in Palestine before, and therefore, mark safe from the Holocaust, and therefore, mark safe from the Holocaust, if you will. And the, those who came out of the Holocaust, to flee the Holocaust. And there's a couple very interesting lenses through which he tells this story. One of them is he talks about how there was some animosity from the natives towards the European Holocaust survivors. And he tells this actually through one story where, I guess, famously, there would be these five old guys playing pinochle in maybe the 1970s in Jerusalem, and four of them had been there. And he tells this story, and he tells this story, and he tells this story, and he tells this story, and he tells this story, and he tells this story, and one of them was a Holocaust survivor, and the other four called him Soap, referring to him like a nickname as Soap because he would have been turned into Soap. And, you know, almost to be like, yeah, this fucking guy. And then the other story was the Adolf Eichmann mission, which is one of the most insane spy exfiltrations ever pulled off. Adolf Eichmann, largely thought is to be one of the godfathers of the Final Solution, had gotten out through the rat lines. Adolf Eichmann was living in, what was it? Was it Chile or Argentina? It was Argentina. It was Argentina. And Mossad, on a team led by Rafi Aitan, got operatives in there, including Rafi, and were able to get him out of the country, bring him back to Israel, and have him stand trial for his crimes. And it's this whole thing created a lot of unity, some form of, not that this exists, but like some form of closure for some people as it relates to the Holocaust, and it allowed for a big international trial where you could hear the testimony of people who had been a victim to this guy. But the way Bergman, and I think it was Bergman who explained this, explained it was, it was actually not even a mission Mossad was going to do. They didn't give a shit. In fact, they had ex-Nazis on their payroll working for him in Egypt and stuff. They were like, we're going to worry about some old war criminal or something. And then they were, they were sold on it because they were told this could be a huge political win. You'll get a lot of popularity. The international community will pay attention. They're like, all right, we'll do it. But they weren't like obsessed. Like who was the guy who ran the, the Simon Wiesenthal? Was it in, in Europe who, who ran like the Nazi hunting and stuff? He was a victim of the holocaust and all that and his family was like those guys they want to go get those guys right whereas the connotation bergman was making was a lot of like the native kind of jewish community people who were in the masan and stuff like that were like fuck this which is really interesting because the way you're describing it and correctly so is that a lot of the basis of the state being able to be created was because of the horrible things that happened in the holocaust and using that as like the well we got to give them this when in fact a lot of the people who were pushing for that creation happen to be using that happily as an excuse even though in some cases i don't want to say in all cases they didn't even respect the people who had been subjected to it yeah it's kind of fascinating to me yeah i think that that would be one way to show just sort of the different um yeah the way that that america americans have a very distinct perspective on this stuff and that's what's driving it and it may or may not reflect the reality on the ground um yeah that that's a you know and one of the things that came out of the the eichmann trial in the u.s was this other conversation that hannah arendt was a a philosopher who ended up writing a book called um eichmann in jerusalem that was sort of made a wave here and and that's where the she coined a phrase called the banality of evil and the idea is that you know eichmann is like the most sort of uh small diminutive person he's not a charismatic he's not hitler he's like the opposite of hitler and yet he's the one who just was obsessed with getting you know the trains on time and those trains just happen to be the ones going into and out of dachau and other concentration camps and how sort of this idea of like what do we think is evil is is often the most you know sort of bureaucratic mundane things not the charismatic uh crazy thing so that was one of the big conversations that came out in in the u.s uh culture that had a lot less to do with israel proper in fact the book got a lot of pushback because she ended up talking a lot about the complicity of certain jews in europe to the holocaust the way that depending on the pressure applied to different rabbis they would actually give part of their community to the officials to try to save another part and it created a much more complicated story and she basically never lived this down the rest of her life she's a very famous philosopher create a much more complicated story about how the holocaust actually was conducted where there were a lot of um uh you know people who were playing both sides and um and there were definitely um collaborators um from the jewish community and and uh and anyway that goes off that's a much different message than the the sort of moral clarity that um the people putting on the trial we're hoping to to get out of it you're listening to a quick ad you know what else is quick selling your car on carvana just put in your vehicle information and we'll give you an offer done no hassle no negotiation no guy from an online listing lowballing you which means by the time i'm done explaining this you could have basically done it still haven't started hey better late than never sell your car today on carvana pickup fees may apply prize picks packs are here rip digital packs and get real basketball football and pokemon cards on prize picks packs available now nationwide once you see your pool you have a choice to sell back instantly for real cash or ship it home cash from your sale will immediately be added to your prize picks balance it's just another way to run your game new users download the prize picks app today and use code spotify to get 25 instantly and bonus packs when you buy your first five dollar pack prize picks run your game 18 plus eligible areas terms apply collect responsibly i don't know if i were someone who had survived that and who more than likely lost like all my family in that you know the idea that then maybe i go live in israel afterwards because you know i want to go to a place where i can be marked safe from that kind of stuff cool but the idea that i could be living among some people who did that from my community yeah that's that's dark yeah that's crazy yeah and this is part of that interesting um you know i've been doing a lot of research and i've you mentioned the sort of tension between the the survivors of the holocaust and the people you know the jews that were in israel before that or palestine and there's another journalist tom segev he had one a book called i think it was called the seventh million and so the six million are the ones that die the seventh million are the ones that survive and they have to figure out what to do afterward and it was a book looking at sort of that same thing of you know in some ways from the outside particularly americans would think oh these are sort of like uh these are the humanitarian cause these are the people that you know if we were to create a state of israel we'd want to create it for but that in israeli society these people were often looked down upon um marginalized right and seen as um many of them were very poor and had as you can emotional psychological issues and all that kind of stuff and so um yes it's one of those things where the way that americans perceive israel from the 40s on is often much simpler and different than the reality of israel um on the ground another big one that um has a bit to do with this too is is most american evangelicals at least understand israel to be a very religious culture um they think they do yeah and and there's there's very narrow ways where that's true if you go to israel on yom kippur everything's shut down sure that's a major holiday on sunday or on saturdays from sundown friday to sundown saturday uh certainly if you're in jerusalem it is very different um it you know the the bus lines don't go a lot of the the shops are closed for shabbat um that being said that's a much more of a you could say a cultural practice than a religious practice you know the vast majority of israeli jews do not sort of um they they practice a sort of cultural judaism but they're not going to synagogue every week they're not reading their bibles they're not doing all the things that american evangelicals would expect but there's another thing where it no matter how many sort of the image is locked in there for for evangelicals that because of all this the bible stuff and the prophecy that israel must be a um a very religious culture if and this goes back to judeo-christianity too if if israel is sort of the pillar of judeo and america is the pillar of christianity just like america should be a christian nation israel should be a jewish nation and um that's just not how it is on the ground it's one of the things if you go there you realize like yeah i mean there are synagogues and there are certainly religious people there are orthodox people um around and there are others that practice but by and far it's like as secular certainly if you're in like tel aviv or um or haifa uh cities that aren't small or jerusalem um they're not religious in the way that evangelicals in the us would think they are so because there's a mythology with it as you put that's been sold which also isn't even like fair to do because it's like there's not a ton of places in the world that are all one thing or all like that you know but it's interesting because i'd asked you earlier if you remember the first time where like the state of israel was discussed within you know your evangelical churches and stuff like that you can remember a specific time but like do you remember the messaging like was there ever a clear message like we have to support israel and stuff like that and you just in passing kind of took that as right mythical place uh god's prophecy gotta support them no more questions to ask yeah so i didn't grow up in the uh in the most um i didn't grow up in a very politicized version of this so there's other insert there's other churches where yes the politics is right under the surface i say i encountered it more as um well one we call it the holy land right so there's already this like elevated sense of something holy is is happening there but but there's a sense that um the the people of israel today the nation of israel the citizens of israel are prophetically significant i would say that that's the thing i took away as a kid was you know there's people in thailand they're normal people there's people in algeria they're normal people there's people in israel they're normal people they're normal people there's people in israel there's a prophecy about that and and the implications of that are you know couldn't you can say are pretty obvious in the sense that that must be a good they're not the good guys they're on the the good side of the ledger but i wasn't in the circles where we talked deeply about the west bank settlers or the newest peace deal you know the newest peace treaty and how israel shouldn't sign it or something like that um but i definitely could see how that would be the implications i would draw and if there was anyone who really cared about it and was trying to like get me to think that way i had built-in uh software you could say that would be like oh yeah that makes total sense like that lines up with with the way i read the bible and everything else so i think i think that's actually where a lot of christians evangelical christians tend to be like most evangelical christians don't spend their days thinking about israel there's there's tens and tens of millions of them a segment of them really care about this issue and create all the literature and all the tv shows and all that kind of stuff um but there's a lot of built-in software in the broader culture evangelical culture that mean that people tilt that way and then if they're pushed uh and if there are events in the world that activate them that they're going to be more likely to go into pro-israel them that's interesting i didn't mean it any more nefarious than the chip just yeah that's wild yeah have you ever read netanyahu's autobiography the one from a few years ago yeah yeah okay so i actually do recommend that to people all the time i read it in 2023 trippy enough ahead of the i finished it two or three weeks before october 7th which is kind of interesting timing right there but you know one of the things he he talks about a couple things in there that tie together number one he's not religious at all he's literally an atheist the way i would describe it i don't know if this is his intention for it to come across this way as he's almost like yeah that fucking religious stuff you know but he loves invoking it when it's useful for his politics which i think is one of the most things you can do that said he talks about in his years in america because he spent a lot of years here you know he's obviously raised a lot of his childhood here that's why he's got that philadelphia english accent and then he spent a lot of his younger adult life here went to mit he went to mit then worked at boston concierge consulting group with mit romney and all that and you know obviously had a lot of relationships but one of the things he he openly you could say like brags about is how he was one of many people but one of the representatives fortifying the allegiance between israel and the evangelical christians who not only did he look down upon for believing in quote-unquote any of that shit unquote but it's also a different religion than what his people that he's protecting believe in that he also looks down upon and he's also a different religion than what his people that he's protecting believe in what his people that he's protecting looks down upon and yet he discusses it in such like a gleeful kind of like yeah this is a really important partnership and all that and something about that just it's gross because it's like you're just trying to get political power in your own country and you're trying to get more power for said country and the things you do and you are using as like some sort of protective tro in my estimation some sort of protective trojan horse a bunch of people in a different country america who have a different religion christianity to get them to believe all these tales that you yourself don't believe so that you can spread your cause far and wide for whatever end means that is like i don't know that seems kind of they're playing dirty to me um i can definitely see that perspective and it's net yahoo is one of the more successful versions of it and he's been around so long that you just it's a huge track record i mean this goes back to the original leaders of israel david ben-gurion was the first prime minister he would do he was more or less a secular person as well though from a different angle than net yahoo he would often invoke the bible and god when he's in front of christians knowing that this is the the common language that they're they're gonna um respond to i mean so so one way you could say this is playing dirty this is using something that's supposed to be sacred to pursue worldly means or something like that i think from the and this is something going back to when i got into the archives of the the state archives of israel so looking at their foreign ministry their religious ministry and their tourism ministry when was this when you looked at this this was when i was i lived there so this was my dissertation research um and you actually can't do this anymore the the the the archival system has changed there so you you don't have the same type of access that you did 15 years ago they call that the dan hummel rule i i don't think i don't think i was i think it was actually net yahoo was the i think there's certain people in israel who've for a long time have said like why are we letting people research our archives out of here um so this is where this is what historians tend to do diplomatic historians you go into the archives of the bureaucracy and you try to figure out what's the story based on the memos and things like that so in in countries like the us there are very open policies like you have to you have to either classify it or has to be accessible usually it's around 30 years so if you follow the scholarship you know like right now there's a ton of scholarship on the 80s because all the stuff from reagan has become available to uh historians that want to to research it and um israel used to have that so i was there in 2012 i was able to research stuff up until the early 80s and so it was it was it was nice it was it was uh interesting to to do that today i think as i understand it you there is no physical space to go to anymore where you can actually you know get the box open the pieces of paper and look at the transcripts you have to request a document you have to request a folder and then some archivist will go and scan it for you and then send it to you as a historian it's like there's so many ways that that could be misleading on what's in there also a lot of what you do as a historian is you don't actually know exactly what you're looking for and so you just sit there and you got to sift through all the stuff that's not relevant to find the good stuff and it's like i can't i can't just request a pdf of the thing i have no idea if it's going to be useful or not so anyway but but when i was back there you know able to do this stuff um there is a term in in hebrew uh that is used a lot in these settings where israelis are trying to appeal not just to evangelicals but to all types of people it's hasbara it's public diplomacy so in that sense what netanyahu is doing what they did for decades before him was just public diplomacy it's like what is you know you need this certain interest group in a certain country to be on your side the us is a democracy so you need sort of these these domestic interest groups to um somehow have affinity for you as the state of israel well what's the things that you could do you could appeal to economics you could appeal to um the technology sector in israel which is you know uh significant in the middle east you could appeal to these like general ethical values about democracy or whatever or you could appeal to the thing that is far more you know of an uh of importance to a lot of these people which is which is the holy land stuff and and the uh the religion stuff and so in that sense i i don't know if um from a bureaucratic standpoint there's much differentiation from in the israeli government between religion and other ways that they would appeal to people and they're not just doing it with the us they're doing it all over the world and every country is doing it yes and there's all different ways that the us tries to pull on the heartstrings of of every country out there as well uh depending on what the history is between the us and that country and what the us thinks uh you know the the public diplomacy people so which is overthrow their government yeah that's been a yeah that's been a resort as well um but you think of like like uh radio free europe and stuff from like the the cold war where it was a very similar sort of appeal to these like common western things to try to get people behind the iron curtain to care about um overthrowing the communists so in that sense i detest the idea that you know if you're a detected at least from the perspective of the bureaucrats that they didn't themselves understand the religious element to be unique beyond the sense that like it's something that we can use here that other groups just don't have as an as an asset um and there i i don't know what to make of that because i i think that that's um in large part it's in large part like how states interact with each other is they um they appeal to these these things they think will will activate someone in and particularly israel is a small country halfway around the world there's not a lot of reason why americans outside of special reasons would care they don't care about jordan the same way they don't care about lebanon the same way um and in again going back to like the 50s and 60s when this started in the post-holocaust context particularly when one of the interpretations even in the israeli state was interfaith relations are really important because the breakdown of interfaith relations is in part what led to the holocaust yeah like this needs to be an area of concern like we need to somehow get christians to reform their theology in order to be less hostile to to jews um as as a people so that's a lot of where it's coming from i think i i agree with you that netanyahu sort of operationalizes that and is very cynical in how he uses it but he's in a tradition i guess is what i'm trying to say like he's not the first one to do that um his father was doing it too yeah his father yeah ben zion um had and ben zion was a scholar of of the um inquisition which was went very poorly for the jews in spain and so he had a very sort of ideological perspective on the threat of the christian world as well that basically right of the christian world that basically underneath underneath every christian is a is an anti-semite because of the history of because christian theology is so anti-jewish and because um uh and because of history because of the way that christians have mistreated jews this has been zion's you know interpretation i think that benjamin basically internalizes so if he does though isn't that kind of fascinating that netanyahu benjamin has spent so much of his life invoking the bible to appeal directly to the people that his father possibly pierce back here taught him not to trust that's kind of interesting to me well i think what what benjamin has done is he's found what he believes to be the few christian the the christian traditions that aren't uh beholden to anti-semitism or anti-judaism particularly american evangelicals and he's cultivated that relationship and he's seen it as you know i can't do this with the catholic church i can't do this with the presbyterians or the lutherans or the anglicans i can do it with these disorganized but powerful christians in the u.s and because of this particular theology of dispensationalism that holds a special place for the jewish people in the future because of prophecy they are not prone to the same type of anti-jewish theology as the rest of the Christian world. They also have a lot of, you give a good visual there of them being like not organized at the same level. So they have a lot of captains of ships, if you will. You can get these larger than life, really cultish mega pastors who also love that money. And if you flow that money in there, they'll find the winds of God to follow it. I'm looking at the Kenneth Copelands of the world and people like that. So they can then use their, I call it what it is, their cult powers and stuff like that to then incentivize their people who would literally follow them off the George Washington Bridge if they told them to, to do what they say from a political standpoint too. Yeah. And I think the sort of er version of this or the paradigm example is Jerry Falwell, the senior from the late seventies, early eighties. This is when Menachem Begin, Menachem Begin is prime minister. And Falwell is exactly what you said, a very charismatic, rich, politically influential mega church pastor who befriends Menachem Begin. And by 1980, Begin is awarding him the Jabotinsky Award, which is named after his ideological hero of the revision of Zionists. And he's the one that brought back Hebrew, right? Wasn't it Jabotinsky? No, Ha'am, Ahav Ha'am maybe is his name. He was not the one who brought back Hebrew. Jabotinsky was a revolutionary in Europe in, and I believe died in the forties, who was sort of the inspiration for Begin's own radicalism. And he, and so this award was sort of just concocted to give to people like Falwell as saying like, hey, you're being honored for your, your friendship to Israel. But Falwell was also considered, you know, interpreted at, in 1980 as one of the reasons Ronald Reagan won the election that year. That Falwell had activated these millions of Baptists in the South to vote for Republicans and that, you know, he had, he had sort of turned the election in Reagan's favor. Thank you guys for checking out this clip. If you haven't already subscribed, please subscribe and hit the like button on this video. It is a huge, huge help. And if you'd like to check out this clip's full podcast episode, that link is in the description below or right here. And finally, you can follow me on Instagram and X by using the links in my description below. Rip digital packs and get real basketball, football, and Pokemon cards. Prize Picks Packs gives everyone the opportunity to pull the one of one Cooper flag rookie card worth $8 million and a Pikachu illustrator card worth $2.8 million and packs as low as just $1. Download Prize Picks and use code SPOTIFY to get $25 instantly and bonus packs when you buy your first $5 pack. Prize Picks. Run your game. Terms apply. Collect responsibly. 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