Part One: The Origins of Terror in Palestine

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the
very worst everything you don't know about the worst people
in all history. It's kind of the initial point, but
we also go back to our name when looking at
kind of the remit of this show, and one of
the things we try to do is get like behind
the bastards, including like the very worst people in the
world today. And we've already done an episode on Benjamin

(00:26):
nettan Yahoo prior to October seventh and kind of this
most recent escalation into genocide and Gaza, and I didn't
really feel like, you know, returning to net Yahoo well,
was kind of think this show does best covering like
things that are currently happening and like breaking news. That's
kind of why we've started. It could happen here. Yeah, yeah,

(00:47):
and I'm among other things in the last year. So
one of the best things we've done there is bring
on doctor Donna al Kurd to help us report on
and you know, not just stuff in Palestine, but you've
done a lot of really good work for us data
and so I want to bring you on as a
guest and talk about a subject that I think is
in your wheelhouse and also really important today. But thank
you for coming back.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
You should recall you doctor Elker the whole episode.

Speaker 3 (01:12):
No, doctor, please don't do that. It's super awkward.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
It is cool, I mean, yeah, but first off, have
you been and yeah, pluggables and stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:22):
Yeah, no, I'm I'm doing. I'm existing. You know, many
Bostonians are right now. But I'm happy that I edited
this handbook called the Handbook on Arab Authoritarianism that just
came out and it's open access, and so that has
been a shining thing for me right now. So yeah,

(01:43):
thanks for asking.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Oh that sounds great. I can't wait to read that.
I've been I've been doing some. I for one of
the things I read for this book, which is kind
of about like the birth of terrorism in Palestine in
the Holy Land prior to the knock, but prior to
the establishment of the state of Israel. This episode, if
you had like an education like me, because I remember
as a kid, most of what I was told about
the series of conflicts there was that like number one,

(02:06):
it's been going on for thousands of years, that's always
been happening. And number two that it's like primarily religious
and always has been primarily religious. In dimension that like,
those are the two truths about it, and kind of
when people are saying that, one thing they're kind of
tacitly saying, I think is that like Muslims and Jews
can't live together, right, Like that is they don't tend
to directly say that, But that's what you're meant to believe.

(02:28):
If those two first things are true, right, and that
they're both this is news to you, and that they're
both they can't live.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Together, but they're also both crazy exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
Right, right, And none of that's true to the conflict.
Right for one thing this you could I mean, yeah,
obviously stuff that happened in ancient times is relevant for
a variety of reasons, just because history is never you know,
discreete right, But if you go back to like eighteen eighty,
you can get a really good grounding and everything that's
really relevant to the conflict today. Right. I mean, maybe

(02:57):
you disagree with that. If so, I yield to your experience,
But that's kind have been sort of what I've come
to feel like kind of reading into it that that's
you really that's a really good grounding and kind of
everything relevant to the to the day starts in the
late eighteen hundreds, Like it's not that ancient.

Speaker 4 (03:11):
Right, No, No, absolutely, Like if I'm always anytime I
talk about this or any time I teach about this,
Like my main takeaway is like, this is a very
recent conflict and recent in the grand scheme of human history,
and it's about nationalism.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
It's about it really boils.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Down, it's about nationalism. And yeah, and one of the
important things to understand is that prior to the outbreak,
I mean, prior to a lot of things, I mean,
Zion isn't being one of them, but nationalism because it's
I mean, Arab nationalism and also European nationalism are deeply
tied to all of this. Among other things, Jews and
Muslims and Christians got along reasonably well in Palestine for not,

(03:48):
you know, never, Like no multicultural society is ever completely
devoid of conflict, right, but there's a lot of I mean,
one of our sources for this is a book called
Lives in Common that really goes into how different things
used to be there and how the fundamental conflict has
nothing to do with faith. Right, So I wanted to
talk about like that, how how we got to kind
of the point of no return, before the estab before

(04:11):
you know, nineteen forty eight, and before the Nakama, right, Like,
how did things and how did the Ottoman Empire and
the British Mandate kind of help push things along to
the point of no return?

Speaker 4 (04:22):
Right?

Speaker 2 (04:22):
So that's I think what we're going to talk about
this week, because yeah, that's just I was initially planning
to do episodes a little bit different, probably on Monocam
Bigan or on Vladimir Yebatinski, But it just it seemed
to make more sense to cover it this way, in
part because I actually didn't feel like just focusing on
like one guy and trying to like sort out like

(04:43):
how things went so wrong through a single It just
didn't seem like the right way to do this.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Now, this is more comprehensive, I would say, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
Yeah, we'll see. So the story that I'm going to
tell this week starts in the eighteen eighties and ends
around nineteen forty with a major terrorist bombing that kind
of sets the stage for a lot of stuff going
on today. But to start, we need to go back

(05:10):
to Palestine during the Ottoman era, and when we talk
about this period, the first thing I need to get
across is that people living in Palestine during like the
eighteen hundreds and even the early nineteen hundreds would not
have considered Palestinian a useful identity within the territory, because
if you're like Muslim or Christian or Jewish, you're still
a Palaestin. Like no one, like someone identifying themselves a
Palestinian would not tell you what they believed, what community

(05:33):
they were a part of, necessarily, right in like eighteen
seventy you know, yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:38):
I mean these were Ottoman provinces. They happened to be there. Yeah,
different communities happened to be.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
There, Yeah, exactly. And you know, in eighteen eighty or so,
the majority of residents in any city in Palestine would
have identified as Arab, including most Jews. And this is
not a category that you see a lot of people
claim today Arab Jew, right, But for a very long
time there were large community of Arab Jews spread throughout
the Middle East and North Africa, And in some ways,

(06:04):
these episodes are the story of why many of those
communities ceased to exist, right, Because that's also very tied
up in the State of Israel and the wars that
happened as a result of that all that stuff. Right,
this is one of the communities that kind of, in
a number of reasons not purely ceases to exist, but
it also gets transmuted. People stop identifying that way, right.

(06:25):
And there's when we talk about Arab Jews, there's a
really it seems to be kind of muddled distinction between
that and like Sephardic Jews, where a lot of Sephardic
Jews would have considered themselves Arab Jews and spoken Arabic primarily,
but it kind of varied, right, that was more common,
as I understand, And like Hebron where the majority of
the Jewish community and Hebron in this period was extremely

(06:45):
Arabic and would have very rarely spoken kind of the
language that most Sephardics spoke, which is Spanish derived. We'll
talk about that, yes, Ladino, right, it was noted like
in Hebron, they would only use Ladino and songs that
like occasionally, right if there was like people in who
might have been from like another city or something during
like a religious celebration, right, Whereas in Jerusalem Ladino was

(07:07):
a lot more common. Right, So you know, stuff like that,
It is kind of a blurry distinction between Sephardic and
Arab Jews, and there's this.

Speaker 4 (07:14):
Category also ms Rahim that kind of slumps Arab and
Middle Eastern Jews from Iran and in Arab countries kind
of all together, that becomes kind of a catch all term,
I think, especially after the creation of the State of Israel.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yes, yes, and I'm not the best. I'm trying to
kind of hopefully not screw this up too much. These
are very complicated, you know when we kind of talk
about how these the terms and how identity has shifted
in these communities over this period of time, Like it's
more than we'll totally get into today. But you need
to understand that, like, among other things, when you're talking
about the eighteen eighties in Palestine, when most Palestinians were

(07:54):
be they Arab, you know, or Muslim or Christian or
Jewish or whatever, if they were getting angry at a
foreign power in those days, that power was the Ottomans, right,
Like that was the enemy for a lot of basically everybody,
right or it was like the ruler that you just
kind of like assumed, well, you probably can't do any
better than this, right, this is just life.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
You know, you are upset about taxes, you're upset about.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
The drugs, right, right, exactly exactly. And also the Ottomans
are Turks, right, the rulers are foreigners, They're not Arab,
and you know, the empire is a foreign one that's
holding a lot of arabsy it's holding Arabs in some
form of bondage, right, And obviously a lot of you know,
Jewish people are not like the Jewish religion is not
is also especially in parts of the you know, it

(08:37):
varies treatment in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, but
they're not considered equal under the law, so they and
also Christians have a lot of issues with the Ottomans.
But Arab nationalists, which are increasingly becoming a thing in
the late eighteen hundreds, are also really angry at the Ottomans.
Everybody's pretty pissed at the Ottomans. They're not a good empire,
especially by this point in time, right, Like things aren't
going They're the sick man of Europe is kind of

(08:59):
the term people use. So in addition to being foreigners
who are drafting people and taxing them, they're also just
not holding up super well, right, And it's kind of
increasingly obvious to everybody. But one of the things the
existence of the Ottomans does is like a ruler over
all the different religious groups and ethnic groups, is that
it mitigates a degree of internal conflict because everybody kind

(09:21):
of has this foreign power that they all see as
like the asshole, right, and it does kind of make
people fight less with each other. I do think that's
a little bit of what's going on in this period.
I think there's some solid area that comes from everyone
being angry at the same foreign power. Right. So Yakav Yahoshua,
a Jewish resident of Jerusalem in this time and a

(09:44):
future Israeli, wrote of this period quote, the residential courtyards
of the Jews and Muslims were common. We were like
one family. We were all friends. Our mothers poured out
their hearts to Muslim women, and they poured out their
hearts to our mothers. The Muslim women accustomed themselves to
speaking the Ladino language. This is his recollection of what
life was like in this period of time, and he's
not recalling any kind of religious conflict really, Like that

(10:08):
doesn't seem to be certainly his primary memory of this time.
It was a lot of solidarity and it's accurate to
note that. And you run across a couple quotes like
this in Lives in Common that some Arab Muslims would
see Arab Jews or Sephardic Jews as one of the
terms I've heard is like inferior locals. And they don't
mean that in they racial or religious sense. They mean that,
and then they have not been here as long. They're locals,

(10:30):
but they haven't been here as long. And that's true
for a lot of these, especially like Sephardic Jewish communities,
because you can tell this by the fact that they
speak Ladino, right, which is derived from Old Spanish. Because
many Sephardics were the remnants of the Iberian Jewish community
who'd been exiled. And one of the things this actually
does is there's a lot of solidarity between some of
these Sephardic Jewish communities and some Arab Muslim communities who

(10:53):
are descendants themselves of the Arabs that were kicked out
of Iberia. And there's this kind of belief pretty wide
spread that some of these Sephardic communities have done a
better job or the best job of maintaining some of
like the musical and artistic culture of that you know,
community that was largely driven entirely driven out by the Christians. Right,

(11:14):
So there's this really deep and we I don't think
these relationships exist very much anymore, but this very deep
relationship between these two different religious groups who are both
exiles from the same place and wound up in Palestine,
which I actually just wasn't aware that that was a
dimension of life in that period of time. I find
it really interesting, especially when you think of how far back,

(11:35):
you know, the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Iberia
is from this point in time. We're talking hundreds of years,
and these are still really meaningful community relationships. I just
find that fascinating. Now, depending on the city and community,
the difference between like how these communities saw themselves and
conflicts between them would would vary and be blurry. But again,

(11:56):
in places like Hebrawn, the Jewish community spoke Arabic as
the first language and only occasionally included Lidno songs and
worship celebrations, right, So it did change depending on where
you were a Jewish resident of the Old City in
Jerusalem or Al Kuds during this time. Alaihu Ali Yashar
wrote that during his youth quote, we heard Arabic and
spoke it utterly, freely with our neighbors. Yakov Alazar, another resident,

(12:20):
recalled Muslim women and mixed religion housing in a mixed
religion housing development, volunteering to draw extra water the day
before the Sabbath so as not to disturb their Jewish neighbors.
Like you, hear a lot of stories of this, of
religion and faith that's like lived in common and like
this really kind of deeply emotionally affecting degree of religious
solidarity and even co celebration of a lot of different

(12:43):
religious holidays, as we'll talk about now. Before we get
into some of those more positive stories, there is another
fact of life in Palestine in like this period of time,
the eighteen eighties eighteen nineties, that we need to address,
which is that for a shockingly long time, slavery still
existed there. Right, People bought and saw old and slaved
Africans for longer than you'd expect. And this is not

(13:04):
just in Palestine. This is a decent chunk of the
Middle East and in North Africa. In bits in his
book Trade Yeah, yeah, And this is by the way,
slavery is practiced and utilized by Jews and Muslims and
Christians in this period of time. There's not seemed to
be a major religious difference between who is buying slaves.
It's a wealth thing if you can afford it, and
you don't have a moral issue with it. You have

(13:26):
slaves in this period of time, some people do, It's
not super common. Klein notes that the Old City had
a market where African girls specifically were bought and sold
that operated until eighteen eighty nine, even though the Sultan
had outlawed the trade in eighteen forty six. Per lives
in common quote, In about eighteen eighty him Aharon Valero
bought an Ethiopian girl who was around ten years old

(13:47):
when the central government enforced the emancipation of slaves in Jerusalem.
The girl chose to stay with Valero's family and converted
to Judaism. A few hundred descendants of these slaves still
live in the Old City, and what is called the
black or slave compound not an aspect of history that
we talk about a lot, but uh, and.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
They consider themselves Palestinian today.

Speaker 2 (14:05):
Yeah, absolutely, yea, and it's it is I have heard
this occasionally brought up in order to slander like Palestinians today,
as if it was something that only one religion did.
And as that quote makes clear, there were plenty of
Jewish slaveholders in old Palestine. It was a money and
a morals thing. If you were okay with it, you
did it, you know. Coming into the eighteen eighties, the

(14:28):
Jewish population in Palestine numbered around twenty five thousand, and
Zionism as a political movement is not really There is
some immigration from Europe, but it's not really a major
political movement until like eighteen eighty two. And this is
when you see a bunch of smaller Jewish organizations in Europe,
some which had been sending migrants to establish farms or
might move to cities in Palestine for a period of

(14:50):
time before this, start to coordinate on like a large
scale right. And that's part of the story, but not everything,
because why is eighteen eighty one eighteen eighty two when
this really gets going. Well, there's a lot of shit
going on in Europe that makes it seem like a
really good idea for a lot of Jewish people to
get the fuck out of places like Russia. A big
fuel for this wave of migration comes in the wake

(15:11):
of the assassination of Tsar Alexander the Second by anarchists,
Russia blamed the Jews, as they usually did, and a
program followed in the city of Kirovorad. And this is like,
this isn't basically modern day Azerbaijan, if I'm understanding it,
I think it's generally a ZERI is like the region
that this is like attributed to. I'm not sure specifically

(15:32):
what country now, but like that's kind of the area
this is occurring in. But it spreads out of kind
of that community to the entire pale of settlement. And
there's like a year and a half or two of
horrific violence against Jews in a large portion, yeah, massive,
And this kind of it leads to the Tsar passing
what are called the May Laws in eighteen eighty two,

(15:53):
which further restrict where Jews could go and what jobs
they can have. And it makes a lot of people
want to leave. But the Oxford Encyclopedia of the History
of Terrorism it does something else too. This also expedited
the consolidation of Jewish nationalism. The most significant essay of
the time was Auto Emancipation by Leon Pinsker, in which
he advocated the idea of self determination for the Jewish

(16:14):
people in their ancient homeland. Now it's worth talking about
all this and talking about what's happening in Russia as
how it helps to fuel Zionism. But it's also worth
noting very few of the people who are fleeing Russia
and other Jews who are fleeing Russia and other Eastern
European countries in this period choose to go to Palestine.
That's about of the huge number of refugees. By the way,

(16:35):
a lot of Jews leave Russia in the period immediately
after eighteen eighty one ety two, about three percent of
them immigrate to Palestine, right, And this first wave, by
the way, it's both not big and also a lot
of them don't stay. Right. Of that three percent of
refugees who come into Palestine as significant, some people say most.
Some sources say most leave pretty soon after because it's

(16:57):
like a pretty different climate than Russia. You know, lot
of people who are used to growing up there maybe
move to Palestine. They're like, oh, I can't handle this
is just yeah, it's not right. New York's way easier, right,
or somewhere else, you know, because it's hard, and it's
hard to farm in the desert, right, Like it's not
the easiest place in the world, and there's not a

(17:18):
massive amount that's going to because one of the things
that causes problems is that some of these refugees who
do stay, these early Zionists, a lot most of them
settle in cities, and a lot become very integrated, but
many settle in the country and start farms, or small
numbers settle in the country and start farms. But even
though it's not a lot of them, because resources are scarce,
and because you know, at this point, by the time

(17:39):
you've had an area that's been farmed and you know,
peopled as long as Palestine has, there's not just a
bunch of like good land that nobody is using, right.

Speaker 4 (17:48):
And they don't understand like indigenous farming. Like they're not
talking to the locals. They're really not adjusting well.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yeah, they're not adjusting well. And there are conflicts, there's
you know, and in this period, theolence, I don't see
a lot of reports about it being like hugely generally
hugely serious. It's mostly like petty theft and property damage, right,
and you know, there's some complaints from some of these
Jewish farmers to the Automan authorities, but obviously the Automan
authorities aren't going to take their complaints seriously, not that

(18:15):
they take a lot of complaint. The Ottoman Empire not
great at addressing the complaints of its people, right, They
certainly don't care about these these like Zionist immigrants, right,
they're the Ottomans in eighteen eighty. Yeah, So from these
initial concerns over security arose the first organized Jewish defense
group in Palestine, which is called bar Giora and Bargiora initial. Ultimately,

(18:38):
I don't know if it becomes the hashimor or it's
more accurate to say the Hashimer is kind of a
spin off of bar Giora, and then the Hashimer obviously
gives way to the Haganah. The Haganah becomes the IDF.
You know, it's you see kind of how things go there.
But initially bar Giora and the Hashimer they are like
left wing organizations because the primary organizing kind of impetus

(18:59):
behind them are these Jewish labor foot federations, and a
lot of these had started with people kind of organizing
their communities back in the old countries and sometimes organizing
like self defense in those communities from the Bagram back
in the Old country. And so some of those people
who make it over to Palestine, and these are generally
like leftists, initially start forming these like self defense groups
right this very first one. And it's not gonna there's

(19:22):
going to be like a right wing, a major right
wing swing that comes in after this. And some of
it is a reaction to the fact that a lot
of people, a lot of Zionists who are right wing,
are really fed up with a lot of these very
left wing like Zionist organizations, and there are conflicts between
them too. There's a left and a right wing. Zionism
is not like a single thing in terms of what
people mean when they say it in this period of time,

(19:42):
certainly not right to look at it that way. People
will mean a number of different things. That said, the
kind of major organizing center is pretty well represented by
Theodore Herzel, right, who is like the big Zionist theoretician
thinker of his day. Have heard of him quoted in
The Big Lebowski. In eighteen ninety seven, Herzel announced the

(20:04):
first Zionist Congress in Basil, which brought a bunch of
these smaller European Zionist groups together for the first time.
In his biography of Monocham, Begin Daniel Gordis makes it
clear that Zionism developed alongside and was influenced by other
nationalist movements, it was not separated from them. One of
the things he does, and obviously Gordis really likes Monocha
and Begin who is a very does I mean, there's

(20:25):
a guy among other things, there's a lot of terrorism
in life. But one thing he does point out that
I think is valuable is he has includes some quotes
from Monocham and he compares them two different like and
this is monoca like quotes that Monocham has come up
with that are like about Zionism, and he compares them
to different slogans and songs of like Polish nationalist groups

(20:46):
in the area Monocham would have been growing up as
a kid, and points out the similarities. And he's doing
this to point out that Zionism cannot be extricated from
Polish nationalism or German nationalism or any other kind of nationalism.
They are all yeah, exactly exactly, and they're they're influencing
each other right like at the same time, even though
a lot of these European you know, Polish and German

(21:08):
nationalists are also often very anti Semitic, that also influences
the development of Zionism, right.

Speaker 4 (21:13):
I mean, I like to point out that, like we're
talking about a time period, like you said, where like
there are these empires and there nobody is a citizen.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
Like it's not a democracy here.

Speaker 4 (21:23):
Everyone is a subject in an empire, and self determination
like nationalism fills a need you know, to like protect yourself,
especially as like the international system starts to develop.

Speaker 3 (21:34):
It's like we have to declare ourselves a nation.

Speaker 4 (21:37):
And like argue for our people's rights otherwise we won't
be you know, kind of legible on the international stage.
We've got to you know, move in this direction. Obviously
there are lots of ills that come from that, but
we'll get to that.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
I'm sure we will. And it's you know, it's also
it's hard to not to understand how if you are
a Jew in a place like Russia and you're constantly
being told you're not Russian, you're not you're part of
a different thing, you don't belong here. I can see
how some people are like, well, maybe that thing's you know, Zionism, right,
maybe that's what I should be doing of I'm not
a Russian. If I can't be here, like what else
is there? And obviously that's not the choice most people make.

(22:11):
Most people choose to go somewhere else for different reasons.
But like, yeah, like you have to. You can't separate
this from all of the other movements at the time.
And this is something Gordois makes a really good point
of making of writing about in his biography Up Again.
Quote the Jews, like the Poles, wanted their land back.
The Polish anthem declared, Poland is not yet lost. While
we live, we will fight with swords for all that

(22:32):
our enemies had taken from us. Well, the Hatikvah, the
Zionist's anthem, ended with the words our hope is not
yet lost, the hope of too millennia to be a
free people in our land. And you can see the
similarities there. And of course one of the big differences
would be the Polish people were singing were actively in
Poland right, and the European Zionists singing the Haktiva were
mostly foreign is, singing about land that other people already inhabited.

(22:55):
Foreigners to the land they intended to go to, right,
who had not been born and raised there. And that
is a meaningful difference, right. But you can also see
how these things are influencing each other as they evolve.
In nineteen oh four, the Kishinev Pogrom occurred in modern
day Moldova, which is of course then part of the
Russian Empire. And I think the cause of this is
the most popular paper in Kishinev publishes a series of

(23:18):
articles with titles like death to the Jews and Crusade
against the Hated Race. I probably don't need to read
you the text of any of those articles for you
to get the idea of like the tenor of them, right,
And this raises tensions to a fever pitch. And then
there's two murders of children. One is a young boy
and one is a young well, one is a young
girl who commits suicide. Right, And neither of these have

(23:39):
anything to do with the Jewish community. But there are
these long standing myths and rumors that like rabbis are
sacrificing Christian children to get their blood to do this
kind of ritual. Right, This is a huge part of it.
That's a blood life ter right, Yep, yep, massive part
of anti Semitism history, right. And so when these these

(23:59):
two young people up dead kind of in the same
area at the same time, there's just like an immediate
disinformation campaign to be like it's the Jews, right, And
then you get a pagram. Right, There's a massacre that
starts on Easter Sunday. I think forty to forty nine
Jewish people are murdered, hundreds more are injured, more than
fifteen hundred homes are damaged, and the pagram itself influences
a lot more people to flee than were directly impacted

(24:21):
by the violence. And one of the folks who was
very influenced by the kitshen of Pagram is Theodore Hertzel,
and this happens right before he dies. He doesn't live
a lot like much after this pagram, but one of
his last acts, and he had again, not a few
years before this, he had held that first Zionist Congress.
He's a major Zionist figure. But one of the things
that's interesting is he gets so scared after this Pagram

(24:43):
that he starts pitching something called the Uganda scheme. And
the Uganda scheme was a proposal that existed at this time,
that had been created by certain British imperial strategists who
thought it would be useful to kind of some of
the great game politics they were playing in Africa if
they could create like a semi independent Jewish community, not
quite a state, but more independent than a colony in

(25:05):
East Africa, Right, that could be useful to them as
like a But there were a number of reasons they
thought it would be useful, right, none of which had
to do with the welfare of anybody in Africa or
any of these Jewish people.

Speaker 3 (25:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
This is purely British power politics, right. And obviously Herzel
and a number of other people are like, well, I
guess you know, maybe this is better than nothing, right,
and it doesn't go anywhere. And a lot of Zionists
get really angry at Herzel because they are very focused
on the primacy of Palestine within Zionism, and Herzel's obviously
somewhat more flexible where he's like, look, I mean if
they're offering Uganda. And this highlights a really important reality,

(25:37):
which is like this whole ideology that is being developed, right,
and all of these European Jews that are being influenced
to move are under this constant paul of doom that
you know, these are the early warning signs of the Holocaust,
and so there's a lot of among other things, it
wasn't definite that the Zionist movement would land on Palestine
at this point in time. You can see that by

(25:57):
the fact that Herzel does embrace the Uganda Plan. And
it also shows just how chaotic things are, how scared
people are, and how little knowledge there is about like
where is a good idea to go and like what
should be done? Right, it's hard to see in this
period of time when these pagrams kind of rise up
like this natural it's not surprising that so many Jews
leave for like the United States in this period of time.

(26:19):
You know, it's really easy to see anyone who's paying
attention being like, well, I gotta go, Like I don't
know where I need to go, but like Eastern Europe
is not the place to be right the fuck now,
Like I'm getting on a bus to anywhere that's not
this place, right, And again, most people go to the
Americas or elsewhere in Europe. But it's not hard to
see why they're leaving so fucking fast. The first and

(26:42):
second waves of migration to Palestine during the Ottoman Empire
are known as the first and second Aliyah. Between nineteen
oh three and nineteen fourteen, thirty five thousand to forty
thousand Russian Jews moved to Palestine. And it's during this
time that Jewish immigrants near living near Jafa create the
neighborhoods that are going to form the nucleus of tel Aviv,
which eventually becomes the first like Hebrew city right in Palestine.

(27:04):
And that's what people will call it. It doesn't start,
and there's a huge like effort to deny that like
Jaffa really was a city kind of now, because the
idea that like tel Aviv was could not have come
into existence without Jaffa and without Jaffa forming a place
for a lot of these Jewish communities to start. And
I mean until nineteen thirty, tel Aviv's downtown was downtown

(27:26):
Jaffa basically because tel Aviv like didn't have one really like.

Speaker 4 (27:29):
They needed that economic opportunity that this very thriving city represented.
And actually that's like the basis of a lot of
the tensions between them and the Palestinians.

Speaker 3 (27:41):
Is the is.

Speaker 4 (27:42):
I mean you already mentioned kind of the labor aspect
of it. Is like they were extremely exclusionary and they
were trying to use these economics, you know, opportunities in
a very kind of directed way. So they were, yeah,
you know, rubbing up against a lot of issues.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
It's very what you said about the being exclusionary is
very accurate. A lot of these communities. Number one, they
only want to speak europe at whatever European language they
came in. They're very and they're not exclusionary just to
the Muslims. They're exclusionary to the Arab Jews and the
Sephardic Jews who had lived There's a lot of complaints,
a lot of quotes from Sephardics in Lives in Common
that are like, well, these new immigrants don't even speak Arabic,
Like I can't even talk to them. Right, So there's

(28:20):
the conflict is not like a Muslim Jewish conflict. It
is a native immigrant conflict, right, Like, that's what's happening here.
So Jews also came to outnumber of Muslims in Alcuds
or Jerusalem or the Holy City during this period. I

(28:40):
think coulds just means holy, right, yes, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah,
so I mean the Holy City, yeah yeah, the Holy Yeah.
During this period, right, and we're talking I think Jerusalem
is about thirty thousand people when that balance tips, right,
So we're not talking about a massive city, but that
change is significant and it shows kind of how these
how meaningful, these kind of numbers of people that are

(29:01):
coming in from Europe really have started to be Most
of the buildings in Jerusalem at this point in time,
when Jews start to outnumber Muslims there are still owned
by Arab Muslims, right, And overall immigration to Palestine remains
pretty small relative to the total population. In nineteen fourteen,
there are about eighty thousand Jews in Palestine, and obviously

(29:22):
that includes Sephardic and Arab, that includes, you know, all
of the other categories, not just you know, Jews who
had come in from Europe. And that means that the
Jewish population is about a tenth of the total population
of Palestine. Kind of Roughly, Jewish immigration to Palestine is
not even all that significant during this period in terms
of overall immigration, right, Like, other people are coming in

(29:43):
and Jews are a big chunk of that, but they're
not yet it's not yet what it's going to be, right,
And as more people of foreign origin start showing up
and buying property and come to dominate some neighborhoods, there
are a lot of native Palestinian people who start worrying.
Now many of these and these foreign Jews are often
called Ashkenazam, right, that's one of the terms for them.

(30:04):
They adopt. Some of them do adopt like an Arab
Jewish identity, and they do blend into these especially earlier refugues,
blend into these earlier communities and become very integrated into
these cities that are extremely multicultural in a lot of ways.
But not everyone's always willing to do that, and also
not everyone's willing to let them. Right, there are some
real differences between and what people are willing to accept

(30:25):
from what they see as our Jews and what they're
willing to accept from these foreigners. And I want to
quote now from Lives in Common Again, we knew they
were different from our Jews, I mean Arab Jews. We
thought of them as foreigners from Europe rather than Jews
as such, wrote Gata Karme, a Palestinian physician and writer
who grew up in West Jerusalem. And I think that's
a really important thing to keep in mind, is that, Like, again,
I know I'm harping on this, but these issues are

(30:46):
not religious in nature. There are issues of like a
bunch of European showing up in a place that's not European,
and like that causes conflict, you know, And there's a.

Speaker 4 (30:54):
Difference between immigrants and settler Like, yeah, exactly at Palestine
has often you know, historically obviously, like look at where
it's placed. It's often you know, absorbed different communities, right,
Like you said, there's like the types that like blend in,
and then there's the ones that refuse and want to replace.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
Yeah, because that is a really good point, because I
I don't and maybe I'll certainly yield to you if
because I'm sure you've considered this more than I don't.
I don't feel super like someone who just like is
fleeing a pagram and winds up moving to like Hebron
or Jerusalem or you know, Jaffa and like becomes a
member of the community that's less of a settler thing

(31:35):
than someone who like starts a farm and like it
starts a separate community that it doesn't want to let
it right, those are two different kinds of things, right absolutely.

Speaker 4 (31:45):
And the fact that they were like especially the ones
in Java for example, like they were disempowering the Palestinian laborer,
you know, like that is the issue. It's not the
issue that there are new people necessarily.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Yeah, it quite frankly, it's the issue that happens whenever
there's a bunch of immigration from a separate place to
a new place. There's always variance of these conflicts. Right now,
this is not entirely the same thing because usually when
that happens, like in the US, you don't have a
bunch of foreign organizations with a bunch of money propped
up by some very wealthy people who are funding a
lot of the immigration. And a lot of these Zionist

(32:17):
groups are funded by very wealthy people who are paying
for these these people to go over there and sometimes
paying for them to basically live. And so one of
the complaints again that a lot of like Arab and
Sephardic Jews have is that like these new immigrants, they're
often just being paid to live by someone else. And
that's also frustrating to me because like I'm a Jew
and I've been here forever. Why don't they have to work?

(32:37):
You know, not that none of them are, not that
that's like most people. But these are the conflicts that
are occurring. Right. That is an attitude a lot of
people have, and it's accurate to some of this influx community. Right,
And these are you can see these conflicts starting to breed. Right.
Even Yakov Yehoshua, who is later the father of a
celebrated Israeli novelist, claimed that Ashkenasm tended to prefer their

(32:58):
own courtyards where they did not mix with Muslims or
Arab Jews. Quote, Muslim women descended to us from the
roofs to while away the evening talking to our mothers.
Our children played with their children, and when other children
came into the neighborhood to hurt us, our Muslim friends
who lived in the courtyard came to defend us. We
were their allies. And that is that is the you know,
the recollection of this kay Yakov, who is a native

(33:19):
and to Palistin and Jewish, right, is that these immigrant
communities do not have the same relationship that we do. Right.
And that quote is lovely, but it does imply something unlovely,
which is that there is still some internescing violence here, right,
Like the fact that in this neighborhood, these Muslim their
Muslim friends are like defending these these Jewish kids when

(33:40):
they get bullied, it means that there also is some bullying, right.
And I've run into quotes like that Monochamkleient's book, and
that's not again, it's going to happen anywhere you have
like a multi Think about the United States, right, Think
about whatever city you live in, Like, there's sizeable it's
the United States sizeable non white, sizable immigrant populations. And
if you listen to this show, I hope that you

(34:01):
consider those people your neighbors and aren't a piece of
shit and a racist. But you know, whatever city you
live in has a not insignificant number of people who
are pieces of shit and racists right against like folks
who are just different. That occurs everywhere. There's different kinds
of people, right, yeah, right, right, And so the fact
that there's some violence like that, I think says less
than the fact that most of these accounts are about

(34:23):
people being like, yeah, and our Muslim friends like protected
us from those folks who are like, you know, assholes
or whatever, right, like that's I think a better picture
of life, which is accurate. It's going to sound familiar
to anyone who lives in the United States, right And
that is also Klein's conclusion right in Lives in Common,
which is that despite the fact that there are structural
inequalities that chews face under the Ottoman system, in this

(34:45):
period of time, in daily life, Jews and Muslims and
Christians in Palestine got along and lived together much more
often than they were in conflict. Right now, that doesn't
mean like things were always ideal. When are they ever?
And there's a relevant quote from the book there between
young Jews and they're Christian and Muslim fellows sometimes grew strained.
Shchulimit Laskov lived in Baka in the early nineteen twenties

(35:06):
in an apartment that the Karakoreans and Armenian family rented
to her parents into English tenants. She played with the
Kiakorean children and when she ate at their home, she
would occasionally participate in Christian prayers with them, but when
they fought her erstwhile friends would sneer Jewish at her. Right.
And this is a Christian family and they normally have
good relations but it's this is just like people, you know, Like, yeah,

(35:28):
I think that it's just human beings. You're always going
to encounter pieces like this, right, and I don't think
that should overwhelm the more important story of like this,
this really significant degree of social solidarity that exists in
this period of time, right, you know, the fact that
there's bigotry that crops up an integrated community shouldn't take
away from that, But it's more important.

Speaker 3 (35:49):
Like you said, oh, so sorry to interrupt them, No, no, no, no.

Speaker 4 (35:53):
I was just saying, like, at the end of the day,
like you said, like it's like their inferior status legally,
which applied also to Christian minorities, like as an Ottoman issue,
not their neighbors issue.

Speaker 3 (36:04):
Right. I'm sorry, I'm smiling, but my family's from ba.

Speaker 4 (36:06):
Ah, so I didn't expect you to come up with
a quote from there.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
Yeah. I think. What's one of the things that's also
important to remember here is that while Arab Jews and
Sephardic Jews and Christians who were born in Palestine and
natives to there were second class citizens, immigrant Zionist Jews
weren't always treated that way, especially in the latter the
very near the very end of the Ottomans, they might
have endured more protection than Jews were native born, because

(36:34):
they're seen as European and because the Ottomans are really
scared of pissing off the Europeans, right, not for any
kind of like, you know, because they're necessarily more connected,
just because they're they're white, right, Like the Ottomans don't
want that smoke. You know that that is a factor here, right.
So as more and more of these foreign born Jewish
immigrants moved to Palestine in the pre World War one years,

(36:56):
they start buying up property, not just real property but
in the cities as individuals, oftentimes just because you know,
you want a house, but also a lot of these
property and probably the bulk in terms of number are
being bought on behalf of and buy these large organizations
that are often doing it kind of strategically because they
want to be able to kind of, Oh, we would
like this to be a majority Jewish neighborhood, possibly because
it's near in Jerusalem, this happens a lot. Oh, we

(37:19):
want to kind of buy up as many of these
communities near the whaling Wall as we can, right, or
we want to buy up as many of these communities
near this other area that we're both of religious significance,
and that there is some conflict over and we want
to move these people that we're immigrating into. That's some
of these large organizations are very strategically thinking about the
property that they're buying that way. And we have to

(37:41):
deal with a couple of things when we talk about
the purchase of property in Palestine by these immigrants. Right,
if you read a lot of Israeli centered histories of Palestine,
you will come across the claim this is very common
up to the present day, that nearly all of the
territory that became the state of Israel was uninhabited when
these these these Zionists to start showing up. Right. This

(38:01):
attitude is represented well from an article I found in
the Jewish Virtual Library titled the Arabs and Palestine Quote.
For many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated,
and widely neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts, and
malarial marshes. Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in eighteen sixty seven,
described it as a desolate country whose soil is rich enough,

(38:22):
but is given over holy to weeds, a silent, mournful expanse,
a desolation here that not even imagination can grace with
the pomp of life and action. We never saw a
human being on the whole route. There was hardly a
tree or shrub anywhere, even the olive in the cactus tree,
those last friends of the worthless soil and almost deserted
the country. And I'm not used to being kind of
pissed at Mark Twain, but.

Speaker 3 (38:42):
Yeah, where's off? Where was he walking?

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Where was he walking? And like he can't have seen
all that much in terms of the actual expanse of
the country. But also I could drive through fucking Oklahoma
where I grew up and be like, wow, a desolate expanse.
I didn't see a whole person for for hours. It's like, yeah, man,
that doesn't mean people don't aren't living there and using
the land. It was hot as hell. Maybe they weren't
out that the time, man, Like yes, ces Man. Lewis French,

(39:08):
the British Director of Development, wrote this of Palestine, we
found it inhabited by Felaheen, who lived in Felaheen are
like Arab peasants. Right, we'll talk more about them later,
who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the
prevalent malaria. Large areas were uncultivated. The Felaheen, if not themselves,
cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals.
The individual plots changed hands annually. There was little public security,

(39:31):
and the Felahines lot was an alteration of pillage and
blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin and Jess I want
to note both how divorced from that is from real history.
In the history I've read you so far, I've read
you a bunch of counts of accounts, and these are
all from like the eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties, the same
basic period of time. Those two quotes I read about
no one being in Palestine, and these are quotes in

(39:51):
a lot of cases from people who become Israelis who
are like no, there was like a vibrant community that
I was a part of, Like a vibrant, settled community
that I was a part of. It was mostly non Jewish. Right.
We have plenty of accounts like that. This is obviously
not true, right, And even that Jewish Virtual Library article
cannot go long without technically admitting to the fact that

(40:11):
what they've said previously is not really accurate. The very
next sentence after the stuff I just read reads the
Arab population at the time was approximately six hundred thousand
compared to ninety four thousand Jews. Well that's not nobody.
That seems like a good number of it.

Speaker 3 (40:26):
Yeah, they're not here.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Yeah. One of the things that goes on that kind
of obscures this, this errant and deliberately errant view of reality,
is that there's just a lot less people in the world.
There's a massive boom in the human population that occurs
kind of during this the end of the eighteen hundreds
early nineteen hundreds. A lot of it has to do
with like the haber Bosch process, with the fact that
we figure out how to create a lot of nitrogen
for fur. There's but human being, Like, there's way more

(40:50):
people in twenty to thirty years from now the period
we're talking about, and there are going to be later
and so you can see that as like, oh, these
Jewish immigrants, the Zionist immigrants brought civilists to Palestine. It's like, no,
there's more people everywhere. Man, It's just what happened, like
we figured out how to make fertilizer. I don't know
what to tell you.

Speaker 4 (41:08):
And they just didn't understand like how these like felahin
likes organized their land.

Speaker 3 (41:13):
Yes, you know, they didn't have.

Speaker 4 (41:15):
Yeah, they didn't have like the property rights system that
they were accustomed to. And there was a big since
the landlords. And it's a whole thing that they didn't understand.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
And they didn't care to write.

Speaker 4 (41:27):
Now.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
That article quoted Lewis French, a British agent who lived
in Palestine after the Ottoman Empire fell in the west
took over governance, and he talked about the fellahin these
traditional Arab desert peasants as if they lived in primitive
filth and we're basically just bandits. And I want to
read you a different description of these guys from a
Sephardic Jewish man named Joseph Meuhas. And Yoseph Meuas is
a Zionist, although not not the kind you're used to

(41:50):
hearing about. We're going to talk about what he believed
because it's really interesting and he grows up in he's
a local, right, and he later wrote that when he
was a kid, which is kind of around this. I
think it's a little later than this, but it's before
things really start to get terrible. He writes that for
a ten year period where he's a young man, he's
going to school, he's training, he was quote a constant
guest in the homes of the Fellas in the evening

(42:12):
when I returned from the Hater, or during vacations and holidays,
I would always visit Mohammad and Fatma, as well as
Ali and Khadijah, my favorite neighbors. They fed me of
their bread, I drank of their water, and sometimes they
honored me with their conversations and stories as dessert. Until
late at night. I would sleep in their homes, and
in this manner, all their manners, values, way of life, speech,
and the stories I loved served as my childhood education. Right,

(42:34):
that's a very different picture, I think, and Mayo has
felt the need to write down his recollections of life
and of the Fela Heen because during the twenties and
thirties things started to get a lot uglier, and he
started to hear a lot of these very racist claims
about these people that he'd grown up with and knew
was not true, and he starts to witness Jewish and
Muslim communities closing off from each other and becoming more hostile,

(42:56):
and this frightens and saddens him. Mayuhas is a teacher
of a Ruin Arabic as well as French at the
Evelina de Rothschild School for girls. The Rothchilds fund a
lot of the Zionist immigration in this period of time.
That's not I know, people, when you people bring up
the roth Childs, it's nearly always conspiracy stuff. This is
a thing like the roth Childs do right, Like they're
funding a lot of this because they believe in this.

(43:17):
And Mayuhus thinks it's his duty because of the kind
of Zionist he is. He thinks it is his duty
to encourage his co religionists to admire, learn from, and
blend in with the Felahen because they've lived there much longer.
Right from the book Lives in common Quote, Mayuhas viewed
the philus as the original Arabs, as opposed to the
desert nomads and the merchants of the cities. The phil

(43:39):
us he wrote, were the descendants of the Canaanites, who
are considered the most ancient inhabitants of Palestine. They fully
preserved all the ancient customs, more and more race that
the Jews have forgotten because of their exile. In other words,
his view is, we don't need, we don't need to
be separate from these people. We need to learn from
them and become part of their community and let them
teach us, because they are living a more authentic version

(44:01):
of ancient Jewish life than us, and we should learn
more from them to honor them. Right. That's his attitude
as a Zionist, right, because to him it means something
very different than it does to guys like Herzel. Foreign
Born immigrants were likelier to see Zionism as a struggle
of conquest. In fact, that was probably certainly the dominant
after a certain period of time attitude, whereas meyu Hus
is a local right and he believes that Arabs and

(44:23):
Jews are spiritual brothers and cousins. Right, If European immigrants
wanted to thrive in Palestine, he reasoned, they need to
have a close and respectful relationship with Arabs in others
in order to be successful. How do you know how
to live here if you're not gonna learn from these people?
Who have lived here.

Speaker 1 (44:37):
Forever, right and here by the way, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:42):
Sorry, shit, I don't know. Yeah, here's an ad We're back. Sorry.
I just I found that this guy really interesting because
you don't hear about stories like all that often or
attitudes like this, and it's interesting the counterpoint he provides

(45:05):
these attitudes that like these people really meant nothing and
had no impact on the development of society and civilization
in Palestine. I think it's really important to look at
someone who's not creating propaganda post taste, right. This is
somebody who lives in this area and lives in this
life and is horrified by what he sees happening in
the twenties and thirties. We'll talk about Mayuhas a little

(45:28):
more later. So as for modern Israeli claims of a
barren and empty Palestine, the reality is that prior to
the mid twentieth century, the area is a lot less populated.
But at the end of the eighteenth early nineteenth century
there's a population and it's not even World War One
takes a real bite at a population growth in the region,
don't get me wrong, but it does start to happen
after this period of time. This is also something that

(45:49):
modern Israeli scholarship likes to credit Jewish immigration for. But
the reality is this is happening in a lot of
ways for the same reasons it's happening in many other places.
Near the end of the eighteen hundred's new rail lines
open up and connect Palestine to the world, and it
brings trade and also brings tourists. Right, A lot of
European tourists want to come and see the Holy Land,
you know. And those tourists would have seen Jerusalem if

(46:12):
they came in like nineteen hundred as an incredibly cosmopolitan city.
The Al Wad neighborhood, to give one example, hosted three churches,
three synagogues, and seven mosques. The many Jewish and Muslim
holidays were celebrated by members of all faiths in particularly
diverse neighborhoods. In the summer two thousand issue of Jerusalem Quarterly,
Salim Tamari writes about an Ottoman era Muslim named Wassif

(46:34):
Jowaria quote. It was a pre nationalist era in which
religious identity embraced the other in its festivals and rituals.
Jowarian narrates that the Feast of Easter slash Pessa as
an occasion from Muslim, Christian Jewish celebrations. He details the
Muslim processions of Palm Sunday, which proceeded from the Abrahamic
Mosque and Hebron towards Jerusalem. The festival of al Nabi

(46:55):
Musa is recalled here as a Muslim popular celebration that
merges with the Christian Orthodox Easter. The Fantasia of Sabt
al Nur Fire Saturday, commemorating the Resurrection of Christ, is
seen as the greatest popular Christian celebration in Palestine, closely
coordinated with Muslim folk festivals. Purim was celebrated by Christian
and Muslim youth and Jewish neighborhoods. Wassif describes in detail

(47:15):
the costumes they wore on this occasion. Twice a year,
Muslim and Christian families, including the Jawaria family, joined the
Jewish celebrations at the shrine of Simon the justin Sheik
Jarra at the event known as Shathat al Yahudia, where
Heim the oud player and Zaki the tambourine player would
sing the accompaniment of Andalusian melodies. Yeah not a vision.

(47:36):
A lot of people want you to have of Palestine
in nineteen hundred.

Speaker 4 (47:39):
I have to tell you, like the Palestine that I
was born and grew up in, Like, even in my
lifetime I'm thirty five, Like I've seen the progression of
like that lessening even more. I remember celebrating Christian holidays
and like there was a lot of integration. Obviously, the
Jewish holidays have been kind of you know, they've given

(48:01):
them they have kind of a different you know, salience
at this point.

Speaker 3 (48:04):
But even now, like in the last.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
Thirty five years, we've seen a huge decline in that,
like and the city has changed so much, so you
can imagine how much more it used to be integrated
back then.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Yeah, that's really sad to think about. I mean, yeah,
now again, obviously, as I've noted, people are not you.
Jews and Christians are not equal citizens of the Ottoman Empire.
They have to pay an extra tax and they don't
enjoy all of the same rights. But they're also protected
by the state and allowed to worship as long as
they accept their faith as subordinate right. And that's alone

(48:38):
doesn't really do a fair job of explaining the complex
social and religious status quot that would have existed during
the last days of Ottoman rule. As Daniel Schrockter, a
historian at the University of Minnesota, told Canadian Jewish News
reporter Jody Shopach, quote, the idea that Jews lived as
second class citizens makes little sense in this context because
the idea of citizenship didn't apply in the pre modern

(48:58):
Islamic world, Truth said, adding Islam did see Jews and
Christians as inferior, but that didn't prevent peaceful interactions between
Jews and Muslims on a quidtitian level. Right, It's also
important to keep in mind, right that, like, you can't
really think about equality and citizenship in nearly the same
way that you can't.

Speaker 4 (49:15):
Exactly right, nobody was no nobody had any rights.

Speaker 2 (49:18):
Yeah, and when we say.

Speaker 4 (49:19):
Inferior, it's like it's because Muslims believe in their faith
and they see these people who don't believe.

Speaker 3 (49:25):
It's the same as Christians.

Speaker 4 (49:26):
They're like, these non believers, they're less than us, Like
it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
And yeah, and it's not when people are using it again,
it's like when they're talking about people, how long someone's
been here, that doesn't mean they don't think you're like
a person who has like worth their value. It means that, well,
your family hasn't been here quite as long, right, right,
in the case of like, if you're speaking like a
Spanish derived tongue in Palestine, you have it right Like yeah,
not that you know that matters in terms Again, it

(49:50):
doesn't generally matter in terms of how people treat each
other in this period of time. That said, the fact
that like things are you've got all of these among
the things, A lot of wealthier Europeans are coming in, right.
A lot of these these these Zionist immigrants are poor
and they're being supported by money by wealthier people. But
there's also wealthier immigrants coming in, and especially since they're
white and European, they enjoyed better treatment, right. And they're

(50:14):
also buying up a lot of property, as we've talked about,
for future Jewish residents, and that causes conflict, not just
with Muslim residents. In the first decades of Zionist migration,
many Arab Jews and Sephardic Jews were extremely prejudiced against
these new immigrants, in part because they didn't speak the
language very well, and in part because they kept to
themselves and often were kind of mean. To some of
the Sophardic communities. There's a lot of conflict between the

(50:36):
different Jewish communities in this period of time. Adding to
the irritation that many Sephardic residents felt was the fact
that a sizeable number of these new immigrants lived off
money donated by wealthier Zionists. In eighteen ninety one, that's
the very first time that prominent Arab citizens of Jerusalem
petitioned the government to stop Zionist immigration to Palestine by
banning the sale of land to foreign Jews. They're starting

(50:56):
to see this as a cultural invasion by Europeans, and
they argue that it represents a threat to their culture.
And as always is the case with complaints like this,
the people who made them most loudly are also the
people who profited from the exact immigration. They declined, cried,
and that's a big part of this right. As Monochamkleiin writes,
the leaders of the Husseini family, who lobbied the court
to place restrictions on the Zionists also sold them landem

(51:19):
Jerusalem's mayor tahire Al Hussini approved the sale of land
to the Zionists and engaged in such transactions himself. In
eighteen ninety nine, Rabat al Husseini sold the colonial lands
west of Jerusalem to the Zionists, where the latter built
the farming village of Muza. He also helped Jewish land
buyers get around the Ottoman land law stipulation that land
which had not been farmed for three years automatically became

(51:39):
state property. Ibrahim Sayid al Husseini worked for Baron Edmund
de Rothschild's land company JCA. He later resigned and signed
protests against the Zionists. Salim al Hussini made a fortune
in real estate ventures with the Jewish community and partnered
in a hotel with Yitzak Rokok, a Nashka Nazi resident
of Jerusalem. And we'll hear about Yitzak Rocock and the
Rocock family a little bit later, well, actually right now,

(52:00):
because Rocock is interesting. His son Shiman moves to Jaffa
and creates a series of Jewish community organizations. Right, and
he buys up a bunch of land. And while his
father had worked with the Husseini family to buy up
this land and to be happy to do that, Rocoq
refuses to deal at all with Arabs, right, like, once
he's got property, and once he owns property, he stops

(52:22):
wanting to have any kind of dealings with the Arab
community at all, with Muslims at all. Quote, he wanted
to keep his distance from them. Becoming one of the
initiators of the construction of Neved Sedek, the Jewish neighborhood
outside Jaffa's walls that became the nucleus of Tel Aviv.
Shimon's son Israel, was elected mayor of the new city.
And this is something that Israel said after being elected
mayor of Tel Aviv. Jaffa played no role in world

(52:44):
history nor in Israeli history, and one cannot find there
any relic of ancient culture from any period at all,
Mayor Rocoq said, and again we've just heard that, like, well,
the only reason the Rocock family had the land that
allowed him to do all this in the first place
is because of like very close business relationships with Arab mumas, right, like,
and Jaffa Tel Aviv starts out of job. It's just
it's just, I don't know, I know we're getting a

(53:05):
little bit off the topic here, but it really it's
really frustrating.

Speaker 4 (53:09):
If people are interested in this element especially, I would
recommend Elon Pope's book on al Jossens because it's really
I always remember this anecdote that like one of the
al Hassenis also sold the land that later Hebrew University
was built on. So it's like a very interesting kind
of dynamic, Like I think you're you're right that, like

(53:30):
they've benefited a lot. I think also they didn't recognize
what was right, right, what was happening.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Yeah, that's part of this too. It's like there's this
this is you can see a lot of this initially
as like relative goodwill of like well why didn't I
sell a house to them? And then it comes like
twenty or fifty or one hundred, like well wait a second,
something's something going on here, right, right, right, Except and
obviously that doesn't mean there also are people who are
pretty aware of what's going on and like, but I
want to get money right and get my bag. That's
always a factor too. But a lot of people, you know,

(53:56):
it's not immediately clear what's happening too, And I think
some of this is just a sign that like, yeah,
people weren't really all that shitty, you know, to their neighbors.
They were like, well, yeah, these guys want to buy
up some buildings, why not, right.

Speaker 3 (54:08):
And there's a class difference too.

Speaker 4 (54:10):
It's like, yeah, you're a wealthy landowner, the that lives
on your land is gonna get screwed.

Speaker 3 (54:16):
You don't really care.

Speaker 2 (54:18):
Yeah, And I do suspect a lot of these Usanis
would have seen these other wealthier like Jewish immigrants as
more of like their type of people than like certainly
the Palahi. Right. Yeah. Anyway, one of the things I
didn't want to note about Rocock's statement there, where he's
like Jaffa played no role in world history, right, nor
Israeli history. One of the things he's doing there, he's

(54:40):
not just erasing like Palestinians from local history. He's a
racing Arab Jews as well as like Muslim Arabs here
because men like Rocock had to in order to make
their view of history work. The reality is that they're
in their community started out nestled in cities and towns
filled with people who had been there for generations and
were only able to get off the ground because of
a lot of support from those people, including like the

(55:01):
Muslim population. It took a purposeful effort to block these
new immigrant Jewish communities off from their neighbors. That was
not a natural state of affairs. It was a state
of affairs that members people within these communities and people
leading them had to want to make because they had
to stop integration from happening. Right. That is also a
thing that's happening consciously and being done consciously. Now. Some

(55:23):
of the effort and some of the conflict here comes
from a lot of these new immigrants see themselves they
are Europeans, and they want to build new European style cities.
They don't like Arabic cities. They see them as barbaric
and backwards. You'll hear that a lot, and that's a
major motivation behind many of the settlements that become tel Aviv.
It's created as a European style city for European Jewish
immigrants who did not want to immigrate and didn't want

(55:45):
to stop speaking European languages. Right, that's like a big
motivation for them in this period of time. Now, alongside this,
nineteen oh nine sees the establishment of the Hashomar by
Jitsak benz Vi and David Bengurian. This was a paramilitary
organization to guard Jewish settlements, and it's again the precursor
to the Haganah, and it's often described as and certainly

(56:05):
describes itself as a purely defensive organ like militia in
this period of time. Right although if you look at
the haganahs slogan at its establishment, it doesn't sound purely defensive,
because the slogan is Judea was lost by blood and
fire and will rise again by blood and fire, which
is like super friendly. Like I'm gonna be honest, if

(56:26):
some guys moved into my neighborhood and started walking around
with guns and that was their their motto, I'd be like,
I don't know, that doesn't sound all that defensive.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
Yeah, very alarming. I don't know, I'm supected to a
blood and fire.

Speaker 2 (56:36):
Sure, we don't have a lot of blood and fire
in the neighborhood right now, and I'm not really sure
we need any. It's important to document the prevalence of
that attitude even then without acting like it's the only one.
Many Jews and Palestine preferred to work within the system.
In the latter days of Ottoman rule, the growing Jewish
community in Jerusalem especially was able to exercise great power

(56:56):
by voting together. The Arab Elite were fractured, and Jewish
leaders offered support to families like the Husseinies who could
wield power directly in exchange for quid pro quo benefits.
One such benefit was an early attempt to take possession
of the Western Wall, a particularly holy site. The Housseini
family owned most of the houses on the other side
of this alley, and opposite there's like an a line

(57:17):
of homes that are owned by the Jewish community, and
a lina homes on the other side that are they're
owned primarily by Muslims, right by the Husseini family and
occupied by Muslims. And if the Husseinis sell these homes,
they can be bulldozed and the alley broadened, right, and
it made kind of an entirely Jewish community, right. Mustafa
al Husseini actually sells a number of these properties to
Baron Rothschild in eighteen eighty seven, but fears among rabbis

(57:39):
of a backlash, and it's rabbies who are like, wait
a second, if we let this go through, it's going
to like make people really paranoid and racist. This is
probably a bad idea. And the deal does sputter out.
In eighteen ninety seven, the Husseinis nearly sold the whole
alley to Rothschild, again from the Alwak Religious Trust, until
protests from Arab families forces him to stop. Right, So

(58:01):
they are trying to do this, and they are protests
from both the Jewish community and from the Muslim community
that stopped this from happening, and that also is really
worth acknowledging. Right. In nineteen fourteen, at the outbreak of
World War One, things come to a head when David
Yellen of the Association to Maintain Historical Sites in the
Land of Israel, writes to the US ambassador to the
Ottoman Court and he asks him to push the Sultan

(58:22):
to sell the Western Wall to the Association. Per the
book Lives in Common. Yellen did not have the money
to do so. He estimated the price would be at
least one million French frocs, including a ten percent bribe
for the relevant municipal officials, but he presumed he could
obtain it from Jewish millionaires as soon as the Ottomans
agreed to the sale and principle. But this never happens
either because Yellen had greatly overestimated how much money there

(58:43):
was for the cause right now. Attempts like this and
continued immigration spark unrest and occasionally even violence from the
Arab community. In a late attempt to slow this kind
of migration, the Ottomans make it law that only someone
with a thousand pounds or more in assets can apply
for an immigration certificate. And this doesn't really stop anything.
It basically creates another opportunity to bry a Bottoman officials.

(59:05):
And one thing that like some rich people who want
to bring more folks in, they'll like put it add
the name of a poor immigrant on their door to
make it look like they're part of the family for
long enough for the officials to check to see like, okay,
is there someone financially supporting them. There's ways around all
this stuff. Right up through the start of World War One, then,
most Arab residents in Palestine had little reason to fear

(59:27):
Zionism or believe that Jewish immigration would have a huge
impact on their lives. There are people getting frustrated by it,
there are conflicts over it, but it's not like the
dominant thing happening right. One of the relatively few people
to see into the future accurately was Najib Azuri, a
Lebanese Maronite Christian who worked for the Ottoman government during
its last days in Jerusalem. He declared in nineteen oh

(59:50):
five that Zionism and Arab nationalism were quote doomed to
constant struggle until one overwhelms the other. And that is
again Arab nationalism is really building this time again. We talked,
We've done our whole series of episodes on Lawrence of Arabia.
The Great Arab Revolt occurs during World War One. That's
happening in this period. That's happening because people are pissed
at the fucking Ottomans, right, and so as much as

(01:00:11):
some of these conflicts are going on in these cities,
the much broader conflict is these The much broader conflict
Arab nationalists are interested in is dealing with these fucking Ottomans, right, Like,
that's self determination, right right, yes, and obtaining I was
putting it crudely, but yes, obtaining self determination. Yeah, both things,
both things are true, right right? And yeah, Also Arab

(01:00:33):
Christians are also part of this. A lot of Arab
Christians are Arab nationalists because they're not being treated very
well by the Ottomans, right.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
They're kind of the godfathers of it actually, like.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:00:44):
Basically, like the answer to Arab nationalism is sectarianism, right,
Arab Christians want to be included in the community. So
like a lot of the big names of Arab nationalism,
like Constantinas Reek and like other people like that, they're Christians.

Speaker 2 (01:00:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really important point. So the people
who are most invested in a multicultural Palestine then sometimes
find themselves in this period supporting the ailing Automan Empire.
And this is very weird. Like Mayosha is one of
a number of Zionists who want the Automan Empire to
last because they see that it's kind of keeping a
lot of conflict from happening within the community, right within Palestine. Right,

(01:01:20):
the fact that there's these Turks who are like, you know,
in charge of everything kind of stops a lot of
conflict that might otherwise brew up. And Mayusha believes that
Zionism is doomed a disaster if the Ottomans fall. He
believes that everything, not just Zionism will fail, but Zionism
will like there will be horrible violence in this place
that he loves, between these communities that he loves if
the Ottoman Empire falls, and he is right about that. Really,

(01:01:44):
up until the end of World War One, though most
people would have been hard pressed to believe that something
like that would really happen. It would be crazy to
predict in like nineteen ten, as someone living in Palestine,
as a normal person, that like, oh, the Ottomans are
on their last legs, they don't have a full decade
left of life. You most people would have made that
guess because the Ottoman Empire had been around for hundreds
and hundreds of years, and so as a result, a

(01:02:06):
lot of Muslim political leaders in this period of time
treat Zionism as like a special interest to be courted. Right.
Salim al Husseini served as mayor of Jerusalem for much
of the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties, and he was
elected thanks to Jewish voters. In a speech, he argued
that Zionism quote is not a political movement, but a
settlement one. And I am certain that no intelligent and
rational Zionist will consider the establishment of a Jewish government

(01:02:27):
in Palestine. Famous I mean not last words, but not
right correct ones.

Speaker 4 (01:02:33):
Right. Yeah, he maybe didn't know enough about the zion
maybe enough.

Speaker 2 (01:02:40):
Right attention, and unfortunately, one of the people who is
very much seeing correctly where things are going is a
major right wing Zionist leader named Vladimir Yabatinsky. Right he
had been born in Odessa in modern day Ukraine in
eighteen eighty to an assimilated Jewish family, and Yebatinsky had
become a Zionist prior to the Kishnev pagrat and he

(01:03:00):
had become a popular speaker and influential organizer, and he
responded to that program by initially in Russia advocating and
helping to organize the construction of Jewish self defense groups.
He was extremely controversial, as was his slogan Jewish youth
learned to shoot, And obviously when he's in Russia being like,
I think we might need some guns. Hard to argue

(01:03:20):
with the man, right, I.

Speaker 3 (01:03:22):
Mean Zienus and non Zionis said the same.

Speaker 2 (01:03:24):
Yeah, yeah, he's not going to stay there law right,
Like that's that's just kind of the fact. And we'll
talk a lot more about him about what happens to Zionism,
what happens to Palestine after and during World War One
in Part two. But you know, this is the end
of part one, how are we feeling?

Speaker 3 (01:03:41):
Wow? They covered so much.

Speaker 2 (01:03:43):
We did it a lot. People should like read the books,
you know, and stuff that we're talking about obviously to
get much more comprehensive. But yeah, I'm we got to
fly through what's sixty years about? Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:04:00):
World events?

Speaker 2 (01:04:01):
Yeah, look at none of what you're new to you,
but yeah, all right, anything you want to plug at
the end here before we roll out in the part two, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:04:09):
Check out the Handbook on Authoritarianism in the Air World.

Speaker 3 (01:04:12):
Yes, yes, clip's very politics.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Yeah, awesome, all right, everybody, We'll be back Thursday.

Speaker 4 (01:04:18):
Whoop.

Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
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(01:04:44):
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: The Origins of Terror in Palestine