Part Two: The Origins of Terror in Palestine

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, normally a podcast about
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history, where I read a story about a
historical monster or some sort of terrible event to a
guest who's coming in cold this week. I'm sort of
doing my best to not embarrass myself in front of
the guest who knows a lot more about the subject
than that A lot of it. Doctor, doctor ocurred, welcome

(00:27):
back to the show. Thank you again for your time.

Speaker 3 (00:30):
Oh, thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
It is kind of cool that we have several like
PhDs on staff because James James Doubt also also a doctor,
doctor Joe.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
And you know, I was declared a doctor by the
state of New Jersey one time.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
My brother's a doctor that count there.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, they don't let doctorbe anything, which really sucks.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
I mean, he's an oncologist, so we're not even in
the same like lettering system.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
But you know what, you don't have prescription abilities, do
you don.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Unfortunately political science does not have that.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah, I would have gotten a policy PhD if I
could have prescribed stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Robert is not the time.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
I mean, it's always the time relevant. Yeah, it's kind
of relevant down do you want to plug anything up
front before we get back into the story.

Speaker 4 (01:19):
There's the Handbook on Authoritarianism in the Air World, Yes,
out with Glimsbury Politics, open access, so people could just
google and read us.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, that sounds much better. One of the sources for
this that I read, which was useful in some ways,
is like the Oxford Handbook in the History of Terrorism,
which is very again, very useful for certain things, and
also like we're we're not going to get into this,
but in nineteen forty six, uh, I think it was
the Good which is like the militia associated with Bitar,
which is like a right wing Zionist group that is
today become like its descendant is Netanyahu's party, bomb the

(01:52):
King David Hotel and kill a bunch of people, and
the Oxford it's really fun when you like read what
the British said about it's an active terror, when you
read what like everyone at the time said about its
an act of terrorism, and then you read the Oxford
Encyclopedia of Terrorism, They're like, well, because the targets were
primarily governmental, we can't call this an act of terrorism.
I'm like, okay, but if it had been like Arab

(02:13):
nationalists who bombed a hotel, it would be.

Speaker 4 (02:15):
Terrorism, right, yeah, right, academics, I can't even right. I'm
a good one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
Facts. We're going to talk about Vladimir Yebatinsky a lot
more in these episodes. So, as we said last time,
this is a guy who grows up in Odessa. Uh.
He is from a fairly young age, really concerned with, like,

(02:46):
you know, fighting back against these programs by establishing Jewish
self defense groups. And after he's close for a period
of time with Theodore Herzal, but he also has some
like breakoffs with him and his issue with a lot.
He does not get along with most Zionists in his
day because he is really right wing. He does not
like these labor unions, he does not like the socialist

(03:06):
politics that a lot of these Zionists have. He's very
against that sort of stuff. And after Herzel dies in
nineteen oh four, Yebtenski becomes seen as the leader among
right wing a leader among right wing Zionists. He's a
very big feat. He goes by Zeev Yebatinski most of
his life, but he's still known as Vladimir at this
point in time, we'll talk about why that change happens.

(03:26):
And you know, after Herzel dies, he's a political leader
for a while, and then you know, the war starts
and he has to take a job as a newspaper editor.
And in nineteen fifteen he's reporting from North Africa and
he tours a refugee camp in Egypt for Jewish deportees
from Ottoman Palestine. And we'll talk about this later too.
The Ottomans start deporting a lot of these European Jews

(03:46):
from Palestine during the war and current entry in the
International Encyclopedia of the First War World War by Ari
Dubnov and Brian Horowitz quote soon thereafter, he reached the
conclusion that the Ottoman Turks would lose the war in
Palasin would fall into the hands of the Entan powers.
It was in this context that he came up with
the idea of encouraging Jews to volunteer for the British

(04:07):
army and secure a future Palestine for the Jews. And
this is unfortunately a really smart play for him. Tom right,
he's a really smart guy and this works very well
for him, Yeah, very much, unfortunately, And it is worth
noting like he does kind of see where things are going, right,
it's very accurate to say that the entent's going to
take over.

Speaker 4 (04:26):
Yeah, and Zionism would not have really survived without British support.

Speaker 2 (04:31):
No, not at all. That's a big part of the
story we're gonna be telling today. So despite the fact
that he's gotten no personal military experience, he does not
actually join this Jewish legion, right. Jebtinski grows close to
a guy named Joseph Trumpeldoor, a Russian Zionist military veteran
who had fought in the Russo Japanese War which had
happened not that much earlier, and had been decorated by

(04:53):
the Czar for his like valorine combat and stuff. And
the two of them approach a general, a British general
named Sir John Grenfell Maxwell, who is commanding British troops
in Egypt, and they're like, hey, we want to take
a lot of these guys who've been like brought to
kicked out of Palestine and put in camps in Egypt
are willing to fight for the British Empire against the Ottomans, Right,

(05:13):
And Maxwell's at first like, I don't know if this
is a good, like, you're not really soldiers. Is this
really going to help things at all? This might just
be more trouble than it's worth. But he also like,
there's not enough manpower, you know, especially not in that theater.
So he's not gonna like show he's not going to
turn down the potential to have a few thousand more
fighters on his hands necessarily either, right, all of these

(05:35):
and he brings this idea up to some of the
other British general officers, and they're all kind of reluctant.
As much as they want these fighters, they also don't
want to endorse the Zionist idea necessarily, And they also
don't want to endorse an offensive on Palestine at the time,
which is what you know, these these people are really
pushing for, is to like, let us invade the place
we just got kicked out of, and the British don't
really want to do that at the moment. But Maxwell

(05:57):
agrees to form a Jewish volunteer force that will fight
alongside the British military and other parts of the Turkish front.
So as this is all happening, World War One escalates
a lot of sectarian hatred and anger that had been
slowly building in Palestine for years. The Ottomans, who are
paranoid about foreign spies and influence, issue a declaration immediately
after the start of the war that subjects of hostile

(06:19):
nations must leave the country. This caused immediate confusion. Some
Jewish residents in Palestine were exempted because they'd start and
I should say some Jewish residents who were had immigrated
from Europe are exempted because if you had come to
Palestine from Europe and you had become a naturalized citizen
of the Ottoman Empire, which there was a way to do,

(06:39):
then you didn't get deported, right, But if you hadn't
bothered to do that, they would deport you because the
Ottoman's argument was, well, that proves that you were not loyal, right,
because you had an opportunity and you didn't take it.
And part of why a lot of ashkinasm don't take
the opportunity to become naturalized Automan subjects is, as I've noted,
they don't want to integrate right, and this sometimes extends
to failing to make legal arrangements, and a lot of

(06:59):
these people are going to suffer because they don't want
to do that. During the war years, Ahmed Pasha, the
Ottoman military governor of the Levant, launched the first of
two major deportations of Jews from Jaffa in December of
nineteen fourteen. This is called Black Thursday, that's what it
comes to be known, and this is the forced expulsion
of about six thousand Russian born Jewish immigrants. A total

(07:20):
of about two hundred and seventy seven Jews from Jaffa
are exiled to Alexandria, where many of them are put
in detainment camps. That are you know these You should
assume these are as nice as any enemy subject detainment
camps ever are in a war, especially World War One,
when people don't really have good medicine. Now, as I
noted in Episode one, foreign born Jews in Palestine had
previously often benefited from more support than Arab Jews, and

(07:43):
we see evidence of this fact even during the war,
in the fact that in May of nineteen fifteen, the
New York Sun published an investigation into the cruel treatment
or of they call them Palestinian Jews. These are mostly
European Jews, would come right by the Ottoman government, and
this outrage fuels Zionists like to marrige Yabatinski, who'd started
his career trying to organize Jewish self defense units in Russia. Well,

(08:05):
the Zionist movement officially announced neutrality in the war and
moved its HQ to Copenhagen from Hamburg as a result,
because it doesn't really make much sense for the Zionists
to pick aside in World War One. Honestly didn't make
much of a sense for anyone to pick a side
in World War One. It was a stupid fucking war, right,
But Yabutinsky because he's realized that the Ottomans are going
to lose the war by nineteen fifteen, and he gets

(08:27):
the approval from Maxwell to create this voluntier force. You know,
by nineteen sixteen or so, this force is in the
field and it's starting to actually gain combat experience. It's
known initially as the Assyrian Jewish Refugee Corps. They're about
six hundred and fifty men in the unit at first.
The other nickname they're known by is the zion Mule
Corps or ZMC, and Jebatinski hates both of these nicknames,

(08:50):
by the way, he considers them dishonorable and shameful to
his people. But if you know the British military, I
actually it's hard for me to interpret Zion Mule Corps
anything but kind of you say, it's like not super woke,
but it's a sign of fondness. If like that's how
I kind of interpret the way the British are naming them.
Maybe other people feel I think there's like some debate
about that, but this is and when I say fondness,

(09:12):
I don't mean that in like a good way. I
mean in the way like the British were fond of
a lot of their African like like military like tried to.

Speaker 4 (09:20):
Kind of like stuff r Cerchole.

Speaker 2 (09:22):
Right, they call them fighting races. Right, that was like
a term the British used. Right, That's what I mean
by fond Right. Not to say it's not racist or anything.
Yebatinski never fought in the ZMC, but most of the
man power came from Russian born Jews who'd been expelled
by the Ottomans. Now the unit eventually receives a more
official name. It becomes the thirty eighth Battalion of Royal Fusiliers,

(09:43):
although it's still more often referred to as the Judaean
Regiment The unit motto was first to Judah, which should
spell out Yabatinsky's purpose for creating this unit. He wanted
Jews to receive combat experience and training so that they
could fight their neighbors in Palestine and the British government
if necessary, to ensure the of the state of Israel.
From the beginning, Vladimir is like, not only does this

(10:04):
give us combat experience and guns and might get us
in good with the British And that could help because
they'll be in charge next and we want them to
like us. But even if they don't, if we understand
how the British military works, then we can fight them
when we need to. Right, That's part of his gain.
He's a smart guy. This is really good strategy. Now.
The worst deportations from Palestine occur under Jemal Pasha in

(10:25):
nineteen seventeen, and Jemal sees his work as necessary to
subjugate the budding Jewish national project in Palestine. He is
not just worried that these are unloyal, he's anti Zionists. Right,
that's a big a motivating factor for this dude. And
because Jaffa was home to a large foreign born Jewish population,
who were slowly spinning tel Aviv up from a suburb
to a city. This is where their focus fell on

(10:47):
most heavily. Pasha saw himself as a warrior for Islaw
and he wanted to crush Zionism. But as this article
in the Journal of Israel Affairs by Glinda Abramson makes clear,
he hated Zionism because it was a nationalist movement out
of a desire to destroy the Jewish community in Palestine
as a whole. Quote. Like many Ottoman statesman, Jimal had
witnessed the nationalist movements of the Balkans of the late

(11:08):
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he was committed to
ensure that nothing similar would emerge in the Levant. While
he was in charge in Syria, they used to say,
if Shimal Pashus scratched his nose, he was thinking of
sending them to exile. If he stroked his beard, he
was thinking of whether or not to forgive them. However,
if he twirled his mustache, be afraid, for the conversation
was on a path that may lead to death. So

(11:29):
kind of a hard gal get bearings ug.

Speaker 4 (11:32):
I mean just to say like Arabs see him as
extremely repressive, like Palestinians see him as extremely repressive. So
he has like different types of repression for different communities.

Speaker 2 (11:43):
Yeah, and that is and that's the really important point.
He is not anti Zionists because he's racist. He's also
anti Arab nationalists. He's anti anyone who doesn't want the
other exactly right, exactly. That's this guy's big issue, right,
not to say that. I'm sure he believed things that
we would call racists, but that's not his motivation. Motivation
is the Ottoman Empire. Right now, one of the diplomats

(12:04):
who fought hardest to stop Pasha from doing these violent
deportations was and this shows you how different the times were,
the German consul to the Ottoman Empire, because the Germans
and the Ottomans are allies, and the German guy is like,
you guys are really mean to these people.

Speaker 5 (12:17):
Yeah, oh well that's cynic.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Yeah. But Pasha would not be swayed. He believed that
Zionists wanted to quote tear part of the body of
the Ottoman Empire off, which they did, and he was
a diehard Automan loyalist. As a result of his persecution
and the wartime shortages, investment in the Zionist project overseas
and in Palestine halted during this period. One Jewish exile
during this time described the war riors in Palestine this way,

(12:42):
and I want to emphasize his description would also describe
how most Arab Muslims would experience the same period of time,
as they were also disfavored, unloyal minorities fighting an active
war against the Ottoman Empire. Quote. They took products from
the shops, flowers, sugar, rice, and so on. They ordered
the bakers to bake bread without payment until there was
no bread or flour left in the city. They ordered

(13:04):
all kinds of laborers and workers to work without payment,
and their families went hungry. In addition, they grabbed everyone
walking in the street, roped them together, and took them
to dig pits, once again without payment or food. They
confiscated the warehouses of large and small trees to make
boxes to carry the stolen oranges to their camps. They
took all the leather and skins from the warehouse to
make shoes for the army. So yeah, Outam and Empire

(13:25):
are not cool.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
Yeah, my family history, Like I don't know because I'm
not a historian, but I don't know if it counts
as a famine, but they remember this time as like
famine like conditions.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yeah, oh, it is a famine. People starved to dead. Yeah, Jews, Muslims,
a lot of people starved to the population of Palestine
drops by I think like four or five percent during
this period. Disease too, is rampant. You know, this is
not just Palestine diseases. There's a horrible fucking plague that
comes at the end of World War One that kills
fucking millions and millions of people. Right, So Jimmel dissolves

(13:57):
the few units of Jewish guards that had existed to
protect you Wish neighborhoods. Doctors were conscripted and taken to
the front, so hospitals had to close, which also caused
and helped make worse massive outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid
that only got worse as soldiers came home from the war.
So by the time of the armises, Yeah, here's the
exact number of Palestine's population had fallen by six percent in
four years. That is catastrophics.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
Yeah, that is kind of strong, like yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:21):
I mean, yeah, that's the equivalent of like what like
twenty or thirty million Americans and four years dead something
like that, if like it were to happen here at
least like this just by back of the hop but
like a lot, right, that's a massive number of people
to die.

Speaker 4 (14:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:37):
Yeah, when nineteen nine and obviously we all lived through.
Think about how the pandemic, what it did to American society.
Did it make people like more understanding of each other
and like less angry?

Speaker 3 (14:51):
Yeah, they were still messed up. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (14:53):
Yeah, imagine if it had killed like three thousand times
as many people proportionally or something like that, right, Yeah,
So yeah, when nineteen nineteen dawned, the Ottoman Empire was
no more. In the Balfour Declaration meant the new British
Mandate had promised to bring some sort of Jewish state
into being. Frustration and rage over this was mixed with

(15:13):
nationalist ambitions from Arab Muslims and Christians alike, who grew
more hostile to both the British and the Zionists. Many
longtime residents of Palestine were distraught by the conflict that
came alongside nationalism. In his book Lives in Common, Clin
writes that members of the old Sephardic Jewish community in
Jerusalem often expressed a sense of sadness and bewilderment about
the death of the old days. Quote. Nationalisms suddenly intruded

(15:36):
on their lives and those of their Muslim neighbors and
imposed its hatreds and wars on them. The construction of
the national eye involved the rejection of prior identities, including
that of being Arab Jews, and that it's both really
bleak and it's also why as this goes on, I
was trying very hard to differentiate between European born Jewish immigrants,

(15:58):
Sephardic Arab Jews. Increasingly it's just Arabs and Jews in
terms of how people talk about it and think about it,
and how the international community talks about and thinks about it.
That hasn't happened yet, certainly not right, not by nineteens
right exactly and flattening right, and that that is happening,
and that's you know, obviously, there's a genocide going on
in Gaza right now, and genocide is not the right

(16:19):
word for just like the end of an identity. But
I don't think there is a good word for what
happens when something like that occurs, right, I don't know it.
I don't really know what to refer to that as honestly.

Speaker 4 (16:30):
Yeah, it's not even assimilation, because it's like a direct
result of political people there.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Speaker 4 (16:39):
So.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
The war's end also brings an influx of new foreign
born Zionist leaders, as well as a return of thousands
of exiled Jews, including many who came back with arms
and military experience. Right by the end of the war,
Jebatinski's Judean Division numbered more than five thousand men. The
International Encyclopedia of the First World War summarizes their service
this way, Gebatinski in pattern. It's one of the leaders,

(17:01):
one of the direct leaders of the forces. Relationships with
the Egyptian Expeditionary Force higher command were not free of friction,
as it clearly contained a number of anti Semitic officers
who made the lives of the legionnaires difficult. At various points.
The legion did not arrive for service until after General
Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem. They proved useful in the final
battles and then in guarding POWs. In nineteen nineteen, the

(17:21):
British government began to decommission the Legion. Jebatinski struggled for
the Legion's survival, claiming that the absence of Jewish armed
forces would lead to violence against Jews. And you know,
first off, one of the reasons why there's conflict, and
this is going to be relevant as much as overall.
The British Mandate is way definitely going to side with
the Zionists and enable them, especially in this period. There's

(17:42):
at least an equal number of British military officers who
are more siding with the Arabs and are very much
hesitant to embrace like the Zionist vision of things, and
who certainly want like they don't want it to just
be Muslim states, but they want integrated Arabs or independent
Arabic states.

Speaker 4 (17:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (17:58):
This comes out of like elo arts and stuff. There's
a lot of British officers who are not in this
period of time bought into the Zionist thing. The British
Mandate though, is very much going to side with the
Zionists over Arab nationalists in many cases, not that they
don't also fight them kill them. There's a lot of
violence between the British Mandate and some of these different

(18:18):
Zionist groups, as we'll talk about two. So the fact
that Yabatinski thinks that if this military unit is decommissioned,
it's going to lead to violence against the Jews. His
fears there would seem to be reinforced by the escalating
violence of the Ottoman state near the end of the war,
and the fact that this causes escalating nationalist hostilities too.

(18:38):
One of the major Muslim festivals we talked to us
a bit was Nebi Musa right, and this is named
after a holy site near Jericho said to be the
tomb of Moses. Palestinian Muslims would celebrate for seven days,
starting just before Good Friday, and in prior years, as
I've talked about, and we read a quote about this
in the first episode, the festival was often attended by
all faiths, as one Jewish resident the Holy City recalled,

(19:01):
a warm and happy atmosphere prevailed among us. We knew
that they were honoring the memory of a prophet and
a man of God, whom we also accepted, and that
is obviously one reason why there's so much religious solidarity.
Muslims think Moses was pretty important too, rite, so it
wouldn't gotten this in previous years. It would make you
feel really comforted, right that, like, well, these people believe
something different, but we have some commonalities. But during the

(19:23):
war things had curdled and in nineteen nineteen, by nineteen
nineteen the Nebi Musa celebration, a lot of the speaking
around it, because they're speakers at these events, right, were
really anti Zionists and anti British right because they're Arab nationalists, right,
and Arabs are furious that their own nationalist aims have
been thwarted. We talk about this in the Lawns episodes,

(19:45):
but the Arabs get really fucked over by the British
after fighting for independence. You know, they had fought as
well alongside Britain and the Ottomans, and World War One
had ended with the Balfour Declaration, but it had not
ended with a similar commitment to their aims though they
had also fought right and so a lot, a lot
of these people think that the new British mandate is
giving preferential treatment to foreign born Zionist immigrants simply because

(20:08):
they're also seen as being European, and they are. In
nineteen twenty, things get valid, Yeah, yeah, you know what
else is valid? Sponsors there's there's not a This is like.

Speaker 1 (20:24):
A horrible episode to break this.

Speaker 2 (20:26):
This is a really bad episode for a break transition. Yeah,
I know we're.

Speaker 1 (20:31):
Doing We're doing our best here, friends.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
We're back. So as I said, after the war, nineteen
nineteen kind of the first post war Nebbi Mussa festival,
it's known as like well, there's a lot of like
anti Zionist and anti British Mandate speeches and things get
really tense, and there's especially like uncomfortable for a lot
of the and particularly a lot of the even the
non Zionists like Jewish attendees the celebrations, and in nineteen

(21:01):
twenty the next year, things get uglear. Several Arab leaders
give speeches against Scionist immigration, but it's not really known
what the trigger is before rioting breaks out. And this
is like really bad. But you'll notice, as I read
the death toll, this is not like a one sided thing,
right like these whatever else happened, it seems like the
amount of force being deployed was, if not entirely accurate.

(21:24):
Neither of these size has like a massive like edge
on the other in terms of their ability to deploy violence.
Five Jews are killed in the rioting, along with four
Arab Muslims, and hundreds of people are injured. And the
wake of the riot, a number of local Muslim leaders
condemn the violence, but a great deal of damage had
already been done. It's very hard to restore the kind
of trust that had existed before something like this. And

(21:45):
there's some really heartbreaking quotes in Lives in Common with
especially as like some there are some communities that just
like clear out entirely, and like the Jews, they're move
in with and start forming in these communities, especially that
had been more integrated of like Sephardic Jews, and like
move in and start living in common with these like
Zionist communities because they don't feel safe anymore, and that

(22:08):
decreases the amount of solidarity and the amount of understanding
between these communities, and it just everything is going to
get a lot uglier in the wake of this. Right,
the riots also provide Yabotinsky with an excuse to do
what he did best, which is form local self defense
militias and arm them with illegally gotten firearms, and he
does that right Like. Yabutinsky's very active during the riots,

(22:31):
and he is arrested immediately afterwards by the British and
charged with illegally using British military forces because he'd gathered
a lot of these guys who think in some cases
were still British soldiers and use them in his militias,
and he'd taken a lot of weapons that did not
belong to him. So he is arrested and sentenced to
imprisonment in Oker. Like most militant true believers, prison only

(22:51):
increased his sense of certainty in what he was doing.
He changes his name during this brief prison sentence from
Vladimir to Ziev, which is a Hebrew name ze apostrophe
ev is how it's at least it's anglicized. The spelling
is usually anglicized as and he's only in prison for
three months, So again we see would a similar guy
who is an Arab Muslim have only gotten what happens

(23:14):
for the same crime or when you have been hunger shot?
Right exactly, So we're already seeing and this is going
to tell massively the fact that and that which you
brought up is really important, the fact that because there
are militant Arab nationalist groups, right, and you know these
are like Palestinian Muslims, and when they do things, they
very much often tend to either get killed or imprisoned

(23:35):
and always have their guns taken away, whereas that doesn't
always happen to these Zionist groups and their leaders, and
it allows them to continue building power and organization in
a way that is forced to exactly exactly.

Speaker 5 (23:49):
Yeah, I mean they not only killed them, they killed
them publicly. Yeah, and they really you know, decimated political
leadership during this time. So like the anti British Man
sentiment was very much materially connected to the fact that
people were feeling extremely repressed.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Absolutely absolutely, And you don't get me wrong. Most of
the Ziatists really hate the Mandate too. It's just they
hate it because, like it's not giving them everything they
want at once.

Speaker 4 (24:15):
Right, exactly different reasons.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, I mean there are all there are also, like
the Mandate will assassinate some Zionist leaders. That does happen too,
And likewise, there are Zionist groups that are assassing a
lot of British officials. That happens a ton, mostly after
a lot of the period we're talking about, but it's
starting in this time. So the Hashimer was reformed after
the war, and in nineteen twenty and it's an extension
called the Hashimer, called the Haganah was created. In its

(24:40):
initial conception, the Haganah was a defensive militia and you'll
see that as I and like the Oxford Encyclopedia terrorism
was like, it's not really a terrorist group. It was
a purely defensive militia. It was defensive in its main orientation.
But purely is not at all accurate, right, really not
act unless.

Speaker 5 (24:57):
You count ethnic cleansing as like defensive self defensive.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
Yeah, the Haganah secret nineteen twenty four constitution declared that
its objective was to protect the Jewish community in Palestine.
But again I should remind you that the precursor Hagana's
motto of the Hagana's motto was Judeo was lost by
blood and fire and will rise again by blood and fire.
So while the Hagana is on paper at defensive force,
over the years they work clandestinely with other militias and

(25:23):
gangs and also clandestinely form other militians and gangs that
are very much offensive, and they also do offensive as
we'll talk about themselves. In nineteen twenty three, Ziev Jabatinski,
now living in Riga, founded a right wing youth movement
called Bitar, which was opposed to both the older left
wing labor movement focused Zionist groups and defensive militias and

(25:43):
the British Mandate. And again Bitar is the precursor to
Benjamin Nettan Yahoo's Lukud Party, right like they therefore follows
the other right there. Yeah, they're fascists and there's a
lot of there's a really good article called Jabatinski the
Fascist Right that talks about a lot of the similarities
between some of these and especially Mussolini's fascist groups because

(26:04):
don't they wear shirts. Yes, they do wear brown shirts,
and there are attempts to work with and they do
work with two A degree Mussolini's government, until Mussolini gets
so inbed with Hitler that they have to push more
anti Semitic laws. Like there's a lot of sympathy with
the the Italian fascists and some of these these right
wing Zionist groups. That's a really important thing that's going

(26:24):
on right now too. I'm not talking about it enough
in these episodes. There's so much to get over, but
that is a really important thing that you should know
that when I say right wing, I don't mean like
kind of conservative on tax policy, right, that's what I'm talking.

Speaker 4 (26:37):
Healthcare policies are a little different.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Yeah, yeah, they're they're not. Yeah, they're they're they're they're fascist,
like proto fascist fastest you know, you could. Academics will quibble, like,
you know, there's a lot of similarities. They're wearing brown shirts, right,
and what else do you need? It out there? And
as the twenties roared on, violence in the Holy Land
only grew more common, and it takes a bunch of
different forms, from street fights between gangs. And some of

(27:02):
these are you could call them Arab nationalist gangs and
Zionist gangs. Some of are just like gangs of people
who are like Jewish and Muslim and live in towns
and they're like pissed, right, they're teenagers fighting or whatever.
And some of them are organized militant gangs and terrorist
groups that are doing as targeted murders and assassinations of
each other. Right. And of course there's also riots periodically,
and a lot of these riots will wind up targeting
Jewish neighborhoods. That happens repeatedly over the years, and it

(27:26):
really hard. The violence and the constant temple violence hardens
a lot of people, and it also causes a lot
of people to change their minds and beliefs. And in
many ways this is in a tragic and it makes
them a lot meaner and more aggressive, but not always.
And this brings me to a really tragic and really
complicated story. Have you ever heard of Jacob Israel de Haan? No,

(27:50):
this I'm glad to get to tell you because I
hadn't note about this guy either, and he's a really
interesting fellow. So Jacob was born in eighteen eighty one
in the Netherlands, just as the first wave of Zionist
my grace from Europe began. He became a teacher and
a writer, and he published his first novel in nineteen
oh four, which is again the same year as The
Kitchen of Pagram. This book was a fictional account of
the author's homosexual relationship with a real scholar, Arnold Alatrino,

(28:14):
who was married, although a public defender of homosexuality. So
what people generally think is happening is that Dehan is
having an affair with this guy who's like publicly married
but also like an advocate for queer people and is
queer himself, and he writes a book fictionalizing it but
using the real dude's name, which is kind of fucked up.
Like it's really messy. This man is messy. Dehn is

(28:36):
considered one of the greatest poets in the history of
the Netherlands, right, but he's like, he is messy. This
man is so fucking messy. He gets fired from his
newspaper gig as a result of this book because it
causes like a real problem, and also his newspaper get
writing a children's column, so the fact that he's written
this book does not make him seem like the best
guy to be writing this column because he's like publicly

(28:58):
accused a guy of like, you know, it's it's it's
it's messy. They also have to alter the book to
like take the name of an actual married dude out anyway,
and his fiance because he has a fiance that he's
like marrying to like hide the fact that he's gay.
She like actually helps buy up all the copies of
his original books get rid of this. In nineteen oh seven,

(29:22):
de Han married a gentile woman and published a second
This had been the fiance and published a second novel
about us. And so, first off, by the way, you
should see, he marries a gentile woman. This is not
a guy who is a super strict believer. I don't
even think he would call himself a believer in nineteen
oh seven. Really he's Jewish, you know, is an identity
as an ethnicity. But he's not really faithful in this
period of time. So he publishes a second novel, and

(29:44):
this one is about a sado masochistic relationship between a
man and a boy. Now this is going to be
relevant to talking about Dehn. But like in this period
of time and a lot of countries, pedophilia and homosexuality
are the exact same thing under the law, and that
causes some real the uncomfortable situations and some really uncomfortable
writing from a number of figures European figures in this

(30:05):
period of time, to Han is not the only one.
And we don't really know, like did he was he
actually like a pederist? Is this just like a thing
he wrote about? Because you know, cultury, a lot of
weird stuff's going on at the time. I don't really
know how to entirely delineate all of that right, But
this is a complicated man. He is very queer, and
he is very much in the counterculture of his day.

(30:27):
You could not be much more in the counterculture of
his day than this guy is. So, despite some questionable
decision making, he gets a doctorate of law in nineteen sixteen.
But to Han can't find prestigious work as a lawyer,
so he starts writing and publishing poetry, and his work
is noted I'm not a good judge of poetry from
this part of the world, but his work is noted

(30:48):
as both being very Jewish and very sexual. Right, he's
super horny, and he's he's like very much chimber of
the Jewish community and influenced by it. Right, He's very controversial,
but his poems are white celebrated today He's still considered
one of the best poems the Netherlands ever produced. And
he starts to develop a degree of respect as a
public eccentric. Right, he kind of crosses over from being, Oh,

(31:09):
this guy is someone you don't want to This guy
is like a weirdo who's into some stuff that we
don't approve of, and you don't want to talk to him.
To this guy's a weirdo. We celebrate because he's a
great artist, right, he crosses that barrier, you know, during
this kind of period of.

Speaker 1 (31:21):
Time, because he's very Juish and very horny, very Jewish,
very horny, that is how people describe to Han, and
very queer.

Speaker 2 (31:30):
He visited Russia near the end of the Tzardom, and
this really seems to have an influence on him, right,
seeing how Jewish people are treated in Russia. He visits
prisons and seeing how prisoners are treated by the czar,
he becomes an activist, right, and his experiences in the East,
Lee didn't become both a Zionist and an observant Jew.
And this is He's also nearing middle age, so maybe
he becomes Orthodox during this time mid life crisis.

Speaker 4 (31:52):
Right.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
Per an article Inherits by David Green, in nineteen nineteen,
Dehan decided to immigrate from Amsterdam to Jerusalem. A letter
to British Zionist leader Heim Weizmann, he wrote, with typical
self assurance, that I am not leaving Holland to improve
my condition. Neither materially nor intellectually. Will life in Palestine
be the equal to my life here. I am one
of the best poets of my generation and the only

(32:14):
important Jewish national poet Holland has ever had. It is
difficult to give up all this. So first off, you
can say this is the guy who was a high
opinion of himself. And second this is a guy who
seems very committed to the Zionist project. But after he
moves to Palestine, he lives through these years we've been
talking about of rap. He comes there as the violence
is starting to escalate. He sees the riots, and he

(32:34):
sees these assassinations and counter assassinations and these beatings as
he's teaching law and writing for a Dutch newspaper, and
he starts to become critical of the Zionist project right
as a result of what he's seeing, this violence really
turns him off of it. Eventually he meets an anti
Zionist rabbi who is This guy is also a really
interesting figure, Joseph heim Sonenfeld. Sonenfeld is the guy, the

(32:58):
rabbi who founded an ultra orthodox anti Zionist community in
Palestine called Ida Haridit and was it spokesman. And he
was also, like Dehan, really controversial. Sexually, he gets accused
of being a pedophile. Today, I don't know how accurate
those allegations are. He is definitely a guy who publicly
made a habit of trying to shock Christian morals as

(33:20):
a protest against homophobia. And I don't know how to
judge him accurately in terms of what he's done, in
part because both of these guys are anti Zionists, there's
also a lot of propaganda against them. I don't know
what's true and what's not about their sexualities and what
they did or didn't do. In nineteen twenty two, Dehan
takes a case to defend a Hareadi political movement protesting

(33:40):
against the need to pay an excise tax that Zionist
authorities had placed on Matso. So these are anti Zionist
Jews in Palestine who do not want to pay an
excise tax that the Zionists want them to pay. Right,
he represents them in court, I think successfully, and he
starts becoming more and more of an anti Zionist activist
in Palestine. And because remember, this guy is a celebrity.

(34:01):
I know when I say I a famous poet, that
doesn't sound famous today, in like nineteen twenty two, a
famous poet could be pretty goddamn famous. And Dahn is
very famous, and so he starts meeting with European political
figures and talking about anti Zionism, and because he's such
a beloved artist, this really starts to worry a lot
of Zionists in Palestine. He also meets with Hussein bin Ali,

(34:23):
the king of now Saudi Arabia, and they start talking
about forming a Palestinian state that would be like multi
racial or religious, multi ethnic, you know, like not a
Zionist date right now, Obviously de Han's not anti Semitic.
He wants the British out, and he wants Palestine to
be an indicopendent country. He just is no longer a Zionist.
He thinks that Jews and Muslims and Christians and presumably

(34:44):
atheist weirdos like him and his friends should all live
in relative harmony. Right so he's no longer supporting a
Jewish state, and this really is going to cause problems
for him, David Green continues. By now Dehn had become
a liability to the Zionist movement and a special dangerous
because of the platform he now had for spreading his
views in London, where critical decisions about Palestine were being

(35:05):
made in Jerusalem, he became persona non grata among Zionists,
including his law students. One anecdote has him walking with
a Dutch visitor who observed that as people passed them
into the street, they were spitting on the sidewalk. The
visitor thought this was a sign of disrespect, to which
de Han responded, According to Dutches, his Storian Ludy gibbles, Oh, no,
they spit on the street out of respect for you,

(35:26):
your presence. Otherwise they would have spit in my face.

Speaker 3 (35:31):
I mean, he's very honest.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yes, is such an issue? He reads me me, Yeah,
he does not have illusions. Early on the morning of
June thirtieth, nineteen twenty four, as he left the synagogue
and shar Zadek Hospital on Jaffa Road, Dehn was shot
three times. He died immediately. And you know this is
the British Mandate issues a reward for information about the killer.

(35:56):
No one ever comes forward, No one's ever caught, right, obviously,
and for a long time people just kind of assumed
the Haganah had done it. But we didn't know the
Hagana had done it until an Israeli businessman named Avraham
Tahomi came forward in the nineteen eighties. We're going to
talk about Abraham a little bit later too. Abraham had
been with the Haganah in the nineteen twenties, and he
claims that when he assassinated Dehn, he was working under

(36:18):
the orders of Yitzak benz v, the future second President
of Israel and an officer in the Hagana at the time.
To Homie insisted, I have no regrets because Dehn wanted
to destroy our whole idea of Zionism. And I just
tell you a lot because Dehn is very much saying
we need an independent state that the British don't run.
He just doesn't want it to be racist.

Speaker 3 (36:40):
It doesn't want it to be exclusion are Yeah. Yeah,
it's an interesting like journey that he took to ethno nationalism.
And I was like, oh wait.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yeah, it shows like someone who whatever else you want
to say about him, looks at as soon as he
realizes how much violence is going to have to happiety,
He's like, no, it's not worth it. That's horrible. I
don't want that. A poet like that's.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Not my I mean, that's the whole thing with like
cultural Zionists, right, I mean, I don't know, I'm not
a historic of Zionism, but like my understanding is they're like, oh,
you know, we belong here, we should have some you know,
stake here, but we should definitely not be exclusionary and
no nationalist coast right, that's suffer too much badness.

Speaker 2 (37:22):
Yeah. Yeah, As I've tried to say, Zionism doesn't mean
one thing. There are a lot of like, you know,
cultural zionis is one is a good term for the
people who like their idea of what Zionism means is
like well, like the Jewish kind of community that we
want to create. It's not necessarily a political state. It's
like a like an actual community, but it doesn't necessarily

(37:43):
require us to have political power and be the only
ones with it. That's not what I a lot of
people are advocating for. Obviously, those folks become less common
as everything gets hardened and everything gets a lot more violent,
and a lot of them get killed.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
You know.

Speaker 2 (37:55):
You see, if you are one of those kind of
people like Dahan, who is willing to like rethink your
ideas and push for a much more integrated and less
aggressive thing than these really aggressive Zionists are going to
kill you if they think you're going to get any far,
because that's what happens to de Han, right, and his
death is often called the first political assassination in the
Zionist community, the first assassination of a Jew buy other Jews,

(38:19):
right like that, and it's not going to be the last,
by the way, but it is really important because it
kind of breaks that barrier, and violence of every kind
is going to grow a lot more common. In the
late twenties and thirties, and Tel Aviv and Jaffa, two
cities joined by the hip by the thirties, there were
constant conflicts over the fact that Jewish kids would visit
brothels and gambling dens run by Arabs in downtown Jafa,

(38:41):
just as Arab kids went to Tel Aviv to do
the same thing. Right, there are like criminals. There are
like Arab Muslim criminals who like run brothels and run
drugs and whatnot in the legal dancing houses, and there's
like Jewish like organized criminal gangs that do the same thing.
And they both tend to have a lot of appeal
to like members of the opposite commun unity, which causes
like the a lot of like the you know, particularly

(39:04):
the mothers and fathers because they're often kids, to start
moral panics about, oh, the Arabs are corrupting our kids,
the Jews are corrupting our kids, right, And the reality
is that like kids like to go do stuff they're
not supposed to do. And if you're growing up in
Tel Aviv, go in to downtown Jafa to go like
into a brothel is going to seem like the most transgressive.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
Thing you can do one.

Speaker 2 (39:25):
Right, right, Whereas if you're a Muslim growing up in Jaffa,
Tel Aviv's going to have a similar appeal. Right. Ultimately,
this is very funny. The British solve the problem with
all these brothels by first they crack down on the
brothels and like close them down, and then that just
means all the brothels are illegal, and they realize that, like,
oh shit, we actually have a problem keeping like enough

(39:46):
salt of our soldiers healthy because all of our soldiers
are going to the brothels obviously they're soldiers. And so
the British mandate establishes a bunch of official brothels so
that they can make sure they don't lose too many
soldiers to VD right, and they keep by the way,
these brothels are stopped with both like Arab and ashkanasm women, right,
Like that's what the part of what the British Mandate

(40:07):
is doing. Like they're deliberately like recruiting a mix of
women to like run like people these brothels as part
of like a public health measure. I guess you'd call it.
You know, obviously there's still illegal brothels, and it's not
uncommon you see brothel owners and like including like a
lot of Jewish brothel owners will get murdered by Zionist

(40:29):
gangs for corrupting the community. The same thing happens Arab
nationalists will murder you know, Arab brothel owners for similar reasons.
Because these are also people are becoming more religious hardline
right or religiously hardline newspapers publish constant allegations that one
community is corrupting the other. There's tons of complaints from like,
you know, people in Tel Aviv that these these Arab

(40:51):
men are coming over to aglar women, and complaints from
like in Jaffa of like these rowdy young Jewish kids
are coming in and like causing problems, right, like you
see a lot of those complaints in the newspapers. And
sometimes as much as it turns into like conflict, it's
also evidence of the fact that these are still deeply
tied communities. Young people are hanging out together, young people

(41:12):
are going over to each other's like downtown margins, and
they're just there's intermarrying and other kinds of inter stuff. Right,
I'm gonna I'm going to quote again from Life's in
Common here. Romance has sometimes developed between Britons and young
women in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Jewish underground militias
fought this phenomenon, tracking and on occasion interrogating girls who

(41:33):
socialized with British soldiers and civilians and with Arabs. Some
were executed on charges of providing intelligence to the enemy.
And you know, there's we're not going to be talking
about enough, but there are a lot of like mixed relationships,
and these are often very common. You have a lot
of really awful stories about like when you know, the
violence boils over during the Arab or bolt and stuff.

(41:54):
You have a lot of families broken up that are
had been inter faith families. Like there's but they're is
that is happening here, and it's a mix of these
people just trying to live their lives and also totally
unwittingly becoming flashpoints because other members of the community get angry.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
Yeah, their identities are like to complicated. Can I just
plug the episode I did about my great.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Ground there here please? Yea yeah, yeah, yeah, it.

Speaker 3 (42:17):
Could happen here if people are interested in like one
particular story that happens to be my in my family history.
There's there's that, but it's I mean, kind of more broadly,
I think we need to understand like the lens of
like sexual politics here is an important one to see
the conflict through because it remains like the way that

(42:39):
both like the British but also then the Israeli government
weaponizes kind of maybe less less progressive sexual politics in
some of these communities is a relevant thing to understand.
I mean it continues until.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
Today, yeah, absolutely. Nineteen twenty nine is a particularly bad
year for violence in Palestine after Zionist leaders refuse British
offers to shared Arab Jewish reports. So there's a lot
of talk about like representation and like moving towards an
independent state in Palestine because the mandate the British never
like own Palestine. That's not how they're thinking about it either.

(43:22):
They are from the beginning though, that they're going to
leave at some point. And so the British, you know,
they have Zionist leaders and you know, Arab leaders come
to the table and they're talking about trying to figure
out some sort of system, and the British make an
offer that would have had shared Arab Jewish representation, right,
and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, you know, and the
Arabs are generally in agreement with this, but the Zionists

(43:43):
do not. They do not want to come to the table,
they don't want shared representation. So this pisses off the
Grand Mufti. It piss off a lot of people. And
the Grand Muffy starts speaking out about a future Jewish
takeover of the Temple Mount, right, And he starts giving
speeches telling like they're trying to take over, they're trying
to take over the Temple Mount. They're trying to push
us out of our of our home. And there are newsletters,
news articles that are published at the same time about

(44:05):
a series of land purchases that had been made by
the Jewish National Fund that inflamed the now decades old
arguments over how much land Jewish immigrants should be allowed
to buy. This is all further incensed by years of
constant conflict over who should be allowed to do what where,
particularly at the Western Wall, which is also part of
the al Oxa Mosque. Now, there had been friction over

(44:27):
this forever pretty much, at least at times, but in
the past a genuine desire of most Muslims and Jews
to let each other do their thing tended to win out.
You don't see that staying true by the late twenties,
and shit just keeps getting uglier and uglier until August
of nineteen twenty nine. And we're talking about you know,

(44:47):
the politics of this, you know the ongoing back and forth,
and the religious dimensions of this. But I also don't
want you to forget the fact that everything boils over
in August when it's really fucking hot, which is just
throughout history always when riots and stuff tend to be
at their worst everywhere when it's hot, right, Yeah, it's
just people. Per an article in EPSCO quote, the unrest

(45:09):
was initially sparked by the installation of a portable screen
by Jewish worshippers at the western wall on Yam Kapur,
aimed at separating men and women during prayer. The location
is significant to both Jews as a remnant of the
ancient temple and Muslims, who viewed as part of the
Al Axa Mosque complex. Following escalating tensions and protests from
both sides, violence erupted when rumors spread the Jewish groups
intended to attack Muslim holy sites. The riots escalated over

(45:31):
several days, resulting in substantial loss of life, with two
hundred and forty nine fatalities recorded, one hundred and thirty
three Jewish and one hundred and sixteen Arab, alongside hundreds
of injuries. The violence extended from Jerusalem to other areas
such as Hebron and Safed, where Jews faced brutal attacks,
and obviously, like Jewish communities are being attacked at the
same time you see in the death toll, this is

(45:53):
not these groups are still not completely out of proportion
with each other in terms of their capacity to do violence.
Right when you have like Zion militias and these Arab
nationalists militias, they're kind of at parody still. You kind
of see that in the death toll.

Speaker 3 (46:06):
You know, just say it's more like a fight than
like a pagrom, like essentially or something.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
There are brawls in there are programs. There are eight
neighborhoods that are attacked that don't have defense, right, and
people are forced out of their homes and lose their houses.
And there are also massive street fights, and there's counter
fights and counter attacks. I don't know if like pagram,
I don't know who gets to determine that it's a
mix of different kinds of violence. This is happening over days,
and it happening in multiple cities, right, So it's not
the same everywhere, right, But it's not a situation is

(46:38):
where like it's just one group of people dying, right, Like,
that's certainly not the case. And this is this is terrible,
and there is a lot of violence against innocent people
and a lot of particularly a lot of like civilian
Jewish communities. And this is one of those terrible moments
that historians often see is having sort of locked in
the worst possible future. Right that this is not necessarily

(46:59):
the point of no return, but it's one of the
points that makes it very hard for things to get better, right,
And the Western Wall rights are a really important point
for things getting worse in Palestine. Afterwards, Jewish militias increase
in size and number, and they began building and importing
more arms. Antisemitic violence rises, as to assassinations and property

(47:21):
destruction by groups like your Gun. Again. That's the good.
Is the right wing militia that bitar the right wing
party forms in Palestine. We'll talk about them too a
little bit more here now I should note it in
Oh yeah, I should also do an ad break, I guess,

(47:45):
and we're back. So nineteen twenty nine. Also August of
nineteen twenty nine also sees the horrific Hebron massacre. That's
kind of part of this whole swell of violence where
this about seventy people are actually murdered. But because the
community Hebron is tiny, there's only six or seven hundred
Jews I think in Hebron at this period of time,

(48:05):
and because homes are destroyed, the community is basically destroyed.
That's how a lot of people see it, Like huge
numbers of Jews and Hebron are like forced out of
their homes, and a lot of people will say like
that's kind of the end of the Jewish community as
it had existed previously, right, and that's also going to
bring a lot more violence. In fact, it's this nineteen
twenty nine program that inspires a debate within the Haganah

(48:27):
over how the organization should proceed. Abraham to Homy again,
the guy who's killed the han becomes closely tied to
Yabatinsky and Batar, and he urges a split and he
forms a group and originally initially called the Haganah b
Or there's like an apostrophe b. I don't know if
it's like literally ab or if it's I'm not you know,

(48:47):
Hebrew's not my strong suit here. It's initially just a
split off of the Haganah, and it's renamed Etzel, and
then in nineteen thirty one it's named renamed Irgun or
the National Military Organization, and this becomes the Militant Terrorist
Arm of Bitar. Rgun is a terrorist group. There is
no other way to look at your gun as a
terrorist than as a terrorist group, right, And in order

(49:08):
to kind of make that clear, I want to talk
to you about, you know, what Abraham Tahomi believed. And
I'm going to quote from a paper in the Institute
for Palestine Studies by Maher Sharif. Abraham to Hoomi declared
that political violence and terrorism were legitimate means in the
Jewish national struggle for the land of Israel. Pretty simple, right,
not a You don't have to read into him much

(49:29):
to call him a terrorist. He does. Irgun is the
largest right wing gang at the time, but it's not
the only one. And in short order they're going to
be joined by like the Stern Gang. I think Getzel
is the other name of the Stern Gang, and there's
several others, right And in short order, these different gangs,
as they're often called, we might call them terrorists, cells
or insurgent groups, you know, that would be a more
modern term for them. They start causing problems for the

(49:51):
British Mandate. They launch a lot of attacks and assassinations
on British officers, and the British are kind of bewildered.
They're bewildered both by this nineteen twenty nine wave of
vice program or you know, riots, whatever you want to
call them, that really scares the British Mandate, that really
convinces them that, like, we probably can't stay here like this.
There's a ticking clock on how long we can keep

(50:12):
things under wraps here, and it also convinces the Mandate
we have to take some major steps to try to
turn down the temperature because things are dangerously close to
outright war. Right, because they're the British, they pick the
worst ways to try to fix all that, well, not
the worst ways, but they do maybe the right thing
in ways that are only going to make the situation worse.
So they zero went on immigration from Europe of Zionist

(50:36):
Jews and land ownership policies as major causes of discord.
And obviously, as we've talked about, these are major causes
of discord. But they immediately throttle Zionist immigration into Palestine
and that infuriates. By the time they do that, you
could say, well, of course, you know, what else are
they going to do? But when you do that, after
like years of it just happening without nearly as much

(50:56):
it and there's like tens of thousands of heavily armed
and organized zion groups in the country, many of whom
had been initially armed and trained by the British, I
should say also, it's just it's it's gonna just cause
more violence, right, They immediately try to crack down on
this thing, and the people that they've given guns to
and training start fighting them a lot harder.

Speaker 3 (51:18):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:20):
This sparks increasing conflict, sometimes deadly between you know, the
British authorities and these different militias. And while the Hagana
try not to get involved directly with attacking the British Mandate.
Part of why er Gun and the Stern Gang and
these other gangs exist and they do have ties to
the Haganah is so that the movement can do attacks
in the British Mandate without like the Hagana, you know,

(51:40):
getting directly involved. Right. David Rappaport, who wrote the influential
article The Fourth Wave September eleventh and the History of Terrorism,
includes Ergun and lee High sorry lee High is the
other name of the Stern Gang as examples of the
second wave of terrorism. The first was the anarchist wave,
which it started in Russia in the late eighteen hundreds,
and the second was an anti colonial wave. But there's

(52:02):
a lot of people who disagree with Rapaport's claim because
it's not really right to look at the violence of
a group like Irgun or Lehigh or the Haganah as
anti colonial like terrorism or anti colonial insurgency. It's not
really anti colonial violence period. And I'm going to quote
from the Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism. Unlike
violent conflicts in other parts of the world during that period,

(52:22):
the Jewish struggle for self determination Palestine cannot be characterized
as anti colonial for two main reasons. First, while both
air Gun and especially lee High targeted British officials, Palestine
was never part of the British Empire. Furthermore, one of
the main initial objectives of the mandate was to facilitate
the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. Anti colonial struggles are
generally associated with uprisings of indigenous populations against foreign rule.

(52:44):
The vast majority of Jews from the Irgun and Lehigh
who struggled for the establishment of the independent State of
Israel were immigrants, while their main opponents, namely the Palestinians,
were natives of the land. Very important point to keep
in mind.

Speaker 3 (52:58):
I'm surprised if the Oxford Handbook was thus honest.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
They did say that at least yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:03):
I mean terrorism studies is just a offenccessful, so this
is yeah.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
Yeah, yeah, that part of it was right. I have
some issues with that. But yeah, Now, all of these
pressures keep building and building, as does the violence, until
things come to a head again in the Great Arab
Revolt of nineteen thirty six to nineteen thirty nine. Sometimes
you'll hear called the Great Palestinian Revolt. I want to
quote now from an article in the journal Origins by

(53:29):
Ori Yehudai. Historians date the beginning of the Great nineteen
thirty six to nineteen thirty nine Arab Revolt as it
came to be known, to the killing of two Jews
by Palestinian Arabs near the town of Karm on April fifteenth,
nineteen thirty six, followed by Jewish retaliation against Palestinians that
expanded into riots and Jaffa and Tel Aviv. So that's
like a really short summary of kind of what happens.

(53:51):
Everything I've discussed over these last two episodes also is
part of why this revolt happens, right, This increasing anger
at the Mandate, this increasing anger at ze Ionism, all
of the violence between these different communities that have occurred,
All of that is a big part of what leads
to this revolt.

Speaker 3 (54:07):
And fifty years at this point, Bry you know, basically
nationalism being suppressed on one side.

Speaker 2 (54:15):
Right right, and another cause also can't be divorced from
is the coming of Nazism to Germany, which causes a
massive surch in Jewish immigration into Palestine that makes them
more than a quarter of the population by nineteen thirty six.
To quote from Oriyhudai again, the Zionists built their settlements
on land purchased from Arab owners living in Palestine or
in neighboring Arab countries. The transactions had a devastating impact

(54:37):
on Palestinian society, as they often involved the removal of
Palestinian peasants from the land. The distress of thousands of
uprooted peasant families, coupled with frustration over the failure of
traditional leadership to halt Zionism, led to a grassroots uprising
launched by younger nationalist activists on April twenty fifth, nineteen
thirty six. Palestinian political parties temporarily put aside their differences
and created a coordinating body called the Arab Higher Can

(55:00):
or AHC, headed by a Haaji Amin al Husseini, the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And the first thing that happens
and what's called now the Great Air Revolt is a
six month general strike that is peaceful. Right. This is
an attempt of by a large organized body of Palestinian
Arabs to address their grievances with the British mandate via

(55:23):
a general strike, which is what everyone says should be
the right way to do something like this, Right, you like,
peacefully but firmly state your demands and without using violence,
create a way to disrupt life in so that the
people who are running things make concessions to you. Right Like,
that's like how you're supposed to try to improve things

(55:44):
like in the West. That's what we say, right, rather
than violence, right, but nothing like. The British not only
ignore them, they outright refuse the demands of this committee.
Right because the committee is demanding an end to Jewish
immigration and land purchase and an independent national government. Now
there's room, as there always has been, for a negotiation here,
but the British refuse. And after six months of peaceful striking,

(56:07):
a rebellion breaks out and it turns into a general
uprising against the British and the Zionists, and it gets
very ugly. There's a number of different rebel groups some
of them carry out attacks on Jewish civilians too. This
is a really brutal time, but that's not the majority
or even all of what's happening. Certainly, the violence convinces
the British that the Mandate is untenable and that they're

(56:28):
going to need to create a Jewish state immediately, and
they drop plans to do this. The initial plans would
transfer because of where they're and I think that their
initial idea for this Jewish state they want to make
is about seventeen percent of Palestine, right, and because of
the way they draw it up, it's going to require
the transfer. That's the term they use, of two hundred
thousand Arab Palestinians out of this new Jewish territory and

(56:49):
about one thousand Jews are going to need a vice versus.
So you see, I mean that's a really good I
look right there at just the discrepancy between how the
Mandate treats these two sides is they think it's reasonable
to ask two hundred thousand Arab Muslims to leave their
homes in exchange for like a thousand Jews doing the
same on the other side, right, which is like I

(57:11):
just think those numbers are kind of useful to look
at next to each other, right, So the Zionist leadership
accepts everything the British offer except the size of their borders,
which is worth noting. The Palestinian leadership says, no, this
isn't really at all.

Speaker 5 (57:27):
Would we do that?

Speaker 2 (57:28):
Why would we like? What?

Speaker 4 (57:31):
What?

Speaker 5 (57:31):
On what?

Speaker 2 (57:32):
The rebellion goes on until fall of nineteen thirty eight,
when the British send in a big old army to
murder their way out of the problem, or re summarizes.
The British sent twenty thousand troops to Palestine and used
harsh measures against the rebels, including house demolitions and executions.
They outlawed the AHC, arrested and expelled activists, and disarmed
the Palestinians. Their vote was suppressed by the summer of

(57:53):
nineteen thirty nine, leaving a toll of approximately five thousand Arab,
four hundred and fifteen Jewish and one hundred British deaths.
And this is the most lopsided death toll we've seen.
Obviously the British are largely responsible for that, but you
know what you've seen here. The British have sent a
couple really important messages with how they've dealt with this. First,

(58:14):
they've told the Palestinians that peaceful protest is not going
to get you shit. And second they've told the Zionists
that your arms and militias are acceptable and your years
of militant organizing are working. These are not great messages
to send. This is going to cause problems for everybody.

Speaker 1 (58:31):
Now.

Speaker 2 (58:31):
Once World War Two gets started, a great number of
Jewish fighters in Palestine again sign up to fight with
the British. And they do this for both the incredibly
understandable reason of wanting to fight the Nazis and for
the same reason Yapotenski had wanted a Jewish legion World
War One so that they could get more arms and
experience for their upcoming war of independence. But the conflict
with the British doesn't end just because they're ostensibly on

(58:52):
the same side of this growing war. In nineteen forty,
the Central Office for Jewish Immigration chartered three ships to
take Jewish refugees from Romania to Palestine. Once these ships docked,
the British refused to let the refugees off. They had
enacted by this point the White Paper Policy to curb
Jewish immigration, and they planned to deport these people and
not by the way back to Romania, and to do

(59:16):
so transferred all of the Jewish refugees from these three
ships to one boat called the Patria, which was docked
at Haifa and bound for Mauritius. That's where they were
going to unload these people, so they weren't going to
be in Palestine.

Speaker 4 (59:26):
Right.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
So you've got this boat full of have you heard
of the Patria case?

Speaker 3 (59:29):
By the way, No, this is a new to me.

Speaker 2 (59:33):
Yeah, this is a really important point. That's kind of
the point we're going to end on. I didn't really
know about this either. So you've got this boat and
it's got these refugees from the Holocaust, right like, docted
at Haifa, and the British are going to send it
off to Mauritius. And there's a massive debate within the
Haganah for what to do here. Now. During World War two,
the Haganah's unofficial motto was fight the white paper like
there is no world war and help the British like

(59:55):
there is no white paper. So they wanted to stop
these people from being howard it right for a lot
of reasons. But when you get into the habit as
the Hagana has by this point of stockpiling guns and explosives,
every problem starts to look like maybe guns and explosives
are the solution, right, Like, that's just a human universal
I want to quote now from an article in the

(01:00:16):
Museum of the Jewish People. Amateurism, negligence, and perhaps even
an inherent subconscious disrespect for the refugees blinded their eyes.
The Hagana commanders acted against experts advice and placed a
bomb in the rickety side of the old ship rather
than under the machines area where there would be no passengers.
And their idea here, at least the claim that the
Hagana makes is that we wanted to set off a

(01:00:38):
small explosion so that they would have to evacuate the ship.
And once they've evacuated these refugees into Palestine, it'll be
a lot easier to keep them here. Right There's You
could certainly run into theories that they intended it to
be as big as it was. But whatever the cause is,
in the official senses that they fucked up and were
just really bad with their explosives. They completely screw up,

(01:00:59):
and they blow this to Kingdom, fucking calm and they
kill two hundred and sixty seven Jewish refugees. Right, it
is a horrible catastrophe, and it is still today known
as the Patry Disaster. Is seen as the largest catastrophe
in which Jews cause the death of other Jews. Two
hundred and sixty seven total people die in the bombing.
They're not actually all Jewish, but the vast majority of
them are, and another one hundred and seventy two are injured. Now,

(01:01:21):
the Haganah again says that we miscalculated. This was a
horrible fuck up on humanitarian grounds. Though the British respond
to this by saying, okay, all of the survivors get
to stay, and so what message has the Mandate sent
the Haganah by exactly right, And this is where I'm
going to end things. Again, it's an arbitrary point. Any

(01:01:44):
point I would pick is, but I think by this
point you see everything that's going to lead us in
to the Nakba to forty eight, Like everything has been
established now there's not really a turning back point, and
a lot of it is because of what the messages
the British have sent, both that they've cracked down and
debilitated and killed so many of these Palestinian leaders, and
they have just continued to yield and aid and a bet,

(01:02:08):
you know the Hagen even while they're carrying out terrorist
attacks that in a lot of cases kill you know,
British civilians and their own civilians. Right. The lesson they
have sent is bombing and violence is the way to
get what you want, and we will give you everything
if you just do a little bit more of it.
That's what the British are saying in nineteen forty, right,
And everything that comes after that is I think pretty
I wouldn't say predictable, but you get I think kind

(01:02:32):
of where everything else happens at this point.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
I think the discrepancy is also really important to highlight
here because when nineteen forty it happens, I think a
lot of maybe pro Israel readings of that event or
propaganda around that event is that, oh, all of these
Arab countries attacked Israel, but in fact they were armed
like three to one. And it's because of this discrepancy

(01:02:58):
that's like continued through time that the British have allowed
for them to like build up their material power. So
even with those Arab countries coming in in nineteen forty eight,
when Israel declares itself after Palstins are ethically cleansed, like
it's it's nothing compared to what the Israeli gangs are

(01:03:18):
able to do, which are an IDEF and all.

Speaker 2 (01:03:21):
About yeah, it's become the IDF. In this period, and
obviously there continue to be conflicts between like the Irgun
and the Haganah because they're not in agreement about, among
other things, yourgun wants to be the military of Israel
right at a certain point, and you know there's I
did debate should I have talked ended this more at
like the bombing of the King David Hotel, But I don't,

(01:03:41):
you know, which is something people should be aware of.
You know, it's another and that I think the was
your gun and Monoch and begin was like a major
figure in sort of helping to mastermind that terrorist attack.
But I you know, by this point in time, you've
seen both like the community that had existed previously, you
know seventeen eight or in the eighteen ags that we
started talking about, has been forcibly broken down and also

(01:04:06):
broken just because like the massive changes that have swept
the culture have meant that like people don't feel the
same about who they are anymore in a lot of.

Speaker 3 (01:04:14):
Cases, and it's very difficult to say you're an Arab Jew,
right when there's not really space for you in either
nationalism essentially.

Speaker 2 (01:04:24):
Yeah, and then of course.

Speaker 3 (01:04:25):
I mean you're not even getting to the part of
like all of the Arab Jewish migration that happens in
the aftermath of Israel's creation and how the state treats them. Yeah,
I mean today I think there are over fifty percent
of the population of Jewish Israelis, but you wouldn't know that,
like there's so much similarity between them and their Palestinian

(01:04:46):
enemies essentially, but because of like you said, the identity
has been.

Speaker 2 (01:04:50):
Erased, right, And that's why there aren't Arab Jewish communities
and a lot of these different Middle Eastern North African
countries that had existed up intol the forties. Is because
after the established to the State of Israel, both there's
reprisals against them. They also feel safe from moving to Israel.
But yeah, as you said, there's like a it causes
there are huge within Israel, like sectarian divides between different

(01:05:12):
points of origin, right, and none of that goes away
you know, and the it's all, it's all just I
keep thinking back. The thing I can't really get out
of my head because I hadn't really known about this
kind of relationship is the relationship between these Arab Muslims
who were descended from the people who got kicked out
of you know, modern day Spain and Portugal Liberia, and

(01:05:34):
the Sephardic Jews who are the same right, and this
this beautiful awareness they have that like we're part of
each other's past, and you know, even though that they're
not the same religion, they've preserved a lot of our
past even better than we did, and so like we
have this degree of love towards them that doesn't I
don't think that exists anymore that interrelate those communities in
a relate like that which.

Speaker 3 (01:05:55):
Those Youdays have been a race essentially. But like said,
do you know what's a really interesting anecdote around this
community is there was a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon who
kind of remembered vaguely that her grandmother had like very
specific customs around certain holidays and like kind of strange
things that her neighbors didn't share. Turns out her grandmother

(01:06:18):
was originally from this Jewish community that was expelled from Spain.
So the Palestinian refugee in Lebanon was able to get
Spanish citizenship on the basis of being a descendant of
jew right, Yeah, I mean absurd.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
Yeah, absurd. And also like just one more piece of
evidence that like the long history of like inter relationship
and like community, like intercommunal existence is way older than
sectarian hatred, you know, like, h it's just sad.

Speaker 3 (01:06:52):
Maybe maybe it's funtor rethink nationalism. I don't know believe.

Speaker 2 (01:06:55):
Maybe maybe it didn't work out great. Maybe maybe it
was mostly bad. Maybe yeah, I don't know. You know
what's not mostly bad? The book you just helped put together.

Speaker 3 (01:07:06):
Oh that's right, The Handbook on Authoritarianism in the Air
World is out now with Bluemsbury Politics. I'd also recommend
my again my episode for it could happen here about
my great grandmother And if people are interested in the
Arab Jewish question, look up the Israeli Black Panthers. Yeah,

(01:07:26):
very interesting little anecdote there.

Speaker 2 (01:07:29):
Yeah, Okay, well that's going to do it for us
at Behind the Bastards this week, and uh yeah, come
back next week where we'll talk about I know, probably
a dictator or something. I'll give you guys. I'll give
you guys a fun one, a fun one, and they're
none of them are fun ones. I'll give you guys
a different one sounds good.

Speaker 1 (01:07:49):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:08:10):
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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 Two: The Origins of Terror in Palestine