Part One: The Origins of Terror in Palestine

Robert sits down with Dr. Dana al-Kurd to discuss how things started going wrong in Palestine, and how terror first came to the Holy Land. Sources: https://www.jpost.com/blogs/my-nation-lives/this-week-in-israeli-history-operation-moses-raful-eitan-and-the-patria-disaster-435421 https://www.972mag.com/the-first-political-murder-in-jewish-palestine-lessons-of-intolerance/ https://archive.is/Rdwny#selection-1141.0-1141.321 https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654849 https://rense.com/general76/zan.htm https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/40692 https://anumuseum.org.il/blog/patria/ https://waqarahmed.org/menachem-begin-israeli-terrorist-who-became-prime-minister-won-nobel-peace-prize https://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/bitstream/handle/10023/24114/hoffman_2020_swi_bombingkingdavid_aam.pdf?sequence=1 https://www.mideastjournal.org/post/jewish-arab-relations-a-deep-dive-into-the-history https://www.972mag.com/before-zionism-the-shared-life-of-jews-and-palestinians/ https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-arabs-in-palestine https://palestinenexus.com/articles/conflict-palestine-bw-jews-arabs-zionism https://thecjn.ca/news/jews-muslims-coexisted-peacefully/ https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/jabotinsky-vladimir/?format=pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/41857736?seq=19wwf See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst, or everything you don't know about the worst people in all of 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 Netanyahu prior to October 7th and kind of this most recent escalation into genocide in Gaza. And I didn't really feel like, you know, returning to Netanyahu well was kind of, I think the show does best covering like things that are currently happening and like breaking news. That's kind of why we started it could happen here.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And I'm among other things in the last year or so, one of the best things we've done there is bring on Dr. Donna Al-Khodr 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, Donna. And so I wanted 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.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  Donna, should we call you Dr. Al-Khodr the whole episode?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  No, no, please don't do that. That would be super awkward.

• 1:15Robert Evans?

  It is cool. I mean, yeah. But first off, how have you been? And yeah, pluggables and stuff?

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I'm doing, I'm existing, you know, as many Palestinians 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, thanks for asking.

• 1:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, that sounds great. I can't wait to read that. I've been, I've been doing some, for one of the things I read for this book, which is kind of about like the birth of terrorism in Palestine, the Holy Land, prior to the Nakba, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, where this episode, if you have 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, it's been going on for thousands of years. It'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

• 2:26Robert Evans?

  that, but that's what you're meant to believe if those two first things are true, right?

• 2:30Speaker 02

  And that they're both crazy.

• 2:32Robert Evans?

  None of this is news to you. And that they're both.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  They can't live together, but they're also both crazy. Exactly.

• 2:35Robert Evans?

  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, discreet, right? But if you go back to like 1880, you can get a really good grounding and everything that's really relevant to the conflict today, right? I mean, maybe you disagree with that. If so, I yield to your experience, but that's kind of 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 day, to the day starts in the late 1800s. Like, it's not that ancient, right?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  No, no, absolutely. Like if I'm always, anytime I talk about this or anytime 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. It's, it really boils down to that.

• 3:28Robert Evans?

  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, Zionism being one of them, but nationalism, because it's, I mean, Arab nationalism and also European nationalism are deeply tied to all of this. For, among other things, Jews and Muslims and Christians got along reasonably well in Palestine for not, 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, before, you know, 1948 and before the

• 4:13Robert Evans?

  Nakba, right? Like, how did things and how did the Ottoman Empire and the British mandate kind of help push things along to, to the point of no return, right? 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 Menachem Begin or on Vladimir Yavatinsky. 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 how things went so wrong through a single, I just didn't seem like the right way to do this.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  No, this is more comprehensive, I would say. Yeah.

• 4:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We'll see.

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• 4:58Robert Evans?

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• 7:17Robert Evans?

  So the story that I'm going to tell this week starts in the 1880s and ends around 1940 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 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 1800s and even the early 1900s 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 Palestinian. Like no one, if like someone identifying themselves as a Palestinian would not tell you what they believed, what community they were a part of necessarily, right? In like 1870, you know?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, these were Ottoman provinces. They happened to be there. Yeah, different communities happened to be there.

• 8:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. And, you know, in 1880 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 communities of Arab Jews spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. And in some ways, these episodes are the story of why many of those communities start, ceased to exist, right? Because that's also very tied up in the state of Israel and the wars that, 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? And there's,

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  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 it, like Hebron, where the majority of the Jewish community in Hebron in this period was extremely Arabic and would have very rarely spoken kind of the language that most Sephardics spoke, which is Spanish derived. We'll talk about that.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Like Ladino, yeah.

• 9:13Robert Evans?

  Yes, Ladino, right. It was noted, like in Hebron, they would only use Ladino in 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 a lot more common, right? So, you know, stuff like that, it is kind of a blurry distinction between Sephardic and Arab Jews and it's not wrong.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  And there's this category, also Mizrahi, 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.

• 9:49Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And I, 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, 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 1880s in Palestine, when most Palestinians were, 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, you know?

• 10:33Speaker 02

  You were upset about taxes, you were upset about the draft.

• 10:36Robert Evans?

  Right, right, exactly, exactly. And also, the Ottomans are Turks, right? The rulers are foreigners, they're not Arab. And, you know, their empire is a foreign one that's holding a lot of Arabs, 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 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 1800s, 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 the term people

• 11:19Robert Evans?

  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, you know, religious groups and ethnic groups, is that it mitigates a degree of internal conflict, because everybody kind of has this, 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 solidarity that comes from everyone being angry at the same foreign power, right? So Yakov Yahoshua, a Jewish resident of Jerusalem in this time, and a future Israeli,

• 12:04Robert Evans?

  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." Right? This is his recollection of how, what life was like in this period of time, and he's not recalling any kind of religious conflict, really. Like, that's not, that 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 a racial or religious sense, they mean that in that they have not been here as long, they're locals, but they

• 12:49Robert Evans?

  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 are descendants themselves of the Arabs that were kicked out of Iberia. And there's this kind of belief, pretty widespread, 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?

• 13:33Robert Evans?

  So there's this really deep, and 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, you know, the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Iberia is from this point in time, we're talking hundreds of years, and there's, 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 vary and be blurry, but again, in places

• 14:16Robert Evans?

  like Hebron, the Jewish community spoke Arabic as a first language, and only occasionally included Ladino 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-Quds during this time, Elihu Aliyashar, wrote that during his youth, quote, "We heard Arabic and spoke it utterly freely with our neighbors." Yakov Al-Azhar, another resident, recalled Muslim women in 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

• 14:58Robert Evans?

  solidarity, and even co-celebration of a lot of different 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 1880s, 1890s, that we need to address, which is that, for a shockingly long time, slavery still existed there, right? People bought and sold enslaved Africans for longer than you'd expect, and this is not just in Palestine, this is a decent chunk of the Middle East and in North Africa in bits. In his book, Klein-

• 15:29Speaker 02

  There was an Arab slave trade, yeah.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  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 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 1889, even though the Sultan had outlawed the trade in 1846. Per Lives in Common, quote, "In about 1880, Chaim Aharon Valero bought an Ethiopian girl, who was around 10 years old. When the central government enforced the emancipation of slaves in Jerusalem, the girl chose to stay with Valero's family and converted to Judaism.

• 16:12Robert Evans?

  A few hundred descendants of these slaves still live in the Old City, in what is called the Black or Slave Compound." Not an aspect of history that we talk about a lot, but, you know, again-

• 16:22Speaker 02

  And they consider themselves Palestinian today.

• 16:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, absolutely. 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 1880s, the Jewish population in Palestine numbered around 25,000, 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 1882. And this is when you see a bunch of smaller Jewish organizations in Europe, some of which had been sending migrants to establish farms or might move to cities in Palestine for

• 17:09Robert Evans?

  a period of 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 1881, 1882 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 of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by anarchists. Russia blamed the Jews, as they usually did, and a pogrom followed in the city of Kirrovo Rad. And this is like, this is in basically modern day Azerbaijan, if I'm understanding it. I think like, it's generally Azeri is like the region that this is like attributed to. I'm not sure specifically what country now, but like, that's kind of the area this is

• 17:54Robert Evans?

  occurring in, but it spreads out of kind of that community to the entire Pale of Sediment. And there's like a year and a half or two of horrific violence against Jews and a large portion, yeah, massive. And this kind of, it leads to the Tsar passing what are called the May Laws in 1882, which further restrict where Jews could go and what jobs they can have, and it makes a lot of people want to leave. But, per 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 Otto Emancipation by Leon Pinsker, in which he advocated the idea of self-determination for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. Now, it's worth talking about all this, and talking about what's happening in Russia

• 18:39Robert Evans?

  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, a lot of Jews leave Russia in this, in the period immediately after 1881 to 82. About 3% 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 3% of refugees who come into Palestine, a significant, some people say most, some sources say most, leave pretty soon after because it's like a pretty different climate than Russia, you know, like people who are used to growing up there, maybe move

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  to Palestine, they're like, oh, I can't handle this.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Huge adjustment, right?

• 19:26Robert Evans?

  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 massive amount. There's gonna be caused, 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 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's using, right?

• 20:07Speaker 02

  And they don't understand like indigenous farming, like they're not talking to the locals, they're really not adjusting well, yeah.

• 20:14Robert Evans?

  They're not adjusting well and there are conflicts, there's, you know, and in this period, the violence, 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 Ottoman authorities, but obviously the Ottoman authorities aren't gonna take their complaints seriously. Not that they take a lot of complaints, the Ottoman Empire not great at addressing the complaints of its people, right? They certainly don't care about these like Zionist immigrants, right? They're the Ottomans in 1880. Yeah. So from these initial concerns over security arose the first organized Jewish defense group in Palestine, which is called Bargiora.

• 20:55Robert Evans?

  And Bargiora initially, ultimately, I don't know if it becomes the Hashem or it's more accurate to say the Hashem is kind of a spinoff of Bargiora, and then the Hashem obviously gives way to the Haganah, the Haganah becomes the IDF, you know, it's the, you see kind of how things go there. But initially Bargiora and the Hashem, they are like left-wing organizations because the, the primary organizing kind of impetus behind them are these Jewish labor 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 pogrom 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.

• 21:40Robert Evans?

  And it's not gonna, there's 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, certainly not right to look at it that way. People mean a number of different things. That said, the kind of major organizing like center is pretty well represented by Theodore Herzl, right? Who is like the big Zionist theoretician thinker of his day. You may have heard of him quoted in The Big Lebowski.

• 22:22Robert Evans?

  In 1897 Herzl announced the first Zionist Congress in Basel, which brought a bunch of these smaller European Zionist groups together for the first time. In his biography of Menachem 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 Menachem Begin, who was a very, does, I mean, he's a guy, among other things, does 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 Menachem and he compares them to different, like, and this is Menachem, like quotes that Menachem has, has come up with that are like about Zionism. And he compares them to different slogans and songs of like Polish nationalist groups

• 23:06Robert Evans?

  in the area when, when Menachem 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.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Or Arab nationalism.

• 23:19Robert Evans?

  They're all developing, 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 nationalists are also often very anti-Semitic, that also influences the development of Zionism, right?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  I mean, I'd 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, like it's not a democracy here, everyone's 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, it's like, we have to declare ourselves a nation 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, I'm sure.

• 24:08Robert Evans?

  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 if 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, most people choose to go somewhere else for different reasons. But like, yeah, like it, you have to, you can't separate this from all of the other movements at the time. And this is something Gordis makes a really good point of making, of writing about in his biography of Begin. 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 our enemies had taken from us.'

• 24:53Robert Evans?

  While the Hatikwa, the Zionist anthem, ended with the words, 'Our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two 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 foreigners singing about land that other people already inhabited, foreigners to the land they intended to go to, right? Who had not been born and raised there. And that is, that is a meaningful difference, right? But you can also see how these things are influencing each other as they evolve. In 1904, the Kishin of pogrom occurred in modern day Moldova, which is of course then part of the Russian Empire. And the, I think the cause of this is the most popular paper in Kishin of publishes

• 25:37Robert Evans?

  a series of 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 anything to do with the Jewish community, but there are these longstanding myths and rumors that like rabbis are sacrificing Christian children to get their blood to, to do this kind of ritual, right? This is a huge part of anti-Semitism.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Literally, that's blood libel, like that's the term, right?

• 26:13Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep. Massive part of antisemitism history, right? And so when these, these two young people turn up dead kind of in the same area at the same time, there's just like immediate disinformation campaign to be like, it's the Jews, right? And then you get a pogrom, right? There's a massacre that starts on Easter Sunday, I think 40 to 49 Jewish people are murdered, hundreds more are injured, more than 1,500 homes are damaged. And the pogrom itself influences a lot more people to flee than were directly impacted by the violence. And one of the folks who was very influenced by the Kishin of pogrom is Theodore Herzl. And this, this happens right before he dies, he doesn't live a lot, like much after this pogrom, but one of his last acts, and he had, again, not a few years before this, he

• 26:56Robert Evans?

  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 pogrom 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 East Africa, right? That could be useful to them as like, 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, right? This is purely British power politics, right? And obviously Herzl and a number of other people are like, well, I guess, you know, maybe this is better than nothing, right?

• 27:41Robert Evans?

  And it doesn't go anywhere and a lot of Zionists get really angry at Herzl because they are very focused on the primacy of Palestine within Zionism. And Herzl's obviously somewhat more flexible where he's like, look, I mean, if they're offering Uganda.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:54Robert Evans?

  And this highlights a really important reality, 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 pall 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's not, it wasn't definite that the Zionist movement would land on Palestine at this point in time. You can see that by the fact that Herzl 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 pogroms 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, you know?

• 28:39Robert Evans?

  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, I'm, 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 second waves of migration to Palestine during the Ottoman Empire are known as the first and second Aliyah. Between 1903 and 1914, 35,000 to 40,000 Russian Jews moved to Palestine. And it's during this time that Jewish immigrants near, living near Jaffa create the neighborhoods that are going to form the nucleus of Tel Aviv, which eventually becomes the first like Hebrew city, right, in Palestine.

• 29:23Robert Evans?

  That's, 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, 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 1930, Tel Aviv's downtown was downtown Jaffa, basically, because Tel Aviv like didn't have one, really.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  They needed the economic opportunity that this very thriving city represented. And, and actually that's like the basis of a lot of the tensions between them and the Palestinians is the, is, 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, in a very kind of directed way, so they were, you know. And Uh, rubbing up against a lot of issues. Yeah.

• 30:16Robert Evans?

  It's very right. What you said about them being exclusionary is very accurate. A lot of these communities, number one, they, they only want to speak European, whatever European language they came in. They're very, and, 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, there, there's this, the conflict is not like a Muslim Jewish conflict. It is a native immigrant conflict, right? Like, that's what's happening here.

• 30:49Speaker 06

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• 31:19Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 31:40Speaker 07

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 32:11Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 32:17Speaker 04

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• 32:24Speaker 07

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• 32:28Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 32:36Speaker 07

  It's real.

• 32:37Speaker 06

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• 33:18Speaker 07

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 33:22Speaker 06

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 33:29Robert Evans?

  So Jews also came to outnumber Muslims in Al-Quds or Jerusalem, or the Holy City, during this period. I think Quds just means holy, right?

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah.

• 33:39Robert Evans?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So like, the holy cities. Yeah, the holy. Yeah. During this period, right? And we're talking, I think Jerusalem is about 30,000 people when that balance tips, right? So we're not talking about a massive city, but that change is significant. It shows kind of how these, how meaningful these kind of numbers of people that are coming in from Europe really have, have started to be. Most of the buildings in Jerusalem at this point in time, when, 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 1914, there are about 80,000 Jews in Palestine. And obviously, that includes Sephardic and Arabic. That includes, you know, all of the other categories,

• 34:20Robert Evans?

  not just, you know, Jews who would 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, 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 the, these foreign Jews are often called Ashkenazim, right? That's one of the, the terms for them. They adopt, some of them do adopt like an Arab Jewish identity, and they do blend into these, especially earlier refugees blend

• 35:05Robert Evans?

  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, to let them, right? There are some real differences between, and what people are willing to accept 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 Gadda Karmi, 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, I know I'm harping on this, but these issues are not religious in nature. They're issues of like, a bunch of Europeans showing up in a place that's not European, and like, that causes conflict, you know?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  And there's a difference between immigrant and settler. Like,

• 35:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Palestine has often, you know, historically, obviously, like, look at where it's placed. It's often, you know, absorbed, uh, different communities. But like you said, there's like the types that like blend in, and then there's the ones that refuse and want to replace.

• 36:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, because that is a really good point. Because I, I don't, and maybe I'll certainly yield, because I'm sure you've considered this more than me. I don't, I, I don't feel super like, some, someone who just like is fleeing a pogrom and winds up moving to like Hebron or, or Jerusalem or, you know, Jaffa, and like, becomes a member of the community, that's less of a settler thing than someone who likes, starts a farm and like, starts a separate community, and doesn't want to let it, right? Those are two different kinds of things, right?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And the fact that they were, like, especially the ones in Jaffa, for example, like, they were, um, disempowering the Palestinian laborer, you know? Like, that is the issue. It's not the issue that there are new people necessarily.

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And 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 variants 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 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, why don't they have to work? You know? Not that none of them are, not that

• 37:34Robert Evans?

  that's like most people, but these are, 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, we can see these conflicts starting to breed, right?

• 37:47Robert Evans?

  Even Yaakov Yehoshua, who is later the father of a celebrated Israeli novelist, claimed that Ashkenazim tended to prefer their 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 guy Yaakov, who is a native and, and, uh, to Palestine and Jewish, right? Is that these immigrant communities do not have the same relationship that we do, right?

• 38:23Robert Evans?

  And that quote is lovely, but it does imply something unlovely, which is that there is still some internecine violence here, right? Like, the fact that in this neighborhood, these Muslim, their Muslim friends are like defending these, these Jewish kids when they get bullied, means that there also is some bullying, right? And I've, I've run into quotes like that in Menachem Klein'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 sizable, it's the United States, sizable, non-white, sizable immigrant populations. And if you listen to this show, I hope that you consider those people your neighbors, and are, 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

• 39:05Robert Evans?

  racist, right? Against, like, folks who are just different. That occurs everywhere. There's different kinds of people, right?

• 39:11Speaker 02

  Any minority group. Yeah.

• 39:13Robert Evans?

  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 people being like, yeah, and our Muslim friends like protected us from those folks who were 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 Jews face under the Ottoman system in this 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, a relevant quote from the book there. "Relations between young Jews and their Christian and Muslim

• 39:56Robert Evans?

  fellows sometimes grew strained. Shulamit Laskov lived in Baca in the early 1920s in an apartment that the Karakorians, an Armenian family, rented to her parents and to English tenants. She played with the Karakorian children, and when she ate at their homes, 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, I, I think that, that it's, it's just human beings. You're always going to encounter pieces like this, right? And I, 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

• 40:40Robert Evans?

  crops up in an integrated community shouldn't take away from that. But it's more and more

• 40:43Speaker 02

  At the end of the day, like you said, oh, so sorry to interrupt.

• 40:46Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  I was just saying, like, at the end of the day, like you said, like, it's like, their inferior status legally, which, uh, applied also to Christian minorities, like, was an Ottoman issue, not their neighbor's issue. And sorry, I'm smiling, but my family's from Ba'ah, so I didn't expect you to, um, come up with a quote from there.

• 41:06Robert Evans?

  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 who were native-born because 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 is, that is a factor here, right? So as more and more of these foreign-born Jewish immigrants moved to Palestine in the

• 41:50Robert Evans?

  pre-World War I years, they start buying up property, not just rural property, but in the cities and 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 by 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 want to kind of buy up as many of these communities near the Wailing Wall as we can, right? Or we want to buy up as many of these communities near this other area that we're, is 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.

• 42:35Robert Evans?

  And we have to deal with a couple of things. When we talk about the purchase of property in Palestine by these, these immigrants, right? If you read a lot of Israeli-centered histories of Palestine, you will come across the claim, and this is very common up to, to the present day, that nearly all of the territory that became the state of Israel was uninhabited when these, the Zionist immigrants start showing up, right? This attitude is represented well from an article I found in the Jewish Virtual Library titled "The Arabs in 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 1867, described it as 'a desolate country whose

• 43:16Robert Evans?

  soil is rich enough but is given over wholly 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 and the cactus tree, those last friends of the worthless soil, had almost deserted the country." And I'm not used to being kind of pissed at Mark Twain, but first off-

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Where was, where was he walking?

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  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 there, I don't know, man.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  It's a siesta time, man, like-

• 44:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, siesta, man. Louis French, the British Director of Development, wrote this of Palestine. "We found it inhabited by phelaheen, who live, and phelaheen 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 phelaheen, 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, and the phelaheen's lot was an alteration of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin." And I want to note both how divorced from that is from real history. And the history, I've read you so far, I've read you a bunch of accounts, of accounts, and these are all from like the 1880s, 1890s, the same basic period of time, those two quotes, I read about no one being in Palestine.

• 44:45Robert Evans?

  And these are quotes, in 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, that 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 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 600,000 compared to 94,000 Jews." Well, that's not nobody-

• 45:17Speaker 02

  They have to admit it, right?

• 45:18Robert Evans?

  That seems like a good number of people-

• 45:20Speaker 02

  They're just hidden.

• 45:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  They're not, they're not here.

• 45:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And one, 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 1800s, early 1900s. 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 fertilizers, but human being, like, there's way more people in 20 or 30 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, the, these Jewish immigrants, these Zionist immigrants brought civilization 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.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  And they just didn't understand like how these like phelaheen like organized their land.

• 46:08Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  You know, like, they didn't have-

• 46:10Robert Evans?

  And I want to talk about that, yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, they didn't have like the property rights system that they were, you know, accustomed to, and there was these absentee landlords. And it's a whole thing that they didn't understand or pretended to.

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  And they didn't care to, right? Now, that article quoted Louis French, a British agent who lived in Palestine after the Ottoman Empire fell and the West took over governance. And he talked about the phelaheen, these traditional Arab desert peasants, as if they lived in primitive filth and were basically just bandits. And I want to read you a different description of these guys from a Sephardic Jewish man named Yosef Meuhas. And Yosef Meuhas is a Zionist, although not, not the kind you're used to hearing about. We're going to talk about what he believed because it's really interesting. And he grows up in Pal-, obviously, he's, he's a, 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 10-year period, where he's a young man, he's going to school, he's training,

• 47:03Robert Evans?

  he was, quote, "A constant guest in the homes of the phelas. In the evening, when I returned from the hayder or during vacations and holidays, I would always visit Mohammed 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? That's a very different picture of the phelaheen, I think. And Meuhas felt the need to write down his recollections of life and, and of the phelaheen because during the 20s and 30s, 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.

• 47:45Robert Evans?

  And he starts to witness Jewish and Muslim communities closing off from each other and becoming more hostile, and this frightens and saddens him. Meuhas is a teacher of Hebrew and Arabic as well as French at the Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls. The Rothschilds fund a lot of the Zionist immigration in this period of time. That's not, I know people, when you, people reading up the Rothschilds, it's nearly always conspiracy stuff. This is a thing like the Rothschilds do, right? Like, they're funding a lot of this because they believe in this. And Meuhas 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 phelaheen because they've lived there much longer, right? From the, from the book Lives in Common, quote, "Meuhas viewed the phelas as the original

• 48:30Robert Evans?

  Arabs, as opposed to the desert nomads and the merchants of the cities. The phelas," he wrote, "were the descendants of the Canaanites, who are considered the most ancient inhabitants of Palestine. They fully preserved all the ancient customs and mores 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, and become part of their community and, and let them teach us because they're living a more authentic version 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 Herzl. Foreign-born immigrants were likelier to see Zionism as a struggle of conquest. In fact, that was probably the, certainly the dominant, after a certain period of time, attitude.

• 49:14Robert Evans?

  Whereas Meuhas is a local, right? And he believes that Arabs and Jews are, 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 other, in order to be successful. How do you know how to live here if you're not going to learn from these people who've lived here forever, right?

• 49:33Speaker 02

  We should do an ad break here, by the way.

• 49:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, sorry, shit. I don't know, yeah, here's, here's an ad.

• 49:44Speaker 04

  Cash Flow Crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds up to $200,000 right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 50:33Speaker 04

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  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  No child should ever experience that. And we were babies.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app.

• 51:16Speaker 07

  Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 51:23Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 51:32Speaker 07

  It's real.

• 51:32Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin Unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network. 12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now.

• 52:13Speaker 07

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 52:24Robert Evans?

  We're back. Sorry, I just, I found that this guy really interesting because I, you don't hear about stories like this all that often, or attitudes like this. And it's interesting, the counterpoint he provides, these attitudes that like, these people really meant nothing and had no impact on, on the development of society and civilization, you know, in Palestine. I, I think it's really important to look at someone who's not creating propaganda posthaste, right? This is somebody who lives in this area and lives in this life and is horrified by what he sees happening in the 20s and 30s. We'll talk about Meir HaSis a little more later. So as for modern Israeli claims of a barren and empty Palestine, the reality is that prior to the mid 20th century, the area is a lot less populated, but at the end of

• 53:08Robert Evans?

  the 18th, early 19th century, there's a population and it's not even, World War I 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 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 1800s, 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 they came in like 1900, as an incredibly cosmopolitan city. The Al-Wad neighborhood, to give one example, hosted three churches, three synagogues, and seven mosques.

• 53:53Robert Evans?

  The many Jewish and Muslim holidays were celebrated by members of all faiths in particularly diverse neighborhoods. In the summer 2000 issue of Jerusalem Quarterly, Saleem Tamari writes about an Ottoman era Muslim named Wasif Jawaria. Quote, "It was a pre-nationalist era in which religious identity embraced the other in its festivals and rituals. Jawaria narrates that the Feast of Easter/Pesha as an occasion for Muslim-Christian-Jewish celebrations. He details the Muslim processions of Palm Sunday, which proceeded from the Abrahamic mosque in Hebron towards Jerusalem. The festival of Al-Nabi 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,

• 54:35Robert Evans?

  is seen as the greatest popular Christian celebration in Palestine, closely coordinated with Muslim folk festivals. Purim was celebrated by Christian and Muslim youth in Jewish neighborhoods. Wasif describes in detail 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 Just and Sheikh Jarrah at the event known as Shathat al-Yahudiya, where Haim the Udd player and Zaki the tambourine player would sing the accompaniment of Andalusian melodies." Yeah, not a vision a lot of people want you to have of Palestine in 1900.

• 55:10Speaker 02

  I have to tell you, like, the Palestine that I was born and grew up in, like, even in my lifetime, I'm 35, like, I've seen the progression of like, that lessening even more. Like, 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, they have kind of a different, you know, salience at this point, but even, even now, like, in the last 35 years, we've seen a huge decline in that, like, and the city has changed so much. So you can imagine how, how much more it used to be integrated back then.

• 55:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's really sad to think about. I mean, yeah. Now, again, obviously, as I've noted, people are not, you know, Jews and Christians are not equal citizens of the Ottoman Empire. They have to pay an extra tax and they, 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 alone doesn't really do a fair job of explaining the complex social and religious status quo 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 Schopak, 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 Islamic world," Schrockter said, adding, "Islam did see Jews and Christians

• 56:33Robert Evans?

  as inferior, but that didn't prevent peaceful interactions between Jews and Muslims on a quotidian level," right? And 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.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. Nobody, nobody was. Nobody had any rights. And when we say inferior, it's like, it's because Muslims believe in their faith and they, they see these people who don't believe. It's the same as Christians. They're like, oh, these, these non-believers, they're less than us. Like, it's the same thing.

• 57:00Robert Evans?

  And it, 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, a person who has like worth or value. It means that, well, your family hasn't been here quite as long, right? And in the case of like, if you're speaking like a Spanish-derived tongue in Palestine, you have it, right?

• 57:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Not that, you know, that matters in, again, it 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, you've got all of these, among other things, a lot of wealthier Europeans are coming in, right? A lot of 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 enjoy better treatment, right? And they're 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

• 58:00Robert Evans?

  very well, and in part because they kept to themselves and often were kind of mean to some of the Sephardic communities. There's a lot of conflict between the different Jewish communities in this period of time. Adding to the irritation that many Sephardic residents felt was the fact that a sizable number of these new immigrants lived off money donated by wealthier Zionists. In 1891, 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 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, and that's a big part of this, right?

• 58:41Robert Evans?

  As Menachem Klein writes, "The leaders of the Hussaini family, who lobbied the court to place restrictions on the Zionists, also sold them land. Jerusalem's mayor, Taher al-Hussein, approved the sale of land to the Zionists and engaged in such transactions himself. In 1899, Rabat al-Hussein sold the Colonia lands west of Jerusalem to the Zionists, where the latter built the farming village of Mutza. 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 state property. Ibrahim Said al-Hussein worked for Baron Edmund de Rothschild's land company, JCA. He later resigned and signed protests against the Zionists. Saleem al-Hussein made a fortune in real estate ventures with the Jewish community and partnered in a hotel with Yitzhak Rokok, an Ashkenazi resident of Jerusalem."

• 59:26Robert Evans?

  And we're, we'll hear about Yitzhak Rokok and the Rokok family a little bit later, well, actually, right now, because Rokok is interesting. His son, Shimon, moves to Jaffa and creates a series of Jewish community organizations, right? And he buys up a bunch of land. And while his, his father had worked with the Hussaini family to buy up this land and would be happy to do that, Rokok refuses to deal at all with Arabs, right? Like, once, once he's got property and once he, he like owns property, he, he stops 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 Neveit Setic, 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."

• 1:00:09Robert Evans?

  And this is something that Israel said after being elected mayor of Tel Aviv. "Jaffa played no role in world history, nor in Israeli history, and one cannot find there any relic of ancient culture from any period at all," Mayor Rokok said. And again, we've just heard that like, well, the only reason the Rukhak family had the land that allowed him to do all this in the first place is because of like very close business relationships with with Arab Muslims, right? Like, and Jaffa, Tel Aviv starts out of Jaffa. It's just, it's just, I don't know. I know we're getting a little bit off the topic here, but it really, it's really frustrating.

• 1:00:39Speaker 02

  If people are interested in this element especially, I would recommend Ilan Pafi's book on Al-Husseini's, because it's really, I always remember this anecdote that like, one of the Al-Husseini's 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, they benefited a lot. I think also they didn't recognize what was

• 1:01:04Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  what was happening. Yeah.

• 1:01:05Robert Evans?

  That's part of this, too. It's like there, there's this, this is, you can see a lot of this initially as like relative goodwill of like, well, I widen up my wood and I sell a house to them. And then it becomes like 20 or 50 or 100, like, well, wait a second, there's something going on here, right?

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Right, right. Exactly.

• 1:01:19Robert Evans?

  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, 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, to, to their neighbors. They were like, well, yeah, these guys want to buy up some buildings. Why not? Right?

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  And there's a class difference, too. It's like,

• 1:01:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  you're a wealthy landowner, the, the that lives on your land

• 1:01:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  is gonna get screwed. You don't really care.

• 1:01:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And I, I do suspect a lot of these Husseini's would have seen these other wealthier, like Jewish immigrants as more of like their type of people than like certainly the Filahi, right?

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Anyway, um, one of the things I did want to note about Rukhak's statement there, where he's like, uh, Jaffa played no role in world history, right? Nor, nor Israeli history. One of the things he's doing there, he's not just erasing like Palestinians from local history. He's erasing Arab Jews as well as like Muslim Arabs here, because men like Rukhak had to in order to make their view of history work. The reality is that they and 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 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

• 1:02:41Robert Evans?

  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 of the effort and some of the, 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 it'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 to stop speaking European languages. Right? That's like a big motivation for them in this period of time. Now alongside this, 1909 sees the establishment of the Hashomer by Yitzhak

• 1:03:26Robert Evans?

  Bin Zvi and David Ben Gurion. This was a paramilitary organization to guard Jewish settlements and it's again, the precursor to the Hagana. And it's often described as and certainly describes itself as a purely defensive organ, like, like militia in this period of time. Right? Although if you look at the Hagana 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, not super friendly.

• 1:03:54Speaker 02

  Ew.

• 1:03:55Robert Evans?

  Like, I'm gonna be honest, if 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.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, very alarming. I don't know. I was suspicious of these guys. I'm not sure.

• 1:04:08Robert Evans?

  We don't have a lot of blood and fire in the neighborhood right now, and I'm not really sure we need any.

• 1:04:13Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 1:04:13Robert Evans?

  It's important to document the prevalence of that attitude even then, without acting like it's the only one. Many Jews in 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 by voting together. The Arab elite were fractured and Jewish leaders offered support to families like the Husseini's 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 Husseini family owned most of the houses on the other side of this alley and opposite, there's like a, a line of homes that are owned by the Jewish community and a line of homes on the other side that are, that are owned primarily by Muslims, right? By the Husseini family and occupied by Muslims.

• 1:04:56Robert Evans?

  And if the Husseini's 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 1887, but fears among rabbis of a backlash. And it's rabbis who are like, wait a second, if we, 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 1897, the Husseini's nearly sold the whole alley to Rothschild again from the Al-Wak religious trust and until protest from Arab families forces him to stop. Right? So they are trying to do this and there are protests from both the Jewish community and from the Muslim community that stop this from happening.

• 1:05:37Robert Evans?

  And that's, that also is really worth acknowledging. Right? In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, 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 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 1 million French francs, including a 10% 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 in principle. But this never happens either because Yellen had greatly overestimated how much money there was for the cause. Right? Now, attempts like this and continued immigration spark unrest and occasionally even violence from the Arab

• 1:06:21Robert Evans?

  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 bribe Ottoman officials. And one thing that like, some, some rich people who like, want to like 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 I, then, most Arab residents in Palestine had little reason to fear Zionism or believe that Jewish immigration would have a huge impact on their lives. There are people getting frustrated

• 1:07:03Robert Evans?

  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 1905 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 in 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 I. That's happening in this period and it's happening because people are pissed at the fucking Ottomans. Right? And so as much as some of these conflicts are going on in these cities, the much broader

• 1:07:44Robert Evans?

  conflict is these, the much broader conflict Arab nationalists are interested in is dealing with these fucking Ottomans. Right? Like, that's

• 1:07:51Speaker 02

  Creating self-determination for Arabs generally.

• 1:07:53Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Yes. And obtaining, I was putting it crudely, but yes, obtaining self-determination. Yeah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Both things. Both things are true.

• 1:08:00Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Um, and yeah, also, Arab 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?

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  They're kind of the godfathers of it, actually.

• 1:08:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. And a lot of them are. So.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Basically, like, the answer to Arab nationalism is sectarianism.

• 1:08:19Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Arab Christians want to be included in the community. So like, a lot of the big names of Arab nationalism, like Konstantin Suryaq and like other people like that, they're Christians.

• 1:08:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a really important point. So the people who are most invested in a multicultural Palestine then, sometimes find themselves in this period supporting the ailing Ottoman Empire. And this is very weird. Like, Mayusha is one of a number of Zionists who want the Ottoman Empire to last because they, they see that it's kind of keeping a lot of conflict from happening within the community, right? Within Palestine, right? The fact that there's these, these Turks who are like, you know, in charge of everything, kind of stops a lot of conflict that might otherwise, uh, brew up. And Mayusha believes that Zionism is doomed to 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.

• 1:09:11Robert Evans?

  And he is right about that, really. Um, up until the end of World War I, 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 1910, 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 wouldn't have made that guess because the Ottoman Empire had been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so as a result, a lot of Muslim political leaders in this period of time treat Zionism as like a special interest to be courted. Right? Saleem Al-Husseini served as mayor of Jerusalem for much of the 1880s and 1890s 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

• 1:09:53Robert Evans?

  that no intelligent and rational Zionist will consider the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine."

• 1:10:00Robert Evans?

  Famous, I mean, not last words, but not right, correct ones.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah, he maybe didn't know enough about those Zion, different kinds of Zionism, as he said.

• 1:10:09Robert Evans?

  Enough. 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 Yavotinsky. Right? He had been born in Odessa in modern day Ukraine in 1880 to an assimilated Jewish family. And Yavotinsky had become a Zionist prior to the Kishinov pogrom and he had become a popular speaker and influential organizer. And he responded to that pogrom 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, learn to shoot." And obviously, when he's in Russia being like, I think we might need some guns, hard to argue with the man. Right?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  I mean, Zionists and non-Zionists said the same. Yeah.

• 1:10:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And he's not going to stay there long. 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 I in part two. But, you know, this is the end of part one. How are we feeling?

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Wow, we covered so much.

• 1:11:13Robert Evans?

  We did.

• 1:11:15Speaker 02

  That was a lot.

• 1:11:15Robert Evans?

  Yada, yada. People should like, read the books, you know, and stuff that, that, that we're talking about, obviously, um, to get much more comprehensive. But yeah, I'm, I'm, we gotta fly through, what's 60 years? About? Yeah.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Lots of world events.

• 1:11:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Look at that.

• 1:11:32Robert Evans?

  None of which are new to you, but yeah. Um, all right. Anything you want to plug at the end here before we roll out into part two?

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, check out the handbook on authoritarianism in the Arab world.

• 1:11:43Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  It's very politics.

• 1:11:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, awesome. All right, everybody. We'll be back Thursday.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

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