Palestine: A Political History of Palestine from the 1880s through Today.

Editorial note: This essay is designed to set the table for subsequent shows that will cover the Palestinian conflict through a historical lens. Any viewpoints expressed along the way, which will be minimal, are mine alone. These entries into the record are not intended to take a stance or sway opinion. They are designed to inform and educate, and all reasonable feedback will be incorporated into our discussions moving forward.

The UNFTR audience is extremely small on the grand scale, but we are interconnected. You’ve given me your trust, and I’ve offered you forums to challenge my assertions and to connect with one another in meaningful dialogue. Most of us identify as progressives, though there are others who listen as part of their own learning journey and might identify on other parts of the political spectrum. On the whole, our exchanges exhibit a high level of empathy, and I expect nothing less moving forward. But it would be foolish not to acknowledge that tensions are running high and humanity is being challenged all around us at the moment.

I expect there will be further bloodshed and horror in the weeks ahead as we plod carefully through this exercise, that will seemingly render portions of these shows obsolete—or late, at a minimum. But the goal is not to provide some sort of magic analysis that, given a wider audience, would somehow positively impact the course of events. The goal is to provide our audience with the tools to discern fact from fiction and a safe space to air out our frustrations.

So, let us begin. What follows is a brief introduction to a series on Israel and Palestine that frames our approach and offers two important disclaimers to consider before we delve any further.

-Max

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Beware the Origin Story

How should we interpret the rights of the descendants of Abraham over a patch of land to which they all claim dominion? Shall we speak to, as Christopher Hitchens wrote, “The apparent tendency of the Almighty to reveal himself only to unlettered and quasi-historical individuals, in regions of Middle Eastern wasteland that were long the home of idol worship and superstition, and in many instances already littered with existing prophecies.” I should think not.

The only way to speak plainly about the horror of war in Palestine is to literally ignore the original motivations of governments, religious groups and terrorists alike. Otherwise, we must concede the root of the disputes is simply too much to overcome, and that it will be God’s will to favor the victor. Namely, that each participant believes that their particular version of God favors them to such an extent that He would annihilate all others who lay claim to a false version. The most inscrutable notion ever concocted by mankind.

But, here we are again. Here we are still.

Each passing day, this conflict will change. Official stories will conflict with facts on the ground. The fog of war will shroud all rational discourse. The chorus of armchair correspondents on television and social media will pick and choose the version of events that suits them most, then reframe the narrative to fit the polling data. Or is it the other way around?

What role do we have to play in this never ending drama? Who are we to even have an opinion on matters that occur far away? Every pro-Israel or pro-Palestine post you make on social media is an indictor to the power base in the United States. And the power structure is listening. The United States holds more keys than we are willing to concede. Veto power in the United Nations. Weapons bear the symbols of U.S. corporations and of those we claim to be our enemies. Money flows ceaselessly from U.S. bank accounts to stakeholders in the region. We hold carrots in one hand, sticks in the other. Every U.S. president from Woodrow Wilson to Joe Biden has played a diplomatic role in negotiations.

Every demonstration is an expression of public sentiment that will ultimately find its way into the attitudes displayed by our leaders and the policy designs that follow. Every loose and ill-informed take is another brick in the wall between you and your fellow citizen. That’s why it’s imperative that we do the work to understand what’s happening in real-time, but in a historical context. We’re long past talk of isolationism. The Middle East is as much a product of our money and policy as it is the design of the Allied Powers after World War One.

The only end to the tragic story in Palestine will be the end of one half of it. Or the end of all of us.

So why even wade into these waters? What could I possibly offer to you about one of the most intractable conflicts in recorded history? I’ve had the words of an Israeli friend in my ears over the many months that I was preparing an episode on the Israel/Palestine issue: “How can you report on something you’ve never experienced?” It’s a valid question. One that I’ve thought a great deal about.

I wasn’t in Tulsa when white residents burned Black Wall Street to the ground. But I understand the implications of it.

Wasn’t around when Camilo Cienfuegos rolled into Havana in 1959.

Never hung with Marx and Engels.

Wasn’t there the fateful night economic neoliberalism was born as Milton Friedman defended the work of Ronald Coase, who claimed, “when transaction's costs are zero and rights are fully specified, parties to a dispute will bargain to an efficient outcome.”

I’m not a reporter. I’m a writer. The one who synthesizes the work of the chroniclers in the hope of providing perspective that empowers you to think critically about a subject. The difficulty here, of course, is that there are hundreds and hundreds of years of stories, perspectives, falsehoods, evidence, points and counterpoints and interested parties that span generations and empires, each of which have played a role in architecting the present state of affairs. All of it built upon Middle Eastern fictions and hearsay that have guided the affairs of man throughout history.

“Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Every man of you put his sword upon his thigh, and go back and forth from gate to gate in the camp, and kill every man his brother, and every man his friend, and every man his neighbor,’” cried Moses.

"Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them," said the Prophet Muhammed.

Holy books dipped in blood and the language of violence. ‘It’s metaphor,’ some say. Merely parables. You have to read it in context. I won’t wade too much further into these waters. I only offer this as a warning to steer clear of arguing with anyone who stakes a claim in origin stories.

And so, the best I can do is tell a story through our chosen socioeconomic lens and Marxist view of history. The best I can do is apply a secular interpretation as to why the corpses of teenagers and old people lay in Israel’s morgues. Why children’s limbs protrude from beneath bloody sheets on the streets of Gaza. The best I can do is take a step back and contextualize such atrocities with books and journals and historical accounts, knowing full well nothing will change so long as people choose to believe the same God somehow favors differing factions among his children and delights in the transgenerational bloodsport that has, and will ever thus, ensue.

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Territorial Designs

I won’t patronize you with accounts of who stepped on what patch of desert sand when, and whether pig bones were found in an archeological dig here or there. This is a story about real estate. No matter the perceived original sins of the parties involved, the circumstances today are familiar to all who live in the post industrial world constructed by the imperial exploits of nation states.

Palestine has the unfortunate distinction of being the least conducive territory to nationalistic tendencies, and therefore the worst expression of them in a world that demands that we identify as such. Who are you if you do not belong to a nation? Who are you if you cannot define the borders in which you exist? Gone are the days of empire. This is the time of nation states. The Vatican can exist in the comfortable enclave of a predominantly Christian nation state. But what of Jerusalem? The Kingdom of David. Where Muhammed took flight on his night journey. Where Christ was crucified.

What is to be done with this most sacred land, whose infrastructure—from its hallowed walls to the aquifers and sewer systems—was constructed by Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1500s? He is as much responsible for the Jerusalem of today than anyone else in history, and yet there are no Ottomans left to lay claim to it because the Ottomans were Turks, Arabs, Jews and Christians. Members of empire. But we no longer live in the time of empires.

And what of the territories that surround it? When the dust settled from the Great War, the imperial forces of the allies blithely carved up the vast region of the Ottoman Empire and created new nation states that ignored cultural, ethnic and religious histories and manufactured Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. Surrounding Jerusalem from Galilee to Sinai, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, a no man’s land.

Palestine.

The French had designs on this territory, given its ties to the newly formed Syria. Winston Churchill, who famously bragged that he created Jordan with a stroke of a pen in an afternoon, considered it the domain of the British. The Jewish Diaspora had visions of a homeland for Jews who had been fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe even prior to World War One. The beleaguered nations that just endured a bloody and costly conflict that engulfed the continent and then some, simply ignored the fact that the land was already inhabited by a patchwork of indigenous farmers and villagers that roamed freely upon the land for generations. These people were never considered in the grand designs of imperialists. They were abandoned by their Arab brethren, who were busy building their new artificially designed territories. And they became a stumbling block to the Zionists who sought refuge in this part of the world.

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The Central Thesis

Let me plainly state the central thesis of this analysis. While the roots of the Palestinian conflict are steeped in what I view to be nonsensical historical fictions, the present reality reflects a world that demands the artificial fealty of nationalism; further, the imperialist designs of superpowers, namely ours, reflect an inherent disdain for self-determination—along with poor and working class people—and exudes anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and racist structures of power that devalue human existence.

Nationalism has supplanted religion as the most dangerous development in history.

Now, before we go any further in subsequent episodes on the topic, there are two foundational deceptions we must address. This is the ultimate in level-setting, because if you cannot see past what I’m about to say, then there’s no point in moving forward.

Here are the two most pernicious underlying claims that undergird the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

The first is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people. Theodor Herzl, a critical figure in this story, is widely considered the father of the modern Zionist movement. In his writings, the people of Palestine were referred to simply as “non-Jews.” But Herzl began organizing a movement well before World War One when there was no Israel, no Palestine and for that matter no Iraq, Syria, Jordan or Lebanon. There was only the vast Ottoman territory of the Middle East. Future Zionists would extrapolate the inference that the indigenous people of this territory simply were non-Jews, nameless and wandering, as they had no formal state as designed by the Allied Powers. It’s a false de facto claim that is as racist as it is ahistorical. But far right leaders of present day Israel from Menachem Begin to Benjamin Netanyahu would repeat this claim and solidify it into the far right ideology of the Zionist movement. Please note that I’m referring to it as the far right of Zionism, as Zionists themselves exist along a spectrum and are lazily portrayed as a monolith in western media.

But the words of Herzl themselves are evidence of the existence of the Palestinian people. More than a thousand villages and migrant farming camps between them existed throughout modern day Israel and Palestine. It’s only through the modern lens of nationalism that we would retroactively revoke their existence simply because they did not identify with a particular nationality; one that didn’t exist. They were Arabs who existed for centuries under Ottoman rule. Nationalism insists that borders lay claim to people within them and ignore historical patterns of migration. People in the United States should understand this concept more than anyone. Natives of this land are no less native because they were banished to the furthest, most resource poor areas of the continent. Such is the plight of the Palestinian people. If there are no historical records of Palestinians referring to themselves as such, it’s because there was no such thing as a Palestinian nation state. It’s the nation that didn’t exist, not the people.

Now, to the other side of the ledger: to those who say that Israel has no right to claim a homeland based upon a cultural and religious identity. One can reasonably litigate the attitudes and approach of the state of Israel toward the Palestinian people. One can even make the claim that the mere presence of a Jewish state nestled deep within a predominantly Muslim region is an invitation for disaster. But on this second point, one must also acknowledge the very real existence of anti-Semitism.

When Herzl and other Jews at the turn of the 20th century began crafting the plans for what could be a safe haven for Jews in the world, they did so because of persistent violent historical persecution. Among the scenarios they envisioned were Argentina, the Baltic region, west coast of the United States and, yes, Palestine. Of all the options, only Palestine offered what they believed to be a tangible connection to a shared cultural identity; a part of the world where Jews once thrived and prospered as a people. As the world repeatedly turned its back on the Jewish people while they were forcibly expelled from Europe, Jews weren’t exactly awash in options. And, as we’ll explore in the forthcoming chapters of this series, there was no guarantee that the Zionist experiment would come to fruition, let alone culminate in an independent state.

I’ve seen critics of Israel say that the Holocaust is not a blank check. While there are survivors of this atrocity who still exist and generations thereafter who are deeply connected to it, the Holocaust should not be viewed as an isolated incident. It was the most recent and unimaginable mass atrocity committed against the Jewish people, but certainly not the first.

Again, we can litigate the politics of Israel, the nation state, where the treatment of Palestinians is concerned. But to suggest that Jews are no different than any other culture or religion is as ahistorical as the notion that Palestinians aren’t a real people. The Jewish experience is singular. It's why I cannot, and will not, condemn those who believe in a homeland where Jewish culture and religion can not just exist, but thrive. Jews are different from every other ethnic or cultural identity on the planet, and I have all of recorded history to back up this assertion.

What I can easily condemn is the settler-colonial attitude of the far right in Israel that refuses to recognize the humanity of the people whose territory they occupy in defiance of international law, and the very tenets of a religion they profess to follow.

What must be agreed upon.

So, before we go any further, can you hold these thoughts in your mind at once?

“This is what you get” is not the same thing as “this is what you deserve.” Meaning, can you condemn the brutal actions of Hamas while acknowledging that they exist for a reason?

The life of a Palestinian is equal to that of an Israeli.

Palestinians are real and deserve the right to self-determination and the dignity of human rights.

Jews are not welcome in predominantly Muslim nation states, and safe harbor in western states provides no guarantee of safety.

The state of Israel has actively pursued a policy of apartheid governance in the region known as Palestine.

Hamas may have been an elected body that rose up against the Palestinian Authority, but it has devolved into a terrorist guerrilla organization.

That many of the nations surrounding the state of Israel have openly expressed a desire to eliminate it.

Just because your ancestors squatted in a mud hut two thousand years ago, does not give you the right to expel people from their land today.

And just because you live in a modern nation state, does not mean that you have the right to dictate terms of existence to people who wish to practice their religion freely or move about the world.

And finally. You. Do you understand that your actions play a role in determining the outcome of this current and future crisis? That you have an obligation to learn the history of this region and people before you post on social media, participate in a conversation or attend a demonstration? That blanket condemnation of one side or the other denies the humanity on both sides?

If you can hold these thoughts in your mind at once, we can proceed.

“The Jewish question is indissolubly bound up with the complete emancipation of humanity. Everything else that is done in this domain can only be a palliative and often even a two-edged blade, as the example of Palestine shows.” -Leon Trotsky, 1937.

You’ll forgive the brutish oversimplification of world history.

Finding a starting point in this journey is precarious considering we’re talking about the cradle of civilization. While we’re going to provide some cultural, religious and territorial background to the part of the world known as Palestine, the inflection point of our inquiry is an event in France in 1894. Not only does this year and specific event conveniently bridge our work in the socialism series, it is considered by many to be the birth of the Zionist movement. More on that in a bit.

First, let’s zoom out to identify the origins of the protagonists in our story: the Israelis and the Palestinians. These are modern nationalistic identities of Jews and Muslim Arabs who live in the territory between Galilee region in the north and the Sinai Peninsula to the south, and from the Jordan River in the east to the Mediterranean Sea. We’ll begin by examining what was widely referred to as “The Jewish Question.”

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Chapter One: Diaspora.

The territory of Palestine and the modern-day nations that surround it were predominantly housed within a series of enormous empires throughout history. If we look at it in the Common Era, these territories were part of the Roman Empire and then the Eastern Roman Empire until they were absorbed into a series of Islamic Caliphates. Over decades and centuries, vast swaths of land would fall under dynastic rule within the major Caliphates, until the mid 16th Century when the Ottoman Empire consolidated much of these territories. Roughly, the Ottomans ruled from 1516 to 1918.

The Ottoman Empire is important to know, because the Jewish people found a safe haven here for centuries before the Empire crumbled during World War One. This area covers the Balkans down through Turkey, all of the Middle East to the border of Persia, or modern-day Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, and Egypt and Northern Africa to the border of Morocco. James Gelvin, author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict writes:

“As in the case of other early modern empires, religion provided one of the cornerstones of dynastic legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire. The empire was the preeminent Sunni Islamic empire of its time.”

At the center of it all, in the middle of three continents and all of history, lies Jerusalem.

Using the vast area surrounding Jerusalem as a focal point, we can bring in the experience of the Jewish people, beginning with the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Until this point Jerusalem had been occupied, and at times controlled, by those who professed belief in Judaism, paganism and the newly formed Christianity. But, for the most part, it was just another important city in vast empires throughout antiquity.

In the centuries prior to Common Era, Jerusalem was both a secular and religious enclave that was swallowed up by Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian rule, and the Jewish people were among those who alternately resisted, but sometimes assimilated, into these empires. Of relative importance to this period is that the people of this land, including the Jews, were still polytheistic. But with the construction of the First Temple and the organizing of the Torah, the Jewish people began to consolidate their faith and mythology to create a unified identity. Note that I’m not using mythology as a derogatory term, rather to emphasize that the faith and traditions were cultivated over long periods of time into a singular narrative. What’s important is the idea that Jews began to build a distinct cultural and religious identity prior to their expulsion from this area after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.

This is what gives us our first key term: diaspora. The term diaspora can be applied to any group of people with a common identity who are expelled from their native land. Today, we mostly refer to the Jewish Diaspora because of the very specific nature of the Jewish people, which will come into play later when we speak about nationalism. One of the reasons I referred to the Jewish experience as “singular” throughout history in the introduction to this essay is because Jews are the only people that can be identified by any combination of culture, ethnicity or religion. One can be Jewish but not religious or the other way around; one can convert to Judaism, but be of another heritage or ethnicity.

Throughout most of recorded history and even in antiquity, where many of our religious narratives have their roots, the Jewish people lived peaceably among other cultures and faiths, and under dynastic rule. The periods of persecution and expulsion that shaped modern Jewish traditions were few and far between, but tended to be brutal and all-encompassing. Most of us in western culture have a passing notion of the diaspora at the beginning of the Common Era because it represents the birth of Christianity and the modern calendar. The dominant monotheistic religions took shape under the yoke of the Roman Empire, and the rise of Christianity marked a seminal change in the course of western empires over the next few centuries.

Over the first half of the millennium, the Jewish Diaspora spread throughout the Mediterranean region from Northern Africa to the Iberian peninsula, where several Jewish communities thrived and Jewish people comfortably assimilated. Jews played a significant role on the Iberian peninsula, in particular, until the Visigoth rule that forced all inhabitants to accept Christianity by decree in 1492, the same year that asshole Columbus sailed the ocean blue. This is the population referred to as Sephardic Jews. Again facing expulsion from a region they had set longstanding roots, some sought refuge in Eastern Europe, and others within the burgeoning Ottoman Empire. And even before the Ottomans pushed further east, Jewish people also thrived in Arabic territories where Islam was already flourishing.

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Chapter Two: Beyond The Pale.

When the Russian Empire started its historic expansion during the reigns of Peter the Great and Catherine the Great in the 1700s, many of the territories previously accepting of Jewish families quickly turned hostile. By this time, about 75% of the Jewish population globally lived in eastern Europe, mostly in what is modern day Poland. As Gelvin writes:

“The sudden appearance of large numbers of Jews within their empire was a matter of concern to Russian imperial elites. In 1791, Catherine the Great hit upon a novel plan to deal with them: Henceforth, Jews living within the empire were to reside in a specially designated area on the empire’s western fringes. 

 

“The Jewish Pale of Settlement, as this area was called, stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south and included within its boundaries territories that make up the contemporary states of Lithuania, Belarus, and Moldova, and parts of contemporary Ukraine, Poland, and Latvia. The Russian government permitted Jews to live outside the pale only under special circumstances and only with special permission.”

Gelvin makes an interesting point about Jewish culture during this period that is worth noting. Throughout the long century from the establishment of the Pale and the turning point of Zionism, several laws were passed designed to target and isolate Jews in the Russian Empire. This included a conscription law bluntly titled, “Memorandum on Turning the Jews to the Advantage of the Empire by Gradually Drawing Them to Profess the Christian Faith, Bringing Them Closer to, and Ultimately Completely Fusing Them with, the Other Subjects of the Empire.” I shit you not, this was the title of the law. But back to Gelvin’s point:

“Because anti-Semitism did not distinguish between observant and nonobservant Jews, it had the effect of strengthening the belief within the Jewish community that shared history and culture, not religious belief or practice, made their community a community.”

This is such an important point to make, especially in today’s context, when we see so many secular Jews with divergent opinions on the state of Israel, where Jews belong in society and the Jewish faith in general. It’s critical to understand just how deep the ties are that bind the Jewish community together; ties that have held together a common identity for thousands of years, despite the absence of a homeland. Understanding the Zionist commitment to the state of Israel depends upon this historical appreciation.

This appreciation among the Jewish people of eastern Europe in particular is referred to as the Haskalah, otherwise known as the Jewish Enlightenment. Like the Enlightenment proper, this movement helped fuse science and reason with culture and was appended to the Jewish experience and traditions. Thus began a rational exploration of the Jewish faith, a quest to understand the Jewish existence in the context of both history and faith. This is similar to the early Enlightenment thinkers that we’ve covered who sought to contextualize their faith within political and economic doctrines. But for Jewish intellectuals, known as the maskilim, it incorporated the question of persecution. Why were Jews continually expelled and driven from lands where they not only assimilated culturally, but contributed to incredible societal gains? For the maskilim, the answer was found in the ancient texts, and the way forward was expressed in a concept known as Zionism.

In the Russian Empire during the late 1800s, Jews were being persecuted once again after being falsely blamed for the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Pogroms spread like wildfire throughout the empire, and Jews once again found themselves seeking refuge in other parts of the world. In all, more than two million Jewish people fled Russia for parts of Europe, South America and the United States. But there were some who had a different vision. A dream of returning to a homeland to fulfill a prophecy. The Hebrew people’s return to the land of Israel. The First Aliyah had begun. The Jews were coming home.

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Chapter Three: France, The Birthplace Of Zionism.

Every nation is steeped in mythology. Hard edges are rounded off, exploits are glorified and combatants are martyred in the practice of building a national identity. For the Jewish people, the story of Israel took on something more than mythological status. It was prophesy.

“He will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth… They will swoop down on the slopes of Philistia to the west; together they will plunder the people to the east.” - Isaiah, 11:10

“‘I will be found by you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,’ declares the Lord, ‘and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.’” - Jeremiah, 29:14

Theodor Herzl was born into a prosperous Hungarian family in 1860. Though educated as an attorney, Herzl eventually landed work as a journalist and worked as a reporter in Paris in the 1880s. It was during his time there that he witnessed the Dreyfus Affair in 1894, whereby a Jewish officer in the French army was wrongly accused of a crime, publicly humiliated and stripped of his rank and sent to prison. The event, as we covered in our socialism series, sent shockwaves throughout Europe and contributed to the fear among Jewish people who were already on heightened alert from the rise of anti-Semitism. For Herzl and other Jews, if liberal and enlightened France proved unsafe for Jews, then nowhere would be.

As former U.S. envoy to the Middle East Dennis Ross writes in his book The Missing Peace, “Herzl authored a book, The Jewish State, in 1896 and founded the World Zionist Organization the following year, even while remaining largely unaware of the activities of Russians beginning to immigrate to Palestine—activities that included reintroducing Hebrew as the national language. Herzl lobbied world leaders to gain support for a Jewish state. He pressed the leaders of the Ottoman Empire, including the Sultan, to lift the restrictions they had imposed on Jewish immigration and land purchases in Palestine.”

Here is Herzl in his own words:

“The Jewish Question still exists. It would be foolish to deny it. It exists wherever Jews live in perceptible numbers. Where it does not yet exist, it will be brought by Jews in the course of their migrations. We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence soon produces persecution. This is true in every country, and will remain true even in those most highly civilised - France itself is no exception - till the Jewish Question finds a solution on a political basis.”

To Zionists, the Jewish question was clearly answered in secular terms first, doctrinal terms later. And the matter of where was secondary to the matter of what. A homeland to the Zionist leaders meant a state, not simply a home. This distinction remains central to understanding the nature of Jewish settlement in Palestine, and a theme we’ll return to when we cover the period between the Second World War and present day.

For centuries, Jews lived comfortably alongside Turks, Arabs and Egyptians, most of whom were Muslim. Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, describes this coexistence through to the first decade of the 20th Century when, “a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and Mizrahi or Sephardic, urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish.”

The Palestinian people prior to the First Aliyah—the term used to describe Jewish immigration to Palestine, and literally translates to “ascend”—occurred prior to Herzl’s declaration of a movement. Tens of thousands of eastern European Jews fleeing persecution in the expanding Russian empire had migrated to Palestine to form agrarian communities known as kibbutzim. Why Palestine, when the new world was accepting of Jewish migrants? For some, it was uncertainty. But for others, it was natural and more economical than starting over an ocean away.

In Palestine, they found other Jews as well as indigenous Muslim, Christian and Druze Arab populations. Moreover, many found meaningful work, though not as much as those in the First Aliyah hoped. Contrary to the modern portrayal of the indigenous population, the industrial revolutions and concepts of nationalism had already penetrated the region. As Gelvin writes:

“It was the obstreperous warlord of Egypt, Mehmet Ali, who introduced Palestinians to the techniques of modern statecraft during the decade-long (1831–41) Egyptian occupation of Palestine…For Mehmet Ali, this territory—also known as ‘Greater Syria’ (the territory of present-day Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan)—was a prize worth fighting for. Occupying this territory would enable the Egyptians to control the commerce passing through the eastern Mediterranean…After the Ottomans, with British assistance, expelled the Egyptian army and administration from Palestine, not only did they retain many of the innovations introduced by the Egyptians, they expanded them.”

Even still, Palestine was rural and less developed compared to their European contemporaries. But it was far from the wasteland some make it out to be. Once the Ottomans expelled the Egyptians, they set about building railroads and planting crops such as wheat, barley, cotton, tobacco and castor oil plants. As Gelvin notes, “On the coast between Haifa and Jaffa, the process of recultivation was slower but still irreversible.”

Again, this isn’t to suggest that “larger Syria” was thriving in the same fashion as the European states; merely to demonstrate that it wasn’t dependent upon imperial rule and oversight in the same way many other colonized agrarian nations were when under the thumb of colonial rule.

Private Property

One of the Ottoman inventions in 1858 would ultimately come back to haunt the people of Palestine: private property. As we espoused in the socialism series, the two pillars of Marxism are the abolition of private property and internationalism. The advent of private property—again, we’re talking about productive agrarian land and not individual homes—meant that it could be controlled. More importantly to our story, it could be bought and sold.

The Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established in 1901 for the express purpose of purchasing land to protect the rights of Jewish settlers throughout the world. The 1858 Ottoman land code provided the ability to do just that, a distinction that makes this part of the world amenable to settlement. It’s also why modern Zionists can rightly claim that much of the land settled by Jews throughout the 20th Century was indeed purchased, and not stolen.

Moreover, because of the expansiveness of the Ottoman Empire, many of the larger land owners in Palestine were absentee Arab landowners. Some were financed by British authorities, others by French and Russian concerns. Regardless of the origin of their capital, they had little connection to the land in Palestine other than to view it as an investment. “When representatives of the Jewish National Fund came around offering top dollar for land on which to establish Jewish settlements,” writes Gelvin, “many did not hesitate to sell.”

As Herzl and others quickly mobilized the World Zionist Organization, they began looking for settlement options. Because the British had an early foothold in the region and were so intimately involved in Northern Africa, it took it upon itself to first offer Uganda. And, in fact, Herzl was open to the idea. But Palestine had a few advantages in the eyes of the Zionist movement.

First off, there were already Jews who had moved there in the First Aliyah. Second, the 1858 land code gave the JNF the ability to begin purchasing large tracts of land. Because of the preponderance of cheap but skilled Arab labor, this would enable the Jewish settlers to get up and running faster than anywhere else. And then there was the doctrinal narrative. With options foreclosing quickly in eastern Europe, and western Europe following a similar path, the Palestine option became the most expeditious way to safely move what would be hundreds of thousands of Jews. Not even Herzl, who died in 1904, could have imagined the catastrophic horror that awaited those who did not join the subsequent aliyot.

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Chapter Four: A Congress In Search Of A State.

The First Aliyah occurred during a global economic crisis. As such, upwards of 65% of the first wave of Jewish settlers wound up leaving Palestine by 1902. Nevertheless, tens of thousands of settlers remained and assimilated into the culture and economy alongside the Arab population. As Gelvin writes, “The first aliyah also raises the always intriguing question of what might have been. During the Aliyah, there was an intimate economic relationship between Jews and Arabs.”

Many argue today over the term settler-colonial to describe the actions of the Jewish people in Palestine. But, at the formation of the Zionist movement, it was widely understood that this was indeed the mission. Here are the four main tenets that emerged from the First Zionist Congress:

1. The promotion, on suitable lines, of the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.
2. The organization and binding together of the whole Jewry by means of appropriate institutions, local and international in accordance with the laws of each country.
3. The strengthening and fostering of Jewish national sentiment and consciousness.
4. Preparatory steps toward obtaining government consent, where necessary to the attainment of the aim of Zionism.

The first is a clear declaration of intent. To colonize the land known as Palestine. A few thoughts on this. First off, colonial rule was a normal way to pursue territorial expansion. It was practiced by all of the imperial powers and even by empires before. Attempting to whitewash or minimize this takes away from the discussion. It’s the second part of the first declaration that proves more interesting.

“Colonization by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers.” Lost in modern discussions is the fact that many Zionists of the time were socialists and viewed Zionism through a utopian socialist lens. This plays a significant role in the formation of early governance in Israel and disputes between what is colloquially referred to as “labor zionism” and “land zionism”, something we’ll explore more fully when we cover the formation of the Likud Party in the 1970s.

The second declaration is interesting. “In accordance with the laws of each country.” If we think about this for a moment, it reveals an obvious tendency. Most of the proposed territories were not yet seen as countries. Therefore, the options were either regions within empires or fully formed nation-states. The former would ultimately inform the decision to settle in a territory that had yet to be claimed by imperial interests.

The third declaration is self-evident. To succeed, the Zionists needed more than a homeland. They needed an identity. Because Jews viewed themselves along a spectrum of culture, ethnicity and religion, there was no singular definition. Centuries of diaspora meant that Jewish culture mirrored their settled lands. Ashkenazi Jews from eastern Europe had little in common with Arabic Jews or Sephardic Jews, for example. Furthermore, it meant there wasn’t a shared language, a critical ingredient in establishing a national identity. And because religious adherence ranged from the ultra-orthodox to secular, religion alone wasn’t a determining factor. The modern nation-state requires defined borders, governing principles, shared language and an identity.

On the last declaration—“consent where necessary to the attainment of the aim of Zionism”—this refers to the consent of the nations that mattered in the imperial designs of empires and nation-states. For the Zionists, Britain would take the lead; but France, Russia, Germany and ultimately the United States would provide such consent at different but critical junctures along the way.

So, if aligning the Jewry of Palestine into a singular identity was of paramount importance to the Zionist movement, it begs several questions. Who ultimately immigrated to greater Palestine, when and where. In answering these questions, we begin to see the vision coalesce, albeit in fits and starts. Again, Gelvin:

“Although the first aliyah did not provide viable economic and social structures that would support the Jewish colonization of Palestine, the second and third aliyot, which took place in the periods 1904–14 and 1918–23 respectively, did. These two waves of immigration brought approximately 75,000 new settlers to Palestine.”

So, the First Aliyah had brought agrarian settlers from the Pale of Settlement and other regions of greater Russia to Palestine in the hope of settling farming communities. It was important to determine a degree of self-sufficiency among those who settled the kibbutzim. Those who stayed comprised the bedrock of the Zionist labor movement determined to bring a democratic socialist vision to life. The Second and Third Aliyot were of a different character, as Europe descended into the chaos of World War One and shortly thereafter. The conquest of labor turned to the conquest of land and brought Jews from all over who were determined to “make the desert bloom.” While still labor-minded at heart, these waves brought with them an understanding that this was it. They were a full generation into the Zionist movement, and this was to be their homeland. No more running.

The socialist-minded Jews who first settled Palestine were also beneficiaries of prior socialist experiments such as Robert Owen’s New Harmony. As Gelvin observed:

“If utopian socialism provided the immigrants of the second and third aliyot with a set of guidelines, economic imperative provided them with the incentive to apply them. As we have seen in the case of the first aliyah, it was all too easy for Zionists to grow dependent on Arab labor, which was both cheap and plentiful. But employing Arabs could only undercut the Zionist project. Not only would it inhibit the emergence of an autonomous, self-sufficient Jewish nation in Palestine, it would expand the pool of available labor, depress wages in the Yishuv, and discourage Jewish workers and artisans from immigrating to Palestine.”

Gradually, the nature of the farming homesteads changed from the communal kibbutzim to the cooperative moshavim that allowed for individual ownership within settlements.

As we’ll cover in the next essay, the wave of immigration during the Second and Third Aliyot was the true beginning of the fracture with the indigenous population in Palestine who were about to be both carved out of imperial conquests and left behind by their Arab neighbors.

These were the so-called “facts on the ground” that the Zionists sought to change. This is a popular term that is important to understand, as it is still invoked today in Zionist policy circles. Changing the facts on the ground means to shift consciousness through land ownership. For example, if Jewish settlers move to occupy a territory, then after a period of time, it becomes a fact; something that must be factored into future decisions.

Steadily altering the facts on the ground through land purchases, and then expansion, was an essential part of the Zionist strategy that worked for Arabs employed by the expanding settlements and the Jewish immigrants. But as immigration increased and Jews no longer required Arab labor, inequity started to eat away at the Palestinian people. But, beyond the facts on the ground, there was another seismic event that occurred in 1917 that produced consequences that remain to this day.

“His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

This statement is what is known as the Balfour Declaration, something you’ve probably heard a lot about in recent weeks. Arthur James Balfour, secretary of state for British foreign affairs, wrote the declaration in November of 1917.

On the eve of the war, the Ottomans made a gross miscalculation and sided with the central powers against the Allies in Europe. This was mostly a reflection of the power structure being centered in modern day Turkey, as the Turks and Germans were more closely aligned. The Balkans were also drawn into the conflict on the side of Germany, and these territories had far more in common with the Ottoman Turks than the imperial forces of the Allies, who were seen as a more of a threat to Ottoman sovereignty. On this point, they were correct. But the Turkish estimation of the German forces, spurred on by early victories, led to the miscalculation. Not only would this lead to the end of the Ottoman Empire, it would deliver their worst fears of imperialist exploits.

The British took Jerusalem in 1917, and immediately set about consolidating their newfound holdings in the surrounding territories. The Balfour declaration, therefore, had the dual purpose of both defining a new imperial outpost for the British and to satisfy the Jewish question that was subsequently dropped on its doorstep. At the conclusion of the war, with nascent Arab states having been drawn all around Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs suddenly found themselves in a no-man’s-land. And the only rights being granted within this nation-in-waiting were offered to the newly settled Zionists.

The League of Nations, the precursor of the United Nations designed around Woodrow Wilson’s infamous Fourteen Points, borrowed liberally from the Balfour Declaration when drawing up plans for British rule in Palestine. Here’s Khalidi:

“The Mandate not only incorporated the text of the Balfour Declaration verbatim, it substantially amplified the declaration’s commitments…One of the key provisions of the Mandate was Article 4, which gave the Jewish Agency quasi-governmental status as a public body with wide-ranging powers in economic and social spheres and the ability to assist and take part in the development of the country. Article 7 provided for a nationality law to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews. This same law was used to deny nationality to Palestinians who had emigrated to the Americas during the Ottoman era and now desired to return to their homeland. Thus Jewish immigrants, irrespective of their origins, could acquire Palestinian nationality, while native Palestinian Arabs…were denied it.”

A confidential memorandum from Balfour himself, declassified 30 years after the war, lays the plan out in stark terms.

“For in Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…The Four great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

The British Mandate encouraged a new wave of immigration, or the Fourth Aliyah, beginning in 1924. Over the next five years, it’s estimated that an additional 80,000 Jews migrated to Palestine, with more than half of them fleeing from new waves of anti-Semitic legislation and actions in Poland. As Gelvin writes, these settlers were, “more akin to refugees than their ideologically inspired predecessors…Many were small businessmen and shopowners. As a result, most did not subscribe to the socialist principles of the second and third aliyot.”

One of the most important figures in the Zionist movement emerged at this time. David Ben-Gurion, who would eventually be tapped as the first Prime Minister of Israel, came to prominence within the Zionist Party and focused his efforts on building a coalition among the laboring classes to align them politically with nationalist tendencies. His philosophy is known as mamlachtiut. While it doesn’t translate perfectly to English, the essence of it was to move the Jewish people from a class to a nation, a notion of sovereignty and self-determination that revolved around both the Jewish identity and the labor movement.

As Nathan Yanai writes in the Jewish Political Studies Review, “Ben-Gurion’s argument entailed two almost tautological propositions: one, that the labor movement must identify with the nation at large and its primary interests; two, that the labor movement was, in fact, ‘the nucleus and the future profile of a new Hebrew people.’”

Ben-Gurion was part of the democratic socialist tradition of the Zionist movement. His was a watered down vision of settler-colonialism that saw the virtues in a Jewish-run state, but one that would absorb the full citizenry of the populated territory. Ben-Gurion ultimately fused his followers into a consensus party known as the Mapai Party, which became the dominant political force in Jewish-controlled Palestine from 1930, through Israel’s founding and through to the 1970s. The ideological underpinnings of the Mapai Party were more inviting prior to Israel’s founding than afterward, but the roots were very much guided by Ben-Gurion’s specific take on labor nationalism and the belief that the way of the kibbutzim could light the path forward.

Ben-Gurion is a giant among Zionists who have contributed to the mythology over decades. However, the wave of “New Historians,” a group of Jewish historians in Israel dedicated to examining the nationalistic myths of Israel’s creation, have cast some doubt over the intentions of Ben-Gurion and the Mapai Party in recent years. The New Historians take a more cynical view of Ben-Gurion’s motives, particularly with the use of the Haganah, the paramilitary force he helped foster prior to statehood; Haganah would eventually become the Israeli Defense Force (IDF).

Ben-Gurion will play a more significant role in the post-1948 essay but his contribution to the formation of the Israeli government cannot be overstated throughout the 1930s.

The Palestinian Arabs were running out of options on the table. The British were running the territory of Palestine under the British Mandate and unbeknownst to the Palestinian people, the surrounding territories had already been theoretically committed in secret agreements reached among the Allies during the war. In March of 1915, the British reached an agreement with Russia to annex the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. In return, the Russians would cede any claims to the oil rich areas of modern-day Iraq and Iran.

In May of 1916, the British and French signed a secret accord known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, which would theoretically divide up the entirety of the Ottoman Empire should the Allies prove victorious in the war. Newly formed Lebanon would go to France. The British would take control of Iran and Iraq. Syria, Jordan and parts of Iraq would fall under French supervision and trade routes would be established between the newly formed Arab states to favor their new imperial rulers. Historical ties to Christianity and Islam and now the influx of Jewish settlers into Palestine made Jerusalem and the surrounding area a little murkier and so the Allies simply punted on the Palestine issue and instead opted to consider it an administrative territory with multiple stakeholders but no one firmly in charge.

What could possibly go wrong?

For their part, as we’ll explore, many Palestinian Arabs had hoped to fall under Syrian rule. Others felt more of a kinship with Transjordan. But Syria now belonged to the French and Jordan to the British. And because Egypt had revolted against the British a decade prior, it had already declared independence in 1922 and wasn’t inclined to extend a hand to Palestinian Arabs as they had their hands full trying to build a nation of their own.

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Chapter Five: The Fifth Aliyah.

25,000 immigrants of Jewish descent came to Palestine from eastern Europe in the First Aliyah.

40,000, mostly Russian socialist Jews came in the Second Aliyah.

The Third Aliyah saw a wave of 35,000 Polish and Russian Jews under the hope and full expression of Zionism under the British Mandate.

Fleeing Polish persecution in the 1920s, more than 60,000 Jews migrated to Palestine in the Fourth Aliyah.

In 1933, the Nazi Party took control of Germany. According to the Holocaust Encyclopedia:

“Between 1933 and 1941, the Nazis aimed to make Germany judenrein (cleansed of Jews) by making life so difficult for them that they would be forced to leave the country. By 1938, about 150,000 German Jews, one in four, had already fled the country. After Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, however, an additional 185,000 Jews were brought under Nazi rule. Many Jews were unable to find countries willing to take them in.”

In 1938, a conference was organized in Evian, France. Delegates from 32 countries were in attendance. President Roosevelt sent a friend from the private sector with no diplomatic authority to address the question at hand: who among the great powers of the world would take in the Jews. Implicit in the question was extermination. Only the Dominican Republic raised its hand. The Dominican dictator General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina agreed to accept up to 100,000 Jews. Over the next seven years, a total of 645 Jews were granted safe passage.

The Fifth Aliyah saw 250,000 Jews flee the Nazi controlled parts of Europe for the haven of Palestine. It was all at once too much for Palestinian Arabs to comfortably absorb, and yet not enough for the carnage and horror to come.

The Holocaust began with isolation and persecution. Anti-Semitic laws were passed, and Jews had their homes and businesses confiscated. They were relegated to ghettos. As the Nazis advanced, the Jewish question became more intense. A mobile killing unit called the Einsatzgruppen was formed to deal with Jews in newly taken territories of the Russian Empire. These killing units were indiscriminate. Their orders were simply to gather Jews and communists in villages, have them dig trenches and then they were gunned down and poured into mass graves they had dug for themselves.

The German officials would blame the Jews for the expense of ammunition that was sorely needed on the battlefield. From the Weiner Holocaust Library:

“On 20 January 1942, leading Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference Villa in Wannsee, a south-western suburb of Berlin. The conference had been called to discuss and coordinate a cheaper, more efficient, and permanent solution to the Nazis’ ‘Jewish problem’. The conference was attended by senior government and SS officials, and coordinated by Reinhard Heydrich.”

This was the “final solution” to the Jewish Problem; the Nazi’s answer to the Jewish question. When modern-day Zionists speak of the Fifth Aliyah, this is what they’re referring to. The systematic annihilation of an entire people. When ghettoization didn’t work, they mowed them down. When that proved to be expensive and inefficient, they turned to mass deportation. When that wasn’t fast enough, the Nazi Party turned to the brightest engineering minds from the business community to devise methods to exterminate Jews en masse.

The delegates at Evian understood the implications of their refusal to absorb Jewish refugees. The nations of the world turned a blind eye to an entire people. The United States even passed legislation prohibiting Jewish refugee migration during the war.

Some call Israel and the partition plans that followed an act of guilt on the part of the European powers. But there’s an even more cynical view to be taken. The refusal on the part of the Allied powers of World War Two, and throughout the Nazi rule that preceded it, remained in place. While a great many Jews did ultimately immigrate to the United States and other parts of the world, the European powers didn’t extend the hand of their motherlands. They extended the hand of the imperial territory of Palestine. Guilt, it seems, has its limits.

I’ll leave you as we started with the prescient words of Leon Trotsky from a journal entry in 1940. One of the last before he was assassinated.

“The attempt to solve the Jewish question through the migration of Jews to Palestine can now be seen for what it is, a tragic mockery of the Jewish People. Interested in winning sympathies of the Arabs who are more numerous than the Jews, the British government has sharply altered its policy toward the Jews, and has actually renounced its promise to help them found their ‘own home’ in a foreign land. The future development of military events may well transform Palestine into a bloody trap for several hundred thousand Jews. Never was it so clear as it is today that the salvation of the Jewish people is bound up inseparably with the overthrow of the capitalist system.”

Joan Peters was a freelance journalist who developed a “fascination” with the Israeli/Palestinian conflicts in the 1970s and ‘80s. The publication of her bestselling book From Time Immemorial was an instant sensation that seemed to settle—in the minds of her western audience at least—the debate over the rights of Palestinians to the land in Israel and Palestine. She even went on to loosely advise the Carter administration. Though met with derision in Europe from the outset, it was met with widespread critical acclaim in the United States and put Peters on the map as a serious journalist with the temerity to wade into one of the most misunderstood conflicts in human history.

Her claim that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people was so forceful and backed by scholarly claims, demographic research and first hand reporting from refugee camps that it changed the national discourse in the United States and affirmed the claims of the Zionist movement that sought dominion over the whole of Palestine. There was only one problem.

The book was a complete fabrication.

If you’ve been following the conflict closely these days or have been tuned to it for a while, you may have come across the name Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein was the first American scholar to dig into the claims made in Peters’ book in his PhD dissertation at Princeton, debunking nearly all of its claims.

The mere mention of Finkelstein’s name enrages Zionists and pro-Israel sympathizers the world over. He was banned from even entering Israel for a decade. His PhD was delayed because he had trouble finding professors to read it critically. His career suffered as well as he bounced around institutions, failing to make tenure at any of them. Lauded in left-wing circles as a truth telling son of Holocaust survivors and principled academic; vilified by nearly everyone else in American society as a self-loathing Jew and terrorist sympathizer.

Figures like Edward Said and Noam Chomsky dug into Finkelstein’s claims and uplifted his work. Others like Alan Dershowitz and Peter Novick of U Chicago became mortal enemies. Nearly all of academia and the mainstream media ultimately came to the conclusion that From Time Immemorial was propaganda at best—a hoax at worst. The central conceit of the book—that the Palestinians never existed and that the small number of Arabs in the territory known as modern day Israel/Palestine were nomadic tribes that hailed from other parts of the former Ottoman Empire—endured in pro-Israel policy circles and, more importantly, in the minds of many Americans.

Both Peters and Finkelstein would wind up disgraced for different reasons surrounding the same claim. And while Finkelstein is experiencing somewhat of a resurgence on the left these days, he remains a marginalized voice and is still viewed as a traitor to Zionists.

I begin with this not to surface the work of Finkelstein or any other pro-Palestinian scholar or activist, but to highlight the tension that exists in all walks of academia, activism and punditry. Our propensity to favor propaganda over fact checking scholarship allows false narratives to endure. Jews control the media and banks. Palestinians aren’t real. If you’re Jewish and criticize Israel, you’re a self-loathing Jew. If you’re not Jewish and criticize Israel, you’re anti-Semitic. If you believe in Palestinian self-determination, you’re a terrorist sympathizer. If you’re Palestinian and believe in a two-state solution, you’re a Jew sympathizer.

Listening to facts and scholarship that challenges one’s beliefs is difficult and we need to allow space for as many people as possible who are willing to try. Thus, in Part One I attempted to contextualize Jewish migration to Palestine in the five Aliyot in the first part of the 20th Century. Similarly, the goal of this essay is to explain how the territory of Palestine developed during the same period and how the indigenous population came to identify as Palestinians and call for self-determination.

These first two level-setting essays mostly cover the birth of the Zionist movement and the turning point of 1948. I want to emphasize the titles of the essays for a moment as well before we move on. Part One is titled “The Jewish Question” and Part Two is “The Palestinian Cause.” The implication of both titles is that both Jews and Palestinians have been viewed reflexively as modifiers in a statement; always framed as a question or a cause. There’s something about this that diminishes the humanity of both groups in my mind. At the root of it, that’s what I’m trying to tease out in these first two essays. To go beyond the question or the cause and to see the humanity in the people caught up in this most intractable conflict.

Where it will get tricky and the tightrope walking begins is in the final essay beginning with the events of 1948. For Jews it marked the historic moment of official statehood. Palestinians refer to it as the Nakba, the great catastrophe. But for today, the Palestinian cause.

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Chapter One: Origin Stories.

“It's not my analysis. I quote Ze'ev Jabotinsky. I quote Herzl. I quote every Zionist leader up to the 1940s, all of whom described their movement as a settler-colonial movement that had to destroy the resistance of the indigenous population. They had no qualms about saying this.” -Rashid Khalidi

This quote is from a lecture by Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, who published The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine in 2020, one of eight books he has authored on the subject. His book begins with a personal family history of his great-great-great uncle, Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, “former governor of districts in Kurdistan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria; and mayor of Jerusalem for nearly a decade.”

In the lecture supporting the book, Khalidi explains that he introduced the book with this anecdote specifically for American audiences because he found Americans unique in their perspective that the Zionist designs on Palestine weren’t settler-colonial in nature; moreover, they had bought into the idea that Palestinians didn’t really exist as an identity, narrative residue of Joan Peters’ From Time Immemorial.

In seeking to establish the identity of the people, he uncovered the personal papers of his ancestors from the mid 1800s through the turn of the century. Among the collections of books, letters and archival material he found a critical correspondence between Yusuf Diya and Theodor Herzl.

“Yusuf Diya sent a prescient seven-page letter to the French chief rabbi, Zadoc Kahn, with the intention that it be passed on to the founder of modern Zionism. The letter began with an expression of Yusuf Diya’s admiration for Herzl, whom he esteemed ‘as a man, as a writer of talent, and as a true Jewish patriot’ and of his respect for Judaism and for Jews, who he said were ‘our cousins, referring to the Patriarch Abraham, revered as their common forefather.”

According to Khalidi, a portion of Yusuf Diya’s letter has been used in Zionist literature where he proclaimed Zionism to be, “natural, beautiful and just,” and, “who could contest the rights of the Jews in Palestine? My God, historically it is your country.” And indeed he wrote that. But by unearthing the remainder of the correspondence, Khalidi noted that this was used to acknowledge a shared heritage and claim to the land but as a prelude to warn against the idea of an exclusively Jewish state. Yusuf Diya follows with:

“‘Palestine is an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, and more gravely, it is inhabited by others.’ He concludes his letter saying, ‘Nothing could be more just and equitable than for the unhappy Jewish nation to find a refuge elsewhere…but in the name of God, let Palestine be left alone.’”

Let’s reflect on a couple of important points within these sentiments. The first is the notion we expressed in Part One, which is the natural and familial relationship between Jews and Arabs of greater Palestine during this period. This isn’t to suggest that relations in this part of the world, or any part of the world, have always been harmonious. That’s a profoundly ignorant claim. However, it is accurate to suggest that for hundreds of years in Palestine, people of varying ethnic and religious backgrounds lived in relative peace. Upper classes within each group thrived economically and were highly educated. There were competent administrators from all backgrounds that worked cooperatively under Ottoman influence to govern disparate territories. More to the Palestine cause, there were indigenous people of the territory referred to as Palestine, composed of modern day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine.

Yusuf Diya’s letter was somewhat prophetic in another respect. As Khalidi writes:

“The former mayor and deputy of Jerusalem went on to warn of the dangers he foresaw as a consequence of the implementation of the Zionist project for a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine. The Zionist idea would sow dissension among Christians, Muslims, and Jews there. It would imperil the status and security that Jews had always enjoyed throughout the Ottoman domains.”

This was both a fraternal and pragmatic warning. And it’s almost haunting when you consider it was written 124 years ago.

Incredibly, Herzl responded within three weeks of receiving the letter. His tone was just as deferential and cordial as there was a clear respect between the two men. But his words, while intended to be reassuring, seem dismissive in retrospect. Here is Herzl:

“‘It is their well-being, their individual wealth, which we will increase by bringing in our own…In allowing immigration to a number of Jews bringing their intelligence, their financial acumen and their means of enterprise to the country, no one can doubt that the well-being of the entire country would be the happy result.’ Herzl continues later saying, ‘You see another difficulty, Excellency, in the existence of the non-Jewish population in Palestine. But who would think of sending them away?’”

Let’s pause here because this is important. There are three things to unpack here. Critical aspects of myth building on both sides.

The first thing to note is Herzl’s claim that Jewish entrepreneurship and acumen would economically enhance the region and therefore all who live there. If we go back to Part One and reflect on the economic development of Palestine during the first three Aliyot, this sentiment rings true. The Jewish people brought important cultural and economic innovations to the region that helped foster its growth. Of this, there can be no doubt. It’s also true that like the colonial experience in the Americas, the indigenous populations passed on agricultural knowledge that helped facilitate this growth. It was a dynamic relationship that often inured to the benefit of both cultures.

As we also learned, however, as Jewish immigration intensified one of the aims of the more modern Zionists was to break free from the reliance on Arab labor. This also happened, so the benefits to the local population were as real as they were temporary. Especially as the Jewish National Fund, the British Empire and other Zionist organizations began to pour wealth into the region. These capital inflows throughout the 1920s in particular, exceeded 100% of the GDP of the region and allowed for extraordinary economic growth while the newly formed Arab states surrounding Palestine floundered under the imperial rule of France and Britain.

Then there’s the language that Herzl uses. “In allowing immigration to a number of Jews.” The tacit implication here is that there was already a structure in place to allow for Jewish settlement. In other words, there was already a local population in charge of regional administrative rule. Contrast this with the notion that Palestine was barely populated by non-native Bedouins in tents, and a clear tension emerges.

But it’s Herzl’s last point that stands out the most, especially because it was volunteered to Yusuf Diya. In his letter to Herzl, Yusuf Diya never raised the idea of displacement. And yet, Herzl wrote: “Who would think of sending them away?” This may seem trivial, but when Herzl’s letters and diary were published after his death, this sentiment expressed in his diary four years prior to his correspondence with Yusuf Diya paints a different picture:

“We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Herzl visited Palestine only once during his lifetime and passed away in 1904. But as he’s considered the father of Zionism, we must acknowledge both the impact of this sentiment and its strategic importance. While the Zionist project would be carried out by others over time, the idea that the indigenous people of Palestine would be henceforth considered simply “non-Jewish people” persisted and would be reinforced in the public consciousness from the Balfour Declaration through From Time Immemorial; a concept that endures to this day.

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Chapter Two: Historic Palestine.

They were Muslims, Jews and Christians. Bedouins, farmers, merchants, fighters, administrators, clerics and educators. Persians, Arabs, Ottomans, Jews. For thousands of years the territory they inhabited was known by many names. The Caliphate. The Levant. The Fertile Crescent. The Ottoman Empire.

Palestine.

Home to the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Mecca, Medina, Hebron and Damascus. But what of the people?

Khalidi said, “My grandfather’s generation would have identified in terms of family, religious affiliation, and city or village of origin. They would have been proud speakers of Arabic, the language of the Qur’an, and heirs to Arab culture. They might have felt loyalty to the Ottoman dynasty and state, an allegiance rooted in custom as well as a sense of the Ottoman state as a bulwark defending the lands of the earliest and greatest Muslim empires, lands coveted by Christendom since the Crusades.”

A people who identified with history, religion, family and language. And like every other person in the world, they would soon be swept up by the changing tide and hurricane winds of industrialism. As we said in Part One, this part of the world was slower to feel the effects of industrialization, but it wasn’t completely immune to it. Just prior to the post-Napoleonic period while Europe’s economy was rapidly expanding the Ottoman Empire, was in one of its waning periods, writes James Gelvin, author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict:

“The [Ottoman] government’s authority throughout the empire was increasingly challenged by local warlords. Two warlords of note emerged in Palestine. A warlord of bedouin origin, Zahir al- ‘Umar, took control over the Galilee region and established a principality with its capital at Acre. Further north, a former slave from Egypt, Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, took control over the port of Sidon (in present-day Lebanon) and established a principality that stretched into southern Syria.”

Eventually, the Ottomans settled the dispute by intervening on the side of al-Jazzar who established the cotton trade throughout Palestine. With the demand for cotton on the rise, this positioned certain cities in the region to join newly established trade routes in the fast modernizing world, and led to the build up of the cities of Acre in Galilee down through Jaffa, known today as Tel Aviv. The Arabs in the cotton trade would experience the same boom and bust cycles as their European counterparts, especially when the cotton trade took off in the United States. The interruption of the Civil War in the fledgling U.S. allowed for the markets in these trade ports to remain competitive at a critical time of development.

Again, Gelvin:

“The expansion of a market economy in Palestine enlarged what one historian calls the ‘’social space’ of its inhabitants, in effect changing their perception of their lived world as links between cities and countryside, and between inhabitants of the region and inhabitants of the world beyond, increased in number and importance. The expansion of personal horizons in Palestine, along with the appearance of an increasingly complex division of labor uniting the inhabitants there, was one factor that contributed to the diffusion of a culture of nationalism.”

These are important factors to consider through a modern lens that often casts this region as entirely backward and the people nomadic. Furthermore, as we noted in Part One, the governance of these territories took a more outward stance during Egyption occupation under Mehmet Ali. Forces from the south, or northern Africa would battle for hegemony with European empires that sought to lay claim to the fertile territories and ancient cities of greater Palestine from this point forward.

A passage from Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine authored by Roger Owen in 1982 sheds further light on the economic activity of this time:

“Alexander Schölch’s ‘European Penetration and the Economic Development of Palestine, 1856-1882,’ makes a number of interesting points. Foremost among them is Palestine’s remarkable economic upswing prior to the beginning of substantial European colonization in 1882. Palestine’s agricultural production and import-export trade activity grew, as did its towns and urban production. Much of this growth was a response to increasing European interest in the country. But European demand is not the full explanation, since internal Ottoman markets (including Egypt) also stimulated production of Palestinian agricultural and manufactured goods. Schölch calculates that Palestine had a trade surplus in most of the 1856-1882 period, counting foreign and intra-Ottoman trade together.”

When you consider that this territory of the Ottoman Empire had a trade surplus that contributed to the growth and development of both cities and rural areas as connection points, it illustrates two things: one, independent of European imperial exploits, this region had already joined the industrial age and was economically independent; and two, the sudden interest on the part of imperialists makes even more sense when one understands the strategic importance of a developing market economy and mature trading routes based in port cities.

I may pull more from Owen’s report in our post-1948 essay as well, but there’s one more interesting section that speaks to a territory of strategic importance around the time of the British Mandate in Jabal Nablus, part of what is now referred to as the West Bank. Owen cites the work of Sarah Graham-Brown, an economist who studied this era and region and concludes:

“It suggests that, despite the ‘backward’ and apparently static character of Jabal Nablus’ economy compared to that of the coast, the Jabal was in fact bound to and affected by the ‘dynamic’ sector of the Palestinian economy and the world market. Relations of production in agriculture are Graham-Brown’s principal concern. She portrays a peasantry ‘which had only one foot in the market economy and retained a substantial part of the crop for its own consumption.’ Most peasants in Jabal Nablus had to seek off-farm work to supplement their agricultural income, and a small number were able to take advantage of the commodity market to improve their economic position. But a class of rich peasants or kulaks did not emerge. Likewise, sharecropping in various forms remained prevalent in relations between large landowners and their tenants.”

Hopefully it’s evident why I’ve included some dense economic information. Palestine, with Jerusalem as its beating heart, experienced the same economic development as other formerly feudal territories in the world. And with this came similar societal upheaval and changes. The emergence of classes. Different industries took hold. Port cities blossomed. Trade routes and passages were carved through vast desert expanses to connect bustling marketplaces. The trajectory of greater Palestine tracks with that of Europe. And like Europe, it was about to confront an existential challenge in World War One that changed the course of human existence.

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Chapter Three: Pan-arab Nationalism.

Before the Great War, the people of Palestine didn’t question who they were. They just were. They were the inhabitants of Palestine who identified by their family name, village, religion and language. It’s a strange thing to think about today. Palestinian Arabs, Jews and Muslims understood their differences on religious grounds but in all the other ways they shared an identity. Prior to the war, and even with the influx from the First Aliyot, Jewish people made up about 7% of the population in modern day Israel/Palestine. Arab Jews and the newer Sephardic and Ashkenazi settlers were fully assimilated into Palestinian culture, economy and governance. But word of Zionist intent to foster mass migration and carve out an independent administrative state began to worry some of the occupants of the region.

In my research, I wasn’t able to concretely correlate a figurehead of the Palestinian movement to what Theodor Herzl would come to mean to the Zionist movement. This is due to the differences between ruling factions of the vast territory of the Ottoman Empire. While the nucleus of the Empire was Istanbul, there were pockets of power and influence spread among a few ruling families. But there is one figure who deserves attention from this period.

Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi is considered by many to be the father of pan-Arab nationalism. Remember that coming into World War One, the Ottomans sided with the Central Powers because of the close ties to the Balkan region. But as the fighting wore on and it became clear that not only would the Allied Powers prevail, the Ottoman rule was about to come to a close and the western imperial powers were devising plans to carve up the Arab territories. In the midst of the war, Hussein and others led a revolt against the Turks and declared Arab independence from the Ottomans. Behind this bold maneuver was the promise of support from the British to back the founding of an Arab nation that incorporated modern day Syria to the Arabian peninsula.

Not shockingly, the British had already sold the Arabs down the river with the backroom deal of Sykes-Picot, thus infuriating Hussein and the Arab leaders. Again, there’s this idea that the Arabs of this part of the world were unwilling to negotiate with the European powers and the Zionists and therefore looked disorganized and factionalized. Now, there’s an element of truth to this with respect to the territory on the peninsula, or modern day Saudi Arabia, but for the most part there was general alignment behind the concept of an Arab nation among Arabs at least. But let’s talk about the exception because it all happened quickly but had lasting consequences.

Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, known as Ibn Saud, was an Arab leader who first led a revolt against the Ottoman Turks in alliance with the British during the war. But Hussein of the Hashemite dynasty had simultaneously led a revolt against the Turks in the areas of Hejaz (western Saudi Arabia), Transjordan and Damascus. He too worked in concert with the British. Hussein, who had proclaimed himself Caliph over the consolidated territories, was shortly thereafter run out of the peninsula by Ibn Saud, founder of the House of Saud and the first King of Saudi Arabia. So for practical purposes, we can kind of take Saudi Arabia out of the pan-Arab nationalism equation and focus on the area of the Levant.

Here’s where our Arab and Zionist correlation gets a bit tighter.

One of Hussein’s sons was Faisal I bin Al-Hussein bin Ali Al-Hashemi, whom I’ll refer to simply as Feisel. (Spelling varies depending upon the source.) Feisel would eventually become king of Iraq. Feisel was well liked and far more modern than his famous father. During the war, he became close friends with one of the most enduring figures throughout the western world. T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence became a fixture in Feisel’s world and through his diaries and books on this period, he offered a remarkable glimpse into the negotiations prior to and at the Paris Peace Conference. I mean, the double dealing that went on at this conference, the feuds and mistrust among the Allied Powers makes for fascinating reading.

Anyway, Feisel led the Arab delegation in Paris and brought a more western and modern presentation that even his father was unaware of. Feisel’s aim was a unified Arab nation, much in vision of his father but certain concessions in his back pocket depending upon where certain alliances fell. With the help of Lawrence they repeatedly pushed for a seat at the table only to be rebuffed or placated while the real dealings happened behind closed doors. By this time, it was known that the British were in support of the Zionist declaration of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It was also understood that the British intended to rule over most of the Arab world. So they were concerned on two fronts: one, that the Sykes-Picot agreement would hold and the territories of the Levant would be unceremoniously splintered, and two, that the area of Palestine would go to the Jews. This would leave the Arabs in this part of the world divided and split between Jewish, French and British rule.

To ward off this potential consequence, Lawrence laid out the Arab case to the British in advance of the conference in an attempt to appeal to the British ego.

“In Palestine the Arabs hope that the British will keep what they have conquered. They will not approve Jewish Independence for Palestine but will support as far as they can Jewish infiltration, if it is behind a British as opposed to an international facade. If any attempt is made to set up the international control proposed in the Sykes -Picot Agreement, Feisal will press for self-determination in Palestine, and give the moral support of the Arab Government to the peasantry of Palestine, to resist expropriation.”

Lawrence was willing to reveal Feisel’s hand, even if it ran afoul of his father Hussein and ran contrary to the secret deals made during the war. In their estimation, the British had the strongest hand and most experience in the region. Unfortunately for the Arabs, the British, French, Zionists, House of Saud and the Americans all had different ideas about the fate of the region.

In an effort to counter the Zionist narrative of an exclusively controlled Jewish state, Feisel himself submitted a memorandum to the Peace Conference pushing for self-determination among the people of Palestine saying, “In Palestine the enormous majority of the people are Arabs. The Jews are very close to the Arabs in blood, and there is no conflict of character between the two races.”

Feisel and Lawrence were trying to demonstrate that not only would the Arab Jews in Palestine be secure in this land but Jewish migrants would as well and that it could be accomplished in a new Arabic nation state that incorporated Jewish, Muslim and Christian Arabs and gave them what he called “representative local administration.”

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After Theodor Herzl, the most significant founding father of the Zionist movement is a man named Chaim Weizmann. Weizmann became the leading figure of Zionism after Herzl and eventually was elected the first president of Israel. In yet another fascinating bit of history, Lawrence wrote an account of a meeting between Weizmann and Feisel for which he acted as an interpreter. According to Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson:

“Both leaders were now in a position to help one another politically: the Zionists needed Arab acquiescence to their programme in Palestine, while Feisal knew that Jewish support during the Peace Conference might help to swing American opinion behind his cause. Lawrence had already impressed upon Feisal the potential value of Jewish capital and skills. According to his own contemporary account, Weizmann assured Feisal that the Zionists in Palestine ‘should…be able to carry out public works of a far reaching character, and…the country could be so improved that it would have room for four or five million Jews, without encroaching on the ownership rights of Arab peasantry.’ Feisal replied that ‘it was curious there should be friction between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. There was no friction in any other country where Jews lived together with Arabs…He did not think for a moment that there was any scarcity of land in Palestine. The population would always have enough, especially if the country were developed.”

The two men, leaders of movements yet without nation states, even entered into a treaty known as the Feisel-Weizmann Agreement. Here are some of the highlights:

• A Palestinian Constitution that incorporates the Balfour Declaration.
• To “encourage and stimulate immigration of Jews into Palestine on a large scale, and as quickly as possible.”
• Freedom of religion.
• Defined boundaries between states defined by a joint commission.
• A survey of economic development possibilities between the two territories.

You might be struck by the first note. Incorporation of the Balfour Declaration. It’s important to understand what Feisel was agreeing to here in collaboration with Weizmann. Feisel was already ceding the idea of a Jewish state. One that was agreed upon, however, by Jewish and Arab parties, not European ones. The Jewish state would live side-by-side with an Arab state that likely incorporated what we know as the West Bank through the Golan Heights, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. It’s quite possible that the Jewish territory contemplated by Weizmann and Feisel could have been more substantial, though it’s difficult to say. Whatever it was, both men were so in favor of it they submitted it jointly to the Peace Commission.

By this time, Feisel had already established an administrative council in Damascus as sort of a kingdom in waiting. Yet despite Feisel and Lawrence’s attempts to be heard in Paris, an agreement at the ready with the Zionist movement and an Arab population desirous of self-determination, the European Allies ignored them all. And things quickly dissolved. As Khalidi writes:

“Many Palestinians hoped their country would become the southern part of this nascent state. However France claimed Syria for itself on the basis of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and in July 1920, French troops occupied the country…Following a bitter clash with Allied occupying forces, the nucleus of a Turkish republic arose in Anatolia in place of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Britain failed to impose a one-sided treaty on Iran and withdrew its occupation forces in 1921. France established itself in Syria and Lebanon, after crushing Amir Faysal’s state. Egyptians revolting against their British overlords in 1919 were suppressed with great difficulty by the colonial power, which was finally obliged to grant Egypt a simulacrum of independence in 1922. Something analogous occurred in Iraq, where a widespread armed uprising in 1921 obliged the British to grant self-rule under an Arab monarchy headed by the same Amir Faysal, now with the title of king. Within a little more than a decade after World War One, Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis all achieved a measure of independence, albeit often highly constrained and severely limited. In Palestine, the British operated with a different set of rules.”

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Chapter Four: The Palestinian Identity.

In the early 1900s there were major newspapers such as Al-Karmil in Haifa and Falastin in Jaffa that began to refer to indigenous Arabs as Palestinians and the territory as Palestine. It was an identity forged in resistance from the start, first to European imperialism and then to Zionism. Each passing year the bond of the Palestinian Arabs increased; connected at the roots by culture, language and economic activity, then resistance to control and war. As Khalidi writes, “Just like Zionism, Palestinian and other Arab national identities were modern and contingent, a product of late nineteenth and twentieth century circumstances, not eternal and immutable.”

Throughout the decade following the Treaty of Versailles, only Palestinians found themselves as a people without a nation. Jews and Arabs alike. Even while new nation states like Transjordan and Syria were ripped out of the pan-Arab nationalist movement, Arabs leaders continued to press for independence and self-determination rather than the arbitrary constructs of Clemenceau and Lloyd George’s pens. Again, Khalidi:

“Their most notable effort was a series of seven Palestine Arab congresses planned by a country-wide network of Muslim-Christian societies and held from 1919 to 1928. These congresses put forward a consistent series of demands focused on independence for Arab Palestine, rejection of the Balfour Declaration, support for majority rule, and ending unlimited Jewish immigration and land purchases. The congresses established an Arab executive that met repeatedly with British officials in Jerusalem and in London, albeit to little avail. It was a dialogue of the deaf. The British refused to recognize the representative authority of the congresses or its leaders.”

The Arabs of the region had already been administering vast territories under Ottoman rule. The mechanics of governance was hardly a foreign concept and many of the Arab leaders were multilingual academics who had studied all throughout Europe. They were both steeped in Arabic culture and tradition and skilled in European diplomacy and statecraft.

Congress after congress gathered each year to craft policy documents and entreaties to the French and British to consider a range of reforms from the establishment of Greater Syria to codifying the language of the Balfour Declaration. On the latter point, the Arab Congresses were still signaling a desire to absorb Jewish migrants into Palestine so long as Arabs weren’t displaced or their independence compromised. And each year they were ignored, even while tensions between Jewish immigrants and Palestinians began to mount. In 1920, anti-Zionist riots broke out in Jerusalem. In 1921, they broke out in Jaffa. All in response to land purchases by the Jewish National Fund and settlement expansions thereafter.

Significant figures of resistance began to emerge that wholly adopted the Palestinian identity. Figures such as Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, a religious leader who helped lead a revolt against the French in Syria. Al-Qassam formed a group known as the Black Hand, a militant group designed to expel Zionists and British from Palestine. Al-Qassam was killed by the British in 1935, turning him into one of the first militant Palestinian resistance fighters. In fact, the militant wing of Hamas is named in his honor.

There were notable scholars such as Issa al-Sifri, one of the most popular writers of the time and the first to publish Palestinian history of the British Mandate. Or Musa Kazim Husseini, who served a term as mayor of Jerusalem and presided over the third and fourth Arab Congresses. Al-Sifri took a more hard line stance against British occupation and Jewish migration, rejecting the Balfour Declaration in the third Arab Congress and Zionist claims in the fourth. His activism was more than political. At the age of 80, he led a demonstration in Jaffa in 1933 to stop Arab land transfers but he was struck by a British officer and died from his wounds shortly thereafter.

The point is these were influential public figures imbued with a sense of Palestinian nationalism and identity.

By now the world was becoming aware of the growing tensions between the indigenous Arabs and their imperial rulers. Moreover, as the world approached the Nazi era and life in Europe was getting increasingly difficult and precarious for Jews, prominent figures began to take up the Zionist cause. One of the most widely circulated articles from this time was a letter to the editor of Palestinian newspaper Falastin in 1930 from Albert Einstein in which he wrote:

“I believe that the two great Semitic peoples, each of which has in its way contributed something of lasting value to the civilisation of the West, may have a great future in common, and that instead of facing each other with barren enmity and mutual distrust, they should support each other's national and cultural endeavours, and should seek the possibility of sympathetic co-operation.”

Not even Einstein could conceive of an equation that would satisfy the interests of all those involved in the region. As the 1930s wore on the Great Depression took a toll on the world. The Nazi Party began making life unbearable for German Jews in their push for Judenrein and it was clear Europe was on the precipice of yet another massive conflict.

Lesser known to westerners is the explosion of Arab nationalism in Palestine between 1936 and 1939 among the laboring class. The revolts took the form of general strikes and caught the bourgeois Palestinians, Zionist settlers and the British by complete surprise. The British responded in brutal fashion under the command of Lord Peel who “expelled two hundred thousand Arab Palestinians as a result,” writes Khalidi, “and declared a path forward that would place Palestinian Arab territories under the control of Jordan. The Palestinian people finally had enough and they revolted against the British in a lopsided affair that saw fifteen percent of the adult male Arab population killed.”

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There was another consequence of the Arab Revolts from 1936 to ‘39 that isn’t talked about much but leaves one again with that “what if” feeling. In May of 1939 the British published a new white paper that declared the British obligations to the Jewish national home as “substantially fulfilled” and that “within the next five years, no more than 75,000 Jews would be allowed into the country, after which Jewish immigration would be subject to ‘Arab acquiescence;’ land transfers would be permitted in certain areas, but restricted and prohibited in others, to protect Palestinians from landlessness; and an independent unitary state would be established after ten years, conditional on favorable Palestinian-Jewish relations.” It was a stunning turn of events considering it was only two years after the Peel Commission recommended the first partition plan for the creation of two separate states.

While Europe descended into complete and utter chaos and other world powers entered the fray, this was how the British retreated in the critical year of 1939. By this time there was a splinter among Zionists between the labor wing and the land wing represented by young militants such as Menachem Begin and politicians like David Ben-Gurion, respectively. Both men would eventually ascend to the role of Prime Minister of Israel, but they represented markedly different visions. Likewise, Arab leadership would fracture with different factions attempting to gain independence of their newly created territories while others still sought to unite them.

As the Nazis engaged in a genocidal campaign throughout the European continent and the Arab leaders fought for independence, territorial borders hardened and attitudes calcified. For the better part of a decade, the world had lost its humanity. And from the ashes, a new world order would emerge but again leave open both the Jewish question and the Palestinian cause.

“I feel equally close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putumayo, or to the Negroes in Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play catch-ball… I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.” -Rosa Luxemburg

The President of the United States and Congress were fixated on the situation in Russia. The invasion of a neighboring territory and the defiance of its people galvanized the nation. It was a tenuous time in the relationship between the American and Russian governments, and it was unclear how it would all play out. The U.S. offered support for the territory in its fight against Russian aggression and quest for independence. In this midst of it all came another surprise.

Israel, one of the staunchest U.S. allies, invaded a neighboring territory with an aerial offensive that caught most of the world, and certainly U.S. intelligence agencies, completely off guard. The dual conflict with intertwined and precarious alliances placed the U.S. President in a tight spot. The American people, and even those closest to the President, began to wonder if his advanced age was beginning to hinder his performance. There were even whispers among his staff whether he would make it through a re-election bid. And even if he did, could he make a second term? This sent chills down the spines of administration officials who were wary of the unpopular vice president assuming the presidency under such tragic circumstances.

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This might read like the introduction to a future account of the times in which we are currently living. It’s not. This is an echo of history so loud, it reverberates in this time. The year was 1956. President Eisenhower was getting on in years, and growing increasingly agitated in a job that he never quite asked for; more like one he was thrust into. His vice president—Richard Nixon. The communist uprising in Hungary declaring independence from Moscow, and the oppressive Stalin regime had just broken out, when Israel sent fighter jets to bomb the Egyptian military, which had just occupied the Suez Canal. Eisenhower would soon learn that the British had encouraged Israel to invade Egypt and, in fact, sent troops to support the invasion, as the Suez was under the joint protection of Britain and France. Eisenhower was incensed.

Eisenhower biographer Jim Newton recalled a meeting in late October, “which began with a frustrated Eisenhower searching for ways to halt the fighting in the Sinai. ‘Let’s call it a ‘Bomb for Peace,’ he exploded at an emergency session that morning. ‘It’s as simple as this: Let’s send one of Curt LeMay’s gang over the Middle East, carrying an atomic bomb. And let’s warn everyone: We’ll drop it—if they all don’t cut this nonsense out.’ Aghast, aides let the remark pass in silence.”

I begin with this anecdote for a few reasons. One, history does repeat itself, and it’s amazing how little we learn from it. Two, the entanglements in this region are as intractable as they ever were. And, three—perhaps most importantly—we live in a nuclear age, and the people in charge really, really matter.

Suppose Eisenhower was surrounded by a bloodthirsty Congress and aides who held the worldview of modern day neocons? Maybe a comment such as this doesn’t pass so easily. The calls to “Free Palestine” and cries of “never again is now” by Jews all over the world are real and painful. To understand this conflict is to know the backstory completely. And, look—maybe a solution isn’t possible, and this will be fought to some tragic end that kicks off World War Three. But we have to at least try to learn from mistakes that have already been made to avert future horrors. It’s just about all we can do.

This show is guided by one fundamental principle. Everything that is done can be undone; good or bad. Time is a long thread, and our actions tie it in knots, and untying them takes time. Retrace your steps. Pull a thread here, a thread there. Reduce the tension until another knot loosens.

It’s why I talk about history being a conversation. Everything that happens is a response to what came before. How can we undo the evils of neoliberal capitalism, unless we understand the path we took to get here? How can we chart a successful path forward with democratic socialist values, unless we know how and where things fell apart along the way?

I’m not saying that there’s a solution to the conflict in the Middle East buried somewhere deep in our historical analysis of events. But I am heartened by a couple of things. Like learning that Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted peacefully alongside one another until imperial despotism and land claims set them in opposition. Everything that has been done can be undone.

It’s also a good time to remind ourselves of the definition of insanity.

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Chapter One: On The Precipice.

The Arab Revolts between 1936 and 1939 were raging against British imperial forces and the Zionist movements alike. Throughout Palestine and in Jerusalem, in particular, skirmishes were becoming routine. All the while, Jewish migration during the fifth Aliyah was intensifying, and Allied forces were confronted on every side during the war.

On the ground, the people of the Middle East were going through a renaissance of identity. Some Arab people began to see Islam as their nationality in the face of Zionist settlements and imperial forces. Others started to adopt their new nationalist identities, as the western colonial forces found themselves otherwise occupied during the war. Oil became more and more important to the developing world, especially in feeding the war machine. Arab states began pulling away from one another, as they sought to harden the borders and secure their futures in a post-industrial and modern world.

Still hanging in the balance were the Jews, Christians and Muslims of greater Palestine, the outlier consigned to a bizarre nation-state purgatory.

In Roger Owen’s paper we referenced in Part Two, he draws upon the work of historian Salim Tamari to describe the class and social dynamics of this period in Palestine. Tamari points to, “groups mobilized along non-factional and, in some cases, class lines.” His examples include the Qassamites (“peasant warriors” and “destitute laborers”), the Palestine Communist Party (unionized workers) and the Istiqlal Party (professionals and others of middle-class origin)... There was no Palestinian bourgeoisie strong enough to act politically on its own, as testified by the limitations of the Istiqlal Party. Only the landlords and their associated urban functionaries behaved politically as a class, and the patronage system was suited to their exercise of hegemony.”

Essentially, pre-industrial feudal relations persisted among different factions that had yet to organize into classes that had formed in western imperial societies. Therefore, no formal political movement had developed along class structures, and the absence of formal state borders meant that there were just pockets of ethnic groups from landowners and farmers to militant groups and laborers.

And yet, the imperial forces who were being ravaged during World War Two were attempting to impose a nation-state plan on a territory that not only hadn’t fully transformed along with the surging capitalist regimes of the time, but the territory itself was being flooded by Jewish refugees from the war.

Moreover, the new Jewish refugees were met by fellow Jews of the third and fourth Aliyot who were more capitalist and nationalist in character than the socialist-minded Jews of the first two. Confronted with the horrors of the Nazi Judenrein policy, the flood of refugees came imbued with a sense of urgency and Zionist fervor encapsulated by leaders like Weizmann, who sought to resolve what Jewish historian Avi Shlaim referred to as “ongoing dispute between the political Zionists and the practical Zionists. The political Zionists, following in Herzl's footsteps, gave priority to diplomatic activity to secure international support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The practical Zionists, on the other hand, stressed the organization of Jewish immigration to Palestine, land acquisition, settlement, and the building of a Jewish economy there.”

Another powerful Zionist leader named Ze’ev Jabotinsky emerged as the head of a group called the Irgun, which included a young Menachem Begin. Here’s Jabotinsky in his own words:

“We cannot promise any reward either to the Arabs of Palestine or to the Arabs outside Palestine. A voluntary agreement is unattainable. And so those who regard an accord with the Arabs as an indispensable condition of Zionism must admit to themselves today that this condition cannot be attained and hence that we must give up Zionism. We must either suspend our settlement efforts or continue them without paying attention to the mood of the natives. Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down.”

Militant Arab resistance was now met with organized Israeli force in the Irgun, and other movements and clashes were commonplace. In 1937, another British invention called the Peel Commission declared that Palestine was to be carved into three distinct territories, with twenty percent allocated to a Jewish state, the balance being united with Jordan and a third zone that incorporated holy cities of Jerusalem and Nazareth into a British controlled protectorate. Every side rejected it, most especially the Arabs, who were tired of being stripped of self-determination.

Then, the British reversed their stance two years later and issued a white paper in 1939 that called for Palestinians to work it out among themselves, but set a limit on Jewish immigration at 75,000. This time, the Zionist leaders balked at the plan and were incensed that the British would just walk away.

As the war raged on, the Zionist movement decided to take matters into its own hands and called a meeting in New York at the Biltmore Hotel. The findings would become known as the “Biltmore Program.” The conference proclaimed the following:

“The Conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened; that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands; and that Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world.”

David Ben-Gurion emerged as the recognized leader of the movement and the program, and he went on a campaign with the major world powers to champion statehood and to raise funds for an armed resistance. Interestingly, while the world was in complete disarray, Palestine was experiencing somewhat of an economic surge, as it served as a feeder system to the wartime economy of the other nations. As James Gelvin, author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict writes, “It has been estimated that by war’s end there was full employment in Palestine.”

The end of the war quickly became decision time. A weary Europe was anxious to settle the Middle East question and put the economy back together. The United States was instantly recognized as the lone superpower in the world for a couple of years at least, while Russia recovered from staggering losses during the war.

President Truman, on the advice of Earl Harrison, who was in charge of creating a plan for displaced persons of the war, urged the British to pave the way for 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine. The British seized on the opportunity to draw the United States into the mix, and the British suggested a joint commission to figure it out if the U.S. agreed to defray the costs of Jewish settlement in Palestine and to protect them. This time, the U.S. balked.

The Zionist movement was beginning to splinter at this time as well. The militaristic wing of the party and the paramilitary organization Irgun were pressing for revolution. In 1946, it even carried out the terrorist bombing of the King David Hotel, British headquarters in Jerusalem. The blast killed ninety-one people and sowed chaos into the discussions.

At the same time, the political Zionists such as Ben-Gurion knew they had the sympathies of a world that learned of the atrocities of the Holocaust, so they were in a solid position to push for the Zionist dream of statehood. The only question was who had the authority to make this happen, and could they secure the approval of the United States. Here’s Gelvin:

“In February 1947 the British threw up their hands and dumped the Palestine question on the newly founded United Nations. The United Nations General Assembly commission the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), made up of representatives from Sweden, the Netherlands, Czechosloviaki, Yugoslavia, Australia, Canada, India, Iran, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Peru, to investigate the Palestine problem and make recommendations.”

The plan called for a termination of the mandate and a partition plan between the two communities that called for them to unite economically and to place Jerusalem under international control. As Gelvin notes, however, “For the record, the minority report recommended the establishment of a single federal state.”

As one can imagine, there was hardly a consensus on the 1947 partition plan. Interestingly, the United States military and intelligence communities were against it, predicting that it would lead to chaos and hurt relations with the newly established Arab governments. Neither the Jews nor the Arab Palestinians could claim any sort of victory, as the plan still didn’t call for official statehood. It was yet another plan to make a plan without the consent of the people who lived there. Another complicating factor was neighboring Jordan, under the rule of King Abdullah since the end of World War One. Abdullah played every side of the chess board. As Khalidi writes, “Both the king and the British opposed allowing the Palestinians to benefit from the 1947 partition or the war that followed, and neither wanted an independent Arab state in Palestine.”

This is surprising to most westerners, who assume that the Arab nations are all aligned. They’re not, and never have been. As we’ve stated before, once the Arab territories were formed and then quickly gained independence from their imperial masters, they had a lot of work to do to build their nations. Abdullah much preferred the 1937 arrangement that placed the West Bank mostly under Jordanian control. However, his duplicity only went so far, as we’ll see in the next section, when he opposed the Zionist army in 1948.

As Avi Shlaim noted, “it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the British colluded directly with the Transjordanians and indirectly with the Jews to abort the birth of a Palestinian Arab state.”

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Chapter Two: No Turning Back.

Altalena was the pen name of Ze’ev Jabotinsky. It was also the name of a ship used to transport weapons to the coast of Palestine by the Jewish militant group the Irgun. The partition plan had sent the Palestinian people over the edge. The British were backing away, and the Americans were taking an interest. The Soviets were getting in bed with the Egyptians. The still fledgling Arab states of Syria, Iraq and Lebanon were forging tepid alliances with one another and trying to figure out the new world order. The Jordanians were playing everyone.

Tensions were bubbling below the surface, spitting fire from the ground and ready to erupt into flames. “Like a slow, seemingly endless train wreck, the Nakba unfolded over a period of many months,” writes Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine.

The Nakba, or “catastrophe,” is what the Palestinians call the war that lasted from the fall of 1947 until May 15, 1948. There are two narratives that have emerged from this period. The Zionists accepted the partition plan and were willing to live in peace alongside their Arab brethren. But the Arab nations rejected the plan and instead chose to invade Israel. Vastly outnumbered and surrounded on all sides, the Zionist Davids beat back the Goliath Arab armies and fulfilled the prophecy of the Israelites. The Palestinian narrative claims the brave Arabs bested the colonial Zionist forces in the battles before imperial forces intervened with western firepower and corrupt neighboring regimes abandoned them in their darkest hour.

Let’s assemble the pieces of the puzzle that our main sources agree upon to get a clear picture of what transpired.

The UN created the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), in May of 1947. The partition plan was offered at the end of August. Irgun militants bombed a police station in Haifa in September, killing British and Arab officers. The UN approved the UNSCOP plan on November 29. Palestinian militants killed seven Jewish civilians near Jerusalem the next day. The war had begun.

Let’s start with Gelvin:

“In 1948 the Arab states were divided into two rival camps: Jordan and Iraq, on the one hand, and, by default Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, on the other. Because Jordan and Iraq were ruled by two branches of the same Hashemite family that enjoyed a close relationship with the British, leaders of Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia feared a British-backed ‘Hashemite conspiracy’ intent on dominating the Arab world. Making matters even more complex, the leaders of Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq each had ambitions to lead the Arab world. As a result, there was no agreement on strategy or war aims in 1948.”

Avi Shlaim called the Arab coalition “one of the most divided, disorganized, and ramshackle coalitions in the entire history of warfare.”

The self-proclaimed “New Historians” note that while Arabs indeed outnumbered the Israelis of the Yishuv, what the Jewish part of Palestine was referred to prior to statehood, Palestinian Arabs had never fully recovered from losing 15% of the male population in the Arab uprisings. They characterized the newly formed Arab units of the neighboring states as closer to domestic police than trained military fighters and more interested in maintaining local rule than fighting someone else’s battles. Of all the states, Egypt and Jordan were the most prepared. Egypt had been independent for a while and had aligned with the Soviet Union. And Jordan’s military apparatus had the benefit of British training and weaponry. But, remember that their interests weren’t necessarily aligned. Here’s Khalidi:

“In the first phase of the Nakba, a pattern of ethnic cleansing resulted in the expulsion and panicked departure of about 300,000 Palestinians overall and the devastation of many of the Arab majority’s key urban economic, political, civic, and cultural centers. The second phase followed after May 15, when the new Israeli army defeated the Arab armies that joined the war. In belatedly deciding to intervene militarily, the Arab governments were acting under intense pressure from the Arab public, which was deeply distressed by the fall of Palestine’s cities and villages one after another and the arrival of waves of destitute refugees in neighboring capitals. In the wake of the defeat of the Arab armies, and after further massacres of civilians, an even larger number of Palestinians, another 400,000, were expelled and fled from their homes, escaping to neighboring Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the West Bank and Gaza. None were allowed to return.”

Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak called it a “shattering exile of a whole society, accompanied by thousands of deaths and the wholesale destruction of hundreds of villages.” This was accomplished by Begin’s Irgun and Ben-Gurion’s Haganah, which crafted a campaign called Plan Dalet, or Plan D, to depopulate major urban centers prior to the close of the war. Zionist revisionist history claims that Arabs were allowed to stay if they didn’t resist and that many assumed it would be temporary. They weren’t, and it wasn’t.

A little more than half of the entire population of Arab Palestine became refugees. Approximately 720,000. That number is from the United Nations, and backed by historical records. The Arab armies of other nations entered a war that was already underway, due to pressure from Arab citizens alarmed by the flood of refugees and Arab leaders sitting on their hands. Israel was way more organized and prepared to battle on a large scale.

The only thing left to the international community was what to do with the refugees and Jerusalem.

The Soviet Union under Stalin was the first to recognize Israel, though historians are split as to his reasoning. Some say it’s because Israel’s labor Zionist movement was more familiar to him and the democratic socialist ideals of Communist Russia. Others believe that he believed the partition plan would distract the British and draw continued resources.

Gradually, the rest of the UN nations would recognize the state of Israel and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had his work cut out for him. Arab hostility would be entrenched from this point forward. But first, he had to settle some internal affairs. The alliance between Ben-Gurion’s Haganah and Begin’s Irgun would shift to a battle for control. It’s a prelude to future battles between Israeli leaders that, in some cases, would turn deadly.

Shortly after declaring statehood, Begin made a deal to import more weapons on the Altalena. When the newly formed Israel Defense Force (IDF) that combined the Haganah and Irgun forces under state control discovered this side deal, the splinter Irgun group took the ship to the port of Tel Aviv where it came under attack by the IDF. Despite a call for a truce, the IDF bombed and sank the ship, killing several Irgunists and wounding 87 more.

Having established central command and authority over military affairs, Ben-Gurion and the newly formed parliament in Israel, called the Knesset, turned to domestic affairs. Of primary importance was the settlement of their newly acquired territory to prevent the possibility of Arab return to the countryside and cities. In 1950, the Knesset passed the Law of Return, sometimes referred to as “birthright,” which stipulated that, “Every Jew has the right to immigrate to the country.” According to Gelvin:

“The Israeli government took over approximately 94 percent of the property abandoned by the Palestinians who fled and distributed it to Jewish Israelis. Some Palestinians attempted to reclaim their property by crossing the armistice lines to harvest crops or carry away moveable property to their new homes. Others crossed the lines to commit acts of sabotage or murder. The Israeli government did not differentiate between the two groups. To deal with the problem of infiltration, Israel launched reprisal raids against the states from which the infiltration occurred… In1953, an Israeli raid into Jordan resulted in sixty-nine civilian deaths, mostly women and children. In 1955, an Israeli raid on an Egyptian military post in Gaza left thirty-eight Egyptian soldiers dead and about forty wounded. Both raids were led by future Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon.”

700,000 new immigrants arrived in the first four years of Israel’s existence. Another 700,000 arrived over the next 15 years.

Over the next several years, skirmishes continued, as the state of Israel steadily weaponized and gained more control over its newfound territories. The occupied parts of Palestine were fully under martial law at this time, but resistance forces remained. According to Palestine Nexus, in April 1956, “Palestinian militants infiltrated Israel from Gaza and attacked the Shafrir synagogue, killing six Israeli children.” In response to events like this, Israel doubled down on the occupied territories in an attempt to snuff out the resistance. In Gaza, its efforts were particularly severe, killing and executing thousands of resistance fighters, causing most of the remaining fighters to flee to the West Bank. In one of the more brutal incursions in the southern Gaza city of Khan Yunis, Israeli soldiers lined up refugees against a wall and executed 275 people, according to the United Nations. One of the survivors was an eight-year old boy named Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who would go on to co-found Hamas.

But long before Hamas came into being, another organization was founded by a Palestinian militant named Yasser Arafat. The organization was called Fatah, and Arafat would run it as a paramilitary group from exile, running raids and skirmishes and providing the spine of the Palestinian resistance. Because it found safe harbor outside of the occupied territories, Fatah was more difficult to pin down.

Within the occupied territories, the people attempted to organize politically and created the Palestinian Liberation Organization, a disorganized and toothless group that Arafat would eventually lead, particularly after the next defining war.

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Chapter Three: Six Days In June, Nineteen In October.

“On 14 May, 1967, Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser placed Egyptian armed forces on maximum alert and sent the Egyptian army into the Sinai Peninsula,” writes Gelvin. “Egyptian newspapers reported that Nasser’s actions were a response to information provided by the Soviet Union that Israel was planning to attack Syria.”

To be clear, Syria had been provoking Israel in the Galilee region, and tensions were running high. But as Dennis Ross writes in The Missing Peace, Hafez al-Assad, defense minister of Syria at the time, “did not launch a major invasion of Israel. When the Israelis attacked the Heights and fought their way up them, the fighting was tenacious. But Assad was not going to see Syria’s army destroyed and ordered a retreat even before the Israelis had completed their conquest of the Heights.”

Most agree the Soviet report was false. Some believe that Nasser knew it was. Some believe that he gambled that Israel would strike first, thereby stripping away their diplomatic cover. As Gelvin writes, “If this was the case, it was a miscalculation. In the first hours of the war, Israeli air strikes destroyed 90 percent of the Egyptian air force, about 70 percent of the Syrian air force, and almost all of the Jordanian air force.”

They had taken over the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, a strip of land bordering Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. It took the Israelis six days, hence the name of the war.

In the wake of the war, the United Nations drafted the infamous Resolution 242. Once again, the British had a heavy hand in the language, as if they hadn’t drawn enough maps around this region. Resolution 242 stated that Israel must withdraw “armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict,” and called for the “termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace with secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Israel, Egypt, Jordan and later Syria all agreed to these terms. But it’s worth pointing a couple of things out. First off, the Israelis would take a loose interpretation on the first note, the withdrawal of “armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The Resolution didn’t say “the territories.” Just territories. The Israeli government would interpret this as territories essentially of their choosing, since it wasn’t specific.

The other part of the resolution was a no-go for Palestinians because it called for political independence of “every State in the area.” Palestine wasn’t a state. And, even though by this time it had representation in the form of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the PLO didn’t have a state to affirm in the negotiation. The only reference to Palestinians was that there should somehow, some way be a “just settlement” of the refugee problem. It would be twenty years before the PLO finally acquiesced to the framework, as set out by Resolution 242.

By now, the U.S. and the Soviets were involved to varying degrees. Selling arms into the region. Failed diplomatic attempts to bring all of the parties together; everyone eyeing the other with suspicion, but no one willing to take the first step among Arab nations and Israelis to negotiate around the 242 framework. Egypt started what President Anwar al-Sadat called the War of Attrition by shelling Israeli strongholds around the Suez Canal and initiating dogfights. Soon the Soviets were chipping in their support for Egypt, which led the Americans to amplify their support for Israel, which began forceful retaliation against Egypt, but without committing American troops, which everyone knew would be a disaster.

Arafat seized an opening in 1969 to formally take over the PLO and declared himself in charge of the organization, and spent the next several years both building a political apparatus and carrying out high profile attacks on Israeli infrastructure, conducting cross-border raids, hijacking airplanes and an event that put the concept of terrorism on the map forever.

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Ten days into the 1972 Olympics in Munich, a militant splinter group of the PLO called Black September raided the Israeli athletic complex and took several people hostage. Black September’s goal was twofold. The first was a swap. The group was calling for the release of more than 200 Palestinian prisoners in Israel. The second was notoriety. When two Israelis fought back, Black September killed the two men, and all hell broke loose from there.

Both Black September’s plan and the German rescue plan were badly botched. Five of the eight terrorists were killed, the rest captured. But not before they executed all nine hostages. But it was the second objective that was achieved beyond the PLO’s wildest imagination. As NPR writes in a recollection of the events:

“When television networks finally switched to covering the hostage crisis, it created the aspect of the attack most notable today: It was the first time a terrorist incident had reached a global audience during a live broadcast…About 900 million people are believed to have watched the hostage crisis on television.”

The PLO was on the map, for better and worse. In the Arab world, the plucky band of resistance fighters under Arafat were doing god’s work and punching above their weight. The western world, however, understood that the PLO had changed the game and proven that it didn’t take a conventional military to strike fear in the hearts of millions of people.

In 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, resulting in thousands of casualties on both sides, in what is referred to as the October War. It is sometimes referred to by Israelis as the Yom Kippur War and by Arabs as the Ramadan War. A reminder of the increasingly religious significance of the fight between two Abrahamic religious states that were once allied as a people.

It also raised the Cold War stakes dramatically, drawing Brezhnev and Nixon to the diplomatic brink and putting nuclear options on the front burner. With tensions running extremely high, the great powers convinced all sides to reach an armistice, with the Israeli forces technically notching a victory, though it only served to harden the resolve of the Arab states against both Israel and the United States. The lines drawn in the sand by the French and the British were now being guarded by the Soviets and the Americans.

The Americans would eventually become the most staunch defenders of the state of Israel, though the relationship went through several ups and downs. The problem on the Palestinian side where its supporters were concerned was the lack of a state actor or recognized authority. That would change in 1974, when the United Nations recognized Arafat as the leader of a legitimate body that represented the people of the Palestinian territories. In addressing the UN for the first time he said, “Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

It was now state against quasi-state.

From an economic perspective, the occupied territories took on a new life. Israel’s defense ministry established a policy called “Open Bridges” to allow Palestinians in the West Bank the right to travel back and forth to Jordan and to work in Israel, though laborers were required to return to the occupied territories by nightfall. Then it made two critical infrastructure moves to take control of the water supply and electric grid of the territories. Moreover, it used its economic leverage to dictate the terms of trade. Again, Gelvin:

“The Israelis found a captive market in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. They enjoyed exclusive rights to export manufactured goods to the territories and, because Israeli farmers had access to subsidies denied residents of the territories, were able to flood the Palestinian market with cheaper agricultural products. Land-use restrictions, production and marketing quotas, Jordanian import controls, and access to the Israeli labor market all served to change the orientation of the Palestinian workforce away from agriculture toward employment in Israel. Within four years of the 1967 war, about half of all workers from the occupied territories regularly commuted to jobs in Israel.”

This created a subservient colonized workforce that was now entirely dependent on Israel for work, food, water and electricity. It’s important to understand the chasm between the intent behind these policies and the eventual market economic forces that would obliterate them. The intent was to actually make life livable in the territories by allowing them to work in Jordan and Israel, move about freely (during the day at least) and access a more mature Israeli infrastructure. But the subsidies and trade restrictions rendered many markets within the West Bank and Gaza unproductive and wholly uncompetitive, forcing workers to look elsewhere. And the hardened borders allowed the right leaning political surge in the late ‘70s to take a different approach to the concept of movement.

The Likud Party was a fundamentalist party on the right in Israel that ran on a platform that stated:

“The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right of security and peace; therefore Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the sea and Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”

In 1977, Menachem Begin rose to power as the head of the Likud Party. The leader of the militant Jewish insurgency Irgun who had battled with David Ben-Gurion just thirty years prior, was now in charge, and Israel would take a hard right turn from this point forward. The Labor Zionist movement was over. The Land Zionists were now in charge.

In 1978, the new Likud government began closing the borders on a regular basis and started importing labor from other parts of the world to displace Palestinian workers. By the year 2000, it all but shut worker mobility down entirely and unemployment in the occupied territories would surge past 50%.

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Chapter Four: The Politics Of War.

Through researching this series, I’ve come to view the story of modern Palestine in three distinct chapters. The first takes us from the 1880s and the first Aliyah through the Nakba. The second stretches from the displacement of Palestinian refugees and recognition of the state of Israel in 1948 through the October War in 1973, when the UN reaffirmed Resolution 242 in Resolution 338. That was followed by recognition of the PLO as a legitimate governing body of the Palestinian territories, though not yet an official state. The third period ranges from ‘73 through October 7 of this year. But let’s go to the transition between the second and third period.

As Ross writes in The Missing Peace:

“Resolution 338 called for negotiations between the Arabs and Israelis to implement UNSC Resolution 242. Resolution 242 established the principles that should guide an agreement: withdrawal of Israeli armed focus from territories occupied in the recent conflict; termination of all claims of belligerency; respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized borders; a just resolution of the refugee problem.”

In an collection of essays from socialist activist Moshé Machover called Israelis and Palestinians: Conflict and Resolution, Machover contextualizes the PLOs evolving approach in the lead up to the resolution and after recognition as a governing body:

“From 1969 until 1974, the PLO unambiguously called for the liberation of the whole of pre-1948 Palestine—including not only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip occupied by Israel since 1967 but also Israel itself—and establishing in it a unitary secular democratic state. However, from 1974 the PLO began to shift its position, and by the 1980s accepted a ‘two-state solution:’ an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which would exist alongside Israel. Thus the PLO was resigned to giving up—at least for the foreseeable future—the Palestinian claim over 78 percent of the territory of pre-1948 Palestine.”

Gaining consensus and political control over the disparate occupied territories would be a puzzle that Arafat would never master. In the Six-Day War, for example, the Golan Heights were seized by the Israeli forces from Syria. A few years later, the Syrians attempted to reclaim this territory in the October war, but the Israeli forces beat back the incursion, leading to an armistice between the two nations. Then in 1981, Israel unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights and immediately began settling the region despite an outcry from the Arab Nations and the United Nations.

Amid the shifting strategy of the PLO toward a more serious diplomatic stance, the Carter Administration attempted to negotiate peace in the region that could eventually lead to statehood for Palestine and security for Israel. As we covered in our series The Carter Years, the Camp David Accords were notable for its ambition and lack of understanding of the players. For example, Jordan was excluded from the talks between then Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Furthermore, the most crucial element of the negotiations where the Palestinians were concerned was the encroachment of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and the economic stranglehold over the infrastructure in these areas. While the Camp David Accords led to a settlement between Egypt and Israel that resulted in Israel returning the Sinai Peninsula to the Egyptians in return for recognition of Israel and normalization of trade relations, the settlement issue was negotiated in a side letter that Begin simply ignored. Within weeks of the agreement, which was lauded by the western world, Begin continued a policy of aggressive settlement expansion.

Egypt was seen as a traitor in the eyes of the Arab world, and Sadat would pay the ultimate price by being assassinated. The settlement expansion only hardened the resolve of militants in Gaza and the West Bank and challenged the legitimacy of the PLO. And, while the Carter team took its eye off the rest of the region, they underestimated sympathies throughout the Middle East with the Palestinian cause and U.S. interventionism. When the Iranian Revolution broke out in 1979 and U.S. hostages were taken in the overthrow of the embassy in Tehran, all the positive feelings from Camp David had all but evaporated.

Matters with Egypt might have been settled between Egypt and Israel and appear satisfactory to western powers, but it caused a huge rift among Arab Nations. Moreover, Jordan was still smarting from being snubbed during the negotiations. Others such as Syria and Lebanon remained opposed to Resolution 242, with Lebanon providing safe harbor and a headquarters for the PLO.

Using the pretense of an assassination attempt of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov, IDF forces launched an assault against Beirut. Though it was known that the attempt was carried out by forces loyal to Abu Nidal, a former member of Fatah who had been expelled, Israel conflated Nidal with the PLO and set out to destroy Arafat and those who shielded him in Lebanon.

This was yet another bloody turning point that would come to characterize the doublespeak between the PLO and the Likud Party in conflicts going forward. Though the conflict didn’t last long, the casualties were extraordinary, and caught many world agencies by surprise. To this day, there is no consensus on the total number of casualties from Israel’s invasion with the support of western allies. At the time, Lebanon was experiencing tremendous internal strife and was already growing wary of the PLO presence.

In other words, it had no real army to put on a battlefield, which didn’t matter much since Israel took the battle to the heart of Beirut, where Catholic relief agency Caritas placed the “‘minimum established figures’ of 14,000 dead, 25,000 severely wounded and 400,000 totally homeless.” By the next year, many agencies had revised the number of killed to around 48,000, though these numbers remain uncertain due to poor reporting from Lebanese police and the inability to identify Lebanese civilians under the rubble. It’s estimated that 80% of the casualties were civilians. At the time the initial figures were released, Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, future prime minister, stated that there were only around 2,000 casualties and that they were mostly military.

Though it would ultimately lend its support to Israel and even commit troops in support of the IDF, according to the U.S. state department:

“The Reagan administration was divided over how to respond to Israel’s invasion. Secretary of State Alexander Haig argued that the United States should not pressure Israel to withdraw without demanding that the PLO and Syria do likewise. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Vice President George Bush, and National Security Advisor William Clark wanted the IDF to withdraw immediately and to sanction Israel if they did not.”

The PLO would wind up on its back foot and completely disorganized, though Arafat remained in tenuous control. But the attack on Lebanon produced a different result that would come back to continually haunt Israel to this day. In the book Hezbollah, author Augustus Richard Norton writes:

“The invasion gave Ariel Sharon…carte blanche to pursue his own dream of destroying the PLO as a political force in the region and putting in place a pliant government in Beirut that would become the second Arab state, after Egypt, to enter into a formal peace agreement with Israel. Within the Israeli government at the time—as within the American foreign policy establishment—there was little understanding of the developments underway among the Shi’i Muslims of Lebanon and no analysis was made of the impact of this invasion on them.” 

Future Israeli prime ministers would eventually grapple with the ramifications of the invasion. Ehud Barak said, “When we entered Lebanon...there was no Hezbollah. We were accepted with perfumed rice and flowers by the Shia in the south. It was our presence there that created Hezbollah.” Yitzhak Rabin said Israel had “let the genie out of the bottle.”

The Reagan administration may have misunderstood the dynamics of Islam and the alliances in the region, but they understood the disaster that would come if Arafat was martyred. Thus, they actually wound up helping Arafat flee Lebanon for Tunisia, where the PLO would set up camp, though still in exile and away from the Palestinian people. As much as Arafat enjoyed the support of the Palestinian people, they weren’t exactly waiting for him to save them. Beginning in December of 1987 and lasting through 1993, Palestinians organically rose up against the IDF in a series of ongoing skirmishes and campaigns designed to destabilize the military control over the territories. This period became known as the first Intifada.

Dennis Ross, who came to know Arafat well, said, “The first Intifada…took Arafat by surprise. Here were Palestinians in the territories resisting Israeli occupation and capturing the attention—and sympathy—of the world. Here were the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem organizing, planning, and guiding the resistance. Where was Arafat? Where was the PLO?”

Arafat the military leader, in his trademark fatigues, needed a makeover. Building upon the newfound sympathies for the Palestinian people, Arafat tried his hand at diplomacy and, as Ross writes, “engineered the PLO’s adoption of the Algiers Declaration, which called for a two-state solution to the conflict with Israel. Forty years after rejecting the partition plan, the Palestinians were now ready to accept a Jewish state alongside an Arab state.”

Hard liners in the Arab world, in Israel and among Palestinians weren’t pleased, but there was enough support and war weariness that this approach would take center stage over the next few years. Below the surface, however, anger grew among the far right on both sides. Just like 1982 was the birth of Hezbollah in Lebanon, 1987 marked the beginning of Hamas in Palestine. For as much as this was an inspired period for the resistance and urged Arafat to get more involved in finding political solutions, IDF forces would exact a heavy toll on the young members of the uprisings. Here’s Gelvin:

“Between 1987 and 1993, Israeli soldiers killed between 900 and 1,200 Palestinians and injured about 18,000. About 175,000 Palestinians passed through Israeli jails and aIsraeli human rights organizations estimate that about 23,000 Palestinians were subjected to‘harsh interrogation; (read: torture). The Israeli army destroyed about 2,000 Palestinian houses as punishments. And it is estimated that by the end of the intifada the standard of living in the territories had declined 40 percent.”

One of the architects of the Israeli response to the intifada was defense minister Yitzhak Rabin, who created and oversaw the “Iron Fist” policy to break the arms of any child who threw stones at Israel’s military.

Rabin was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1992 and, like Arafat, took a more diplomatic turn as the head of the Labor Party and heading into the Oslo Accords. Two former militants who made their bones in brutal ways would be facing off under the diplomatic eyes of the world.

The Oslo Accords, the first in 1993 and second in 1995, was a political detente of sorts, but it served to exacerbate tensions among hard liners in Israel and the Occupied territories. Though Gelvin notes that 60% of Israelis were in favor of the accords; and the PLO, which was desperate for legitimacy at this point, attempted to put forward a softer approach, it further fractured the far right of both parties.

The PLO accepted Resolution 242, while Rabin put a pause on Israeli settlements in the midst of a flood of Jewish immigrants from the crumbling Soviet bloc. This took a huge swath of the pre-1948 territory off the table for Palestinians and pressured the Israelis to both absorb new settlers at the same time they halted settlement expansion. Again, Ross:

“Dr. [Baruch] Goldstein, a settler from Kiryat Araba, just outside of Hebron, saw the peace process with the PLO as a historic mistake, and the prospective turning over of land to the Arabs as sacrilege. On the morning of February 25, 1994, in the city of Hebron, he entered the Tomb of Abraham in an army uniform, walked into the adjacent Ibrahimi Mosque, and gunned down twenty-nine Arabs while they prayed—an act of murder designed also to kill the Oslo process.”

Palestinians were enraged by this event and the notion that Arafat had given away too much in the negotiations. This led to the increasing popularity of Hamas, which had gained credibility in the eyes of Palestinians who were increasingly hemmed in. In 1995, a young Israeli militant named Ben-Gvir hoisted the hood ornament from Yitzhak Rabin’s car, declaring to cameras, “We got to his car. We’ll get to him, too.” This took on some importance on two levels. The first is that Rabin was assassinated just a few weeks later. More presently, Ben-Gvir was part of the conservative bloc of politicians last year that made an alliance with Netanyahu and surged the Israeli government to the far right. In his office he prominently displays a picture of Baruch Goldstein.

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The Oslo Accords marked the beginning of the end of any serious attempt to reconcile Resolution 242. The Likud Party once again took over the Knesset, ushering in the first of the Netanyahu administrations. Entering the 2000s, Israel would continue to isolate the occupied territories economically and continue with settlement expansions, leading to the second Intifada that lasted from 2000 to 2005. This led to the construction of Israel’s defensive shield, known as the Iron Dome. The Palestinian cause would be all but forgotten in the western world after the attacks of 9/11, and Israel strengthened its diplomatic and personal relationship with the United States as its chief ally in the region.

In the mid-aughts, things shifted politically once again. Yasser Arafat, who was outmaneuvered on the diplomatic front and was never able to align the factions within Palestine, died in 2005. Mahmoud Abbas was elected as the head of the PLO, and Israel pulled all of its settlements from Gaza, leaving it completely open and unguarded. Abbas was to rule over both Gaza and the West Bank as Arafat had done prior under the umbrella organization called the Palestinian Authority, established and recognized by the United Nations as the political body of the territories. Below the surface, however, another political movement was bubbling thanks to the support of the Israeli government. Here’s an excerpt from The Intercept to explain:

“Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Segev, who was the Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s…told a New York Times reporter that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a ‘counterweight’ to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Fatah party, led by Yasser Arafat (who himself referred to Hamas as ‘a creature of Israel.’)

 

“‘The Israeli government gave me a budget,’ the retired brigadier general confessed, ‘and the military government gives to the mosques.’

 

“‘Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,’ Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. Back in the mid-1980s, Cohen even wrote an official report to his superiors warning them not to play divide-and-rule in the Occupied Territories, by backing Palestinian Islamists against Palestinian secularists. ‘I…suggest focusing our efforts on finding ways to break up this monster before this reality jumps in our face,’ he wrote.”

In an attempt to divide and conquer the PLO by funding Hamas, the Israeli military helped foster the organization, which by this time was receiving aid from other Arab allies in the region. Hamas was a militant organization at its core, but it also understood the importance of building credibility beyond insurgency. And so, it used foreign funds to build both a military infrastructure as well as schools and hospitals in Gaza mostly. Thus, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise—though it certainly did to outsiders as well as Abbas—that when the PA called for elections in the territories, Hamas won a majority of seats and used this capital to take over Gaza.

Though the Palestinian Authority was granted status of non-member observer state in the United Nations in 2012, it’s no closer to being recognized as a formal state. Netanyahu was re-elected again in 2009, and but for about 18 months beginning in 2021, has served in the role since this time as the longest tenured prime minister of Israel. Despite attempts in 2014 to reinvigorate Oslo, it barely came to fruition, as Palestinian fighters continued to resist the occupation and Israel furthered its stranglehold on the territories.

On May 30, 2018, Gazans organized a march to the border wall to protest the occupation. On the order of the Israeli government, the IDF opened fire on the gathering, killing 14 Palestinians and wounding hundreds. This act led human rights organizations to condemn Israel’s actions as a violation of international law. In that same year, President Donald Trump unilaterally moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem saying “the Jewish people appreciate it but the evangelicals appreciate it more than the Jews.”

In 2021, the long simmer was coming to a boil. Human Rights Watch, a New York based NGO, formally declared Israel an apartheid state. Arab led attacks on Israeli Jews in Jerusalem inflamed tensions in the holy city. Israeli police then restricted Palestinians from entering the Old City during the month of Ramadan, followed by Israeli demonstrations by “a group called Lehava, whose supporters chanted ‘death to the Arabs,’ writes the Council on Foreign Relations which continues saying, ‘at the same time Israel’s courts paved the way for the evictions of six Palestinian families from a neighborhood in East Jerusalem called Sheikh Jarrah, and for Jewish families to move into those homes.’”

Pew Research in 2016 found that, “Most Jews across the religious spectrum agree in principle that Israel can be both a democracy and a Jewish state.” But it also unearthed profound disagreement among Jews as to what the nature of democracy even looks like. For example, we’ve seen images of Jews entering the al-Aqsa mosque and taunting Palestinian worshipers. But just the very action of entering the mosque is forbidden by Orthodox Jews, who are often in complete opposition to the right wing Likud Party. Orthodox Jews in other parts of the world are even staunchly opposed to the Zionist movement, claiming that the Torah calls for Jews to remain in Diaspora to specifically spread wisdom to non-Jews of the world. The youth in Israel are split as well between agitating for peace and fighting against conscription and calling for the destruction of all Palestinian territories.

In the United States, positions are just as complicated. As we covered before, there is no such thing as a monolithic position on the issue of Israel/Palestine. Young progressives take a hard line stance against Zionism. Hard stop. Black and Brown Americans tend to feel the same sense of outrage against the state of Israel, recognizing it as a colonizing force against an indigenous people. Jewish Americans predominantly support the rights and actions of Israel as proud Jews and supporters of Birthright. Some secular Jews of the left wing, however, have called for an end to the occupation. Perhaps the most bizarre alignment, of course, is between right-wing evangelicals and the state of Israel as Trump inelegantly noted. But there’s truth and logic to this sentiment.

In their reading of the Bible, the Abrahamic covenant basically says that Israel’s children will return, a battle will ensue and the Rapture (a term not found in the Bible) will begin, and God will call his true children to heaven. The important piece for evangelicals is that the Jews must be in place in Israel for this to happen. Of course, they don’t mention the second part, which is that they will be forced to accept Jesus Christ as savior or be vanquished with the rest of the heathens on earth.

In other words, it’s a mess. A mess of imperial design. In the end, the only people who matter in all of this are the Jews and Palestinians of this region. As we’ll talk about in a brief epilogue to the series, October 7, 2023 might mark the next and perhaps final turning point in the history of this region.

My hope with the three parts of the series was to lay out as much context as possible to help you draw your own conclusions about the events that have recently transpired. I’ve tried to limit any emotion or personal feelings so as not to distract from the narrative. In the epilogue, I will talk more about the horror unfolding in Gaza, options for peace that were never fully pursued or were made impossible, and I’ll return to the thesis of this exercise: Palestine is the land imperialism left behind.

9/11 changed me. It changed the country, and in response, we changed the world. I don’t have a sob story, and I’m careful not to co-opt the tragedy of that day out of respect for those I know and love who were personally impacted. I know a lot of them because my wife and I were newly married and living in Manhattan at the time.

The resurgence of Bin Laden’s letter to America on social media and the callous way young people comfortably joke about 9/11 is a reminder that we move on from everything. And one day, sooner than you might think, we’ll move on from what’s happening in Israel/Palestine right now. Despite the coverage on television, interest in the war is already declining on the search engines.

The Mueller Report was released, Trump was impeached, Hurricane Dorian obliterated the Caribbean, the Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire, a gunman massacred worshippers at the Christ Church Mosque in New Zealand and inspired a 21-year old white nationalist to murder 23 people El Paso, Texas. These were just in 2019. Point being, we no longer possess the ability to give a shit about all that much because we’re confronted with all too much.

Never forget. But we always do. I used to volunteer for a Holocaust remembrance organization. This experience helped shape me as an individual and cultivate the world view that I hold today. The voices of the survivors I met still echo in my writing. And every year, my inbox is filled with emails that begin with, “we are heartbroken to announce the passing of…“

As the survivors of the Holocaust leave us, they leave a piece of living history behind. The survivors I met left an indelible impact on me, and I wonder how they would feel about what’s happening right now. They weren’t monolithic in their teaching and approaches as docents, so I imagine they would be severely conflicted. Some were devoted Zionists and harbored an unwavering hatred for the German people. Others actively sought out Islamic leadership in New York to cooperatively develop anti-bias programs.

One couple stands out in my mind. A married couple, both survivors of concentration camps who married shortly after the war. They traveled the country, teaching together and promoting tolerance for all faiths and backgrounds. We wound up interviewing them at my old job, and the woman’s words still resonate with me. Reflecting on a life of activism and teaching, she said, “my husband believes people can change.” Then in a whisper she said, “But I’m not so sure.”

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Bloodlust

When I interviewed Professor Khalidi of Columbia University the other day, I admitted to him that the bloodlust I felt after 9/11 is still very much a part of me. Calls to carpet bomb the Middle East didn’t bother me at the time. In fact, I cheered it. The smell of the burning rubble as we left our apartment persisted for what seemed like forever. The shock and sadness of it all was worn on the faces of everyone we passed. It would take me years of introspection and study to move beyond these feelings and evaluate the attacks and the U.S. response to them with clear eyes. I still struggle when I see the images from 9/11, but I can divorce the visceral feelings in my gut from the perspective that is required to see the U.S. empire for what it is.

I understand what the Jews of Israel feel in their bones. And western media has done its job conveying this sentiment and keeping it alive during the bombardment in Gaza. Likewise, I understand the palpable fear and unease among Jews throughout the world who are connected to Israel in a way that few understand. Hopefully, Part One of our series helped explain the sentiment buried deep within the Jewish experience. It’s not just the Holocaust. Remember the statistics. 75% of Jews in the world lived within the borders of the Russian Empire by the late 1800s. Then they were forcibly dispersed despite their deep connections to the land and even their neighbors.

The Dreyfus Affair in France demonstrated to Jews that western Europe would offer no safe haven for them either. The Sephardic Jews in Spain were chased into the Levant by the Catholic Church, whose missionaries kept anti-Semitism alive in their doctrines. The same Catholic Church that maintained a secret back channel with Adolf Hitler’s government in the 1930s and issued thousands of visas to Nazi Party members after the war. And, as we covered, when the nations of the world were presented with the ability to offer safe harbor for Jews prior to the Holocaust, 645 German Jews found refuge in the Dominican Republic while every other nation refused.

I’m reviewing this history to remind us all of the existence of Israel. It’s why the build up to this epilogue was so exhaustive, though it still only scratched the surface. So often, it’s the basic questions and proclamations that trip us up and the propagandized versions of history that endure. Why do the Jews need their own country? Are Palestinians a real people? Why don’t the Arab nations take in the Palestinians? Israel has a right to defend itself. Israel is an apartheid state. The United States should call for a ceasefire. The United States should just stay out of it. And the one my close friend calls the shut down argument: If it were up to the Jews, there would be a Palestinian state in the region; but if it were up to the Palestinians, there would be no Jews in the world.

With the contextual essays behind us, let’s get into it.

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In Current Context

Israel’s ethno-nationalism is unique and highly charged. There are nations that are predominantly one religion or ethnicity. Canada is among the most diverse of the western nations in the world, whereas Argentina is one of the least diverse. Rwanda is near the bottom of the list, while Chad ranks among the highest in terms of cultural diversity. But Israel is an outlier in a few ways, as it is a Jewish state by national charter, but there are Arab Christians and Muslims who live within its borders. It’s also true that it is rare for Jews to live in predominantly Muslim nations. After 1948, James Gelvin, author of The Israel-Palestine Conflict writes:

“About 123,300 Iraqi Jews emigrated to Israel. They were joined by 165,000 Jews from Morocco, 88,000 from Egypt, 50,000 from Tunisia, 48,300 from Yemen, 31,000 from Libya, 15,000 from Algeria, 10,000 from Syria, and so on. Jewish communities that had existed sometimes for centuries, sometimes for millennia, disappeared seemingly overnight. By the year 2018, only about 3,500 Jews remained in the entire Arab world.”

Some of the Jews in the Arab nation exodus wound up in other countries, but we backstopped Gelvin’s figures with Khalidi’s from The Hundred Years' War on Palestine in Part Three, noting that 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel after 1948 and another 700,000 immigrated over the next 15 years.

Some might argue that the settler colonial activities of the Zionists created unsafe conditions for Jews in predominantly Muslim countries that viewed the encroachment on Palestinian Arab territories as an affront. Perhaps there’s some truth to this, but to punish all Jews for what happens in Israel is exactly the definition of anti-Semitism. One of the reasons for doing the double deep dives prior to 1948 was to demonstrate that tensions between Jews and Arabs grew in parallel with Zionist activity as Christians, Jews and Muslim Arabs lived in relative harmony under the Ottoman Empire. It’s fair to point out, however, that the Nakba and the aggressive settlement expansion was a point of no return for many Arab leaders.

Much of the migration was facilitated by Israel’s controversial Law of Return, which allows Jews from any nation to immigrate to Israel. Earlier this year, the law came under scrutiny for what is known as the Grandchild clause, that allows anyone with a Jewish grandparent to obtain citizenship. Liberal Israelis have been trying to repeal this clause for years in an attempt to make citizenship and immigration more democratic in Israel. But attempts to change this ran into resistance from the Likud Party and American organizations who sponsor naturalization.

The process of gaining citizenship in Israel is difficult for non-Jews. Difficult, but not impossible. One must be proficient in Hebrew, have received work papers, lived in Israel for at least three years and be willing to renounce citizenship elsewhere. It’s a byzantine process, but who are we to talk?

One of the most persistent talking points is that Israel is the only democracy in the region, which is absolutely true if you are a Jewish Israeli, which I’ll explain. There are several criticisms mounted against this claim, but it should be said that Israelis possess far greater freedoms than its Arab neighbors who operate sometimes brutal regimes that are hostile toward LGBTQ communities and women and basic civil liberties like freedom of speech and religion. So, comparatively speaking, this needs to be factored into the equation.

Apart from the obvious nightmarish existence in the occupied territories, when people speak out against anti-democratic measures in Israel they are sometimes referring to discriminatory practices codified into law against non-Jewish residents and citizens within Israel’s borders. For example, the Knesset’s recent actions to make Israel’s Supreme Court subservient to the legislature caused an uproar among Israelis and put Netanyahu’s new ultra-conservative coalition on the defensive.

In terms of the discriminatory codes, the Council on Foreign Relations points to a database of 65 Israeli laws or codes that are considered discriminatory toward the Arab population of Israel. According to the CFR these codes manifest in ways that promote socioeconomic disparity between the Jewish and Arab populations such as education assistance and discounts for permits for Jews only. Furthermore, similar to the way redlining in the United States has created permanent blocks of poverty, Arabs in Israel are poorer, possess lower levels of education due to underfunded schools and receive inferior municipal services. These are the soft metrics that aren’t spoken about in the discourse.

There are also fewer rights afforded to Arab residents designated as permanent residents, most notably in East Jerusalem, and who are blocked from obtaining full citizenship. So, while it’s true that around 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab and are represented in the Knesset, they are a minority with no real ability to exercise power, especially in an increasingly far-right governing body.

Within the Occupied Territories, things are far more precarious. According to Human Rights Watch:

“In the West Bank, authorities have confiscated more than 2 million dunams of land from Palestinians, making up more than one-third of the West Bank, including tens of thousands of dunams that they acknowledge are privately owned by Palestinians. One common tactic they have used is to declare territory, including privately-owned Palestinian land, as ‘state land.’ The Israeli group Peace Now estimates that the Israeli government has designated about 1.4 million dunams of land, or about a quarter of the West Bank, as state land. The group has also found that more than 30 percent of the land used for settlements is acknowledged by the Israeli government as having been privately owned by Palestinians.”

When Israeli settlements were evacuated in Gaza, it left the territory isolated from Israeli governance and placed it under full military occupation. This isolation led to the surprise victory of Hamas in 2006, which was formed in defiance of the PLO’s acquiescence to UN Resolution 242 during the Oslo Accords. Since gaining the majority and declaring itself independent of the Palestinian Authority, Hamas has turned increasingly militant, and there have been no elections since they came to power.

As we mentioned in Part Three, the Likud Party initially supported Hamas, as did the other Arab states. The Likud Party wanted to split the allegiances of the Palestinian people to minimize the political power of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the Palestinian Authority, and Arab nations saw Hamas as freedom fighting liberators. Hamas would use the funding and support from Arab nations to build social institutions in the public eye while building an armed militant group of 40,000 paramilitary fighters, according to experts.

So, if we examine the territories from a top level perspective, you can begin to conceptualize the stranglehold over the Palestinian territories. The western narrative is that the West Bank is more stable and perhaps holds promise for statehood. But, with more than one-quarter of the West Bank now controlled by the Israeli government and Israeli settlements interconnected throughout the territory, it’s highly unlikely that the West Bank could simply split from Israel. Moreover, as we covered in Part Three, the water supply and electric grid have been taken over by the Israeli government, so pulling this apart would be structurally difficult, if not impossible.

In our interview, Rashid Khalidi recalled a time in the not-so-distant past when residents in the West Bank could travel freely throughout the whole of Palestine and even go to the beaches in Israel. That’s no longer the case. Mobility has been severely restricted, and there are multiple checkpoints throughout Israel and the West Bank. Moreover, with most of Northern Gaza reduced to rubble and Netanyahu declaring full occupation for the foreseeable future, it’s inconceivable at this point that any serious attempt to rebuild a life in Gaza will occur.

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The Chasm Between

When the war in Ukraine broke out, I lost several Unf*ckers who were incensed at my take on the conflict. Personally, I think it has aged well. My argument was that the United States was defending Ukraine “down to the last Ukrainian,” which has since become a familiar sarcastic refrain. By not demanding that the EU and China join us in a call for a diplomatic resolution, it would only serve to destroy Ukraine slowly. Having Russia emerge as the bad guy on the international stage served only our anachronistic Cold War foreign policy views and is based on the fear of not looking strong in the face of Russian aggression.

My assessment hasn’t changed and carries over to the assault on Gaza in response to Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel. You don’t have to like anyone involved in the conflict to understand that we wield tremendous influence over world affairs, with veto power in the United Nations, the ability to impose brutal sanctions and to leverage our exorbitant foreign aid for positive outcomes. But we’re simply not built this way. The last president in the United States to threaten Israel over settlements was George H.W. Bush. Since then, the U.S. government has issued a blank check to Israel, though President Obama attempted to appear stern in the face of Netanyahu’s aggressive settlement stance.

Does Israel have a right to defend itself? Sure. But this is where the dialogue deteriorates rapidly, and the Israeli government knows this. In fact, it depends on it. It took me about 20,000 words to contextualize the Palestinian situation in a way my western eyes and ears could absorb it. But how many people are really paying attention beyond the headlines? Prior to October 7, the Israeli government response to Hamas missiles from Gaza, or just kids throwing rocks, has been brutally asymmetric. But, it was always able to throw it back to Americans especially and say, “What are we supposed to do? Do we not have a right to defend ourselves?”

But when the world saw video footage of Israeli soldiers firing indiscriminately at Palestinian protestors in 2018, something changed. Years of progressives demanding an end to the occupation, a younger generation more attuned to Palestinian suffering than historic Jewish suffering, and the rise of social media began shifting the narrative. In our essay on the divide between Black and Jewish Americans, we talked about Zionist and progressive lines in the sand and how it was creating an unhealthy dialogue.

By pinning the fate of Israel to Jews around the world, it has created a rift between Zionists who defend Israel above all else and secular Jews who are conflicted about Israel’s actions. Forget about Christian evangelicals and their need to stand on the shoulders of dead Jews to be seen by God in the Rapture. There is a crisis of Jewish identity in the United States.

Likewise, it has created an even greater divide between Jewish people and Black and Brown Americans, who find Israel’s colonial attitude toward the Palestinians familiar. We can laugh off Kanye’s meltdown or ignore Kyrie Irving’s blatant anti-Semitic attitude, but we can’t ignore the underpinnings of the sentiment. Black and Brown Americans have been watching and sharing horrifying social media accounts of Israel’s brutality for years. They see a predominantly white authoritarian government indiscriminately engage in collective punishment against Brown people. For the same reason Martin Luther King, Jr. split from LBJ over the war in Vietnam, Black and Brown Americans are leaving Joe Biden over his refusal to acknowledge the suffering of Palestinians.

This has led to a fracture among liberals and progressives who are also hardening their positions. You can’t be a true progressive if you believe Israel has a right to build an ethnic national state. You have to be 100% against Israel always. This has caused a rift between liberal Democrats and progressives, similar to the split between Zionists and secular Jews.

Some might rightfully question what all of this has to do with the United States. Hopefully, it was clear in our prior episodes that the United States has firmly planted its flag on the side of Israel for a few reasons, and that without our support it’s likely that the Zionist experiment might have been very different or even failed outright.

The rationale behind our alliance is murky. It partly developed out of the Cold War when Russia threw its weight behind Egypt. Even President Truman was hesitant about statehood for Israel, and was in fact quite callous about the whole thing. But, between guilt over the Holocaust and pressure from administration officials who pressed for a Jewish state, and the fact that we were unwilling to absorb Jewish refugees, it became the politically expedient thing for Truman to do.

After 1948, Jewish institutions emerged and began to close ranks. They raised significant sums of money for Jewish refugee settlement and to build the Israeli political and military apparatus; American Jews finally had a way to support their fellow Jews. For the first few decades, it felt entirely righteous to back the state of Israel as it clashed with Arab nations in the region. Israel needed us, and we needed an ally in the region as a bulwark against the communists. And since Europe abandoned the Palestinian people and left them without a state, we had no other diplomatic considerations in the region beyond Israel and nations we sought to partner with for oil.

But, with the hard-right turn of Israeli politics in the late 1970s through Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the situation quickly evolved. It pursued settlements in the occupied territories in defiance of U.S. wishes. It tested a nuclear bomb in the south Atlantic without notifying the Carter administration in 1979, in what became known as the Vela incident. Had Carter been re-elected, relations between the U.S. and Israel may have soured, but the Reagan administration fully embraced the far right policies of the Likud Party and, but for a brief moment under Bush senior and limited tension between Obama and Netanyahu, the U.S./Israel alliance has been solid ever since.

Thus, while segments of the U.S. population have begun to question this relationship or decry it in some circles, U.S. policy hasn’t budged. And then, October 7, 2023.

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The Final Turn

The horrific attack on Israeli civilians stunned the world. We’re all now familiar with these events and what happened after. Less talked about is what Professor Khalidi highlighted within Israel. After the initial shock, there was obviously sadness and devastation. But Israel’s media reported the anger that followed in a different way than most western outlets. Israelis didn’t need more ammunition to hate Hamas. Their anger turned toward their prime minister. Already unpopular and clinging to a far-right coalition that frustrated Israeli citizens, the only thing Netanyahu had left in his arsenal of credibility was security. If nothing else, he made good on his promise to keep Israelis safe. He was Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. The man on the wall that you ignore, but you’re glad he’s there to defend you.

The sheen was off and rage flowed in the streets of Israel, alongside pain and sorrow. It was a betrayal. The vaunted intelligence apparatus and unbeatable Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had failed on a colossal scale, and now Israelis live in daily fear. That fear has unlocked that dormant, but never dead piece of Jewish consciousness around the world.

To reclaim its authority and cover for the shame of this failure, Israel is mounting a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza. A term I’ll unpack more in a bit. But that’s not the only focus of their revenge. The Associated Press reported this week that in the West Bank:

“In six weeks, settlers have killed nine Palestinians, said Palestinian health authorities. They’ve destroyed 3,000-plus olive trees during the crucial harvest season, said Palestinian Authority official Ghassan Daghlas, wiping out what for some were inheritances passed through generations. And they’ve harassed herding communities, forcing over 900 people to abandon 15 hamlets they long called home, the U.N. said.”

Nowhere is safe in Israel or Palestine right now. And we’re doing nothing to prevent either the massacre of Palestinian civilians or to assuage the fears of Israelis by showing diplomatic strength in the region. We’re letting it all play out, and here’s how this is going to end.

There will be no Gaza. It will be uninhabitable, and there will be a refugee crisis in the bombed out south of Gaza, in the Sinai and wherever else Palestinians can flee. From here, any number of events can transpire. As we’ve established, the neighboring Arab countries are in no position to absorb a million Palestinian refugees. Egypt has balked at the idea. Syria is barely a country with 7 out of 10 Syrians in need of humanitarian assistance and 5.2 million refugees in the region. Lebanon remains in an economic crisis with a 98% devaluation of its currency and inflation in triple digits. And, as Professor Khalidi stated, Jordan is little more than an impoverished desert territory with a corrupt monarchy that operates a police state.

Those who suggest that the Palestinians should simply give up the cause and migrate to these other nations are blindly out of touch and don’t understand the dynamics of the region.

As for Palestinians of the West Bank, the future looks just as bleak. As we stated, fully one-quarter of their territory has been illegally claimed and occupied by Israel, which also maintains a stranglehold over economic activity and mobility alike. The walls are closing in on all sides, and the United States will sit idly by while it happens. If our intransigence costs the Democrats the election, they will have only themselves to blame. Moreover, it will be the frying pan into the fire for Palestinians if Donald Trump reclaims the presidency. At that point, all bets will be off, and the blood-thirst of the evangelicals will prevail in foreign policy. And Jarad Kushner will attend the ribbon cutting alongside Netanyahu as it forecloses on all of the occupied territories.

But isn’t it possible that the Arab world intervenes, bringing about World War Three?

I doubt it. It’s highly likely that there will be battles and skirmishes. There will be terrorist activity the world over in the name of the Palestinian refugees. Arab states will reconsider normalization with Israel, and the United States may even be drawn into conflict, especially under another Trump regime. But don’t expect the Arab nations to suddenly coalesce, put their historic differences aside and collectively declare war on the state of Israel.

No, all we have to look forward to is terrorism and acts of violence and vengeance.

And then, somewhere down the road in the not-too-distant future, we’ll forget. Because we always do. We’ll recalibrate to the new normal, give up more of our civil liberties, double down on false narratives and convince ourselves there was nothing we could do.

Here are some other unpopular proclamations.

Zionism will have unintentionally made the world more dangerous for Jews.

The Palestinian people will be lost to history within a generation.

Climate change will make this part of the world increasingly unstable and therefore uninhabitable, creating a refugee crisis that will make the Palestinian crisis look small in comparison.

Was this avoidable? Much of it, perhaps. There were competing visions along the way that capitalism and imperialism wouldn’t allow for. Bear with me as I thread a few passages from essays written by Moshé Machover, the last living member of the Israeli socialist organization Matzpen.

At 87, he remains one of the most outspoken Israelis against the Zionist project. Machover foresaw what would happen and campaigned for a socialist revolution that would result in a one-state solution:

“Accommodating both national groups within the regional federal union. The Palestinian Arab people will take its place alongside the other components of the Arab nation. And the Israeli Hebrews can be offered equal membership with full national rights, on similar terms as the the other non-Arab nationalities located within the Arab world (Kurds, South Sudanese)...Will the disposition envisaged here be a one-state or a two-state setup? It will be both and it will be neither. It will be a one-state setup—in the sense that both national groups will be accommodated, as federated members, in one state. But that one state will not be Palestine; it will be a regional union. And it will be a two-state setup in the sense that each of the two national groups will have its own canton (in the Swiss sense) or Land (in the Federal German sense), where it constitutes a majority of the population…Finally, Arab and Israeli socialists have a special historical responsibility. A revolution doesn’t happen by itself; and when it does break out it can take a disastrous turn if it is hijacked by regressive forces. In order to ensure that an Arab revolution can resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the benign way envisaged here, we must start working and organizing now in a democratic and nonsectarian way. We must closely coordinate our thinking, strategy, and activity; and form organizational links on a regional scale, prefiguring the future in the present.”

People close to me have suggested that perhaps I went a little too deep this summer in exploring the history of socialism. I disagree. Our job is not just to rail against what is, but to explore what can be.

Palestine, the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, the Ottoman Empire, Arabia—whatever you want to call it—wasn’t meant to be carved into pieces in smoky back rooms in London or Paris. The culture never fit neatly into imperial designs. The western world has spent more than a century trying to bend this part of the world to its will and put square pegs in round holes in the desert. It never worked, and it never will. The great tragedy is that there were visions, democratic socialist visions that recognized the distinct cultures and religions and valued the inputs of the laboring class.

The British and French saw what could be pillaged from the land and the strategic importance of the ports. The Americans saw what could be pillaged from beneath the soil and stepped into the shoes of the frail European economies after World War Two. We see. We rape. We leave you for dead. That’s what capitalism demands. All for us, none for you. Rosa Luxemberg understood this and was killed for it.

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The Language Of Genocide

I’ll finish by clarifying something I struggled with in Show Notes recently when challenged by an Unf*cker to commit to certain language when describing the assault on Gaza. She said there is no recognized international human rights definition of ethnic cleansing, but there is one for genocide. She’s right. Article II of the Genocide Convention states that it must meet two standards, one mental and one physical. 

The mental element must contain, “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” 

The physical includes five acts:

1. Killing members of the group.
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The UN referred to northern Gaza as a “children’s graveyard.” According to the Associated Press, the Gaza Health Ministry no longer has the ability to track the death toll, leaving it—as of this recording—just north of 11,000 Gazans, one in two hundred civilians, nearly half of whom are children. That’s out of a population where half are under the age of 18.

Language is important. And so I think it’s entirely accurate to call this an unfolding genocide, with the exception of “imposing measures intended to prevent births.” Four out of five.

The other night on CNN, Rami Igra, a former chief of the Mossad, told Anderson Cooper, “the non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip” is really a non-existent term because all of the Gazans voted for the Hamas, and as we have seen on the 7th of October, most of the population in the Gaza Strip are Hamas.”

Cooper had no follow up question or statement for that.

It’s this type of uncritical coverage that will allow for this to play out to its full conclusion in Gaza. Anderson Cooper can muster up crocodile tears on an almost weekly basis. So how come he’s not coming apart at the seams over the fact that now 53 of his fellow journalists have been killed in the conflict? How has the entire media apparatus of the world not called for a general strike to protest the killing of journalists, the most ever recorded during a conflict, and we’re still only several weeks into it?

Because they have names like Mohammed Abu Hatab, Nazmi Al-Nadim, Ahmed Al-Qara, Mostafa El Sawaf, Yaniv Zohar, Shai Regev and Ahmed Shehab. Real names of real journalists. Different from yours and mine, and therefore meaningless.

I come back to where I started.

“This is what you get” is not the same thing as “this is what you deserve.”

The Israeli citizens didn’t deserve to be murdered in cold blood by Hamas.

The Palestinians in Gaza don’t deserve to be systematically annihilated.

Israel doesn’t deserve to be represented by the likes of Netanyahu or Ben-Gvir.

None of us deserves the terrorism, war and refugee crisis that is to come.

But it’s what we get when we value commodities over babies, land claims over human rights and capitalism over everything.

Resources

• Marxists.org: Leon Trotsky on Zionism 
• Council on Foreign Relations: What to Know About the Arab Citizens of Israel
• PBS: Parallel Realities - Resolution 242 And The Aftermath Of 1967 | Shattered Dreams Of Peace
• Wikipedia: Six-Day War
• Opinio Juris: The Biden Administration and the Golan Heights
• Al Jazeera: Mapping Israeli occupation | Infographic News
• Jewish Virtual Library: Vital Statistics: Jewish Population of the World
• Christopher Hitchens on Antisemitism
• BBC News: Golan Heights profile
• The Baffler: Unmaking the Myth of Ben-Gurion
• My Jewish Learning: Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews
• JCPA: Ben-Gurion’s Concept of Mamlahtiut and the Forming Reality of the State of Israel 
• Council on Foreign Relations: The Sunni-Shia Divide
• Council on Foreign Relations: What Is U.S. Policy on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?
• Council on Foreign Relations: How Evictions in Jerusalem Led to Israeli-Palestinian Violence
• NPR: This is how the Republican Party became so strongly pro-Israel
• The Jewish Agency: Modern Zionist Aliyot
  
• The Weiner Holocaust Library: How did the Holocaust happen?
• Holocaust Encyclopedia: The Evian Conference
• Palquest: Interactive Encyclopedia Of The Palestine Question:  Issa al-Sifri
• UN: Faisal-Weizmann agreement/Non-UN document - Question of Palestine
• Palquest: Interactive Encyclopedia Of The Palestine Question: Musa Kazim Husseini 
• Palquest: Interactive Encyclopedia Of The Palestine Question: Great Arab Revolt, 1936-1939 
• Fanack: Historic Palestine: The Arab Executive (1920 -1934) 
• MERIP: Owen, Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine
• MERIP: Conspiracy of Praise
• Just Vision: Izz ad-Din al-Qassam
• The New York Times Archive: The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World since 1948
• Jewish Virtual Library: Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky
• Encyclopedia: Altalena
• Palestine Nexus
• Palquest: Abd al-Aziz Rantisi
• MERIP: The War of Numbers
• The Washington Post: War Casualties Put at 48,000 in Lebanon
• Office of the Historian, Foreign Service Institute: The Reagan Administration and Lebanon, 1981–1984
• Al Jazeera: Who is Israel’s far-right, pro-settler Security Minister Ben-Gvir?
• Blowback: How Israel Went From Helping Create Hamas To Bombing It
• HRW: Israel: Gaza Killings Unlawful, Calculated
• The Hill: Trump on Israel embassy move: ‘Evangelicals appreciate it more than the Jews’
• HRW: A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution
• Pew Research Center: Israel’s Religiously Divided Society
• The Guardian: Red Cross and Vatican helped thousands of Nazis to escape
• Pew Research Center: The most (and least) culturally diverse countries in the world
• Mosaic Magazine: The Looming War Over Israel’s Law of Return
• The Daily: Israeli Citizenship for Non-Jews - Exploring the Naturalization Process
• The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel: Discriminatory Laws in Israel
• Council on Foreign Relations: What to Know About the Arab Citizens of Israel
• Human Rights Watch: A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution
• Reuters: How Hamas secretly built a 'mini-army' to fight Israel
• Human Rights Watch: Israel: Gaza Killings Unlawful, Calculated
• Wilson Center: The US Discovery of Israel's Secret Nuclear Project
• Associated Press: With the world’s eyes on Gaza, attacks are on the rise in the West Bank, which faces its own war
• Council on Foreign Relations: Conflict in Syria
• Reuters: Lebanon economic crisis worsened by vested interests, IMF says
• United Nations: Ethnic Cleansing
• NPR: Half of Gaza's population is under 18. Here's what that means for the conflict
• Mediaite: Former Mossad Chief Makes Shocking Claim on CNN: There’s No Such Thing as ‘Non-Combatant Population in the Gaza Strip’ Because ‘All of the Gazans Voted For Hamas’
• Committee to Protect Journalists: Journalist casualties in the Israel-Gaza war

Sources

• Gan-Shmuel archive via the PikiWiki - Israel free image collection project. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.
• Stamp by Fred Taylor for United Kingdom Government, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.
• Kyle Taylor from London, 84 Countries, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.
• Matt Hrkac from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.