Darryl Cooper — #2 - Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, pt. 2

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): Hey, everybody. This is Daryl Cooper. You're listening to the Martyr Maid Podcast. You're about to hear episode two of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a six-part series on the early history of Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

If you enjoy this

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): series, please do consider subscribing to my Substack page. where I post supplemental writings and exclusive

Speaker 2: podcast episodes that are available only to subscribers for just $5 a month or $50 per year

That is

Speaker 1 (lower-pitched voice): at martyr made dot substack.com. And to all of you who are already contributing, I really appreciate you allowing me to do this. So I hope you guys enjoy the show. Here we go. I'm

content to die for

Speaker 3: my beliefs

So cut off

Speaker 3: my head And

make

Speaker 4: me a martyr The people will always remember

it

Speaker 5: Now They

will forget Hell

Speaker 6: does exist God is a thought God is an idea It

is a

Speaker 6: place It is

Speaker 7: somewhere Hell does exist

We'll be right back. But

Speaker 8: its reference is to something that transcends all things. I'm

asking why we must tear

Speaker 9: ourselves apart for this small question of religion. This

episode

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): took so much longer than I hoped it would. It took so much longer than I

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): expected it would. I've been... Probably 95% finished with it for at least a month. Over a month

But I was

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): stuck. In

my effort to

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): get unstuck, I read probably at least half a dozen whole books that ended up having no bearing on the episode at all

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Good books, but they had nothing to do with this in the end

Often I'll

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): write to help myself

kind

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of worked through my thinking on

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): on certain subjects or issues and so i wrote probably 50 pages of of essays and posts trying to clarify my thinking didn't use any of it

now the

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): history of this period

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the story of the period we're about to cover that part of this episode has been done i wrapped that up ages ago

that's not

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): what was holding me up

See

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): sometimes when I study a topic or get ready to tell a story, there'll be some idea

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): or some question that I just find myself coming back to over and over and over. It starts out vaguely, but eventually it emerges enough that I can start to make out its

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): shape. But what can happen if you're not careful, and I'm almost never careful when it comes to this kind of thing, I'm going to have to get better

at it. is that

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): that foggy question can become a kind of obsession that ends up pulling you away from the story or topic that made you ask it in the first place. And

I kept trying to bring

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): myself back to the history, just buckle down and tell the story. You know, that's why you're here, right? That's why you're

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): listening

Because every time

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): I would try to explain this thing that was eating at me in the context of the episode, to weave it in, it just never seemed to work

Right? Maybe it

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): wasn't working because it's always hard to explain something to someone who hasn't been in your head, right? They're not privy

to your

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): inner monologue, and so they don't know how you arrived at that idea. And it makes perfect sense to you until you start to explain it to somebody else, and you realize that they just don't have the background of why you think this is so interesting or important. That's part of it, but partly I think it wasn't working because even right now, right now as I'm recording

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): this... The idea and the precise ways that it's important to this specific story still aren't completely

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): worked out and elucidated in my own mind. I

finally decided to just hit

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): record and start talking when I realized finally that I don't have to figure it out and explain it to you. I'm not a philosopher or a priest, and I'm not here to lecture anybody. You're not here to have something explained to you

Once I

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): reminded myself of that, I just hit the red button and started talking, and here we are

You know, I'm

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): here because I have questions. And because I hope that this might be a way to find other people interested in some of those same questions, and who might help me work through some of them. You know, that's why I'm doing this. And

so that's how I

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): want to start out this part of our story. I

want to start by

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): asking you a question

and you don't

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): have to answer it right now in fact in fact even if you think you have a clear answer i'm

gonna ask

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): you to just hold on to it for now

and let it float

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): in your mind as we start to move into this part of

our story because it seems

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): like a simple question maybe the simplest question

but many many

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): lives and destinies are going to be shaped by this question

And by

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the struggle to answer it in this first part of the 20th century that we're going to be talking about. I

want to ask you what

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): it means to be a people

And what is the

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): difference between

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): just a crowd of individuals and an army? Or, okay... So what's the difference, say, between the United States of America, right

Speaker 16: and just 300 million individual people living out their lives in relative proximity to each other in the middle of North America? And

what's the difference? And how do you get

Speaker 17: from one place to the other place

For all social mammals, and

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): human beings are ultra-social mammals, so all pre-civilized traditional human societies... Identity is determined by blood. The extended family is the social unit, okay? The clan is what people mean when they say "we." This is easy enough to understand from a biological, evolutionary standpoint

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): right? But to make urban civilization possible, to make any of this that we see around us possible, at some point, groups of people had to make this very complicated

leap from

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): identifying primarily with a kinship group with a biological family to instead identifying with a symbolic family something that can scale see

people don't

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): just say i live in america right it's not

Speaker 19: just a place they say i'm an american but

but what

Speaker 19: does that mean

america is

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): just a symbol it's just an idea Right? It's not the mountains, or the rivers, or the fields, or the lines on a map, or the sum of those things even. It's not even

the people

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): If everyone woke up tomorrow morning and just forgot about it, or decided that there's no such thing as America, then there is no such thing as America. It's gone. It's just an idea. It's

Speaker 19: just in our heads. And yet somewhere between 1776 and today, America, that thing, it became something with a sustainable, independent existence in a way. It became something like a family, a symbolic family, an us, right? Not a blood family, a symbolic

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): family

and an

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): identity to which people gave their loyalty that superseded their identification with their family name

See, there

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): are more people in the United States today, I think Who will say, I'm an American And get real

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): emotional, if anyone has a problem with that Then there are people in the country who will go around saying I'm a Smith, or I'm a Cooper, or I'm a Jackson, or whatever We just don't really do that here anymore And when people do, we kind of look at it as this sort of lower class throwback kind of

thing You know

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): there's this movie, you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, and you shouldn't, I commend you if you don't, but there's this Adam Sandler movie from the 90s, I don't remember what it's called, but there's this big dumb bully, right, and every time he would bully Adam Sandler, he would yell, O'Doyle

Speaker 20: rules, because O'Doyle was his last name, right, and

you

Speaker 10 (lower-pitched voice): probably have no idea what I'm talking about

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): forget it. The point is that

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): most people today in a developed country like the United States, when they see people clinging to a local community, provincial small identity like that they look at it as if there's something that maybe that person hasn't quite figured out yet that the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): rest of us have you know that maybe they're hanging on to something that the rest of us have kind of let go of and transcended

you know i

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): don't mean that people aren't

Speaker 19: loyal to their family members and i'm not talking about being loyal to our family members but to the family

right The

Speaker 19: family is an entity in itself, a body with its own life, where the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): individual members are constituent cells whose interests are subordinate to the interests of the larger whole. That's what I'm talking about. And that's the state of natural man and

Speaker 19: traditional societies. But to anyone in a modern nation state, it's a curiosity. It's a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): throwback. We

see it even

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): romanticized in something like the Godfather movies, and it's still hard for most of us to relate to

It's

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): fascinating, but it's hard to relate to. Part of the reason The Sopranos was so great was because of how it played with the fact that the kind

of

Speaker 19: clan loyalty that's romanticized in the Godfather movies, it just, in reality, has not been able to stick in the United States

It seems

Speaker 19: out of place and anachronistic and kind of ridiculous

But

Speaker 21: why? Why is that

When you look around the

Speaker 21: world

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): today

you'll find

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that civil society... Okay, strong institutions, state legitimacy

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): these things exist almost universally in inverse proportion to the extent that people identify with the Klan and give their primary loyalty to the extended family or the tribe. And

again, the Godfather

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): movies are like graduate courses on this dynamic. I'll use the book, actually. There's a scene in the book, it's in the movie too, but I'll quote from the book. There's a scene where Michael Corleone is explaining

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): to his wife why he has to follow his father

and

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): be loyal and obedient no matter what

now she's a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): regular person you know to whom the laws and norms of the larger society have been fully internalized and so she doesn't understand why michael would follow his father even if it means running afoul of those laws

and so he tells

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): her quote i don't trust society to protect us

I

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): have no intention of placing my fate in the hands of men whose only qualification is that they manage to con a block of

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): people to vote for them

See, in

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): countries like the United States, that enjoy strong

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): legitimacy, whatever we think about politicians or judges or the police or whatever, the essential legitimacy of the system is usually never in question

If a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): terrible injustice occurs in the criminal justice system, say someone is wrongly convicted by a corrupt judge and evil cops, people

will call for

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the injustice to be corrected, maybe for the judge and the cops themselves to be

punished, but

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): no matter how egregious the injustice, you almost never hear someone claim that the system itself has no right to

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): judge him

that

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): our institutions have no right to expect his participation or his obedience

But to

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): people

Speaker 19: like Michael Corleone, whose extended family is an entity

with a

Speaker 19: separate existence and a primary claim on his loyalty, the national institutions of the United States are simply other entities with whom he and his family happen to have dealings. See, patriotism and tribalism are natural enemies

And it's

Speaker 19: not just

a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): binary comparison of, say, the United States over here on one end with its nuclear families and strong institutions and all the way on the other end, Afghanistan with its tribal identities and weak institutions. No, no, no. You can trace that relationship reliably up and down the whole spectrum of nations

Go down to the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): European Mediterranean countries like Spain, Italy, Sicily, Greece. You find countries where the extended family plays a big role, much bigger than the United States or, say, Britain or Scandinavia. But you find states with notorious difficulties with tax evasion and nepotism, corruption, and so forth

And go up to

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Northern Europe. Go to Scandinavia. You'll

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): find strong institutions and families that, well... you wouldn't see a Swedish version of my big fat Greek wedding, right? You just wouldn't. In

the last few

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): years, those countries on the Mediterranean that I listed

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): they've all had huge debt and government finance problems that are directly related to their difficulties collecting

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): taxes

Their tax

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): collection problems can be directly traced to the cronyism and corruption resulting from this complex

Speaker 19: web of personal relationships and family connections that for many of the people in these countries... are simply more real, and more tangible, and more important than the state institutions, and have a greater claim

to their loyalty

Speaker 19: I'm not beating up on the Mediterranean societies, by the way, because

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): there's certainly something to be said for the deep family structures and the intense communitarian relationships you find in these places. But

as we

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): go forward in this story, something I want you to keep in mind

is that It's

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): just important to understand that strong family

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): identity is an obstacle to the construction of larger symbolic identity formations like the nation-state. In

America, we're used to

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): hearing a narrative that puts nationalistic patriotism and family values, quote-unquote

over on the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): same side of the ideological spectrum, but that's only because the battle's over in America

And we've

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): internalized the individualist ethos and the nuclear family structure so

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): thoroughly that national identity and family identity are no longer in competition with each other. The competition's over. Now

you can keep

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): sliding down that spectrum through

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): regions where tribal loyalty and tribal identity are more and more prominent, and in just about every single case... You'll find that that society has had a corresponding amount of difficulty establishing strong, sustainable, you know, independent, legitimate civic institutions. Every

nation, at some

Speaker 23: point, if it's going to be a nation, at some point has to accomplish this gigantic task

of somehow

Speaker 23: getting people to transcend their local ties of blood and instead identify with an

idea of

Speaker 23: Something they can't see, can't touch. And yet that idea has to earn their loyalty to the point that they're willing to leave their home, leave their blood family behind, to go off and fight and die for

it. And again, if

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you live in a place like the United States

we do

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): this all the time. It's how we butter our bread, right? You probably take this totally for granted

You're

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): wondering why I'm spending so much time talking about it, but that's only because this

task, has

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): been so thoroughly accomplished. It

was already

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): mostly accomplished for us by the English and the Dutch and the rest before they ever even got to the New World

And today we hear about

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): the difficulties, right, that the U.S. is having with its nation-building adventure in Afghanistan and how, what's the headline usually

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Something like, Afghan tribalism impedes the formation of the state, right

And, And most

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): people think of that

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): as a sign of sort of primitive backwardness in Afghanistan, even if they're polite enough not to say it that way. But what those people often fail to understand is

that the

Speaker 21: tribalism of Afghanistan is normal. Okay

that's the

Speaker 26: default. And

what you see in the

Speaker 26: United States, that's not normal. If

anyone's ever told

Speaker 26: you that this is normal

Speaker 19: They're lying to you. No matter how much

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): we take it for granted, 320 million unrelated people living together in, you know, relative harmony with individual violent crime but no civil strife to speak of, that is not normal

Figuring out how to get

Speaker 23: non-kin to cooperate in a sustainable way is a basic human social

Speaker 19: equation that very few groups ever solve

Doing

Speaker 19: it on this level has only happened very recently and sustaining it is a balancing act, a very delicate one. In

the U.S., we all

Speaker 19: remember the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): story of the Hatfields and

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): the McCoys in the U.S. I think we hear it as kids. If you're

not from the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): U.S., you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. So the Hatfields and the McCoys were these two families in the southern United States who got

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): embroiled in this decades-long blood

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): feud back in the 19th century

It

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): started over something small, but revenge led to reprisal. A ton of people got killed, and eventually, decades later, these two families are still

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): calling in reinforcements and hiring mercenaries and having basically military engagements, small-scale military engagements, these two families

Now, the very fact

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that most people in the U.S. today still know that story, I think there was a TV movie about it a couple years ago

that tells

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): you something important about

it. It's

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): famous because the very social structures that would allow a generational family feud like that to happen have been pretty much eliminated. So

it's kind

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): of fascinating to watch on TV. That kind of tribal blood feud wouldn't even make the gossip pages in Pashtun Waziristan in 2015. It's

just a part

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): of

Speaker 28: life. And

so how do you

Speaker 28: get different people

who don't

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): identify with each other at

all, Who

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): may even be rivals or traditional long-term enemies to start thinking of themselves

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): to start feeling themselves, to be part of a larger, symbolic family. How

do you get the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): Hatfields and the McCoys to put aside their differences and

Speaker 29: shake hands and say, Well, brother, we're both Americans and there's a war on in Germany, so I guess we've got to end this fight of ours and get over there together. How do

Speaker 19: you do that

that

Speaker 19: sounds silly but but for millions of people in nineteen eighteen this was not a theoretical

question for many

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): people living in the former territories of the empires that had just been

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): shattered by the first world

war it was the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): only question the

russian

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires had just been wiped out, and their constituent peoples had already begun the process of constructing

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): advocating, and fighting over the identities that were going to replace them

The proximate

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): cause of the whole war was rooted in this dynamic

The war was

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): kicked off by the assassination of an Austrian archduke by a young Bosnian Serb who wanted a Serbian national

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): identity apart from the broader empire

The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Russian Empire had been burned to the ground by its revolution, and right at this moment you've got a civil war raging between not only the revolutionaries and the remnant of the old regime, but between different groups of revolutionaries. You've got people fighting for their national independence and identity

and then

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you've got hardcore communists who want to throw out national identity altogether

and

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): replace it with an economic class identity. They see national borders, national identities as just barriers to keep the workers apart from one another. They want only an identity based on economic class. In the Arab world, in the Arab territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire, it's national identity projects, and they're starting up almost from scratch

The

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): Ottomans, they'd ruled Arab lands for hundreds of years, and there had never been

an Arab

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): nation-state, not in the modern sense of the word. There were wide cultural

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): differences between the various Arab regions, though, and so national identities began to take root along those lines. But

it was not

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): going to be easy

If the 20th

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): century taught us anything at all, it

taught us

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): that there's more to building a nation than just running a rag up a flagpole. Wow

the wars and

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): the revolutions of the twentieth century they were about competing identity projects as much as they were about economic arrangements or competition for resources or any of those kinds of things people can live for a long long time in poverty they've done it all through history people will not tolerate living very long at all without a meaningful answer to the question of who

they are when the

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): existing answers to that question fall into doubt

and

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): new answers begin to be offered up as replacements, the transitions bring turmoil, and that turmoil

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): very often turns into chaos

But the Arabs... The Arabs had

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): already seen more turmoil in the last few decades than most people had seen in the last few centuries. As

the Ottoman

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Empire was falling into decline, European colonial powers had begun to move into the lands that the empire formerly controlled

All

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): of North Africa had already come under the control of European empires by the early 20th century

These new

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): colonialists were barely finished unloading their ships when the First World War broke out, and they wasted no time pulling up locals and sending them off to fight in Europe

Most Arabs weren't sure

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): what to make of the whole thing or what any of it had to do with them. I mean, try to imagine. I'll use the example of the French in Morocco. France had only been in Morocco for about two years when the war broke out

The

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): people in many of the outlying villages or in the hills hardly knew who the French were. Many of them didn't know who the French were, and yet after only two years, the French were loading up 45,000 Moroccan Arabs onto ships and sending them off to fight Germany in the trenches of the Western Front. I

mean, can you

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): imagine how disorienting that must have been

Britain and

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): France were both conscripting people from their new colonies and sending them off to die, very often

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): in the front lines, because

Why

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): not, right? Remember, it's the early 20th century, and our thinking on many things is a little bit different, so there's no sense

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): wasting nice young white boys if you can throw some Moroccan or Egyptian Arabs out there to absorb that first volley of German machine gun fire. So

just imagine, just a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): couple weeks ago, or a couple months ago, you were in your village in Morocco, living your life, now you're sitting in a European trench... Covered in mud being shot at by other Europeans in some other trench They all look the same to you for reasons that make no sense to you

Because a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): European country showed up to your home in North Africa and told you that they were in charge and would be needing you to Do your duty as a loyal subject

I think

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Egypt alone sent sent nearly a million men to go fight or work in other capacities for the British Empire during the war hundreds of thousands of whom became casualties Meanwhile on the other side

The

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Ottoman Empire had pressed some

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): 300,000 Mesopotamian and Levantine Arabs into its own army, and they didn't have a choice either

Frequently, the Europeans

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): would send their conscripted Arabs to fight the Ottoman Empire's conscripted Arabs

As you can

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): imagine, many

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): units on both sides objected to being sent

to kill

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): each other because some archduke was killed in Europe

and

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): when they objected too vociferously, they were subjected to the same military discipline as French or British or Turkish troops, as

if

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): they had volunteered for this whole thing. Well, worse, actually, in most cases

Every First

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): World War army executed some people for desertion, sedition

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): or even things like falling asleep on watch. Okay, fair enough, right? Militaries have been doing that since there have been militaries

But for

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): their colonial troops, the Allied... Well... I don't say the Allies, really the French became notorious for this in particular. They

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): brought back the old Roman practice of decimation. If

you refuse

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): your orders or deserted, they weren't just going to kill you

They were

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): going to kill a bunch of other people from your unit. So

you could

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): carry that with you

And again

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): though, you know, war is hell, right? And if you're the French army trying to hold things together as the Germans marched toward Paris, maybe you do whatever you have to

do. But if

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): you're an Arab from North Africa or Syria being pulled off your farm because foreign powers on both sides of a war pressing you into their armies to

fight a war that

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): you don't

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): understand or have anything to do with and you're being told to go kill other Arabs with all the gusto that you can muster or else be executed as a coward and a

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): deserter, again

it was

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): very disorienting for the people involved

You know

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the effect of the First World War on the Arab

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): world is one of the most overlooked aspects of the entire era. So

many pages have

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): been written about the First World War with so many authors looking for some unique angle to present that it's really inexplicable that it's not better known. And for somebody who's kind of an amateur World War I junkie like I've been for a while, once you kind of start to learn about the effect... of

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): World War One on the Arab world and how it's trickled down into the modern era, it really just blows your mind that you haven't heard

more about

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): it. In the region of the Levant, for example, now the Levant, sometimes it's called Greater Syria. This whole area is still under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire during this

Speaker 23: period. In the Levant, the war was a total catastrophe

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Okay, and I know the First World War

was a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): catastrophe everywhere, but in the Levant, it was

just, I

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): mean, it was just a disaster. As

soon as the war

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): breaks out, Turkey installs just a brutal military dictator. They sent him to govern the region of the Levant and to stave off the possibility of any Arab independence movements

Even before

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): the war, there was a lot of this in the air, and they wanted to make sure that they weren't hit by anything from the inside while they were fighting

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the First World War. In Turkey, this man was called Jamal Pasha

but he

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): earned the nicknames

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): the bloodshedder and the butcher among the levantine arabs that he was sent to govern and he earned

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): those

nicknames in

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): addition to having a huge portion of the male population pulled up and pressed into the war by the ottomans the region was swept by diseases several times after the allies brought in hundreds of thousands of colonial conscripts from india and

other places If that

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): wasn't enough, the Allied naval blockade, combined with the interruption of agriculture caused

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): by the war itself, and then a poorly timed drought and locust infestation, a couple of locust infestations actually, a few years in a row, led to a famine of apocalyptic proportions. And this part's controversial, but there is evidence that the Ottoman Empire, and Jamal Pasha specifically, impose the famine on the area

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): of Mount Lebanon, very similarly to the way that Joseph Stalin would later do in Ukraine, partly because they wanted to requisition

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): all available food for the war, but also possibly to suppress any chance of Arab nationalist uprisings. It was a huge concern the Ottoman Empire had during this period, and it turned out rightfully so. This accusation was common for decades after the war, but again, it's highly controversial, along with... everything else having to do with turkey and the ottoman empire during this period so so i'm not telling you that it happened i'm telling you that there is a controversy about it if you're interested i encourage you to investigate it on your own so okay so we we all know how terrible the war was for france and for belgium right for for germany and russia but

beyond

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): the arab rebellion

You

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): know, Lawrence of Arabia and all that. Not a lot of people even know what the Arabs were up to during this period

Well, this

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): famine in greater Syria in particular was devastating. And

don't mistake

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): me

Speaker 19: this was a famine. This was not a food shortage, okay? There are pictures, and they've got everything you're used to seeing and all the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): most infamous and horrific famines in history were

Weak

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): and bony people lying in the streets just waiting to die. You know, skeletal children with the big

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): distended bellies. Women and children digging in fields for insects and roots and everything they can find. I mean, everything. It's horrible

Edward Niccoli

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): was an employee at what would later become the American University of Beirut. And he kept a diary at the time. And

in it

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): he wrote, quote, "'Starving people lying about everywhere

At

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): any time, children moaning and weeping, women and children clawing over rubbish piles and ravenously eating anything that they can find

When the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): agonized cry of famishing people in the streets becomes too bitter to bear, people get up and close the windows tight in the hope of shutting out the sound. Mere babies amuse themselves by imitating the cries that they hear in the streets or at the doors, end quote

Okay, now stop for a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): minute and try to

put

Speaker 23: yourself in that place. Okay, actually stop. Take it out of his diary, pull it out

Speaker 21: of its literary context and just imagine what must have been going on in that community, what it must have been like

Imagine being

Speaker 21: in your house and having to shut up the windows as tight as you can and close the gaps with towels because all day and night there are people moaning and children crying in the streets because they are starving to death. They're

out there

Speaker 21: moaning. Imagine lying down to sleep every night with your belly empty, with your children hungry

and hearing

Speaker 21: non-stop moaning in the streets like it's the zombie

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): apocalypse out there. A

famine is a

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): special kind of disaster

And not to

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): downplay the horror or the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): tragedy of any loss, but say when an earthquake ruins a city and kills thousands, the

shock is

Speaker 23: instantaneous

The

Speaker 23: suffering is acute. It happens, it's horrifying, and then you try to

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): process the loss. Maybe you're successful, maybe you're not. A famine is something else. It just drags on. Starvation gradually breaking people down, reducing human beings who previously had read poetry and worshipped God, turning them into mere creatures

who hunger. And no

Speaker 33: appalling tragedy or act of just ultimate terrible

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): depravity brings the whole thing to a big climax. No, no, no. It just goes on and on and on, breaking human beings

Speaker 34: down. There

are reports of

Speaker 34: cannibalism

Speaker 23: One Maronite Christian priest, he later admitted that a man had come to him to confess that he had killed and eaten his children

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): He

said, the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): psychological impact of going through a period like this not only on individuals but but also on the society is overwhelming

there's a

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): book called bloodlands by by timothy snyder about what

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): ukraine and poland and belarus and the other countries caught between hitler and stalin suffered through during that period

and the first

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): chapter of the book on the famine imposed by stalin on ukraine and and and about

What

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): people did and how they got through that insane

Speaker 21: desperate time, that chapter is so devastating to read that you can't imagine how it's ever possible to come back from it

You read the few

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): pages on cannibalism that took place, and you feel like you need a shower. It doesn't leave you

And we

Speaker 28: weren't there

We didn't

Speaker 28: go through

it. We all

Speaker 28: like to believe

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that we would have been the ones to hold out and keep our dignity and do the right things all the way to the end if we

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): had to. But history tells us that hunger and desperation run deeper than human will. And

there's a point

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): beyond which something far more ancient than our ideals and our considerations of ourselves as moral creatures takes over. At

least it takes over

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): for moments, but a moment is all it needs

You know, the man

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): who confessed to eating his

Speaker 19: children in his delirious, starved madness. When the madness passes, he doesn't go back to being a man who has never eaten his children. You

don't get

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): cured of that. Or

even if you just

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): did something relatively less horrible, like stole the last piece of bread that your neighbor

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): had to feed his starving children because you

needed

Speaker 21: to feed your own starving children

When

Speaker 21: the famine passes, you don't go back to being a person who can pretend that you would never do such a thing

People like to say

Speaker 28: that shared pain can bring out the cooperative best in people

That trauma

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): can bring people together. And it's true. We've all seen minor versions of it. We remember

In the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): United States back to 9-11, right? For several weeks after that. People talk about this still today. How people were

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): nicer to each other in the streets. And people came from all over the country to help out. Everybody went to give blood. It's true

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): right? Collective pain, trauma can bring people together

But only

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): up to a point

And beyond

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that point. In

a place

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that very few of us can even imagine

Human beings

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): are broken

Right? The

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): strong right

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): along with the weak

The Russian

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): writer Varlam Shalomov

he has a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): book called Kolyma Tales. It's about his time in Kolyma, one of the Soviet Union's most infamous gulags. One

of the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): worst places in history for a human being to find himself. And

he wrote about

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): this popular idea that suffering brings people

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): closer together. He said, quote, If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship... Then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great

Whoever thinks

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): he can behave differently has never touched the true bottom of life. End quote

When you've been

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): down to the bottom, that experience doesn't leave you

It's not a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): trauma that goes away

Shalimov had

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): spent years in that darkest place. In

the same

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): book, he talked about... the trauma of having some of his illusions about himself and about his fellow men shattered. He said, quote, There is much that a man

Speaker 23: should not know, should not see

And if he does

Speaker 23: see it, it is better for him to die, end quote

There are things that

Speaker 23: we were never meant to see

And there's

Speaker 23: knowledge that we spend a great deal of energy as individuals

and

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): as societies finding ways to avoid

when our

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): illusions

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): and avoidances break down society itself can break down with them there

are whole

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): libraries of books that discuss how the trauma of the war in europe affected the outlook

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): and the development of france and germany and britain even the united states for that matter

But

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): you'll read

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): dozens of books on the events in greater Syria after the war, and they'll talk about what the Zionists did, and how the Arabs responded to that, and what the British thought about all this

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): and maybe how the French came in and influenced things. And it's very rare that they will even mention the

fact

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): that the native Arabs in the region had just lost more of their population than England and Germany lost during the Black Death of the 14th century. By

the time the war was over and the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): horsemen had run their course

a

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): third of the Arab population of greater Syria was

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): dead. A third

If you know much about

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Stalin's Ukrainian famine in the 1930s and how horrific it was and what it did to those people

that famine

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): killed about a quarter of Ukraine's peasant population

The region of greater

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Syria suffered more dead

Speaker 23: as a percentage of the population than any place on earth during the First World War

The

Speaker 23: survivors were

Speaker 28: profoundly damaged. I

Speaker 35: mean, what does it even mean to have killed and eaten your children? What

does it mean to have the

Speaker 35: knowledge that your neighbor did

Speaker 26: it or that someone in your community did it

And none of us have any frame

Speaker 26: of reference for something like that

When the

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): crisis passes, do you just go back to your life? Do you just go back to work and go buy fruit at the market

Trauma

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): can make otherwise normal human relationships very difficult. We all know that, right? Doctors and counselors often talk about how female rape survivors will often struggle to feel safe around men or to trust them. Often, this is something that they

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): have to work to overcome because it stays with them. Well, Sholomov's book about the Kalima Gulag, it talks about this same sort of lifelong trauma in the sense that it's a sort of eulogy it reads like he's grieving for the loss of a certain kind of innocence when

he says that there

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): are things that a man should not see and if he does see them it's better for him to die

he's not

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): talking about a gory mess or some awful scene of your of your friend getting blown up or something no no he's saying that that once you've seen what men are in extremis

With

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): everything stripped away, once you've seen what becomes of every ideal, when men are dragged below a certain depth, that below that depth is not just a wolf, because a wolf can be romanticized, but a worm. You cannot erase that vision. Shalemov himself was broken by that vision. In Snyder's book, Bloodlands, he talks about the damage that something like this does to

To

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): a people, and to a society, not just physically, but morally and psychologically. His subject

is the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Ukrainian famine, again, but this is standard for any famine of this severity. He writes, quote

The duties of

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): parents could

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): not be fulfilled. Marriages suffered as wives, sometimes with their husbands' anguished consent, prostituted themselves with local party leaders in exchange for a bit of flour. parents even when alive and together and acting in the best of faith could hardly care for children the desperate peasants holding up infants to train windows were not necessarily begging for food often they were trying to give their children away to someone

Speaker 33: aboard a train the good people died first those who refused to steal or prostitute themselves died those who gave food to others died those who refused to eat corpses died those who

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): refused to kill their fellow man died parents who resisted cannibalism died before their children did in

the countryside

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): the healthier peasants formed brigades

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): to collect the corpses and bury them

they rarely

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): had the inclination or strength to bury them very deeply so that hands and feet could be seen above the earth burial

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): crews were paid according to the number of bodies collected which led to certain abuses crews would take the weak along with the dead and then bury them alive

they

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): would talk with such people along the way

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): explaining to the starving that they would die soon anyway so what difference

did it

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): make in a few cases such

Speaker 15 (lower-pitched voice): victims managed to dig their way out of the shallow mass graves in their turn the gravediggers weakened and died their corpses left where they lay as an agronomist recalled the bodies were then quote devoured by those dogs that had escaped being eaten and had gone savage

end quote So how do

Speaker 28: people who have lived

Speaker 23: through this, who

have seen their

Speaker 23: neighbors behave as starving people in a famine behave, who have themselves behaved in such a manner, how do they smile at each other in the streets afterwards? How do they build the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): thousand little daily sinews of trust that it takes to create a civil society? I

asked a

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): moment ago, How you get unrelated people to transcend local identities and pull together under a larger symbolic identity. As if that

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): equation wasn't already difficult enough to solve

How do you

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): accomplish that task with the traumatized people

who have

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): seen firsthand what people are capable

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): of when everything is stripped away

Who don't have the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): benefit of illusions anymore

It's hard to

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): imagine it being possible at

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): all

And

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): yet these were the people crowding the streets to cheer for Emir

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): Faisal I as he installed himself in Damascus

The people of

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): greater Syria were clamoring for the opportunity to be a part of the first independent Arab nation in centuries

Emir Faisal I, son of

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Hussein bin Ali and commander of the Hashemite Arab forces

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): that led the rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, He waved to the throngs of enthusiastic new patriots as he entered the city of Damascus

But he knew that their

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): fight for independence

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): hadn't ended with the defeat of the Turks

Late in the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): war, it had been revealed that the British had made a secret deal with the French and Russians to divide up the Middle East along old-school

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): colonial lines

Today, we call

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): it the Sykes-Picot Agreement after the British and French diplomats who negotiated its terms. And

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): according to Sykes-Picot

The

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): entire northern region of Faisal's kingdom, all of Syria, Lebanon today, northern Iraq, and the northern part of Palestine, all that would belong to the French, either directly or as an

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): exclusive sphere of influence

And the British assured

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): Faisal that the deal with

the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): French was just a wartime expediency and that he was perfectly safe, but he knew the French weren't going to take that lying down

And would

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the British really risk a conflict or even risk an argument with the French just to honor a deal with an Arab ally? Faisal

had other

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): problems brewing as well. In late 1917, even as Faisal's army began its second year of fighting and was pushing into Palestine with General Allenby to help

Speaker 36: liberate Jerusalem, Faisal

learned that

Speaker 36: the British had published the Balfour Declaration, making

sort

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): of ambiguous promises to a group calling themselves Zionists

Yes. And

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): remember, Faisal's family came from the Western Arabian Peninsula, so he had only really heard of the Zionists at this point. And

the Balfour

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Declaration was making these ambiguous promises about establishing a homeland in Palestine for the Jews. Now, Palestine, again, was supposed to be the southern portion of

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): Faisal's kingdom. And

the British

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): assured him that these Zionists were simply looking to immigrate and live alongside the native Arabs. There's no

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): political agenda at all. But many of the Jews who had begun to arrive... They hadn't seemed to have gotten that

message. He

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): began to hear rumors that the Zionists believed that Palestine belonged to them. That they weren't talking about a Jewish home, but about a Jewish state. When he demanded further clarification of British intentions, Britain sent Chaim Wiseman, who was now unquestionably the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): leader of the Zionist movement internationally. They sent him to meet with Faisal to reassure him that the Zionists had no political agenda, no plans for a Jewish

state. Weisman

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): knew that Faisal was in an insecure position. He promised that the Zionists had no political designs in Palestine and were only hoping to live and

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): participate in a society alongside the native Arabs. He convinced Faisal that the Zionists might be able to use their influence to help make sure that Britain kept France out of Syria. If

Faisal needed any

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): more convincing, the British diplomats, Sir Mark Sykes, um of the sykes

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): pico agreement this is a highly placed british diplomat he

was openly

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): talking about this all-powerful international jewish conspiracy and he warned faisal personally quote believe me when i say that this race is universal all-powerful

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): and cannot be put down end

quote and he

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): warned faisal to to give the zionists whatever they wanted Because their agents were to be found, quote

in the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): councils of every state, in every bank, in every business, in every

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): enterprise, end quote

Now, Faisal

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): had enough to worry about

This might

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): have sounded ridiculous to him, but remember, Faisal's from outside the European system

And this is

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): coming from an insider's insider that he's hearing this. Again, he had enough to worry about. These Jews obviously had enough suction with the British government to get the Balfour Declaration

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): out of them, so maybe cutting a deal with Wiseman would help keep him on the good side of the British Empire. It was worth a shot. The two men met as 1919 began, and the Paris Peace Conference was about to open up to discuss the terms that were going to be imposed upon the defeated Central Powers. Faisal and Wiseman agreed that the Zionists would

Speaker 23: immigrate under British supervision

to

Speaker 23: an area that would be now officially demarcated and defined as Palestine

Up to this

Speaker 37: point, there were no borders in the region. They officially marked off where Palestine would be

In their

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): agreement, Faisal would write, "...we Arabs look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement. Our deputation here in Paris is fully acquainted with the proposals submitted yesterday by the Zionist organization to the peace conference, and we regard them as moderate and proper." "We will do our best, insofar as we are concerned, to help them through. We will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home. I look forward, and my people with me

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of the civilized peoples of the world

Faisal's allies in

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Greater Syria started getting very restless at this point

You

Speaker 19: remember, Faisal's Hashemite clan, they weren't from the Levant. They

came from

Speaker 19: the Arabian Peninsula. He was asking the independent tribes of greater Syria to accept his leadership and submit to this new state. The Syrian nationalists had spent the war being tortured and hanged by the bloodshedder's secret police, and they didn't like the compromises Faisal seemed to be making with people that they considered a threat to their independence

Yeah. They were

Speaker 19: trying to tell Faisal that he couldn't

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): trust Wiseman's promises. The Zionists who were coming into Palestine were telling a very different story. Just

after Faisal

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): reached his agreement with Wiseman, the Arab mayor of Jerusalem at the time had a run-in with the head of the Zionist commission that kind of gives you an idea of what they were so worried about. The

head of the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Zionist commission, a man named Menachem Ussishkin, he had come for a scheduled meeting with the mayor

After

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they exchanged greetings, Usyshkin came right at him, partly to get an answer to the question and partly to judge the mayor's reaction. He came right out and demanded to know, quote, How is it that the streets are so full of potholes and thick with such awful dust? I'll let historian Tom Segev tell the rest of the story. Quote, The mayor explained that the city engineers were unable to pave the streets with asphalt because the streets were not flat. "'Furthermore, asphalt is dangerous,' he said, "'because people and animals could slip on it. "'Usishkin would not let up. "'Certainly it must be possible to level the roadbed,' he said. "'The mayor explained that there was no

money.' "'Then

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): the mayor asked how things were going at the Paris Peace Conference. "'Usishkin said that there was still no treaty, "'but everything was pretty much settled. "'Syria would be put under French protection, "'and Palestine would remain with the British. "'The

Arabs will

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): not consent to that,' the mayor responded.' Look, I said everything is settled, Usishkin repeated, and mentioned that Prince Faisal had already agreed to the Jewish national home in Palestine. As

far as the mayor

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): was concerned, the Arabs in Palestine had not authorized Faisal

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): to make concessions in their name. He had nothing against the Jews, he said. Those who already

lived

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): in the country were welcome. But the Arabs opposed the immigration of more Jews. He tried to explain to Usishkin that style was important

The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Zionists did not understand Arab culture, he said, and they spoke to the Arabs in a contemptuous and patronizing way

And now

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): this is me talking again. Keep in mind that this is only a few months after the end of the war, and Jews still only make up about 8% of the population of the country. So keep that in mind as you go forward

this

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): is back to segev usishkin did not deny that jews had injured arabs he said these things could be resolved

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): but on no account would the jews concede their national demands there was no room for compromise we do not want war he went on in fact we are doing everything to prevent war yet the jews are not afraid of war he said if it is necessary As his excellency knew, Ussishkin told the mayor, the Jews were currently equipped with everything needed for war. A war would hurt both sides, but the Arabs would suffer more, end quote

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Ussishkin's a very interesting guy who doesn't pull punches, as we'll see more of that in a moment. Remember, that just blows me away that he's coming into the Arab mayor of Jerusalem when there's still only 8% of the population of the country and talking like that

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): It shocked the mayor, too

It kind

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): of gives you an idea of how assertive the Zionists are becoming at this point

In the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): first decade or so of the 20th century

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): the Jews who were moving into Palestine were they were purchasing land and setting up their settlements mostly in out-of-the-way locations to avoid arousing the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): suspicion of the Arabs. This was a strategy that the Zionists talked

a lot

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): about. But the announcement of the Balfour Declaration had changed

things. Chaim

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Wiseman was still calling for caution, he had the long-term vision in mind, but Wiseman wasn't in Palestine and he couldn't keep a leash on everyone that was. The way the Palestinian Zionists saw it, the big bad boot of the British Empire was going to come kick in the door of Palestine and let them in, so it didn't matter what the Arabs thought anymore. An American commission that was charged with looking into the situation in the former Ottoman territories arrived right around this time and it had a pretty standard experience

They write

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): about how they went into their project predisposed toward the Zionist cause. Until arriving in Palestine, the American commissioners had only heard the curated version, the safe statesmanship of Chaim Weizmann

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): as he called it. But in Palestine, they found something completely different. They found Zionists with very different

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): expectations

And the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): commission's report is so interesting because it's an official document for consumption by international panels and all that, but it registers their shock at finding that the Zionists in Palestine were looking forward to, well, as they put it, quote, they were looking forward to a complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, end

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): quote. And

so the report

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): denounces the Balfour Declaration, calls on President Woodrow Wilson to oppose it

But before

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): the report can be circulated through the wider American government and published, Wilson suffers a stroke, goes into seclusion for the rest of his presidency, and

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): it never gets pushed. Whatever Wiseman was telling Faisal, his allies in Palestine were seeing what this American commission was seeing

They were

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): seeing Zionists

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): out in the streets, holding parades and rallies, celebrating the Balfour Declaration and circulating pamphlets and giving speeches that were openly talking about Palestine being taken over altogether and made into a Jewish state

There were

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): groups of Zionists conducting military drills in the streets of Jerusalem

Speaker 19: and no surprise, the Arabs were starting to freak

out. So Faisal's

Speaker 19: allies are urging him to take this seriously, but

Speaker 28: he's got a lot of plates up in the air. Anyway, how seriously could he take it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Whatever Mark Sykes said about the Jews' international power, they still only made up less than 10% of the population

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): right? What harm could it really do to throw Wiseman a bone? Faisal hadn't committed to anything specific, and if the Jews really were up to something, they were still only 10% of the population. If they became a problem

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): he could cross that bridge when he

came to

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): it. Right now he had more immediate problems

Right

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): now, he had to deal with the French

See, it

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): was becoming apparent that whatever the British said about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the French considered the deal

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): binding, and the French were not about to back down. In four years, the three richest countries in the world literally bankrupted themselves, producing munitions and launching them at each other as quickly as possible

More of

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): that carnage rained down on French soil and on French people... than anywhere else in the world. When the war started, there were about 8.7 million men aged 20 to 50 in France, about 8.7 million military-aged males. By the war's end, France had suffered about 6.2 million killed or

wounded. So

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): when the peace was settled, France expected to get something

out of it. In

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the British had agreed that France would get

Syria, and the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): French weren't interested in whatever side deals Britain may have made with the leader of some desert tribes. In

late 1919, the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): British told Faisal that they would be pulling their troops out of Syria

leaving him

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): defenseless and ceding the territory to the French

During the war, the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): British had made these conflicting

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): promises, openly conflicting promises, and they knew they were conflicting. They made them to the French, the Zionists, and the Arabs

Well, if

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Faisal had been fooling

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): himself into believing that the fact that the land in question was Arab land meant that the promise to the Arabs would matter more to the British than their promises to wealthy European Jews or to the Republic of France, well, as David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of Britain at the time, said

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the friendship of France

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): is worth ten Syrias. So

of the three promises

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): made, the French and the Zionists would both get their wish. When

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): push came to shove, the Arabs were voted off the island. And

if they

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): wanted to protest, but it's our island, well, welcome to colonialism. Make yourself comfortable, because you're going to be here for a while. Faisal

had been

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): betrayed. There's no other way to put it

Now looking

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): back, most of us think what he was probably finally thinking in that moment. Of course he

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): was betrayed. Of course the British took sides with the French and the European Jews and threw the Arabs under the bus. What did he think was going to happen

He might

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): have been upset about it, but he also knew that he had no choice but to take the advice of the British and try to deal with the French. Any

force he

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): could muster would stand no

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): chance against just a few divisions of the French army. And

so in January

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): 1920, they agreed to terms which stated that Faisal would remain in

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): power, and

even that

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): the French would not station a large permanent military force in Syria as long as

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): French advisors were the only ones influencing policy

Well

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Faisal's allies weren't

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): having any of that. Faisal agreed to it. They weren't letting that go. Remember, Faisal's Hashemite clan was, again, from the Arabian Peninsula. So he's expecting the tribes and cities of the Levant to pledge their loyalty to him. And

more than

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): that, he's

Speaker 19: asking them to give up a lot of autonomy and submit to a state government that he would be running

But they

Speaker 19: knew colonialism when they saw it, and they

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): hadn't just fought a war against the Muslim Ottoman Empire

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): to just hand Palestine over to the Zionists while the rest of Syria became another French colony, with Faisal as their puppet. They

would have

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): been better off under the Turks. The

French and

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): British did try to soften the blow. See

they knew

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): that the world had

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): changed in the last four years. Old-school, ass-kicking colonialism wasn't as simple as it used to be. For

one thing

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): you had the Americans, the... annoying, self-righteous Americans who wouldn't stop talking about it, and they didn't like it. And the British owed the Americans a lot of money, so you kind of had to listen to them, at least a little bit. And

the French and

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the British also found that even their own populations had begun to sour on just straight up dominating and exploiting other people

You

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't just go around kicking in doors and barking orders

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): like the good old days. They had just spent four years pumping their own people full of propaganda about how that was the kind of behavior that only the evil Germans engaged in. Civilized nations like France and

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Britain just didn't do that. I

mean, they're still

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): totally going to do that, obviously

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): but they just have to put some lipstick on it first. The

lipstick that

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they came up with was called the Mandate System

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): In a nutshell, it went like this

The

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): former territories of the Ottoman Empire aren't ready for self-government yet. They have no natural leadership structures and no experience building institutions. And

so the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): brand new League of Nations determines

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): well, the French and British decided that the League of Nations would determine, that the victorious allied nations would receive mandates to act as custodians of the various territories to shepherd the people along to eventual independence. Can you

Speaker 19: isn't that nice of them? Man, I'll tell

those

Speaker 19: French and British are just such

Speaker 39: sweethearts they're always looking out for the little guys around the world with all the financial problems they're having after the war they're just going to donate their time and resources to help the little Arabs learn the art of independent self-government

Speaker 40: wow

if you

Speaker 40: buy that I recommend letting someone else

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): handle your finances the Arabs didn't buy it

they knew

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): how the game worked they've been going on a long time by this

point When the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Europeans established a colony, they didn't just come in with a huge army and put a white guy in a powdered wig on the throne. Come on now, that's crude. We're much more sophisticated. Every good colonialist knows that you find some local

who will

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): play ball with you, leave them on the throne for appearances, and then control the country through him. In

the late

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): 1800s, the British controlled India, a nation at the time of about 300 million people. They controlled it as if they had owned it for a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): thousand years

You know

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): how many administrators they had in-country pulling the strings of that nation of 300 million

About a thousand. The only way you

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): conquer a whole country and then control it in a sustainable manner, at least reasonably

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): sustainable manner, with a thousand administrators is by not letting the people know

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): that they've been conquered or that they're being controlled. At

the very

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): least, you try to make it seem like it was

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): their idea, or maybe that it's in their best interest

well at the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): end of the first world war we're closer to the end of the age of colonialism than we are to the beginning this kind of thing has been going on for a long time and people

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): are starting to catch

on and so

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): when the french and british

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): showed up with their mandates the arabs had no illusions about what was

going on i

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): mean the sykes pico agreement spelled it all out in case there

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): were any lingering doubts france and britain would retain all rights of development exclusive financial interest and control over resource exploitation

and

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you would keep an Arab chief around for appearances. It was all written down. Well, Faisal's allies had had

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): enough at this point

He was

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): just too willing to compromise when time and time again the Arabs had been taken advantage

of

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): First he trusted the British, then he compromised with the Zionists, and now he's negotiated a deal with the French. And where was any of this flexibility getting

them? The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): French

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): couldn't care less about their agreements with the British

They

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): weren't even bothering to pretend that this was an equal partnership. The post-war French were in a foul

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): mood, to use the understatement of the century, and they hadn't come to Syria to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): collaborate or take requests. They'd come to give orders. Faisal's allies demanded that he renounce the agreement with the French immediately

and at this

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): point he had no choice

He was on the

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): verge of facing open revolt in his own ranks

so he

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): withdrew his agreement and demanded that the French leave Syria

That

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): wasn't going to happen, so confrontations began to take place between local Arabs and French

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): troops. And when violence started to break out, this just reinforced the fact to the Arabs that all this talk, all these negotiations with the French, with the Zionists, they weren't negotiations at all

They were

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): just a fig leaf. They're basically just saying, "Look, we can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way. As long as you do what we say, we're negotiating. The minute

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you try to resist... we don't recommend it with mounting alarm and resistance from the arabs weisman and other zionist leaders try to get out in front of the

message you

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): know they don't want the british government realizing that this might be more work than they thought it was

going to be the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): british army's chief political officer in palestine was a zionist sympathizer and he was doing his best to kind of conceal what was going

on

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): at the time he knew better than most people that the british might

have

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): expressed support for Jewish immigration, but the empire had no intention of alienating the whole Arab world by smashing through Palestine to force the Zionists on them

The American

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Commission, coming through right around this time now, they were hearing from British military officers in Palestine that they

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): were going to need at least 50,000 troops to even get the Zionist project off the ground

Most of the British

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): government wanted nothing to do with that

Weisman had

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): been promising that there would be no problems, that the Arabs were happy with the arrangement

The majority

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): of the British

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): government thought of the Balfour Declaration as a commitment to facilitate an essentially peaceful process. Not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they didn't want the kind of trouble that was already beginning to become associated with

it. So the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): army political officer knew that it was important to keep that illusion

up. And to

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): that end, he had been advising the British government to keep the Arabs in the dark about the plan to begin implementation of the declaration. He explained to London that there were unfounded rumors being circulated around Palestine, among the Arabs, about what exactly the Balfour Declaration meant. So there was no reason to arouse their opposition by making some big announcement about it. Just start it. There's no reason to talk about it. But on February 27th. a British major-general

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): who was sympathetic to the Arab cause, he let the cat out of the

bag. He

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): published a proclamation in Palestine's major-Arab-language newspaper that the Balfour Declaration would begin implementation

immediately. And

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): what happened next is one of those situations, there's a lot of these in history, that at the time probably seemed to happen as a result of several misunderstandings and bad breaks

But

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): looking back on it today, seems almost inevitable

In the months

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): after the British

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): handed Syria over to the French, it's just chaos, especially in

the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): border region between the two zones, northern Palestine and that border with Lebanon and southern Syria on the French side. It's just chaos

To the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): point that it gets very difficult

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): to even keep up with everything that's going on and what game each individual group is running on the others and who's on whose side

And I

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): always think that if anything in any historical story is

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): confusing for me, if it's hard for me to keep up with, with all the sources laid out in front of me on my desk and, you know, the work of a century's worth of brilliant historians all pouring through it and giving me their best summaries of the whole situation

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): if it's still confusing to me

then I

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): can't imagine

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): how in the fog of the present moment it must have been for the people who were trying to sort out everything that was going on on the ground in real time back then. Okay, for starters, the French and

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): the British are arguing over exactly where this new border between French Syria and British Palestine

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): is going to be. As they move it north and south, the Zionists are moving with it and setting up border outposts. See, every time they move the border north

that's

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): expanding the british zone of influence expanding palestine basically at the expense of lebanon and syria the zionists obviously want this for their own reasons but the british want more territory to to influence and control as well so there's probably a strategic alliance between the zionists and the british here thinking that you know if the zionists set up jewish settlements as far north as possible the french probably aren't going to ask

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): for that territory back Because there are already Jewish villages there, the British are the ones who are in charge of this whole Balfour Declaration Jewish homeland thing, so it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): should probably just go to the British. It was probably, you know, a strategic move between the British and the French, having very little to do with the actual Arab communities in question, but it's leading to a lot of friction with the Arab communities in that region. And

so you've

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): got tension building from

that. Then

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you've got Bedouin fighters and other Arab irregular fighters

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): who are loyal to Faisal coming down out of the hills and out of the desert to harass the French army forces who have been coming into the country, starting to pile up. The French army forces, for their part, are barging into Arab villages and Jewish settlements, by the way, to bivouac and camp out and take supplies. Well, to ratchet up the distrust even more... it's starting to become very hard to tell which of these villages are helping the french willingly and which ones are being forced you

know the arabs are

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): already suspicious of the jewish villages for for obvious reasons suspicious that they're going to be helping the french but that

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): wasn't all

some arab

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): christians mostly in lebanon um but also in other areas but mostly focused in lebanon were siding with the french the french had a long history in lebanon

and

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): some of the people there not all for sure but some of the people there were not unhappy to see them at least

so arab

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): patrols began to raid and search villages arab and jewish villages that were suspected of possibly providing support to

the french meanwhile

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): you've got zionist militias forming up in several towns We mentioned this a moment ago. They're collecting weapons and training so that by this time you've got, in Jerusalem alone, you've got some 600 Jewish fighters performing regular military drills and training routines in the streets of Jerusalem

The British

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): military is supposed to be de-escalating the situation and keeping the peace, and this kind of thing drove them insane. I'm

sure you

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): can imagine how well it went over with the Arabs

The whole

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): border region where control is disputed

is

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): just becoming confusing and chaotic again. You know, this is not the internet age or the age of the 24-hour news cycle. Rumors and word of mouth are the primary source of information for huge numbers of

people. And

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): rumors were rampant. It's hard to tell who's on

whose side. You

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): know, again, there are Arab villages supporting the French. French troops are using Arab villages and Jewish villages to camp and resupply. No one knows which of these villages are being compelled and which ones are collaborating willingly

there's

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): even evidence that the british were helping to supply the arabs and providing them with intelligence in order to undermine the french

you know

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they were allies but the war is over so there's a little healthy competition going

on again and

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): although it was in defiance of the official policy of the british government you've got british military officers on the ground in palestine many of whom fought alongside faisal and his troops during the war and were sympathetic to the arab

cause

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): who were reportedly passing messages to him that if only he could hold on to a unified Syria for a little while

just for a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): little while against the French and the Zionists, maybe the French would get tired of this business and just cut an easier deal with the British, giving the British a larger zone of influence. And maybe the British would step in and recognize Syria's nominal independence under loose British supervision

Now this is

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): something that even Faisal's allies probably would have accepted. They wanted total independence, they would have preferred that, but most indications we have today are that most of them would have settled for partial independence under the British. They

at least had a

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): good working relationship with the British, especially with the British military officers who were in-country. So

if the average

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): person on the ground

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): British, Jewish, Arab, the average person holding a rifle on watch or patrolling a road, it's just

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): hard to know what's going on, who to trust. As you come upon somebody on the road, it's hard to know whose side this person is on

Well, once the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): border between British Palestine and French Syria is finally settled, the Zionists have a Russian Jewish military veteran named Joseph Trumpledor head on up there to take control

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): of the settlements and reinforce the frontier defenses. Trumpledor was a dentist by training, but he had more than a little experience with this kind of

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): thing. So he gathers up some men and some supplies and he rides up to Galilee. Trumpledor is from the Caucasus region of Russia, down toward Chechnya, Dagestan, that whole

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): region of southern Russia. I mean

if you

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): know anything at all about that area, the people there are just hard as nails. They just make a different kind of white people down there. They might have the single highest concentration of stone-cold badasses of any place on the planet, honestly. Well, apparently they make their Jews pretty tough, too, because Trumpledor was just... He was as hard as they come. Okay, the guy was an animal. I

mean, how

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): do I even describe this guy? Okay, so Trumpledor had been an officer in the Russian army before coming

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): to Palestine, right

The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): army of the late Russian Empire was

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): notorious for suffering from terrible morale because it consisted mostly of conscripted peasants who weren't happy about being pulled off their farms and sent to fight for the Tsar

But when the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Russo-Japanese War broke out in the first years of the 20th century, Joseph Trumpledore didn't need to be conscripted. He didn't need to be ordered or asked to do anything

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): He marched right in and volunteered for the front-line shock troops. He wanted to

fight. you know

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): he grew up just like a lot of jews not just in you know anti-semitic southern russia but jews had to deal with this all over europe and in the united states as well anywhere they were they he grew up listening to these stereotypes about jews being

Speaker 19: these brittle little urban weaklings and unreliable cowards and basically he just wanted to tell everybody exactly where they could stick

that

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): stereotype and what they could do with it that's what a huge part of A lot of what his character was about. That's just who this guy was

During the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Japanese siege of Port Arthur, during that same war, Trumpledor took a piece of shrapnel, lost his left arm

After a brief

Speaker 19: period of recovery, he goes in and tells his commanders he's ready to be put back on the battle line

And he's not

Speaker 19: asking to remain in service

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): He wants to fight

And he

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): doesn't have a left arm, so initially he's refused, and they tell him to go home. They gave him a medal, and

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): you know, thanks for your service, but go on home. Or, you know, if you're going to be stubborn about it, at least take an admin position or a rear echelon role, you know, we'll put you in a training position

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): or something. But his reply is famous. He's supposed to have said, "But I still have another arm to give the motherland." That could be a total legend, but nobody challenges it, really

because... And

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): honestly, it wouldn't surprise anybody if it was true right down to the letter, because it fits everything else we know about this guy. You know, sometimes you hear a line like that coming out of somebody's mouth in history, and you're kind of like, well, maybe, maybe not. Nobody would be surprised if that was exactly what he said, maybe with a few expletives thrown in there. It's just who this guy was, okay? So you can't waste a guy like that. The Russian officers were at least smart enough to know that. And so with only one arm, they hand him a rifle and put him back out on the

line. When Port

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Arthur finally

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): falls to the Japanese, Trumpledor becomes a Japanese prisoner of war

Now this

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): isn't like being a Japanese prisoner of war in the 30s or 40s, but it's still not at the top of anyone's list of desirable vacation

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): destinations

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): okay? I don't know how you would handle Japanese captivity. I have doubts about how well I would fare, but you and I probably aren't Joseph Trumpledor

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): While he

was a

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): prisoner, he goes around and seeks out and begins organizing other Jewish POWs. He finds about 500

of them. He

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): creates an underground newspaper, starts circulating it

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): around, and it talks about Zionist news and activities. He organizes classes for these Jewish groups on the geography of Palestine, starts preparing them for the possibility of moving into Palestine. He

organizes other

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): classes on Jewish

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): history and literature. This is all while he's still in Japanese captivity, okay, with only one arm. By

the time the war ends

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Joseph Trumpledor is the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russian history

he's the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): first jew to ever receive an

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): officer's commission in the russian army so

he more than

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): fulfilled that initial goal he had when he enlisted because even the most anti-semitic russian military officers can't say anything to him they they admired him they treated him as an equal

so after the war

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): trumpledore realizes that he's not going to make much of a dentist with one arm

so he

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): studies law for a while that's not really his speed finally he gathers

up a group of

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Zionists, and leaves for Palestine in 1911

And when he

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): gets there, a few years later, the First World War erupts and... Oh, did you think his

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): glory days were over just because he was the most decorated Jewish soldier in Russian history? Please. No, no, he's just getting started. So the First World War erupts, and the Ottoman Empire is not feeling particularly charitable toward Russian nationals in their territory, especially decorated Russian military veterans, so Trumpledor's got to get out of there. He flees to Egypt

He

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): sets up a unit called the Zion Mule Corps to fight for the British army. Now

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): the Zion Mule Corps is considered to be the first all-Jewish military force since the Roman exile almost 2,000 years ago. It

was under the overall

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): command of a British army officer, but this is Trumpledor's unit. The unit took part

in the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Gallipoli campaign against the Ottoman Empire, that infamous Allied disaster. Okay. and when they arrived to the battle, it was just bananas. They're forced to land under heavy artillery and small

arms fire. A

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): guy like Trumpledor, I guess, doesn't even bother interrupting his nap until the shells are a few yards away, because at Gallipoli we see the same guy that we saw in the Russo-Japanese

War. He's

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): shot through the shoulder during the fighting, but, I dunno, apparently anything less than losing a limb is beneath his notice, because he refuses to leave the battlefield, even under direct

orders. His

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): commander was just blown away. The British commander who was overall in charge of the unit. Later on he wrote, "Many of the Zionists, whom I thought somewhat lacking in courage, showed themselves fearless to a degree when under heavy fire

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): while Captain Trumpledor actually reveled in it. And the hotter it became, the more he liked it." End quote. So this is... I should just stop the podcast and make a five-hour podcast about Joseph Trumpledor, but I won't. Maybe later. See, he's more than up to the task of going up to the north of Palestine and organizing the defense of a few frontier settlements against sporadic Bedouin raiders, okay? This is small potatoes for him

Well, on March

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): 1st, 1920, that's going to be put to the test. A

band of Arab

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): militia approach the frontier settlement of Tel Hai. They're demanding to search the premises for French soldiers

As soon as

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): they demand entry, a Zionist guard fires a shot to the air to alert Trumpledor, who's at a nearby settlement, telling him to bring reinforcements as quickly as possible. Trumpledor mounts up with several militia and rides to the scene. They try to deny the Arabs entry, but the Arabs outnumber them, so an Arab search party forces its

way

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): in. As they conducted their search, there's some confusion and controversy over what happened

next. one

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): version is that a jewish guard accidentally

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): fired his weapon another is that a jewish woman who was in a house she didn't know that any of this was going on and she was startled when she sees an armed arab enter her home so she grabs a gun and shoots at him whichever version is correct the results the same everybody starts shooting

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): the arab

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): search party

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): believing that they'd come under attack they're running through the streets until they're finally able to barricade themselves off in one section of the village

The leader

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): of the Arab search party starts talking to all his people and he realizes that this has just been some kind of a mistake, so he calls out that there's been

a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): misunderstanding and he asks the Jews for a ceasefire. The Zionists agreed, and as the Arabs are retreating out of the village, they're making their way to the gates, one of the Jewish gunmen apparently hadn't received word that there

was a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): ceasefire, at least that's how the story goes, and so he begins shooting at the Arabs again

They

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): return fire and they flee the town, eventually making it out to rejoin the main force. Well, now they think that they've been tricked and ambushed after an agreed-upon ceasefire, so they're furious. They get together with the main force and they prepare a counterattack. They also think that maybe the reason they got shot at twice is because this settlement actually is hiding something. So they launch an attack. They assaulted the walls of the compound as the Zionists fight back from defensive positions and sniper nests

When

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): finally the smoke clears and the Arabs pull back, they're dead on both sides. Although the numbers depend on who you read. The most common number is that eight Jews and five Arabs were killed, with more wounded on both sides. But Israeli historian Benny Morris reports in his book Righteous Victims that six Jews and "dozens of Arabs" died and more were wounded. So you can take that for what it's worth. Let's just say at least a half a dozen on each side died and a few dozen were

wounded. As the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Arabs are regrouping and deciding how to proceed, the Zionists look at their position and they realize that it's untenable, so they back out and abandon the outpost. Now

as you can

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): imagine, every single detail of this incident is controversial and emotionally charged. In fact, I should probably just put a disclaimer at the beginning of this episode to say that this is the case for every single part of this entire story. But

I would

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): still say it here because it's important. this is a watershed moment in the relationship between the two groups this is this is an important point where something changes

for good zionist

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): historiography insists that this supposed search party was only using that excuse to harass and rob the jewish settlement

the arab

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): versions often say that the shots fired by the zionist after the ceasefire were an attack not

a mistake why it all

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): started and how it proceeded is murky No one really knows exactly what happens, but in this part of the world, back then just as it

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): is now, there seems to be like a force field around it that repels any kind of ambivalence or any grey areas at all. Everything is black and white

So it wasn't a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): week before the Battle of Tel Hai was being mythologized by both sides

Among the Jewish dead was

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the old warrior Joseph Trumpledor, shot in the hand and the belly

he had been

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): evacuated with the rest and he wouldn't die until later on that night and as he was bleeding out someone is supposed to have told him that his wound was likely

fatal there are a

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): few versions of his reply but the most common is never mind it is good to die for our country those words would stay on the lips of zionists for decades they would become a slogan almost Trumpledor was a hero, the first Jewish martyr in their fight for Palestine

And this was the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): first major engagement between the Arabs and the Zionists. So it sent shockwaves through both communities

Up until this

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): point, many Zionists had been in a state of denial almost about the natural antagonism between their goals and

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): the political rights of the Arabs. There were things they just did not want

to face. There had

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): been Zionist leaders who were trying to tell their fellow Jews that there was a conflict approaching. That

the creation of the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Jewish homeland was not compatible with the Arabs' hopes for political independence. But a lot of people just didn't want to hear that. The

American Commission

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): had said the same thing in its report, but that report was squashed. So up until this point, Arab opposition to Zionism, while it was ubiquitous and strongly felt, and everyone knew that... It wasn't felt by most

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Zionists to be an imminent threat, requiring immediate direct action. Only a few months before this fight

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): some Arab militias were approaching these same Jewish settlements to offer them an alliance against the French. Remember, Chaim Weizmann had sold Zionism to Faisal in the first place by telling him that the Jews were hoping to work with their Arab neighbors to build up this independent country, so some of the Arabs tried to tell the Jews that maybe they both had a common enemy in the French

The French

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): weren't going to be any more interested in the Balfour Declaration

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): than they were in Arab independence. So if you guys really want to help build a country with us, start right now. Help us stand up to the French. Well

of course, the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Zionists wanted no part of that. The

Arabs were out

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): on their own, but the Jews knew that they were safe under the protection of the British. So there wasn't this clear idea, among all of the Arabs at least, that the Jews were the enemy up until this point

Well

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): any ambiguity in their relationship evaporates after Tel Hai. This first battle, and it was really a gunfight between a couple of gangs, but we'll call it by its

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): mythological name, the Battle

of Tel

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): Hai, it's really a microcosm of the entire history that follows right up to the present

day. I'm

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): talking about the way the incident was understood and the way it was treated by each side after the actual event was over

After

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the battle, both sides go their separate ways, and their separate versions of what happened go with them

The Zionists

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): brought back stories about how they were

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): minding their own business after declaring neutrality regarding the dispute between the Arabs and the French, and then along comes this group of armed Bedouin and Shiite militia demanding to invade our homes supposedly

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): to search for French soldiers

And

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they forced their way in, barging into houses and shouting, and naturally they frightened someone into firing the shot which started the firefight

After we gave

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): them a fair chance to retreat, they took advantage of an honest

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): mistake by one of our defenders to regroup and attack our settlement and do what

Speaker 33: they wanted to do all along

Well, if I was a

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Zionist in Jerusalem and I wasn't there, and I heard that story from ten different people

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): I'd be pretty upset

Okay. But while the

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): story of Joseph Trumpledor's heroic sacrifice in defense of the plucky pioneers of Tel Hai was spreading among the Jews, another version of the story was making its way through Arab villages and towns. They

were saying that the

Speaker 19: Zionists, saying that they're for an independent Palestine, refused to help us defend it from French domination. When our fighters were searching one of their settlements

Speaker 33: for French soldiers, the Zionists fired upon them

When

Speaker 33: our warriors realized that the fight had been the result of a mistake, they called for a

Speaker 27 (lower-pitched voice): truce and asked to leave. The Zionists agreed, but once our men were out in the open again and defenseless, the Jews opened fire and our men barely made it out before rejoining their comrades to mount

Speaker 41: a counterattack

Now here's the

Speaker 41: thing, a participant

in the

Speaker 41: fight on either side can probably tell their version of the story and not be lying at all. That's probably exactly how it looked from their perspective

This was

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): the final straw for Faisal's allies in the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Levant. They maintained their loyalty to him, but it was time to force the issue. So they convened the Syrian General Congress once more and officially proclaimed the independent Arab Kingdom of Syria, naming Faisal

as their

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): king. Now I'm not sure how exactly they were expecting the French to react

to it, but If

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they were hoping the French might just pack up their

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): gear and head home, they were going to be disappointed

Without yet

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): declaring war, the French army ordered the new

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): government of Syria to stand down, disband its troops, and submit

to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): French rule. We're not asking. Faisal

was reluctant to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): enter into any kind of a conflict with the

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): French. He knew how this would turn out, but he was being carried along by events at this point

You

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): know, before and during the war, Faisal is

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): described by everyone as sharp and energetic and as this inspirational leader. And when you see old film of him, he has very quick, nervous movements, almost like bird-like movements. But

in every picture

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): I've seen of Faisal, and I could be projecting all of this, of course, he

almost

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): looks like a tragic figure. You

know, there's

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): this sadness in his eyes, and

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): through all the various histories, you read... about a guy who just seems to know the position that his people are in. He

knows they can't

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): stand up to the French. But

he also knows

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): that his people are not going to let him back down. They're not going to let him compromise anymore

They're not going to

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): accept any more compromises. And

Speaker 42: it's hard to blame them. They're saying, look, look, you're our leader, okay? It was your family that made the deal to drive out the Ottoman Empire so that you could have your kingdom served. Well, okay, great. We fought for you. We're your people. You've got your kingdom, and we've got your back, but do something. So

once the kingdom's

Speaker 42: officially proclaimed

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): people are excited about it. I mean, there's energy all through Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine right around this time. They're out in the streets, not just with enthusiasm, but in defiance as well. rallies and parades are being held from aleppo all the way down to gaza you know in the whole region of greater syria which is now called the arab kingdom of syria the arab kingdom of

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): syria exists now and faisal is the king

of it

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): that's how international politics works you declare something like this you have it it exists unless somebody can take it from you well the arab kingdom of syria exists and people are excited

now

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): palestine's the southern province of this kingdom this is something the vast vast vast majority of palestinian arabs were totally in favor of this is what they wanted

so

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): they're out in the streets proclaiming their loyalty to their new king faisal and also showing their excitement at being a part of this thing

you know this

Speaker 41: is the first independent arab state in centuries they're the first independent arab nation state ever

It's

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): an exciting thing. People are out showing that excitement. But the whole month of March is also marked by increasing

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): tensions. You thought it was bad before. It's getting real bad now. Even sporadic violence is starting to happen. And as March turns over into April, it's starting to spiral. Everybody can feel it. Countrywide demonstrations are scheduled for Easter Sunday, April 4th. This is also the traditional day for the Muslim festival of Nebi Musa

Every

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): year for Nebi

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Musa a parade would take place And this year the religious celebration is going to double as a political rally Which it always did to a certain extent This was kind of wrapped up in Nebi Musa This kind of thing isn't uncommon in the Arab world even today These

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): things are very often tied together You'll often see public rituals like funerals and weddings And I don't know, holiday festivals and so forth Turn into sectarian or political demonstrations Right

The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Nebi Musa festival was kind of born out of that tendency. It always had a political element to it. Christians would be pouring into the

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): city of Jerusalem for Easter from all over the place. And so Muslims from around the region would pour in to kind of match their numbers and make a show of force

It almost always

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): went off without incident, but there's always this tension in the atmosphere for Nebi

Musa. The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Israeli author Tom Segev describes what it was like, he says, "They came in from all over the country

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): as well as from neighboring countries, tribe after tribe, caravan after caravan, with their flags and weapons as if they were going to war." So there was

always this

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): political element to it, and it was always, you know, you could cut the tension with a knife at Nebuchadnezzar, but now the dynamic had totally changed. There had never been anything like this before. See, instead of Arab Muslims and Arab Christians pouring into the city in opposition to one another

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): now you had both Muslims and Christians united in their opposition to Zionism. So Zionist leaders are concerned, they're terrified

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): actually, they're imploring the British to ban the public gatherings altogether, using force if necessary

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): but the British know better than that

They

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): probably understand that this will just make the situation infinitely worse, so they refuse. They're still going around the country trying to convince the Arabs that they have nothing to worry about, that they shouldn't feel threatened. They start using the army to ban their traditional holiday festivals. How's that

going to look

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): The British are usually way more savvy than that. Unfortunately, they go all the way in the other direction. In the end, the British deploy 188 troops to keep order in Jerusalem. To put that in perspective, the Ottoman Empire would usually deploy thousands. They would keep artillery pieces trained on the route of the procession during the annual Nebimusa parade

Well, when the day

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): arrived, there were up to 70,000 Arabs, by some counts, crammed into Jerusalem. An

article in the Times of

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): London from 1920 describes what it was like. Quote, It

must be

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): admitted that trouble has been brewing for some time

The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): religious festivals seem to have brought matters to a head. The Muslims have shown no hostility to the Christians. When Christian and Muslim processions on April 2nd almost met, not a word of hostility was uttered. A number of Muslims came into Jerusalem from Hebron on April 4th, when the procession was approaching the Jaffa gate. The cry went up from outside the gate, "The Jews are attacking us

It is not

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): known whether there was any foundation for the cry, but it started the trouble

the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): jews seem to have been prepared for

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): they were armed with knives

and so a

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): riot breaks out mobs of young arabs attack jewish shops and homes and they're fighting

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): with jewish gangs in the streets

many of

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): them head over to the jewish parts of town and they're breaking into homes and now attacking jewish

civilians lacking the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): manpower to break this thing up british troops instead just focus on trying to contain

it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Trying to block off certain areas of town, prevent movement and isolate people, just prevent anybody new from joining it

Well, that

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): sounds great in theory, right? You don't want armed Jewish gang going in and joining a riot in progress, but the Zionists later complained that the only effect that this had was

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): to prevent Jewish defense forces from going in and driving out the rioters, which the British just did not have the manpower to do

And so Jews in the old city

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): found themselves shut into

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): this area with a rampaging mob

The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): British weren't letting people move around the city, so these people couldn't get out, and Jewish defense units weren't allowed to go in to try to help them out

When finally the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): British gather enough soldiers to impose martial law, five Jews are dead, 200 are wounded, 18 critically wounded. Now

to make

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): matters worse, many Jewish men had formed themselves up into these defense units to go do battle with the rioters, right? So many women and children were left alone throughout the

entire event. Because

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): see, the British, they largely prevented any of these Jewish militias from actually joining or effecting the fighting at all. They identified them and bottled them up pretty quickly. So the women and children were mostly defenseless and they suffered the brunt

of the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): violence. Many of those 200 wounded were women and children. Many of those wounds were from sexual violence. Women were raped all over the place

And there was one

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): report of a 15-year-old Jewish girl being gang-raped along with her sister. I mean, this wasn't uncommon. It was a

nightmare. On the Arab

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): side, there were four dead, another two dozen critically wounded at least, mostly by British soldiers and Jewish militias who had managed to get into the

fighting. Now, I don't

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): know about you, but whenever I think about these long-term enduring historical tragedies like the conflict between the Jews and the

Arabs, it's

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): something my mind does. It's always hard

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): for me not to look back and wonder if it had to be that way

You know

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): if there were conflicting interests and a collision course here that really probably couldn't have been avoided

Or if it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): could have gone differently. And

if it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): could have, if there ever was a chance, then where were those invisible Rubicons that got crossed? Those points of no return? You know, those moments of sadism or poor judgment when something was broken that now it couldn't be put back

And now the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): system of violence sort of takes on a life of its own, has its own energy, its own momentum, and nobody even has to remember how the whole thing started anymore. Now it's just a

It got

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): its own energy of reciprocal grievances that doesn't even require recourse from outside the system. I think it's likely that the Nebi Musa riot of 1920 was that kind of an

event. If

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): peace had ever been an option, and it may not have been, by the way, you had very important Zionists, guys who would go on to become the leaders of the movement in the next few decades. You

had

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): these leaders up to this point, before this point, telling their fellow Jews that they were the conquerors

here. and

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): that this was a situation where you had a conqueror and

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): the people in land they intended to conquer so i don't know how you make peace out of that but but if there ever was a chance that some of the other people some of the more moderate zionists might have won through and guided this process back onto the tracks that possibility probably died in early april 1920

after the riots and

Speaker 32 (lower-pitched voice): You know, the British have made this cake and it didn't take long for them to start to eat it. They're going

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): to get a little taste of what their life's going to be like in Palestine for the next few decades. If

they thought

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they were going to make friends here with anybody, they're about to find out how wrong they were. Neither side is happy with the British. In fact, both sides are lobbying accusations

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): against them

The Arabs are angry

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): that the British seem to already be breaking every promise they ever made

And to the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Jews, well

I

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): mean imagine, to them this just looks like an old-fashioned pogrom, at least that's how many of them were going to characterize it. A few of them know the difference between a pogrom and a riot, and maybe there's a little bit of cynicism

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): involved with characterizing it this way, but in their defense there was some evidence that at least a few people in the community had foreknowledge of what was going to happen, or had an idea that

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): something might happen. There was even some evidence

that

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): Maybe the local authorities, or some elements of the local authorities, either looked the other way or maybe failed to adequately prepare for it. But some people would go much further

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): than that. Chaim Weizmann and several other Zionist leaders, they just straight up accused the British army leadership of allowing the attack

to go forward. And

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): then once it started, a failing to contain it as quickly as possible, just to make a point. And we'll get into that point here in just a moment, but well, to give you an idea

of how

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): the relationship between the British

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): and the Zionists is starting to develop. I'll give you one example. After Nebi Musa, the head of the Zionist commission, Menachem Musishkin, we heard from him a moment ago. He had the run-in with that mayor of Jerusalem. He was involved in another confrontation. It really shows you the budding resentment and distrust on the part of the Zionists toward the British military leadership

Ussichkin

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): had been visited by the British military governor in Jerusalem. This is the guy that is in charge of keeping peace in the city. His name is Colonel Ronald

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Storrs. And so Storrs had come to express his condolences to the Zionist leader. And he tells them when he gets there, he says, "I've come to express my grief over the catastrophe that befell us

And Ussichkin

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): kind of gives him this sarcastic, confused look as if he's not really sure what Colonel Storrs is talking about. He says, "Which catastrophe

And

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): Storrs is a little bit puzzled by this. He says, well, I'm referring to the saddening events which took place here the last few days. And then Ussichkin lights up with recognition. He says, oh, His Excellency is referring to the pogrom. And

now again

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): remember, a pogrom implies that this was sanctioned or even abetted by and aided

Speaker 25 (lower-pitched voice): by the authorities. In this case, the British, which means Storrs himself, because he was in charge of keeping peace in the city. So he's outraged. You know

Speaker 38 (lower-pitched voice): Storrs is just shocked that he would say this. Storrs says, this was not a pogrom. It's impossible to call

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): these riots a pogrom. And Ussishkin, who, on some level, you've got to love this guy. He's very bold, if nothing else. He's saying this to the British military governor in Jerusalem, remember. He says, quote, You, Colonel, are an expert in administrative matters. I am an expert in pogroms, and I can assure you that there is no difference between the Jerusalem pogrom and the Kishinev pogrom. The organizers of the local pogrom didn't show any originality. They followed step by step the ways of the perpetrators of the Russian pogrom. Tsar Nicholas also did not interfere with the pogrom. He has also oppressed us. Yet, perhaps Your Excellency is aware of what has befallen him? In his place sits Trotsky

all

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): our enemies in the world and in the land of israel will also meet such an end end quote so you got to give him credit for being bold if you give him nothing else

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you cannot take that away from russiskin he's telling a british military commander well really the military commander in jerusalem that the british maybe ought to take note of what happened to czar nicholas the second in the russian empire after that regime failed to protect its jewish population

and

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): just to remind everyone czar nicholas was executed in a dirty cellar with his whole family down to the little children by a couple jewish communists so usishkin's got a mouth

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): on him and we shouldn't take his words as being representative of the whole zionist position but he is the highest ranking zionist in palestine at this time so it should give

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): you an idea of how quickly and dramatically the relationship between his people and the british military is starting to deteriorate

And while it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): would be a stretch to say that the feeling was mutual from the British side, the patience of the British military for the Zionist antics was starting to wear thin already. They

saw the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Nebimusa riots and the behavior of the Zionists in general very, very differently. Very differently from the politicians back in London even. This

is to put it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): coarsely, but really they saw the situation through soldiers' eyes, the way you might expect a soldier to see it

What

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they saw were Zionists moving into Palestine, agitating the Arabs, pushing them off their land, making a big show of their intention to take over the country. And why? Because they're going to come invade? Because they're going to fight for it

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): No. They're doing it because they think that their groveling, bought-off politicians back in London are going to make the British army do their work for them

They think they can

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): agitate the Arabs all they want because the British politicians are going to make the British army protect

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): them. Well, this drove the British Army crazy, right? They had just spent two years relying on the Arabs, fighting alongside them, watching them risk their lives for their independence. Meanwhile, many of the Zionist leaders had spent most of the war supporting the Germans and the Ottoman Empire. And now that the war was over, they're just switching teams and streaming into Palestine demanding that the British Army do their dirty work for them? The Arabs had fought for their independence

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): The Zionists had bought it at cocktail parties with the British politicians. That's the way that a lot of the army leadership felt about it, and it pissed them off

After the riot, the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): British government sent a commission to investigate the causes of what happened. Its findings were far more ambivalent, I guess we could say, than the Zionists expected. The

commission reported

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): that the immediate cause of the disruption was, of course, the violent actions encouraged and engaged in by groups of Arabs at the festival

but it

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): didn't stop at immediate causes in fact most of the report isn't taken up with those immediate causes it also had a lot to say about the zionists and about their behavior leading up to the incident

the report said

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): that the immediate cause had again been the

Speaker 23: violent actions of these arab gangs That, quote, the Zionist commission and the official Zionists, by their impatience, indiscretion, and their

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): attempts to force the hands of the administration, are largely responsible for the present crisis, end quote

Now, this is a huge

Speaker 19: accusation, and it drove the Zionists berserk, as you can imagine

But see, it's

Speaker 19: exactly what the military leadership had been going

Speaker 44: on about, what had been making them so angry

See, they

Speaker 44: believed that the Jews were being deliberately provocative, that they were being belligerent on purpose

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): thinking that if the Arabs could be incited to violence, that the British Army, whatever they might have thought about what the Zionists were

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): doing, at that point they would have no choice but to choose sides and crack down on the Arabs. The political leadership would

make them do

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): it. That was the Zionist calculation, well, the army had called their bluff

The

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): Zionists had been parading through the streets and performing military drills in Jerusalem and giving speeches about what they intended to do, but when the Arabs inevitably reacted to that, the British military was nowhere to be found. Not

only was

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): it not around to save the Zionists, they actually blocked and arrested armed Jewish militias who did try to save the Zionists. Now

of course, the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): military leadership explained this as a simple tactical miscalculation, nothing on purpose, but the

Speaker 24 (lower-pitched voice): Zionists did not buy that at all. in fact the commission didn't really buy that either at least not fully they had plenty of criticism for the military's actions beyond just you know mistakes

were made now the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): british commission though it was experiencing this same cognitive dissonance that the american commission had the previous

year Before

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they arrived in Palestine, they expected to find something completely different from what they did find. As far as they had been told by British Zionists like Chaim Weisman, the Zionists were just looking to be good neighbors. They were looking for a place to live, a society to participate in, nothing

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): more. But

when they

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): interviewed actual Zionists living in Palestine, that's not what they found. What they found was a lot of

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): people who didn't like Arabs and weren't shy about telling anybody who wanted to listen

And also

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): who weren't shy about telling

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): anyone who wanted to listen that they didn't plan on being anyone's friendly neighbor. Now

this is

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): not what the

Speaker 19: commission expected to find. It's not what they had been told. And

they knew that

Speaker 19: it's not what the wider British government thought it was getting itself into or thought it was supporting. So

it generates a

Speaker 19: report

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): to detail its findings and deliver them to the cabinet. But

before it

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): can make its way up there, the report is squashed. It never sees the light of day

Just as

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): the American report had been suppressed a year earlier, this British report on the Nebi Musa riots is marked secret, put on the shelf, and never released to the wider British government. This is the second time

in a very

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): short period of time after the First World War that a major commission has investigated this situation, been shocked by what they found, and for one reason or another

fails

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): to get that information to the British government in a way that might actually affect their policy and allow the British government to make an informed decision about what it's doing. This

is a pattern

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): that's going to repeat itself one way or another for the next two decades

You

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): know, military and civilian administrators on the ground in Palestine are going to try again and again and again to alert the British government that things are not going as planned. And that... Whatever information the British government has, the orders they're passing down don't make any sense. They're making things worse. But

for the next two

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): decades, the Zionists and their allies

Speaker 23: in the British government are going to continue to place themselves in those critical nodes in the information flow that allow them to curate and filter the information before it reaches the British political leadership in

order to

Speaker 23: create a narrative that suits their goals. That downplays the resistance and makes it seem as if the British government is maybe not getting itself into something as troublesome as

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): they really are. And

as a result, the

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): British government is going to continue to just march forward blindly in pursuit of this contradictory policy. Never really understanding until it's too late that the goals of the Zionists and the rights of the Arabs cannot coexist when the goal of the Zionists is to eliminate the Arabs' political rights altogether

But as

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): much as the Nebimusa riots were an outrage and a tragedy for the Jews in Palestine, Zionist leaders also knew that it was an opportunity. This was their moment. The French had been waiting for an excuse to just take the gloves off and really knuckle down on Faisal and the Syrians, and

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): so the Zionists make sure that they have

one. They

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): spread word around Europe that innocent Jews are suffering pogroms in Jerusalem of all places, and this gives the French the international political cover that they need

Even

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the people who are sympathetic to the Arabs are having trouble getting a word in now. As stories about Nebi Musa spread, the French are able to steer the narrative away from imperialism and towards the idea that they're going to protect the Jews from persecution. And

so the French cobbled

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): together a League of Nations conference to make its mandate for Syria official. It hadn't actually been put down on paper yet. Now it has been. And

this gave

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): France a free hand to declare war. Because now Syria was in violation of the League of Nations mandate, and so France could say that it was merely enforcing the will of the international community. And

so in the

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): summer of 1920, France moves in force against

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Faisal

Well, Faisal

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): wants nothing to do with this. Probably at the urging of the British, he surrenders without a fight and orders his men to do the same. And

you've really

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): got to remember... We talked about this at the beginning when Wiseman met with Faisal. Faisal's not even from the Levant, okay

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): He's not from the area

And his family

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): still controls a kingdom that spans the whole western portion of the Arabian Peninsula and includes the two Muslim holy cities

So

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): he and his Hashemite followers, whatever happens to Syria, they have a perfectly good home to go back to, in other words

For

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Faisal, Syrian nationalism had always been about personal and family ambition. Most

of the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): disillusioned Syrians who had rallied to Faisal's banner just went back to their homes. What else were they going to do? Faisal's Hashemite forces were by far the most capable and well-equipped Arab military force. They were the only ones who even might have dreamed about standing up to the French, and they were sitting in the capital preparing to surrender

a few of

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): them took to the hills to try to carry on an insurgency that went nowhere one man did do his best to mount a symbolic defense his name was yusuf al-azma and he had been faisal's own minister of war

actually he

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): threw together a rag-tag group of poorly

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): equipped civilian militia with a few veterans to try to get between the french and damascus but there's no surprise ending here He had about 3,000 Arab light infantry, and they were crushed by a French army that was about 9,000 strong

And it had

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): cavalry, artillery, and aircraft support. It wasn't a fight. It was a slaughter

But this is

Speaker 12 (lower-pitched voice): what's called the Battle of Mesalin. It's the

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): only battle of the Franco-Syrian War, and it wasn't much of a battle, and a war that wasn't much of a war. Yusuf

al-Azma had

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): been a former Ottoman general, so he knew the score

He knew

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): what he was getting himself into. He harbored no illusions about what he was walking into. He knew that his chances of victory were sub-zero. But

he decided to make

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): a stand, knowing what would

happen so

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): that no one would ever be able to say that the Syrians had welcomed the French into their country. Because there were already people trying to push that narrative, but as far as he was

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): concerned, no one was ever going to be able to say that the French had been welcomed in. If the French were going to take over, they were going to have to kill some Syrians to do it

Faisal might

Speaker 14 (lower-pitched voice): have rolled over, but Al-Azma made a stand so that the French would be forced to show their hand as conquerors. Al-Azma

himself was

Speaker 23: killed in the battle. He made the sacrifice himself, but to be

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): honest, he probably didn't have

to. The

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): French were not shy about looking like conquerors in 1920. Just

to give

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): you one example, the commanding general of the French forces cleared up any lingering doubts future historians might have had as his army entered the city of Damascus. As

his army

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): moves in, he makes a detour to stop at the Grand Mosque. He enters the tomb of the great 12th century Muslim general Saladin. Now, Saladin is the ruler and commander who... had finally driven the crusaders from the region eight centuries ago. He's one of the most revered figures in the Muslim world to this day. I mean, he's one of the greatest figures in history, period

And so as Faisal and

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): his Hashemites are waiting around to welcome their new French masters, this victorious general first makes sure he has an audience

and

Speaker 23: then he walks up to Saladin's tomb and kicks it

He calls

Speaker 23: out, quote, "'Awake, Saladin! We have returned!' "'My presence

Speaker 45: here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent.'" So you

can't get

Speaker 46: much clearer than

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): that

The destruction of

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the short-lived

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): Arab kingdom of Syria by the French threw any hopes for Arab national independence in the Levant into a blender

Up until this

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): point, Arab nationalism in the region had been focused on this larger Syrian kingdom

and all

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): their efforts had been dedicated to rallying support for a national identity on that basis palestinian arab leaders had been selling their people on this idea of committing their loyalty to that larger state well that idea had just been strangled in the crib and there was no recovery and there was nothing left to even fight back against since faisal had just given up

and left So the Arabs

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): in Palestine who were still interested in building a national state, they were starting all over again from scratch. With

Syria out of the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): picture, Palestine is now isolated under the British mandate. And this is the point where the focus shifts to emphasize a specifically Palestinian national identity. From here on out, we're done talking about Syria. The

Palestinian

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): Arab leaders now realize that they're on

their own. And they

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): know that a bunch of divided tribes will never be able to stand up

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): to the British or to the Zionists who are now flooding into their country. Only a nation can do that

Their future will

Speaker 23: hinge on whether they can make that leap that we mentioned at the beginning and awaken a unified national Palestinian identity before it's too late

But they've got an

Speaker 28: uphill battle. When

the French

Speaker 28: and British had carved up the Middle East, they broke up all the national projects that the Arabs have been pouring their efforts

into. And

Speaker 28: convincing the tribal leaders to give up their autonomy, to subordinate their traditional tribal identities to this national project, that had been a huge step

It had taken

Speaker 28: a huge leap of faith from all the people involved. And

yet this

Speaker 28: people who were traumatized by war and oppression, disease and starvation, they'd allowed themselves to get excited about it, to get excited about this nation

During the

Speaker 28: war, Syrian nationalists had been tortured and executed by Jamal Pasha. They had been killed in battle fighting for this independent country. And then right at the moment when they thought they had achieved their goal, they had been sold out by their allies and

by the

Speaker 28: very leader in whom they had placed their

Speaker 23: faith. So the Arabs now are playing catch

up. They are

Speaker 23: starting from scratch with a disillusioned people who have already been fooled

once. And two

Speaker 23: other factors are

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): making the nationalist job even more complicated. First, the literacy rate of Palestinian Arabs

is

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): maybe 10% in 1920. Second, a majority of the population is spread out over the countryside in farms and villages

Those may not

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): seem like such a big deal, but if you're a nationalist, these are huge obstacles for you to overcome. See, generally speaking, nationalism It's historically been a phenomenon that arises in literate, urban

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): societies. The tools of the nationalist are the pamphlet, the flyer, the protest placard

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): The soil that a nationalist grows in is a dense, urban population where ideas spread very quickly from person to person. The fluid and unstable masses that you find in cities, these people are unburdened usually by old loyalties to blood and place. And it's usually a pretty simple thing for a skilled

Speaker 23: operator to get a young man with no family living in a modern city to adopt an identity that might include some strangers he's never met. It's pretty easy, actually. I mean, let's think about who this man is, what his life

is like. Most

Speaker 23: likely he's a wage laborer of one

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): kind or another. He spends the majority of his time and energy working for someone else, exchanging his hours for a paycheck. He's probably got a one-year lease on his apartment, maybe

And

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): it probably means nothing to him to move to another city or even to another part of the country. His current crop of friends he probably met sometime in the last few years. And his old friends and his parents and his extended family, he sees them once or twice a year maybe on holidays. He has no inherited traditions. In fact, the cosmopolitan

Speaker 23: city-dweller usually develops a sort of contempt for inherited traditions, for anything old-fashioned

The age of

Speaker 23: the urban bourgeois and the industrial city, that was also the age of ideology. That's not some historical coincidence. The uprooted masses that unsteadily cohere in our great cities, they're a feeding frenzy for anybody with a bit of charisma with a bolt-on identity

to sell. But now think

Speaker 23: of the

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): people out in the country. It's a much tougher sell out in the provinces

To

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): begin with, a man out there is probably farming or grazing on a piece of land that has taken his family generations to build up

There are

Speaker 23: memories attached to the stones and trees, and he probably lives geographically very near a large extended family whom he wouldn't even consider leaving. His

large family is

Speaker 13 (lower-pitched voice): nested in a larger clan and then a larger tribal structure on top of that, and there's a long history

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): of alliances and feuds and victories and defeats and betrayals with all the other groups

His tribe

Speaker 18 (lower-pitched voice): will have

Speaker 23: traditions that have been passed down faithfully from his grandfather's grandfather, probably taught to him next to the same fire, in the same house, on the same piece of

land. And this is a

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): much larger issue that, well, I'll try not to let myself get too sidetracked by it, but I want to explore

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): it for a

moment. Earlier in

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): the episode I mentioned the economic difficulties that some of the Mediterranean countries of Europe have had recently

I

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): talked about how partly this has to do with the various social implications of emphasizing large extended families instead of isolated little nuclear

Speaker 23: family units. See, modern industrial capitalism functions best when people can be packed up and transported to wherever the great industrial machine happens to need them at any given time. It's an obstacle to efficiency if people are too attached to

a place. If your

Speaker 23: whole family going back three

Speaker 30 (lower-pitched voice): generations and stretching out to the second and third cousins all live in a 40-mile radius, and they've done so for

Speaker 11 (lower-pitched voice): years, you're going to be much less likely to just pack up your little nuclear family and move across the country for another job. It's a much bigger decision than it would be in a place like the United

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): States, for example, where most likely you moved to the other side of the country as soon as you left home for college, and you probably only see your grandparents at Christmas

time. This plays

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): into why those Mediterranean countries see so much nepotism in both the public and private sectors. If your nephew gets laid off from his job, and it's no simple thing to move his wife and children away to look for another opportunity, you're probably going to do whatever you have to do to make sure that he gets something

nearby. See

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): modern states and economies are at war with these attachments, these traditions

with

Speaker 23: any of the emotions that prevent people from becoming the portable little cogs that the machine wants them to be

The perfect

Speaker 23: worker-consumer in a capitalist state is basically one who's in a nuclear family, with no sentimental attachments to

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): place, no prejudices segmenting his preferences or desires. In fact, the more homogenous and predictable his preferences are, the easier he is to market

to. I

Speaker 23: mean, can you imagine how annoying it must be to McDonald's that so many people in India don't eat beef? All

that extra

Speaker 23: work, printing up new

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): signs, creating different product lines. If McDonald's had its way, every Hindu in the world would convert tomorrow

Modern capitalism, as

Speaker 22 (lower-pitched voice): much as communism, although in a much less obvious and direct way, is a corrosive force

And I

Speaker 23: don't even mean that in a bad way. I'm not attaching a value judgment to it necessarily. I'm just, when I say corrosive, I'm referring to the way that it slowly works to dissolve differences into homogeneity, and

the way

Speaker 23: that it works to create people who have tastes and fashions, but not identities. To

many people in the

Speaker 23: developed urban world today

Speaker 28: the simple question, the very simple question, who are

you? can

Speaker 28: provoke a lot of anxious sputtering

Speaker 23: At best, maybe you'll get a few quotes from some existentialist philosopher about the fluidity of identity, but if you put that question to the man that I just described from the country, from the province, the

Speaker 21: peasant farmer, the tribal herder, you better pull up a chair. He

knows

Speaker 35: exactly who he is. He knows exactly where he fits

If anything

Speaker 21: he suffers from a surplus of identity. He's burdened by its heaviness rather than gnawed at by its lack

No traditional

Speaker 21: agrarian society will ever give us an existentialist philosopher. It just will never happen. They have no use for them. When the door-to-door identity salesman comes around the province offering a shiny new national consciousness

Speaker 23: it's a much tougher sell. That's my point

And this

Speaker 23: is the difficulty that's being faced by the Palestinian nationalists and all of the Arab nationalists really heading into 1921. The British acted more or less as a single will, so did the Zionists. To stand up to them, the Arab leadership would have to find a way to convince the traumatized and disillusioned Palestinian Arabs

to come

Speaker 23: together. But now

Speaker 28: think about what a national project is asking these people to

give up. A

Speaker 28: tribe has freedom. The cost of that freedom is having to remain vigilant to protect your own

interests. And so asking a tribe to

Speaker 19: submit to a state essentially means asking them to give up their autonomy in exchange for making their lives more predictable, more stable. It's

kind of like

Speaker 23: asking an entrepreneur to give that up to take a job in a cubicle, in a more predictable, stable salary

And

Speaker 19: it's not a Perfect comparison, but I'm going to go with it. It's simply not an attractive offer to many people who have a choice

They listen to

Speaker 19: the offer and they say, Okay, let me get this straight. You want me to sign up for a project where other people that I've never met can levy

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): taxes on me

They can

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): call up me or my sons to go to war, whether we agree with the war or not. They get to regulate how I use my land and how I buy and sell. They get to tell me where I can travel, where I can live, or anything else that they decide to vote and pass a law on

And best of

Speaker 31 (lower-pitched voice): all, if somebody harms me or my family

Speaker 21: I have to go to you and trust that you're going to make it right

And if I

Speaker 21: retaliate myself, then I'm a criminal

In exchange

Speaker 21: for what again? What am I getting out of this

Just

Speaker 21: so that we can have the resources for grand-scale projects and an army and a political system to stand up to great nations? Couldn't those

Speaker 26: things just as easily be turned against me

This is the

Speaker 26: way a lot of them see it. I mean, this is why I quoted Michael Corleone from The Godfather earlier

You know

Speaker 26: he said, I

Speaker 41: don't trust society to protect us. I'm not leaving our fate in the hands of

Speaker 23: men whose only qualification is that they con some people into voting for them. It's exactly what he's talking about

here

Speaker 23: leaving aside the deep ties of loyalty and identity, forgetting all that for a moment, from a strictly practical

Speaker 21: standpoint, the trade-off is just not that interesting to a lot of people who have a choice. And remember that on top of all this, the Palestinian Arabs have stumbling blocks that are unique to their historical moment as well

Their recent

Speaker 21: history with states has been with the Ottoman Empire and the European colonialists. So their impression of what states are

and

Speaker 21: how they relate to their people, it's been formed by recent experiences that were "sub-optimal," we'll say. You've got to remember that for

most

Speaker 28: of human history, the state meant something very different than it means to people living in Luxembourg in 2015

A state

Speaker 28: was basically what

Speaker 23: you had when a group of warriors established their dominance

over a

Speaker 23: region and then claimed the right to tax that region's peasantry. A tax farm, basically

When

Speaker 23: two states went

Speaker 19: to war over a territory, you know, a king might say that he was defending his people, but he meant it in the way that he might have meant