Darryl Cooper — War All the Time: Israel vs. Palestine, 1948-82 (Bonus Episode)

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, and you are about to hear a special episode of the Martyr Maid podcast. This

episode is

Speaker 3: meant to be a sort of addendum to Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, my earlier series on the early

history of

Speaker 3: Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian

Speaker 4: conflict. If you've managed to find this episode

on

Speaker 4: Without having first listened to that earlier series, I recommend listening

Speaker 3: to that series first. I know it's a time investment, but it is very thorough. And there are going to be a lot of things in this episode that I'm going to glide past or maybe cover lightly. Because I'm going to be assuming that you're already familiar with that earlier material. I'll

try

Speaker 4: not to do that, but it's going to be inevitable

This episode is

Speaker 5: going to cover the period from 1948

the

Speaker 5: year of Israeli independence and the

Speaker 6: Palestinian Nakba, to

the Lebanon

Speaker 6: War of 1982. It

is not meant

Speaker 3: to be a thorough history of that period, the way fear and loathing was of the pre-1948 period. To

do justice

Speaker 3: to that story would require another ten episodes, not just this one. So this one has a narrower focus

The story I

Speaker 3: want to tell today is not about

history

Speaker 3: Every figure and every event and motivation Relevant

Speaker 7: to the conflict in those years It's specifically about How the level of savagery Has escalated over the years The steps

Speaker 8: by which those escalations occurred

To bring

Speaker 5: us up to the point where we are now With virtually unrestrained violence And dehumanization completely normalized on

Speaker 9: both sides

So it's not a

Speaker 7: pretty story

And

Speaker 7: several sections of this podcast are not going to be for the faint of heart. It's not something to listen to with your kids in

Speaker 5: the car. At

times when I was

Speaker 5: putting the notes together, it started to even feel

a

Speaker 10: bit voyeuristic. The violence started to feel sort of gratuitous and pornographic, you could say

Speaker 5: Because, well, you

know, every time I tried to

Speaker 5: delete a passage, though, I thought... No. Well, this has to be in here

And so I'd end

Speaker 5: up putting it back in. Because it's one thing to hear that there was a terrorist attack today and 14 people were killed. I

think it's really

Speaker 11: important to try to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who goes through something like that. To

see before

Speaker 11: our mind's eye what those people saw. Because only then can we even attempt to understand why people would react to these things the way they do

That means

Speaker 11: imagining that it was your mother who was forced out of her home by Israeli soldiers after seeing your father killed

And

Speaker 11: then your mother walking out in the desert carrying your baby brother collapses in the heat before she can make it to a safe place and she dies and the baby dies before your eyes. And now you're 19 years old living in a refugee camp and somebody comes along asking if you want to join the resistance against the people who did that to you. And

it means imagining

Speaker 11: that the families butchered by Palestinian terrorists were your family

That

Speaker 12: your wife and children, or your husband and children, were brutally murdered in front of you

And then you're

Speaker 13: offered an opportunity to vote for a politician who promises to take a savage revenge on the people who did that

It's really hard for

Speaker 5: people outside of the region, or not from countries that have been engaged in serious local conflict recently

To

Speaker 14: understand what being in a state of war for such a long time does to people. The

Palestinians

Speaker 15: have been living in degraded conditions, terrorized and

Speaker 5: controlled by Israeli security forces, subject to periodic military assault for many decades now. Decades. Most

Palestinians who

Speaker 5: are alive today, in fact virtually all of them at this point, have lived their entire lives under those conditions

Thank you. The

Speaker 5: Israelis, you remember a few years back, back in 2015-2016, when ISIS terrorism in Europe and the U.S. was at its peak. And

it seemed like

Speaker 5: an attack was happening somewhere practically every other week

for a while. I remember

Speaker 5: that time well, and it was nerve-wracking. I remember myself saying some things that, in retrospect, I probably didn't mean about what might need to be done to get that under control

Well, the

Speaker 5: Israelis have been dealing with that kind of thing for many decades, as we'll see in this episode. Dealing with attacks every bit as savage as anything ISIS did in the U.S. or Europe. And all of it happening in a tiny country the size of a small U.S. state. War radicalizes and hardens people. And

prolonged war

Speaker 5: can corrupt the soul in profound ways that can be hard to see from the inside

What I

Speaker 5: don't like is

Speaker 16: when people who are not a party to the war, you know, Americans and others, who do everything that they

Speaker 6: can to cheer on the conflict and intensify the level of hatred and dehumanization that's driving it. I understand why Israelis and Palestinians

Speaker 11: have gotten in that place. It's their families being killed. I'm not going to tell somebody whose family has been murdered how they're supposed to feel

about it. But if you're

Speaker 11: on the outside looking in, you know, I think we all have an obligation to try to talk the two sides back from the brink, to

try to

Speaker 11: be peacemakers, rather than prodding them on like a group of middle schoolers yelling, fight

Speaker 7: fight, fight

Anyway, enough

Speaker 7: preaching. I will

try to

Speaker 7: avoid that in this episode. This topic makes me preachy, I know, and I hate when I get preachy as much as you do

I just

Speaker 7: have a lot of... I'll just be

up

Speaker 17: front. I have a lot of personal connections to people on both sides of this conflict. And

I get

Speaker 18: agitated when I see people that I otherwise respect saying awful things about them

Anyway, after this is

Speaker 11: released

and

Speaker 11: I've had time to knock out a few other projects I've been

Speaker 7: keeping on the back burner. I will do a follow-up episode that will focus on the period from 1982 up to the present day, with a focus on the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah and other jihadist elements in the Palestinian movement, as

well as the

Speaker 7: profound impact caused by the Iranian revolution. Very

quickly, as many of

Speaker 5: you know, I have another podcast with my friend Jocko Willink

Speaker 7: That podcast is called Jocko Unraveling, and we discuss historical topics and current events

We try to tie the

Speaker 7: two together

Most recently

Speaker 7: we've done a couple episodes on the latest

Speaker 3: outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. Jocko

is pretty

Speaker 3: much the sole sponsor of the

Speaker 19: Martyr Maid podcast. So if you like this show, go check out Unraveling. Go check out Jocko Podcast, his main

Speaker 9: podcast feed if you haven't

And

Speaker 16: head on over to OriginMaine.com. That's Maine with an E, like the state. O-R-I-G-I-N-M-A-I-N-E dot com. Where you will find super

Speaker 20: high-quality gear of various sorts. All made right here in America at the Origin Factory. They've got everything from buffalo hide boots, high-quality jeans, hoodies

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you will see so

Speaker 12: let's get to

it You

Speaker 12: are about to listen to a special episode, War All the Time

Speaker 21: Israel and Palestine, 1948-82

Here we

Speaker 22: go. I'm

content to die for

Speaker 22: my beliefs. So

cut off my head

Speaker 22: and make

me a

Speaker 23: martyr

The people

Speaker 23: will always remember it

Speaker 24: No. They

will forget. Hell does

Speaker 25: exist. God is a thought. God is an idea. It

is a

Speaker 25: place. It

Speaker 26: is somewhere. Hell does exist

Hell does exist

Speaker 28: April

Speaker 21: 1956

at a

Speaker 3: funeral in southern

Israel. Eight

Speaker 3: years since the Israeli war of independence, or as the Arabs called it, the Nakba, the catastrophe. The Arab states had fought with the newborn Israeli defense forces in 1948, but Jordan, Syria and Egypt were not up to that task. They lacked the resolve and the coordination of the Zionists, and they lacked the investment

as well. And

Speaker 3: when they felt they'd done enough to save face, their forces withdrew, leaving the Palestinians to pay the price for their

failure. The Israelis

Speaker 3: invaded and took over parts of the country that still had large Palestinian Arab majorities. And in the process, they drove 700,000 Palestinian Arabs out of their homes

for good

Speaker 3: And for eight years now, in 1956, Those people had languished in squalid refugee camps ringing the borders of the new Jewish state

Palestinians who

Speaker 15: still lived within Israeli borders were restricted in their

Speaker 21: movement and

Speaker 30: activities

herded into neighborhoods

Speaker 30: surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards to keep the men

No one, not the

Speaker 6: Israelis, not the Palestinians

Speaker 3: not any country in the region, thought

that

Speaker 3: That 1948 was the end of the matter

The secular

Speaker 5: rulers of Egypt, Syria, and a short time later, Iraq

they all

Speaker 5: wanted

Speaker 3: to unite the Middle East into a pan-Arab national state. Of course, they all thought they should

Speaker 31: be the ones leading it

And they saw

Speaker 31: Israel as an open wound in the heart of the Arab world that had to be healed before that dream could be realized

Okay. Arabs

Speaker 31: across the region were shocked and humiliated by the terrible performance of Arab forces in the 48 war. And

so leaders

Speaker 31: played on those feelings to bolster their credibility on the Arab street

For the Palestinians

Speaker 11: this wasn't just a political game. It was much more personal, much closer to home, obviously. And as far as

they

Speaker 31: were concerned, their resistance hadn't ended just because Syria, Egypt, and Jordan had thrown in the towel

A

Speaker 31: swelling hatred grew in the hearts of humiliated men in the Palestinian

Speaker 11: refugee camps. Their mothers and their grandmothers were living in tents in tin and cinderblock shanties, living on canned rations delivered by the U.N. or the Arab states, while the homes and land that their families had lived in, sometimes for generations

were

Speaker 11: now in the hands of Jewish occupiers just a few miles away

And so raids and

Speaker 3: skirmishes never stopped when the 1948 war officially ended

Some young guy

Speaker 3: in a refugee

Speaker 11: camp with no job and no future might not be able to give his mother her house back

but he

Speaker 11: could burn that house

Speaker 32: down. That sounds irrational

Speaker 3: and nihilistic, but I would be slow to judge until you've seen your mother chased out of her home at gunpoint, forced to walk out into the

Speaker 32: desert with whatever she could carry and ending up in the state that the Palestinians now found themselves in

The Arab

Speaker 33: governments were humiliated as well

And so they

Speaker 33: provided

Speaker 19: supplies and training and intelligence and just general encouragement to any Palestinian militants who were eager for revenge

Okay

Speaker 19: Sometimes, those militants

Speaker 34: targeted infrastructure in Israel, and sometimes they targeted

Speaker 7: people. Their state sponsors were not picky about the targets, as long as they harassed and destabilized Israel

In one

Speaker 3: attack sponsored by Egyptian intelligence, a dozen Palestinian and Bedouin terrorists slipped into southern Israel and intercepted a bus on

the road. They

Speaker 3: waved it down and stopped it

Speaker 34: at gunpoint

and when it stopped

Speaker 34: They opened fire at point-blank range and killed 11 people

On

Speaker 5: board was a nine-year-old boy who had managed to avoid being shot by hiding under a seat. And after a while, after he

Speaker 7: thought that the killers had left, not knowing that every other person on the bus

Speaker 3: had been killed, he called out, "Have they

gone?" But they

Speaker 3: had not gone

And

Speaker 3: one of the killers came back and shot the boy in

Speaker 36: the head. He lived a while longer, but he was paralyzed for 32 years, and then he died at

Speaker 37: age 41

Now, the Zionists

Speaker 37: after years of insurgent warfare and with the Second World War hardly in the rearview mirror

these were a

Speaker 38: hardened bunch, and they were well prepared to defend themselves from Arab

Speaker 16: raids when the occasion arose

But

Speaker 16: they couldn't defend everywhere all the time

The Arabs

Speaker 11: inevitably chose the time and place to harass or attack, and the Israelis had

Speaker 37: neither the organization nor the manpower to cover the whole border and interdict every raid

And so, Moshe

Speaker 5: Dayan, boss of the Israeli defense forces at the time, explained in a lecture

Speaker 3: what the Israeli strategy would be

Speaker 39: Quote

We

Speaker 39: cannot prevent the murder of workers in orchards or of families in their beds, but we have the ability to set a high price for our blood, end quote. In

April 1956, Dayan was

Speaker 40: standing over the grave of a young Israeli lieutenant who, by

Speaker 36: chance, he had just met personally the previous day

A squad of

Speaker 33: Palestinian militants had opened fire on a kibbutz near the southern border with Gaza, and the lieutenant had ridden out to confront them

Speaker 34: but he was outnumbered and the guerrillas killed him. And

then they

Speaker 34: gouged out his eyes. And

then they

Speaker 34: dragged his body through a field and left the mutilated corpse for people to find. And

Dayan was

Speaker 34: at his funeral to deliver the eulogy. Quote

Let

Speaker 34: us not today cast

Speaker 41: blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For

Speaker 16: eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes, we have been turning the land

Speaker 19: and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance

Speaker 11: End quote. Now, Moshe Dayan writes

It

Speaker 11: was no softy. This is a hard

Speaker 3: man, a clear-eyed soldier. And

he was

Speaker 3: not suggesting that his people should take pity on those refugees, much less that they should forgive

Speaker 16: anybody who attacked Jews in Israel, whatever their reasons. What

he wanted was

Speaker 16: for his audience to

Speaker 11: see things clearly, as he did

To not be

Speaker 11: delusional and understand that there could be no forgiveness from the

Speaker 16: Palestinians for what had been done to

them. There

Speaker 16: could be no sufficient restitution short of

Speaker 11: giving back their homeland and abandoning the Zionist project. And so if the Israelis were not willing to do that, Dayan was telling them, then

they were

Speaker 11: going to have to put aside this false hope that some arrangement

Speaker 42: can be reached where both sides get enough of what they want. They

have to

Speaker 42: put that aside. And

they'd have

Speaker 39: to look squarely at what was going to be required of them

Speaker 11: Quote

We

Speaker 11: are the generation of settlement, and without steel, helmets, and the maw of the cannon, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home. Our children will not live if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire fences and machine guns

Speaker 16: we will not be able to pave roads or drill for water

Millions of

Speaker 16: Jews annihilated because they had no country— gaze at us from the dust of Jewish history and command us to settle and raise up a land for our people

We must not

Speaker 11: flinch from seeing the hatred that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who live around us, and await the moment when

Speaker 43: they are strong enough to get our blood

We will not

Speaker 7: avert our gaze lest our hands grow weak. This is our generation's destiny

The Israelis had

Speaker 34: reason to believe that the attack that had led to the lieutenant's death had been organized by the same Egyptian

Speaker 43: intelligence chief who had been causing a lot of their other problems, and they wanted that guy dead. It

so happened that the

Speaker 44: dead

Speaker 45: lieutenant's cousin was a bomb maker for Israel's fledgling Special Operations and Military Intelligence

Speaker 3: branch, and so

Speaker 45: it seemed

Speaker 3: appropriate to make him the instrument of revenge

And so

Speaker 3: what he did was hollowed out the pages of a book and filled it with explosives, rigged

to go off

Speaker 3: when the book's package was opened. That

part was

Speaker 3: easy enough. The hard part was making sure that it got to the right guy without being opened by some lackey working in the mail room

And so the

Speaker 46: Israelis called on a Bedouin man who had been doing undercover work for Israel in Gaza. The

thing

Speaker 3: is

The

Speaker 3: Bedouin wasn't actually working for the Israelis. Actually, he was a double agent working for the Egyptian intelligence boss that the Israelis were targeting

Now, the

Speaker 3: Israelis had already figured that out

But neither the agent

Speaker 19: nor Egyptian intelligence knew that the Israelis had figured it out. And so rather than cut that guy loose or just kill

Speaker 11: him, the Israelis thought this might

come in

Speaker 11: handy sometime. And so they kept him on the payroll until

it did. well

Speaker 11: now his number had been called and so they give him this package

Speaker 18: with the book in it and they really like play it up you know they're like look we are trusting you with this because it's just so

Speaker 33: important I mean like if the Egyptians ever got a hold of this I mean that would be the end of us I don't know what we'd ever do just pray the Egyptian intelligence boss never gets his eyes on what's in this book I mean they got him real excited

They

Speaker 33: told him

Speaker 34: it was of the utmost importance that he bring this package to another

Speaker 44: Israeli agent in Gaza, hoping that instead he would rush to deliver the book to his Egyptian boss. And

that's

Speaker 47: just what he did

When Colonel

Speaker 33: Mustafa Hafez heard what the book was supposed to contain

He

Speaker 33: got so excited that instead of having the package checked by technicians

he

Speaker 44: just tore it open on the spot and 300 grams of explosive

Speaker 43: blew up in his face and he died on the floor right there in the headquarters of Egyptian intelligence. A brilliant operation on the Israelis' part. And while that couldn't bring the young lieutenant back to life, it could, as Dayan said, send a clear message that a heavy price

Speaker 48: would be exacted for Israeli blood

And that

Speaker 48: wherever you were, you might think you're safe. You

might

Speaker 31: think you're too high up the food chain to be vulnerable. You are not. Now

intelligence and

Speaker 6: clandestine operations are an art, not a science. And

Speaker 3: sometimes bombs went off in the faces of the wrong people

Other times

Speaker 6: Israeli units sent on punitive raids into Palestinian villages killed innocent people

or

Speaker 34: destroyed

Speaker 3: the homes, or the orchards, or the livestock or gardens of Palestinian families as punishment for the crime of a cousin, or a second cousin, or an even more distant relative. Prominent

targets were

Speaker 43: hunted individually, but the new state of Israel did not have the resources or

Speaker 49: the trained manpower for a whole lot of that kind of thing, so the explicit strategy in these

Speaker 3: early years... was deterrence through collective punishment, or as nationalists and other revolutionary thinkers in the 20th century called it, through terror

These were not law

Speaker 43: enforcement operations to take down a perpetrator

or even

Speaker 43: military operations

Speaker 3: to eliminate enemy personnel or resources much of the time

The purpose

Speaker 3: to put it very bluntly, was to terrorize and intimidate the Palestinian population

So

Speaker 3: that they would put pressure on their sons and their brothers and cousins to stay out of the fight and don't piss the Israelis off because you're going

Speaker 42: to bring their wrath down on all of us. It

was to say

Speaker 42: look, if you want to kill Israelis, people close to you are going

Speaker 50: to die. They're

going to

Speaker 50: get their houses blown up and their livestock killed and their

Speaker 51: orchards burned down. And

so think

Speaker 51: about that before you plan your next raid

And you have to

Speaker 51: remember that back in these days, again, we're talking late 40s, early

Speaker 3: 50s, Israeli intelligence did not have detailed files on all the militants in a given region. They

didn't have

Speaker 3: electronic surveillance tracking their communications or high-altitude drones and satellites

Speaker 43: tracking their movements. Most

of the time

Speaker 43: they wouldn't know their names or what they looked like

Someone

Speaker 16: would take a few pot shots at a kibbutz, or an Israeli military patrol would run over a landmine, and

then whoever

Speaker 42: did it was gone

And all the

Speaker 42: Israelis would know a lot of the time is that some eyewitness said they went that-a-way, towards some village, a refugee camp

And they also lacked

Speaker 7: the resources to track all the movements of the regular military forces of the neighboring

Speaker 3: Arab states. And so sometimes when Israeli units were sent out on punitive raids

They

Speaker 3: would encounter

Speaker 52: military units of the Jordanian or Syrian or Egyptian armed forces

And when that

Speaker 43: happened, the Israeli forces did not avoid contact if they thought that they could handle it

If they thought they

Speaker 53: could handle it, they would initiate contact. They would attack

And it sent a message to

Speaker 3: those countries that

they were

Speaker 3: going to be held responsible for any trouble Israel had from the Palestinians coming from their direction. so that hopefully it would incentivize those other countries to get the

Speaker 54: Palestinians under control themselves in order to avoid Israeli retaliation

As the Israeli state

Speaker 15: was built out, its intelligence and military capabilities matured

Speaker 3: and differentiated and specialized. In 1953, David Ben-Gurion, longtime leader of the movement and now Israel's first prime minister, Ordered the formation of a new special operations unit under the command of a 25-year-old soldier named Ariel Shinerman, sometimes called Arik and better known to most of you as Ariel Sharon. Sharon's

team essentially functioned as

Speaker 3: a targeted assassination squad, although they would sometimes conduct their own missions like infrastructure sabotage and other

Speaker 55: things

It

Speaker 55: was called Unit 101 and these guys were real cowboys

Speaker 19: Their first mission was really just Sharon and a bunch of his buddies sneaking into a Palestinian village to blow up the house of an alleged terrorist

Speaker 56: while the guy was asleep

inside

Speaker 57: Very loose in terms of how they conducted

Speaker 36: their operations. Sharon had fought with abandon as a 20-year-old in the 1948 war and he was badly wounded

in it

Speaker 16: Now as a commander

he

Speaker 16: very quickly earned a reputation for always being out front of his men

Speaker 6: always taking the most dangerous jobs and manning the most vulnerable positions, never asking his men to do anything that he wouldn't do himself

He was a very good

Speaker 58: soldier, very courageous

Speaker 59: extremely motivated

sometimes too motivated. You see

Speaker 59: officially, the

way the process

Speaker 60: was supposed to work officially was... Military intelligence would identify a potential target

They

Speaker 16: would investigate that target

And if the

Speaker 16: target was approved for liquidation, then Unit 101 would get its orders to develop an operation

Speaker 11: and take that guy out

Well, that's a slow process. And

Speaker 11: patience was never one of Ariel Sharon's strong suits. And so while he waited for Israel's spies to identify his high-value targets... Unit 101 occupied itself by developing its own intelligence, running its own operations, attacking and terrorizing Arab villages where Palestinian militants were thought to be hiding or using for support

Sharon was one of those guys

Speaker 3: who was never comfortable unless he was out on an

Speaker 43: operation. As

soon as one

Speaker 43: mission was over, he was begging his superiors to turn him loose on another one

And

Speaker 43: not just waiting for orders

Speaker 11: but coming to them with ideas. You know, we should hit this, we should do that

He wanted to

Speaker 11: continue attacking Palestinian villages and camps, of course

But he also

Speaker 7: wanted to go after not just military, but civilian targets in Egypt and Syria and Jordan

Sometimes when he couldn't

Speaker 6: provide his superiors with a good reason to attack the Arabs, he and his men

Speaker 3: would just create one

They'd run an

Speaker 3: off-the-books operation to bait an Egyptian military unit to engage them

And

Speaker 3: then they'd call headquarters and say, we're under attack by the Egyptians, we need reinforcements, and the IDF would show up in force

Unit 101's

Speaker 3: intelligence officer, Uzi Ailam, said

There were

Speaker 3: many cases

Speaker 34: in which we, at Arik's bidding, provoked the enemy over the border and incited war. In

a real

Speaker 34: analysis of who started it over the entire history of the IDF's retaliations, we will not come out squeaky clean

When I think

Speaker 3: about the early Zionists, I often make a comparison to the Americans colonizing the frontier in

the

Speaker 36: 18th and 19th centuries. Many

of the

Speaker 36: Zionists, incidentally, made that same comparison to the point that

Speaker 45: the American cowboy aesthetic actually became popular among the settlers for a while

Obviously

Speaker 11: there's a million differences between those two sets of circumstances

but I make

Speaker 3: the comparison because the bottom line in both of those situations was this

There was no

Speaker 3: way to turn North

Speaker 16: America into

a

Speaker 61: European state and maintain good relations with the Native Americans. That was just not going to happen

Speaker 16: It was not possible. And

there was no way to

Speaker 16: transform Palestine into a Jewish state without coming into conflict with the Arabs who

Speaker 44: lived there. That was not possible

And so the

Speaker 16: people who came to settle America were not exactly a random cross-section of European society. These

were a lot

Speaker 16: of bold people

Speaker 12: a lot of desperate people, fanatics, zealots, adventurers, soldiers

Speaker 11: some criminals. And then

the Americans who

Speaker 11: went out into Indian country to colonize the frontier, they were self-selected to be an even harder group of people

Just

Speaker 11: imagine taking your family out into the middle of nowhere to build a cabin out of trees that you cut down with an axe in

a place where

Speaker 43: there are no police to come to your rescue and the natives come knocking wanting to know why your home is on their hunting ground

It wasn't just

Speaker 11: anybody going out there

It was hard people

Speaker 11: who had an idea of what they were getting into and thought that they could handle it

sort of a

Speaker 16: similar situation with the zionists you know that kibbutz where that young lieutenant i mentioned a moment

Speaker 43: ago was killed it's called nahal

oz go

Speaker 43: find that on a map

it is

Speaker 43: less than half a mile from the border with gaza and then as now

Speaker 62: gaza was full of a lot of very unhappy arabs many

Speaker 11: of whom had been recently driven out of their homes by the

israelis And there was

Speaker 11: no wall surrounding Gaza yet. No surveillance drones. No remote-controlled robot machine guns like they have today. None of that existed. And

so what kind of people

Speaker 63: are you going to get to go live in a place like that? Because

somebody's got

Speaker 63: to go live there. Because

if

Speaker 50: your people don't go live there

then

Speaker 64: the Gazans are going to start to spread out and they're going to take that territory back just by osmosis. So you've got to go settle that land if you want to keep it

Who are you going to

Speaker 65: get to do it

And when the

Speaker 65: Arabs do attack and Jewish blood is spilled, who

are you

Speaker 65: going to get to go across the border into

Speaker 42: their towns, into their villages, into their neighborhoods to take revenge

Today, in a

Speaker 64: place like America, we say, well, you send in the army, you know, send in the

Speaker 37: Navy SEALs

and then

Speaker 37: this massive bureaucratic apparatus kicks into gear to go deal with whatever

Speaker 5: it is. But

institutions like

Speaker 5: the army in

Speaker 16: Israel at this time had not really developed into much more than a militia. And

while the

Speaker 16: average soldier might be brave, might be prepared

Speaker 37: to handle

Speaker 11: a rifle and stand firm at his defensive position if the Arabs attack

Not

Speaker 11: everybody is cut out to go into hostile territory

Speaker 16: beyond the range of any rescue or reinforcement to go carry out assassinations or sabotage

And so who are you

Speaker 64: going to get to do it

There's only one

Speaker 64: answer to that question

There's only

Speaker 43: ever been one answer. You're going to get people like Ariel Sharon

You don't do something

Speaker 43: like what

Speaker 16: the Zionists were doing

Or

Speaker 16: what the Americans did on the frontier, for that matter. Without people like that

And those

Speaker 42: people often have a character that makes them heroic when the shit hits the fan. But

makes them a

Speaker 42: dangerous liability in any

Speaker 16: situation short of that

Kind of

Speaker 16: like that tough guy friend that you always want to have your back in a bar fight. But

for some

Speaker 64: reason, every single time you go out with them, you seem to get into a bar fight

well

Speaker 16: with men like Sharon at the business end of Israel's relations with the Arabs it was easy to see how things were going to turn out

and of course Sharon would

Speaker 16: say they were always going to turn out that way only

Speaker 11: without men like him the whole Zionist project would have gone under it's like Dayan said in that eulogy how

could they

Speaker 11: ever come to terms with a people whose land they had taken by force other than by giving their land back. You remember, at this time we're talking about

this was not

Speaker 11: something that had happened a few generations ago. It wasn't something that had happened to your grandparents or great-grandparents

It happened

Speaker 11: to you

Seven to

Speaker 42: eight hundred thousand Palestinians were living miles away in squalid camps while Jews slept in their beds in their former homes

But that

Speaker 66: is not something that can be fixed

Speaker 43: with words. And

the more

Speaker 43: ruthless and practical Zionists like Sharon and Dayan knew that there was no way to make that right because they knew how

Speaker 11: men like them would react if that had happened to them. And so unless they wanted to just give up on the

Speaker 7: Zionist project, and at

this point

Speaker 7: where could the Jews go even if they wanted to in the wake of World War II, they

were just going to

Speaker 7: have to forget about questions of right and wrong

And

Speaker 7: just get ready to fight

Now the Palestinians

Speaker 43: were not only a problem for Israel

Anytime you

Speaker 43: uproot 700,000

Speaker 11: people, throw them out of their homes with what they can carry on their backs, and send them off to live anywhere but here

that population is

Speaker 16: going to present problems for any country where

Speaker 43: they

end up. Where they

Speaker 43: ended up was in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Gaza

borders Egypt

Speaker 3: and fell under Egyptian military control after the 48 War. The

West Bank

Speaker 3: which is on the western bank of the Jordan River that the Israelis hadn't taken, had been under the control

Speaker 68: of Jordan since the 48 War

The

Speaker 3: influx of so many destitute refugees was very difficult on these countries. It was

Speaker 5: economically burdensome, socially disruptive, politically destabilizing for sure, in all the countries that received them. Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, these

were all

Speaker 5: very young states themselves. Until

the First World

Speaker 5: War, they'd been Ottoman Empire

Speaker 18: provinces

And

Speaker 3: then France controlled

Speaker 18: what would become Lebanon and Syria while Britain controlled Jordan

And these

Speaker 18: countries only really acquired independent statehood in the mid-40s during and after World War II

And so they're

Speaker 16: just a few years old

Aside from Egypt

Speaker 16: these young states were held together with string and silly putty. And actually, even in Egypt, the government wasn't really stable. In

Lebanon, for

Speaker 16: example, around 100,000 Palestinian refugees... entered a state with a total population of only about 1.3 million

And those people weren't

Speaker 16: distributed evenly throughout the country. They were concentrated in certain

Speaker 7: areas in the south, which meant that certain portions of the already fractious Lebanese population felt the brunt of the consequences. The Lebanese

Speaker 69: government was totally out of its depth

Speaker 7: trying to deal with that situation

and

Speaker 6: And so, the various ethnic and religious communities started taking matters into their

Speaker 3: own hands. And tensions started to build, and Lebanon started down its path to disaster. 100,000 people is a lot in any case, but that's one-thirteenth of the population of Lebanon at the time. So, just imagine

Speaker 16: something like 25 million people coming into the U.S. all at once

With

Speaker 16: little or nothing to their names, and essentially taking over a region of the country. Oh

and by the way, they're at

Speaker 16: war with

Speaker 70: the country next door. And the country next door is going to hold you responsible for anything those people do

The largest group of

Speaker 3: refugees ended up in Jordan. And

ever since the

Speaker 3: founding of Israel, the Jordanian monarchy has had to walk a tightrope

with

Speaker 40: provoking Israel by its support for the Palestinian

Speaker 42: cause on one side and inviting accusations of being a collaborator and a stooge of the Zionists on the other side. They

still walk

Speaker 42: this

Speaker 7: tightrope

And just

Speaker 7: now, in the last few weeks, a record number of Palestinian protesters, hundreds of thousands of protesters, flooded the streets

Speaker 3: of Amman, the capital of Jordan, to denounce the Israeli assault on Gaza and call for action from the Jordanian government

This is not a

Speaker 38: small concern for a monarchy that is not even native to the region of Jordan

The Hashemites

Speaker 38: who ruled

Speaker 16: Jordan came from the Arabian Peninsula. At

the time

Speaker 16: we're talking about, they had only been imported and installed by the British barely 40 years earlier. So it's not as if they had some deep claim to legitimacy. Palestinians made up

Speaker 63: over half the population of Jordan. They still do. The overwhelming majority of the urban population, which is to say the politically significant population

From the very

Speaker 42: beginning, whenever the

Speaker 39: subject of a Palestinian state came up, the worry of Jordan's monarchy was that someone was going to say, Uh, excuse

me. Why

Speaker 33: shouldn't Jordan be the Palestinian state? You

know, the

Speaker 33: Palestinians are the majority there, after all. And, you know, the

Speaker 50: Hashemites who rule that place are not even from the area. Why shouldn't that be Palestine

And so, in

Speaker 3: fact, a lot of the

secular Arab

Speaker 3: leaders around the region, meaning the leaders of countries that had presidents, not kings

Speaker 71: like Egypt and Syria

they

Speaker 71: were asking exactly that question. Why shouldn't Jordan

Speaker 38: be the Palestinian state? The retreat of the European empires from their former colonies after the Second World War gave

Speaker 3: rise to a generation of charismatic nationalist leaders in the Third

World. This was

Speaker 3: something you were seeing happen in Africa, it was happening in Asia, it was happening in the Middle East and North

Africa. The

Speaker 38: people were swept up in the enthusiasm that comes with fresh independence. And charismatic leaders were rising up to represent those

Speaker 16: people and also to take advantage of that energy. The

thing is, in

Speaker 16: many of these countries, the Europeans had pulled out their colonial administrations and pulled out their military forces. But they didn't give up ownership of the resources and the infrastructure in those countries. So

that's just a

Speaker 11: recipe for conflict

In

Speaker 11: fact, many of the post-colonial conflicts in the

Speaker 16: third world throughout the 20th century

were

Speaker 3: the result of exactly this dynamic

And so, for

Speaker 3: example, the British and the French still held a controlling interest in the Suez Canal, which is really Egypt's chief

Speaker 72: infrastructure asset, chief

Speaker 7: strategic

asset of, The Suez

Speaker 7: Canal runs right through Egypt, it's all on Egyptian territory, connecting the Red and Mediterranean Seas, and it's still owned by the French and the British at the time

The Arab nationalists who

Speaker 3: were leading these new republics were not happy about the lingering foreign control in their countries, but it wasn't an easy thing to do something

Speaker 11: about it

The biggest

Speaker 11: problems the Arab nations have faced

Speaker 3: Then, and that they still face, is that they've just never been able to cooperate with each other. Not

for any

Speaker 3: length of time, anyway

Some Arab

Speaker 18: countries are ruled by monarchies, others call themselves republics

Some are

Speaker 18: religious and sectarian

Speaker 16: others are secular and socialist

The leaders of each

Speaker 16: Arab country competed with each other as

much or

Speaker 16: more than they did against outside powers, including Israel

And so

Speaker 16: they've always been

Speaker 3: easy marks for Israel and the West to play off against

Speaker 42: each other

These secular

Speaker 42: Arab leaders, they all wanted some form of pan-Arab unity

Whether

Speaker 16: that meant political unification, as in like an Arab Warsaw Pact, or just a lighter alliance like an Arab NATO, they wanted that kind of organization. But they

all meant

Speaker 16: pan-Arab unity under their leadership, and they wanted that kind of organization. and so they could never quite agree on how to get it done

After the

Speaker 16: humiliation of the Arab armies in 1948, one of the ways to bolster popular

Speaker 73: support

Speaker 38: for you being the one

not only

Speaker 38: among your own people, but throughout the region, was to promise that you were going to be the one who was going to confront the Zionists

Speaker 7: and get justice for the Palestinians. By the

mid-1950s

Speaker 6: over a million Palestinians were now living in squalor, mostly in squalor

In

Speaker 40: neighboring countries with no end or change in their situation in sight

Israel was a

Speaker 16: constant reminder of the years of European domination. Actually, not just a reminder. To the Arabs, it represented the continued

Speaker 42: presence of European imperialism in the Arab world

while

Speaker 42: the Israelis saw themselves especially after World War II essentially as a nation of refugees themselves that

is not how

Speaker 42: the

Speaker 43: Arabs experienced them the Arabs experienced them as invaders and colonizers that's

not

Speaker 18: exactly new in history that's often how it goes the Turks who conquered the Byzantine Empire were only there because the Mongols had driven them off

the steppe The

Speaker 18: Visigoths who sacked Rome in 410, they were being driven deeper into the Roman Empire because they were trying to get away from the Huns. Hell

a lot of early Americans

Speaker 43: believed that they were refugees from persecution, but

that did not

Speaker 43: soften their impact on the Native Americans. And so, promises by the Arab

Speaker 3: leaders to drive out the Zionists were

were of

Speaker 3: a piece with their more general commitment to extirpate European

Speaker 63: influence, political and economic control from the Middle East

How you see the

Speaker 51: Israelis' behavior

Speaker 3: both toward the Palestinians as well as toward the surrounding Arab countries, really depends on how broad a view of the situation you want to take

Or maybe a

Speaker 75: better way to say it is

It

Speaker 75: depends on when you want to start the historical clock

Somebody taking

Speaker 20: a close-in view would say, well, look, the Israelis are being attacked

so they're

Speaker 76: within their rights to retaliate. I mean, what are they supposed to do? Just let people attack them

Answer to that seems

Speaker 64: pretty obvious, right

But someone taking a

Speaker 64: 30,000-foot historical view is going to say, well, wait a second, the Israelis were the ones who

Speaker 18: seized this land and drove these people out of their homes

Right? And so

Speaker 18: the Palestinians are surely within their rights to fight back. What are they

Speaker 43: supposed to do? Just accept their ethnic cleansing and move on? And

the answer to

Speaker 11: that seems pretty obvious too. And you still see people throwing these lines at each other with full earnestness as people debate the topic today

Now that Israel's

Speaker 16: been around for 75 years

people on the

Speaker 16: outside tend to have a different view of the situation than when it had only been around for a decade or so. Today, many people look at Palestinian terrorism the way they would look at it if the American Indian movement here in 2023 started lighting off bombs

started a

Speaker 16: campaign of mass terror to take

Speaker 32: back North America. Just anachronistic, pointless

Speaker 38: violence, even if their original historical grievances were totally legitimate. But

most of us

Speaker 78: view Indian attacks in the 1700s

Speaker 43: and 1800s During and just after European settlers were driving them out of their homes and colonizing their land, we

view that

Speaker 43: differently than if the AIM started launching attacks today

When the Israelis and Arabs

Speaker 79: were killing each other in the 50s and 60s, either

or both

Speaker 79: sides could be seen as acting

in

Speaker 3: legitimate self-defense or taking justified revenge, depending on how you want to frame the question

But like

Speaker 16: Moshe Dayan said in that eulogy, for the Israelis, these were going to have to be moral quandaries for their children. To

debate and judge

Speaker 20: hopefully, in Israeli universities, in Israeli cities, but that was only going to

Speaker 7: happen if this generation, this first settler generation, put those quandaries aside and acted ruthlessly and decisively. This

was in the

Speaker 5: wake of World War II

And so

Speaker 5: the Zionists were not in a mood to take moral

Speaker 80: advice from anybody

nor to

Speaker 80: listen to anyone's lectures on the laws of war. The

attitude of many

Speaker 16: Israeli leaders was the same as that of many Palestinian militants. If

America

Speaker 81: can nuke Japanese cities, and the Soviets can massacre their way through Eastern

Speaker 82: Europe

If

Speaker 75: millions of German civilians can be ethnically cleansed from European countries they lived in for centuries, then

given the

Speaker 42: existential danger they faced, both Israelis and Palestinians

Speaker 16: felt that any means were justified in pursuit of their victory. It

really is

Speaker 16: important to remember that historical context, meaning the fact that the initial

Speaker 3: acts which set off the cycle of violence happened right around the era of world war ii not because the context

Speaker 16: justifies anything but

because it

Speaker 16: affected what people thought

Speaker 64: of as normal

what people

Speaker 64: thought of as being within the bounds of what was normal

in war the world

Speaker 37: had spent the last few years of world war ii engaged in

Speaker 16: total unrestrained violence against civilian populations

and

Speaker 16: Both sides, the Axis

Speaker 11: and the Allies

When the

Speaker 11: Zionists expelled the Palestinians in 1948, the Soviet Union, a world power

a member in

Speaker 16: good standing of the UN Security Council, legitimized by the other Allies who had allowed Soviet butchers to sit as judges of war crimes at Nuremberg

At the same time that

Speaker 64: the Zionists were carrying out those expulsions

The

Speaker 64: Soviet Union was engaged in extraordinary violence against millions of people in the parts of Europe that it had conquered

In the Korean

Speaker 64: War, a few years later in the early 50s, we killed something like

Speaker 42: 20% of the entire population of North Korea. A

lot of it by

Speaker 42: using heavy bombers against an enemy that had no air force

And so that's the

Speaker 42: state of the

Speaker 83: world

The

Speaker 83: state of international affairs in the 40s and 50s

There's another point

Speaker 84: about the historical context, which is good to keep in mind. And

Speaker 85: actually, I guess I've already kind of touched

Speaker 51: on this, but it's worth bringing into the foreground

And it's that in

Speaker 37: these early days, Israeli government institutions were still in their

Speaker 16: infancy. I

mean, they

Speaker 16: were just being put together

You hear

Speaker 16: about like an Israeli intelligence agency And a lot of times it just meant a shabby building With a few deaths thrown in it

Today

Speaker 3: when we say Mossad or Israeli defense forces People picture this hyper-efficient High-tech organization With elaborate bureaucracies To handle everything from recruiting To training, to pensions To propaganda

Speaker 42: and legal questions Back

in the

Speaker 42: early days None of that existed

And the

Speaker 42: Israelis were flying by the seat of their pants a lot of the time, often building out these institutions as it became necessary in the course of operations. And

so they were

Speaker 42: carrying

Speaker 34: out very bold operations. Operations that would never make it past legal review today in the modern world

They would often

Speaker 33: carry out operations in one part of the government that the rest of the government knew nothing about

Just

Speaker 3: like Sharon's Unit 101 Picking its own fights in Gaza Half the time the Israeli defense forces Sent in to reinforce them They just thought it was an Egyptian attack Which is what was intended by Sharon's unit

Take an

Speaker 3: example from 1954 Famous

Speaker 16: example In 1954 Israeli military intelligence Recruited a handful of Jews Who were living in Egypt at the

time and got

Speaker 16: them to agree to plant bombs in movie theaters, libraries, and education centers owned by Britain and the United States, where British and American people frequented. Two

American

Speaker 86: libraries in a British theater were

Speaker 73: bombed by these terrorists working for Israel

They called it

Speaker 73: Operation Susanna. It's come down better

Speaker 87: known as the Levon Affair. after the Israeli defense minister at the time

The plan was to

Speaker 73: blame the attacks on the Egyptians to incite the British and the Americans against Israel's main enemy. Just a straightforward, dictionary-definition

Speaker 20: false flag

Fortunately, the

Speaker 40: operation was poorly planned and sloppily carried out

So the

Speaker 40: Egyptians caught on, and 11 Israeli agents, both Egyptian

Speaker 45: Jews and undercover Israeli officers

were

Speaker 45: captured, they were tortured, and except for two

Speaker 88: who managed to escape, sentenced to long prison terms or death

Israel, of

Speaker 16: course, denied involvement in the Levon affair, continued to deny involvement until 2005, when the government

Speaker 45: finally dropped the charade and officially honored the

Speaker 3: surviving agents of the operation

So that's the kind of

Speaker 3: thing that was going

on. Two

Speaker 3: years later, 1956, the Israelis engaged with Western powers against Egypt more

Speaker 34: directly. Jamal Abdul Nasser had taken over as President of Egypt in 1956, and he was positioned as the natural leader of

the Arab

Speaker 34: world. He was also Israel's number one nemesis from the mid-50s

Speaker 3: until the late

1960s

Speaker 3: Nasser was a complicated figure in many ways. In some ways I would say he was a

Speaker 16: great man, you know, in a political sense, a great man of 20th century history. He was

Speaker 20: tall, he looked the part, he was a very, very good orator, very inspiring figure

Speaker 89: Sometimes, let's just say, his appetite was a little bigger than his stomach, and that brought some disaster onto his country eventually. Nasser

championed the

Speaker 90: Palestinian cause, as all Arab leaders

Speaker 38: did, and

he did it

Speaker 38: for his own reasons, as all other Arab leaders also did. Nasser

wanted to bring the

Speaker 5: Arab countries under a single political authority, under his leadership, and

And so

Speaker 91: aside from questions of justice or law or religious obligation, Israel was just in the way. It was literally

Speaker 3: a physical impediment to his plans, separating Egypt from the rest of these Arab countries. All

the secular Arab

Speaker 3: leaders in the region favored some kind of pan-Arab cooperation, if not outright political unification like Nasser wanted. All the republics

Speaker 6: wanted that

But none of

Speaker 6: the Arab monarchies wanted that. The Hashemite kingdoms of Jordan and Iraq

Saudi

Speaker 43: Arabia and the other Gulf shikdoms, the Moroccans, these countries were the personal possessions of

Speaker 3: their monarchs, and they were not going to allow their personal possessions to be absorbed into some

Speaker 34: pan-Arab socialist republic. Many

of these monarchies

Speaker 34: had been put in place by the British Empire

And

Speaker 34: they continued to have chummy relations with Britain in the West

Now, the

Speaker 7: Prime Minister of Jordan, who served King Hussein in the late 60s, for example

that guy

Speaker 7: had served in the British Navy

And so, from

Speaker 7: Nasser's perspective, and

that of the

Speaker 7: Syrians and the

Speaker 42: Ba'athists as well

these monarchies

Speaker 42: were illegitimate. They were pawns of Western powers. More importantly, they stood in the way

Speaker 38: of Arab unity

and, And so they

Speaker 38: were all right next to Israel on the list of things that had to go. Egypt

had for a long time

Speaker 38: been close to the British too. But

neither

Speaker 42: the British nor any of the Western powers were in

Speaker 40: favor of Arab unification. And so once Nasser came to power in 1956, he began to pull away from the West and started seeking friendship with the Soviet Union

Speaker 3: which was looking for allies in the region and making big promises of funding and engineering support and military training

And so 1956

Speaker 3: was going to

Speaker 39: be the year of the second Arab-Israeli war, the first being 1948. It's usually called the Suez Crisis over here, but it was the second Arab-Israeli war, and this time there was no question about who had started

it. as i

Speaker 39: mentioned a few

Speaker 3: minutes ago egypt was a sovereign independent nation now but british and french investors still held the controlling interest

in

Speaker 92: the suez canal which ran right through egypt the

french and british

Speaker 93: reaped a majority of the profits from

Speaker 38: shipping that passed through the canal

and so nasser

Speaker 38: decided that had gone on long enough and that the canal properly belonged to

That

Speaker 38: Egypt should be the one deciding whether and whose and how much shipping would pass

through

Speaker 3: their territory, and

that the Egyptian

Speaker 3: people should be the ones benefiting from it financially, and so he nationalized it

Well, the British and the

Speaker 7: French were not prepared to just let such an important strategic asset, not to mention cash cow, go without a

Speaker 16: fight. The French and British wanted to take military action against Egypt

But someone

Speaker 11: was standing in their way, that someone was U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower

Speaker 16: Eisenhower was focused on the broader Cold War with the Soviet Union. He was not interested

Speaker 40: in the petty financial interests of the French or the

Speaker 19: British. And he was interested in

Speaker 37: asserting America's authority in the post-war

world. He was much

Speaker 16: more concerned with the possibility of alienating all the countries of the Middle East and losing them to the Soviet Union and what that might mean in the context of the Cold War. A

global propaganda

Speaker 16: war was being waged in the Third World and non-aligned countries. Soviet messaging was very simple. It practically wrote itself. They were saying to the Third World, Look, yeah, sure, we joined

The

Speaker 16: Allies, Britain, France, you know, America, we joined the Allies to fight the fascists during World War II

But then what happened? Your

Speaker 16: colonizers, backed by the Americans, went and allied with Japan and even Germany

And they're

Speaker 16: still trying to

Speaker 94: control your countries. You know, we support your movement for national liberation. We're with you. They want to retain their empires

And

Speaker 95: just look at the French in Vietnam and Algeria, look at the British in Kenya, still

Speaker 16: asserting control over the vital resources and assets in your countries, threatening you with violence if

Speaker 43: you try to take back what's rightfully yours. Now, you can poke holes in that narrative if you want, but that's very powerful propaganda for newly independent

Speaker 64: countries whose core infrastructure and natural resources are in fact still owned by their former colonizers

And so while

Speaker 16: the British and French were concerned with trying to keep their assets, at least some American leaders had their eye on a bigger picture. And they knew that France and Britain bullying countries in their former colonial stomping grounds made for very bad propaganda. And

so Eisenhower vetoed

Speaker 40: any military action by the French or British against Egypt. which was the most populous

Speaker 39: and, in the terms that mattered to Cold War planners, the most important Arab power in the Middle East

And so the French and the

Speaker 39: British got together with the

Speaker 3: Israelis

And they huddled

Speaker 3: together and came up with a plan

Again, this was

Speaker 3: 1956, so the Soviet Union was

Speaker 34: busy putting down a revolt in Hungary. They weren't going to be available to bail Egypt out of a military crisis

And so the

Speaker 34: three devised a

Speaker 16: secret plan in which the Israelis would attack Egypt unprovoked

with the goal

Speaker 16: of provoking an Egyptian counterattack, which would then allow Britain and France to move in and occupy the area as peacekeepers

Speaker 3: reclaiming the Suez Canal in the process. And

so that's what

Speaker 3: happened, and it all went according to plan. Israel invaded, Egypt retaliated, France

Speaker 16: and Britain moved in, seized the canal, and Israel was rewarded for its role

with control of

Speaker 18: the Sinai Peninsula. Now

they knew that the Americans

Speaker 16: were going to figure out what happened right away, but

they figured

Speaker 16: that Eisenhower would just accept the facts

Speaker 43: on the ground once the deed was already done

But they were

Speaker 43: wrong about that. Eisenhower was not happy

It

Speaker 43: didn't help that David Ben-Gurion gave a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament

Speaker 16: crowing about how the

Suez Crisis

Speaker 16: had made the 1949 peace with Egypt dead and buried, and that Israel would no longer be constrained by the terms of that deal

There were calls for

Speaker 16: a UN peacekeeping force to separate the Israelis and Egyptians at Suez

but Israel

Speaker 96: Ben-Gurion said that under no circumstances would UN forces ever be allowed

Speaker 3: on any territory controlled by Israel. And so Eisenhower was pissed, and he wanted to make it absolutely clear

Speaker 16: who was calling the shots in the non-communist world

He ordered

Speaker 16: the French and British to get out

He made the

Speaker 16: Israelis give back the Sinai Peninsula, and then Nasser allowed UN peacekeepers to be stationed near the canal

It was

Speaker 16: probably the moment you can mark in the history books as the official end of France and Britain as real great powers on the

Speaker 37: world stage

Well, so Egypt had lost

Speaker 37: that war militarily. They'd lost it badly. But Nasser was still able to

Speaker 44: brag... Nasser had only been in office a few months. He came in in 1956, and that's when this happened. And he was able to brag

that... He

Speaker 44: stood up

Speaker 97: to not just Israel, but to the two European powers that had dominated the Middle East since the Turks left

and at least

Speaker 75: ended up no worse than he'd started off. And

so his popularity

Speaker 16: around the Arab world skyrocketed. Two years later, in 1958, he formed the United Arab Republic with Syria, a first step toward political unification. And while Syria remained nominally independent

For

Speaker 16: the few years that it lasted, Nasser was making most of the important decisions for both countries

taking an

Speaker 16: important first step toward

fixing

Speaker 31: the Arabs' traditional problem of never being able to cooperate with each other. Nasser

was so

Speaker 43: popular that Nasserite factions formed in other countries

usually

Speaker 3: led by military officers who wanted to model their own country's government and foreign policy on Nasser's Egypt

Nasserite

Speaker 98: factions gained momentum in Lebanon, Yemen, and

Speaker 43: especially Iraq. Iraq, again, was controlled by a monarchy from the same Hashemite family as the monarchy that ruled

Speaker 51: Jordan. Pro-Nasser military officers in Iraq wanted to overthrow that monarchy

and

Speaker 16: institute a secular government along the lines of Egypt and Syria. And in 1958, the year Nasser formed the UAR with Syria

Speaker 67: the plotters launched a bloody coup d'etat, which reduced Iraq to chaos for a while

My wife's mother

Speaker 3: was actually a little girl

living in

Speaker 3: Baghdad at the time of the revolution in 1958. And

even though

Speaker 3: she was very young, she remembers tanks pointing their cannons at her family's apartment building

and

Speaker 3: seeing cars dragging bodies through the streets

This is from

Speaker 3: Jillian Becker's book on the Palestine Liberation Organization. Quote

In the

Speaker 16: 37 years since the British had created the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, there had been 57 ministries, a history of

Speaker 38: instability with numerous uprisings, massacres, and barbaric assassinations

The

Speaker 33: regent, Abd al-Alaq

The

Speaker 33: uncle of the young King Faisal II had ambitions of his own for Iraq to dominate

Speaker 16: in Arab unity embracing Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait. In February 1958, he achieved a union

Speaker 40: between Iraq and Jordan, the two remaining Hashemite kingdoms. This

was as

Speaker 33: intolerable to Nasser as the union of Egypt and Syria was unbearable to Abd al-Alaah

Under

Speaker 33: pro-Nassarite

Speaker 16: leadership, a contingent of Iraqi troops dispatched by the region to help quell a pro-Nassar uprising in

Speaker 33: Lebanon turned instead on their own ruling house. At

dawn on

Speaker 33: 14 July 1958, Faisal was murdered, along with his grandmother, his aunt, and others in the palace, including an orphan boy. His uncle, Abd al-Ela, was dragged through the streets of Baghdad tied with ropes to the back of a truck

Then

Speaker 33: his body was dismembered with axes and his limbs and head tossed about by the hysterical mob

The torso

Speaker 33: was hung from a balcony, and chunks of its flesh were sliced off and thrown to the crowd below

The Prime

Speaker 33: Minister, Nouriel Saeed, disguised himself as a woman and tried to escape, but he was found and instantly killed, and his body was left lying on the road to be driven over and squashed and broken

Speaker 16: by the cars of exulting motorists

He was

Speaker 16: succeeded for a brief period by General Abdel Karim Qasim, who led the revolt and the massacre, and who favored friendship with the Soviet Union

After five

Speaker 3: years, Qasim, too, was murdered, and his body was devoured by dogs

Now, I should

Speaker 3: mention that Jillian Becker's book on the PLO definitely has an angle. It's not a neutral book. It's got an

Speaker 33: agenda to the point that you would be justified calling it a polemic against the

Speaker 99: Palestinian groups and their supporters and an apologia for

Israel. But it's got a

Speaker 38: lot of good information. Sometimes you just have to work through bias sources and account for the bias because sometimes

Speaker 3: they provide information that is not spelled out well in other sources. And

in her

Speaker 3: book, there's particularly good

Speaker 67: information about how Arab leaders around the region use the Palestinian cause to jockey for position among themselves. Now

Iraq was

Speaker 100: just first on the

Speaker 101: list. Nasser wanted to see all the monarchies toppled

In

Speaker 6: 1960, his agents killed the Prime Minister of Jordan with a bomb that had been intended for the king. In 1962, he took the side of revolutionary forces

Speaker 73: against the monarchy in Yemen and fought a proxy war there against Saudi Arabia

Speaker 38: In

the meantime

Speaker 38: there was another coup d'etat in Syria

And

Speaker 38: that country pulled out of the

Speaker 3: United Arab Republic in order to start reasserting its own leadership position in the region. Hopefully you're starting to get a picture of why the Arab nations were never able to organize and cooperate to keep from being pushed around by little

Speaker 16: old Israel

Meanwhile, the

Speaker 16: Palestinian issue festered, and relations between Israel and its neighbors continued to deteriorate

In

Speaker 16: 1964, with the Egyptians fighting in Yemen and Syria reasserting itself, Nasser had a clever

Speaker 44: idea. He

called a meeting of

Speaker 44: all the Arab heads of state as well as some important factional leaders to

see if

Speaker 44: the one

Speaker 37: issue

on which

Speaker 37: they all agreed, the Israel-Palestine issue, could bring them together, under Nasser's

Speaker 84: leadership, of course

He

Speaker 102: proposed to create a political entity to

Speaker 50: organize and represent the Palestinian

Speaker 42: people. The Palestinian people were scattered in many countries. They didn't have a national government of their own to speak for them

And so the Arab League

Speaker 39: approved the plan. They voted to fund this new organization. And thus

Speaker 103: was born the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. Again

this was a

Speaker 104: clever idea by Nasser

He had

Speaker 104: called the meeting

he

Speaker 16: chose the president of the PLO, and he expected that it was going to organize the

Speaker 45: Palestinians into an Egyptian proxy that he could then put to use in the countries where Palestinians lived

Later in the year, the

Speaker 45: PLO

Speaker 16: president was invited to represent the Palestinians at a meeting of the Arab League, and he was treated like the leader of a proper national state

Well, this was

Speaker 51: welcome to most of the participants, but not to King Hussein of

Speaker 16: Jordan. Again, most Palestinians lived in Jordan. Most Jordanians were Palestinian. So an organization whose purpose was to politically organize and represent the Palestinian people would amount to forming an alternative state structure

Speaker 97: within his country

Worse, the

Speaker 97: PLO had already started behaving like a state, demanding the right to levy taxes

Speaker 16: on Palestinian citizens in Jordan to fund its operations, and even to raise a Palestine Liberation Army that would operate independent of the Jordanian military. These are

things no

Speaker 16: sovereign country could tolerate

Speaker 105: Naturally, the actual government of

Speaker 106: Jordan saw this as a threat to its authority and legitimacy. which it was, and which is exactly what Nasser had intended it to be. So all political energy, most political energy around the Palestinian question started

Speaker 16: flowing into the PLO at this point. But not all Palestinians were enthusiastic about it

Some of them did

Speaker 16: not trust the Arab states to stand for the Palestinians when the chips were down. In 1948... They had fled as soon as they had done enough to say they'd done something

These people didn't

Speaker 45: trust international organizations to take any meaningful action on their behalf

They believed that

Speaker 75: only Palestinians could liberate Palestinians, that their liberation could only be achieved through

Speaker 81: armed revolutionary struggle in keeping with the spirit of the age

One of those who

Speaker 107: thought this way was George

Speaker 16: Habash, a young Palestinian Christian who would later found and lead the People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine

Speaker 108: the PFLP

Habash was born in

Speaker 16: 1926, making

Speaker 45: him 22 at the time of the 1948 war, in

a town

Speaker 45: called Lidda

During the war

Speaker 16: the new Israeli army had moved into Lidda and forced virtually every Arab resident out of the town with whatever they could carry, driving them out into the desert on foot in July

Speaker 91: to live or die however they could while Israeli soldiers

Speaker 45: looted their homes and stripped them of valuables on their way out. And hundreds of them did die out in the

Speaker 39: desert, especially old people and children, before they were able to reach the next safe haven

The cleansing of Lida and a

Speaker 3: simultaneous identical operation

in the

Speaker 3: town of Ramla resulted in some 50,000 Palestinians being driven out into the desert on foot as

a result of

Speaker 3: one operation

For people who

Speaker 1: were there and for people who heard the stories of those who were, this act of ethnic cleansing and, you know

Speaker 3: look, there's some dispute over whether that term is appropriate here, but there's no controversy as far as I'm concerned, so I'm going to

use it. the

Speaker 109: order was given by the israeli government to drive the residents of lida and ramla out

israeli

Speaker 16: military communications were already referring to the people as refugees while they were still in the cities

look

Speaker 110: that's a

Speaker 33: debate we can have another time the bottom line is one way or another tens of thousands of palestinians were driven out of the two cities at gunpoint and many of them died on their long walk through

Speaker 51: the desert

and And to

Speaker 51: the people who went through that

to the people who

Speaker 41: went through that, it left a permanent impression of what the Israelis were actually all about

Speaker 1: whatever they might say

Another young man who thought

Speaker 91: like George Habash was Khalil al-Wazir, nom de

guerre

Speaker 40: Abu Jihad, born in 1935 in the Palestinian town of Ramla, the

Speaker 3: other city whose population was driven out. during the operation I just mentioned

Speaker 45: Khalil was 12 or 13 years old in 1948

when the

Speaker 45: Zionist terrorist group known

Speaker 16: as Irgun exploded a bomb in Ramla's main marketplace, killing 18 civilians and wounding another 45

And then

Speaker 111: later that year, he and his family and everybody he knew were driven out of

Speaker 1: Ramla at gunpoint by Israeli forces and never

allowed to

Speaker 16: return. Khalil and his family ended

up in

Speaker 16: Gaza, and just three years later, when he was 16 years old

he was already

Speaker 16: leading a Palestinian militant group, 16 years old. He and his friends sought out men who'd gained experience fighting in the '48

war, And

Speaker 16: those men taught Khalil and his friends what they knew

And then

Speaker 16: Khalil's group went out and recruited and trained more fighters. And by the time he was 18, in 1953, Khalil commanded some 200 young fighters, 18 years

Speaker 67: old

Operating out of Gaza

Speaker 67: they launched operations against infrastructure and against

Speaker 37: people in southern Israel

And they were encouraged and

Speaker 37: supported by the Egyptians

who

Speaker 37: used them as expendable proxies to

Speaker 16: harass the Israelis. And

the

Speaker 51: Egyptians would send Palestinian students from Cairo as reinforcements for the group

One of the young

Speaker 61: men they sent was an electrical engineering student

from the

Speaker 61: University of Cairo named

Speaker 80: Muhammad Yasser Abdelrahman Raouf Arafat Al-Qudwa Al-Husseini, better known to all of you as Yasser Arafat

Arafat and Abu

Speaker 61: Jihad immediately recognized the other's talent, and they took a liking to each other, and

Speaker 45: the two formed a partnership that would completely change the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

After a few years

Speaker 20: Arafat, Abu Jihad, and another friend who had become important to their organization, Saleh

Halaf

Speaker 112: traveled to Europe

to go to

Speaker 113: an international student congress sponsored by the Soviet Union in Prague

Many prominent

Speaker 67: Palestinians and other Arabs who could afford to do it would send their kids to school in Europe, and so the three guys made important connections

Speaker 40: with a lot of these expats during their visit. And then instead of going back, immediately they moved on to Stuttgart in West Germany to go sound out the student movement there. This

was still

Speaker 17: 1956-1957

So

Speaker 17: there's not a whole lot going on internationally with

the

Speaker 114: Palestinian movement outside of the Arab emigre students groups. Arafat

had become

Speaker 115: accepted as

Speaker 21: the leader of their little group by this point. And

since he

Speaker 21: was an engineer, he applied for and got a job in Kuwait. And once he got there, he got

Speaker 16: work permits for his friends to come and sent for them

Well

Speaker 16: when Abu Jihad arrived, he had brought along a new friend that he had acquired in Europe

The man was a

Speaker 90: Palestinian, but he

Speaker 67: had spent the previous few years fighting for the National Liberation Front, the FLN, against the French in the Algerian War of Independence

Speaker 39: The

Algerian War was

Speaker 39: a savage affair that officially began in

Speaker 16: 1954. The Algerian War was a savage affair

that officially began in 1954. That

Speaker 16: year, the French had just been humiliated at Diem Bien Phu and driven out of Vietnam, and revolutionary nationalists in Algeria thought, hey, if the

Speaker 116: Vietnamese can do it

we can

Speaker 116: do it too. Algeria

was very

Speaker 116: different from

Speaker 73: Vietnam, though

There were

Speaker 73: over a million French living in Algeria, many of whom had been born there

And

Speaker 73: many in the French establishment considered

Speaker 90: losing Algeria to be akin to losing a province in mainland France

And so it was

Speaker 91: a very ugly affair

It ran for eight

Speaker 91: years, from 54 to 62, and the French

Speaker 16: went out kicking and screaming

The success of the

Speaker 16: Vietnamese was proof that a determined national insurgency could defeat a European power

But the

Speaker 16: Algerians provided a demonstration of a whole new kind of war, a people's war designed for the mass media age, a very dark and ugly kind of war, but one that tries to answer the very hard question

of how a

Speaker 16: far weaker force can defeat a vastly superior force in a prolonged conflict

The problem

Speaker 16: all these

Speaker 75: anti-colonial movements faced was simple and similar. There is a much more powerful military force in your

Speaker 16: country. They don't want to leave. It is up to you to change their minds. So how are you going to do that

The Vietnamese

Speaker 16: showed that under

Speaker 42: certain conditions, as

long as

Speaker 42: you're tenacious and well-equipped and willing and able to take casualties, and

as long

Speaker 42: as you have a safe haven you can retreat to to lick your wounds

You might

Speaker 42: actually be able to defeat that military in a war of attrition. But

most of these

Speaker 42: resistance and revolutionary movements were working with far less in the Vietnamese, and yet they still had to solve that same problem. How do you make the stronger force want to leave

Speaker 116: Well

it's a method with

Speaker 116: which we're all now very familiar, because it's arguably the mode of warfare that has most defined the

Speaker 16: post-World War II era of combat. In simplest terms

The

Speaker 16: insurgents

Speaker 40: engage in acts of terrorism that are not intended to harm the capacity of the other side to fight

but to

Speaker 40: provoke the stronger side into retaliating

in a way

Speaker 16: that will not play well in the media, and on campuses, and in parliaments back home and around the world

And that's what

Speaker 16: happened in Algeria

The FLN

Speaker 16: engaged in wanton acts of violence

The French

Speaker 79: responded with their own brutality

And

Speaker 79: the left-wing and anti-colonial activists back in France, they took it from there

By the end, by

Speaker 16: 62, the French military was not about to give up Algeria

Speaker 3: In fact, there was almost a military coup against the French government over it

But by the early

Speaker 3: 60s, the French

Speaker 76: people and

the French

Speaker 76: political establishment had had enough

Again, this

Speaker 73: makes for a very ugly war. Where when the enemy

Speaker 3: responds to one of your operations by massacring some civilians, maybe some women and children on your side, or by torturing some

Speaker 42: of your people who were held prisoner, then that's actually a successful operation. That's actually

the point. To get the

Speaker 42: other side to do those things to your own people so that you can use

it as

Speaker 42: propaganda, knowing that over time, at least when you're fighting a

Speaker 83: western country

it

Speaker 83: tends to have its effect

Well

Speaker 79: it had its effect in Algeria, and the Algerians drove the French out

And that made a

Speaker 112: huge impact on revolutionary movements around the world

Arafat and his

Speaker 7: friends took that lesson to heart

Speaker 16: Palestine would not be liberated by Arab armies. It would only be liberated through the armed struggle of a Palestinian people's war along the lines of

the one... That

Speaker 16: had returned Algeria to the Algerians. Arafat

Speaker 20: Abu Jihad, and Khalaf, they self-consciously separated

Speaker 40: themselves from Palestinian elites and the Arab regimes. They presented their group as coming up

Speaker 16: from the people

You know

Speaker 16: they wanted to differentiate themselves not only from the Arab regimes who had lost the 48 war, but also from the Palestinian elites

Speaker 42: who were perceived by many regular Palestinians as having sold the people out

You know, these

Speaker 42: people who could afford to just move to Beirut and buy a nice villa for their

Speaker 3: family, that they had left the poor Palestinians, the rural Palestinians, hanging out to dry

Arafat

Speaker 3: himself was a cousin of the very prominent Husseini

Speaker 40: clan, but he often denied or downplayed that connection publicly

Speaker 66: he wanted to be seen

as a man of the

Speaker 41: people. They emphasized their lack of dependence on the Arab states, for

Speaker 117: anything except places to train and conduct their

Speaker 73: operations. They called themselves the Movement for the Liberation of

Palestine. And

Speaker 3: unfortunately, after they had settled on the name and started publicizing it and operating under it for a little while, somebody

noticed that

Speaker 42: the Arabic acronym of the name spelled out Hataf, which in their language means something like quick death. And

so one

Speaker 42: of them had the idea to switch it around from Movement for the Liberation of Palestine to the Palestine

Speaker 86: Liberation Movement. reversing the acronym to a word that translates to something like glorious victory, and that

Speaker 42: is the name by which we all know Yasser Arafat's organization today, FATA. FATA

started

Speaker 118: gaining momentum

Speaker 45: around the time that the alliance between Syria and Egypt broke up

Already by

Speaker 20: 1961, Arafat and Abu Jihad had been making a lot of moves

They had

Speaker 50: managed to insert their activists into student groups in Europe and

Speaker 16: throughout the Arab world. They picked up a decent number of recruits, including a couple hundred Palestinians from European universities who actually went and traveled to the Middle East for training in guerrilla warfare. And they were forming

Speaker 119: alliances with like-minded organizations

After the

Speaker 40: victory of the Algerians in 1962, the new government there turned Algiers into a headquarters for the world revolution

They provided

Speaker 120: subsidies to foreign revolutionary groups. They

gave

Speaker 87: asylum to foreign revolutionaries who were on the run from their home countries. The

Algerian

Speaker 73: government

Speaker 16: recognized groups like the North Vietnamese and the Black Panthers as the legitimate representatives of their people

and set

Speaker 16: up embassies for them. And so Arafat met with the new president of Algeria and came away with offices and a stipend for Fatah. But then, in 1964, Nasser called that conference that created the PLO and activist and political

Speaker 40: energy surrounding the Palestinian cause all began flowing into that channel. And the Algerians gave Fatah's offices to the PLO

Speaker 99: They weren't actually called Fatah yet. I'm just using it to avoid confusion

And

Speaker 39: Algeria redirected the subsidy and the other support that they had been giving to Fatah to the PLO as well. And so Fatah basically collapsed all the way

Speaker 91: back down to its original core. Just Arafat, Abu Jihad, Saleh Khalaf, and a few others, about eight people. Arafat

and his friends

Speaker 3: were sort of at a loss for how to proceed, but

help

Speaker 16: was on the way

Because

Speaker 16: as fate would have it, they were not the only ones looking for an alternative to Nasser and the PLO

The Syrians were

Speaker 34: back on the scene, and looking to make their own bid for leadership of the Arab world

The head of Syrian

Speaker 45: army intelligence at the time

Speaker 67: Major General Ahmad Suedani, said in an interview, I believe

Israel is

Speaker 16: not a state, but serves as a military base for the imperialist camp

We must

Speaker 16: not take the line of conventional

Speaker 45: warfare, using conventional weapons. We must take the line of the

Speaker 42: Popular Liberation War

Should Israel

Speaker 42: react to the Popular Liberation War by conventional warfare, the Arab armies must be ready to enter the battle in order to safeguard the bases of the Fedayeen, who are the basic element of popular warfare

Arab unity

Speaker 44: is a necessity

We

Speaker 44: believe that unity born in battle is the unity we long

for. He

Speaker 44: who liberates Palestine will be the one to lead the Arab nation forward to comprehensive unity

He

Speaker 42: who ignites the fire of popular liberation war can throw all the reactionary regimes into the

sea. The

Speaker 42: sons of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and other reactionary countries will overthrow the kings

Speaker 16: as traitors

and

Speaker 16: joined the liberation march, end quote

Arafat and his buddies

Speaker 16: were in Lebanon when they got word that Syrian army intel agents were working the refugee camps, looking for recruits to train as Fedayeen fighters

Fedayeen

Speaker 3: translates as self-sacrificers, but we're not talking about suicide bombers or anything like that. That comes quite a bit later

Speaker 39: Fedayeen is the common word for guerrilla fighters in the Arab world, especially in the

Speaker 40: context of Palestinians fighting Israel. Two

years after the coup

Speaker 44: d'etat that had led to Syria pulling out of the United Arab Republic, there

was

Speaker 3: another coup in 1963, this time by Ba'athist military officers. And they immediately went to work trying

Speaker 16: to reestablish their country

as a

Speaker 16: powerful independent player in the region

not

Speaker 16: playing second fiddle to Egypt anymore

Syria had

Speaker 16: surrendered the initiative to Nasser when he'd formed the PLO

But the Syrians began

Speaker 16: working immediately to secretly build up a rival organization to counter the PLO, to counter Nasser's

Speaker 122: play for leadership of the Palestinian cause

And so Arafat and his

Speaker 16: friends approached one of the Syrian agents, and right away the Syrians realized that they had something very useful in their hands

Fatah

Speaker 16: hadn't just brought them eight new recruits but eight

Speaker 45: tightly knit operatives with experience recruiting, organizing, and leading others a few with combat experience

people who did

Speaker 16: not need a lot of hand-holding or preparation before they could be put to work and so the Syrians put them to work right away

For their first

Speaker 16: operation it was decided that they were going to bomb Israel's national water carrier here

This

Speaker 16: huge system of pipes and canals delivering water from the Sea of Galilee down to the dry areas in the south. The

attack was meant

Speaker 16: to be more symbolic than anything else. The

teams

Speaker 45: didn't go in with enough explosives to do any damage that couldn't be repaired very quickly. But

the

Speaker 50: symbolic value was still significant, not

only

Speaker 123: to Fatah, but to their new Syrian sponsors

The water

Speaker 73: carrier was one of the most important infrastructure projects in the early development of Israel

It was a

Speaker 73: vast project, and its

Speaker 16: construction was seen as a marker that was being put down by the Zionists to say, we are here to stay. This

is the

Speaker 16: new world. It is a permanent arrangement, and so you

Speaker 72: better get used

to it. The

Speaker 16: Arab states, especially Syria

Speaker 42: had been blustering on about how they would never allow this project to come to completion, but no one had actually done more than

Speaker 16: talk. The

bad news for Arafat

Speaker 16: and his buddies was that the attack failed miserably. The

good news is

Speaker 16: that that really didn't

Speaker 75: matter. Again

this was a

Speaker 75: new kind of war, with different measures for operational success or failure

The first

Speaker 75: group of

Speaker 124: Arafat's men were

Speaker 33: caught before they ever laid their explosives. The second group laid their explosives, but they didn't go off, and then they were all caught

Speaker 16: A

couple weeks later

Speaker 16: a group managed to plant some bombs, and they did go off, but they didn't do any damage of any real significance. In

any

Speaker 19: traditional mode of warfare, that operation was a complete and total disaster. But

this was not

Speaker 84: any traditional

Speaker 16: mode of warfare. The group released a communique and sent it to several Arab media outlets

Speaker 65: crowing about the great blow struck against the Zionist beast by the Fedayeen, who, with

Speaker 64: God's help and permission, had struck fear into the heart of the colonizer

Well, that's what

Speaker 64: the Arab papers printed

And word

Speaker 64: spread that a

Speaker 44: great blow had been struck against Israel

not by the

Speaker 44: Arab states, but by common

Speaker 16: people willing to give themselves over to the cause

Okay

Speaker 16: Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan all officially denounced the attack. Egypt because they wanted Palestinian political energy flowing into the PLO. Lebanon and Jordan because the last thing they needed was their Palestinian population starting to think

Speaker 42: about the possibilities presented by infrastructure terrorism. But Syria applauded and promoted it

That attack signaled the

Speaker 42: beginning of a shift in strategy for the Palestinian

Speaker 61: militants

They

Speaker 61: had been relying on the Arab states to rescue them in 1948, and they didn't come through. They'd been waiting ever since, but they didn't have to wait. They

could take

Speaker 61: matters into their own hands. Now

the Israelis hardly

Speaker 61: paid any attention to the attack

had no idea

Speaker 61: that it

Speaker 81: was the first shot on a newly opened front in their long war against the Palestinians. The

Israeli security

Speaker 16: establishment was, for good reason, ill. totally focused on the threat from neighboring Arab militaries

and they

Speaker 16: considered these student groups and

Speaker 40: other young radicals like Arafat Nabu Jihad to be a nuisance at most

It was only in

Speaker 40: 1965 that

Speaker 16: anybody in the Israeli security agencies was even assigned to the issue of monitoring and countering Palestinian terrorism. A three-man committee was set

Speaker 20: up to identify and eliminate targets, and

When

Speaker 40: they came up with their list, Arafat and Abu Jihad were right at the top of it

The committee was going to

Speaker 40: have to be

Speaker 21: very creative with their methods

After a

Speaker 21: couple high-profile failures by the

Speaker 123: Mossad had caused the government to lose confidence in that intelligence agency

There are actually

Speaker 89: more than

Speaker 7: a couple disasters

Within the Mossad, there

Speaker 7: was this Tier 1 Special Ops unit called Qasaria, which

Speaker 40: specialized in assassinations

The

Speaker 40: unit's top spy in 1965 was an Egyptian-born Jew named Eli Cohen. Cohen

was

Speaker 16: assigned to go into Syria posing as an Arab merchant who had been away for years in Buenos Aires and to work himself into the elite social circles of Damascus. His

Israeli handlers

Speaker 16: recognized his value

Speaker 42: especially as he started to make connections, and they didn't want to waste him on anything worth less than

he was— And so the

Speaker 42: official order was to act as a pure sleeper agent. Just

go

Speaker 72: be

Speaker 42: this prominent Arab businessman. That's it. Only activate if you hear

Speaker 75: that the Syrians are planning a surprise attack. Then you let us know and you come back to Israel. It

was his

Speaker 75: only

Speaker 42: job

In case of an

Speaker 42: impending attack, he would send a message alerting Israel to what was happening. Otherwise, he was to keep a low profile as a Syrian merchant

Speaker 20: unfortunately cohen got too comfortable too confident in his cover story and he began transmitting back all kinds of low-level

Speaker 40: information including

simple

Speaker 123: gossip he was picking up at parties and in other places

as handlers

Speaker 104: should have told him to cut it out but they

Speaker 3: didn't and eventually the syrians caught on cohen was arrested he was tortured

and He was

Speaker 40: hanged in Damascus' central square and left hanging, covered in a white sheet with the text of his death sentence written on it as a message to other Israeli

Speaker 125: spies

The savagery of his

Speaker 16: torture was evident on his face, but the torturers had also pulled out his fingernails and electrocuted his testicles

The Mossad

Speaker 73: worried that he must have broken under that strain, and it turned out they were right. Cohen had given up secret encryption codes, he had deciphered hundreds

of

Speaker 3: secret messages for the Syrians, told them everything else that he knew about how Israeli intelligence operated. Well

just after this

Speaker 40: debacle, an Israeli agent was uncovered in Cairo by the Egyptian government. He

would have

Speaker 40: suffered the same fate as Cohen

Speaker 45: but

The

Speaker 45: government of West Germany agreed to help Israel by telling the Egyptians, falsely, that he was also working for them and so pretty please don't kill him and we'll owe you one

And so this spy and

Speaker 126: his wife were not hanged, but they were sentenced to life in prison

So 1965 was a

Speaker 34: tough year from Assad

This is from a

Speaker 34: book by Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman

Speaker 46: Quote

Prime

Speaker 16: Minister Esh Kahl said, regarded the downfall of the two spies as a national disaster

But despite

Speaker 16: the bad state the Mossad was in, Eshkal decided to approve a special targeted killing mission by Qasaria in Uruguay anyway. Two months prior, a conference attended by representatives of the various intelligence agencies had been held to discuss the state of the hunt for Nazis, a matter that was not high on the list of priorities

rafi

Speaker 16: medan deputy chief of the amal unit which handled the issue surveyed the possible targets for assassination on the

list when

Speaker 16: he came to the name of herbert kukurs a latvian war criminal who as an aviator had volunteered to assist the ss and the gestapo and began describing

Speaker 75: his horrific acts a loud thud

was heard The

Speaker 75: head of Amman, the military intelligence directorate, Major General Aharon Yarev, had collapsed, and it took some time before he came to. Kukurs

it

Speaker 80: emerged, had burned alive some of Yarev's relatives and friends

After the

Speaker 127: conference

Speaker 16: Amit, Meyer Amit, he's the head of Masada at the time

Amit

Speaker 44: who was very close to Yarev and was deeply affected by the incident, went to see Prime Minister Eshkol and received

Speaker 39: permission to have Kukurs eliminated. Holocaust survivors called him the "Butcher of Riga," and his name came up frequently at the

Speaker 16: Nuremberg war crimes trials as directly involved in the murder of some 15,000 Jews and indirectly in the killing of 20,000

more. But

Speaker 16: after the war, he had managed to escape and find refuge in Brazil, where he developed a tourism business, surrounding himself with security guards for fear of the same fate that befell Adolf Eichmann. Yaakov Medad, a Casaria operative who spoke Spanish and German, Posed as an Austrian businessman, seeking openings in the tourism industry in South America, and managed to persuade Cucurs to go to Uruguay to meet a group of developers at a luxurious mansion outside Montevideo. At

the mansion

Speaker 16: three assassins would lie in wait

The plan

Speaker 16: was for Medad to enter first, followed by Cucurs

One of

Speaker 16: the assassins would

Speaker 6: shove him inside and close the door behind him. Then, when the Mossad team was out of the line of fire, he would shoot him. The job, however, did

Speaker 12: not go as smoothly as planned. Kukurs was alert and feared a

Speaker 16: trap

The moment

Speaker 16: he entered, he grasped what was happening and made a break for it

Yarev tried

Speaker 16: to get a stranglehold on him as another Israeli dragged him inside. The

fact that

Speaker 16: Kukurs was frightened to death, said Medad

and

Speaker 75: had lived in dread of this moment for 20 years gave him superhuman strength he managed to knock the guy down he grabbed the doorknob and had it not been for the three of us including

me holding the

Speaker 16: door shut he would have been able

to get out kukors

Speaker 16: bit hard into one of yarev's fingers cutting off the tip which remained in his mouth yarev

Speaker 44: screamed in pain and had to loosen his grip

on kukors neck He

Speaker 44: almost broke free, but at the last moment one of

the

Speaker 16: hitmen, Zaev Amit, a cousin of the Mossad director, who had not been able to fire because of the danger to his comrades, picked up a hammer and smashed it into Kukur's head again and again until he

Speaker 128: passed out

Then the

Speaker 129: third assassin, Eleazar Sadiqsharon, formerly

the

Speaker 44: chief hitman for the Irgun, fired two shots into the mass murderer, assuring that he was dead

The

Speaker 44: operatives put the body into a suitcase, which they left in the mansion, and added on top of Verdict, a sheet of paper inscribed with the words, In

Speaker 3: consideration of his personal responsibility for the murder of 30,000 Jews, with horrible brutality, the condemned man has been executed. Signed

Speaker 131: Those Who Will Never Forget. End quote

Now within Mossad, this

Speaker 132: operation was considered a success

They

Speaker 132: had been told to kill a man, and the man was dead

But

Speaker 21: everybody else knew that it had been very

Speaker 3: sloppy and could have led to disaster

And finally, I'm

Speaker 3: actually not done. I told you 1965 was a very rough year for the Mossad

There was this. Israel had been

Speaker 122: cultivating a relationship with Morocco, a relatively pro-Western Arab

Speaker 16: regime with which Israel had no territorial disputes

And

Speaker 16: in the fall of 1965, the Moroccan king had allowed Mossad to bug all the meeting rooms and private suites of the Arab leaders and military commanders who were going to be attending a summit at Casablanca

The subject of the

Speaker 16: summit was what to do about Israel and how to proceed in doing it, so this was one of the great intelligence coups in history handed

to him

Speaker 16: on a silver platter by the king of Morocco

The catch was that the

Speaker 40: Moroccans were not running a charity

And

Speaker 40: they had a little ask of their

Speaker 16: own. A few years back, the king of Morocco had exiled his main political opponent, a man named Mehdi Ben Barca

Ben Barca

Speaker 16: was an intellectual and a political activist who had briefly been a professor teaching his future persecutor

Speaker 43: King Hassan II. But he was not a terrorist. He

was not a

Speaker 43: militant of any kind

He'd been

Speaker 16: living in Europe since his exile, continuing to agitate for reforms in Morocco, and so the king marked him for death, and he wanted the Israelis to kill him

or at

Speaker 16: least help

Speaker 21: his own men do it, and

so the

Speaker 133: Israelis agreed. They

started

Speaker 80: investigating Ben Barca, and before long discovered a kiosk in Geneva where he would have his magazines delivered. They

waited until he

Speaker 80: showed up, and then placed him under surveillance

Mossad

Speaker 91: devised

Speaker 134: a plan to lure Ben Barker

Speaker 91: to Paris, supposedly to meet a documentary filmmaker who was interested in making a film about his life. The

Israelis

Speaker 73: provided the Moroccans with safe houses and vehicles in Paris, as well as fake passports, poisons, and shovels and

Speaker 135: other equipment to dispose of the body. Ben

Barker

Speaker 21: took the bait, And when he got to Paris, the Moroccans kidnapped him, took

him to

Speaker 3: one of the Mossad safe houses, and

went to work

Speaker 3: torturing him until he died from asphyxiation after being submerged again and again in

a tub

Speaker 3: of filthy water

Mossad claims its agents were not

Speaker 84: present at their own safe house during the torture or killing. And who knows, it could be true that

Speaker 136: they... ...excused themselves temporarily while the actual deed was being done

But it was Mossad

Speaker 12: agents who took care of the body

They took the

Speaker 12: corpse to the San

Speaker 73: Germain Forest......threw the body in a hole and covered it with chemical powder to dissolve the remains

That disposal

Speaker 42: site was chosen on the fly, so a short time later......Israeli agents moved the body, and according to some of the agents who were involved

Ben

Speaker 91: Barca's remains are still buried beneath the Louis Vuitton Foundation Art Museum in Paris

Well, given his status

Speaker 3: as an exiled foreign activist

the French

Speaker 3: had been keeping an eye on Ben Barca themselves, and it did not take them long to figure out what had happened

The story exploded

Speaker 3: like a bomb in

Speaker 80: the French media and government

President de

Speaker 40: Gaulle actually disbanded his intelligence agencies for letting it happen

and

Speaker 40: prosecuted the corrupt French police officers who had

Speaker 91: helped with the assassination

France cut off all

Speaker 91: diplomatic relations

Speaker 16: with Morocco, and the incident left a shadow over relations between the two countries that really hasn't fully cleared to this day. The

Israelis denied

Speaker 40: involvement and outwardly presented a united front

But

Speaker 40: behind the scenes, there

Speaker 34: were severe recriminations, and opposing political factions within Israel tried to use the incident to damage and extort their opponents

And so in the wake of

Speaker 40: all this, when it came time to kill Yasser Arafat and Abu Jihad, the

Israeli

Speaker 3: government was not prepared to hand the operation to Mossad

Speaker 84: assassination squads

Instead, the

Speaker 34: three-man committee recommended that the Israelis pull an old trick out of the hat

and

Speaker 34: use letter bombs. And so they tried, but

Speaker 67: they didn't achieve much. A few Fatah operatives were injured

but nobody important, and

Speaker 67: nobody was killed

This was the

Speaker 80: first of many, many attempts on Arafat's life by the Israelis. And the

Israelis were

Speaker 80: already feared

Speaker 16: as legendary operators, with a carefully cultivated reputation of being able to find and kill anyone, anywhere in the world

And the Israelis were already feared as legendary operators, And

Speaker 16: soon, the elimination of Yasser Arafat would be the focus of whole departments of Israeli military and intelligence services for many years. And yet, Arafat would die an old man in

Speaker 34: 2004. Not

an easy

Speaker 34: thing to do without a state apparatus protecting you. In

1966, Fatah was

Speaker 40: able to carry out dozens of attacks. They were becoming more sophisticated and audacious

The

Speaker 51: Syrians had set up training camps in the Jordanian-controlled West Bank, very close to the Israeli border. Jordan

the

Speaker 67: government of Jordan, registered protests, but it was very difficult for them to do anything about it without alienating Jordan's Palestinian majority. Attacks were emanating

Speaker 16: from those camps, and after three Israelis were killed in a Fatah attack, Israel attacked and destroyed two of those camps

Thank you. the

Speaker 16: jordanians had

Speaker 37: sent secret messages to the israelis saying look we're against these camps we're not responsible

they might have

Speaker 16: even been happy that the israelis took them out

but the

Speaker 21: jordanian government again was in a very tricky situation arabs everywhere supported the palestinian cause

The

Speaker 33: Jordanian government was already looked at by many in the region as an archaic

Speaker 73: monarchy, as a western

Speaker 16: puppet weak on Zionism, and if enough of the Palestinian population got really riled up and started looking at the Hashemite regime as an obstacle that had to be cleared before their struggle could

move forward, then he

Speaker 75: and his family could end up like his cousins in Iraq

And so King

Speaker 44: Hussein did his best to play both sides, doing what he

Speaker 16: could to avoid provoking the Israelis, trying to keep the Palestinian militants under control, while still trying to maintain a pose of being down for the

Speaker 137: cause. It

was always a

Speaker 137: very hard line to walk

and it

Speaker 3: was only going to get harder as things heated up

In the second half

Speaker 3: of that year, again we're in 66, Fatah got the gumption to start attacking Israeli military targets. And in November, three Israeli

Speaker 80: soldiers were killed when their vehicle hit a mine Fatah had planted on their patrol route

This time, the

Speaker 16: Israelis sent a strong force into a nearby Palestinian village for a punitive operation

But a

Speaker 16: Jordanian military unit happened to be in the area conducting exercises

The two sides

Speaker 16: got into a

Speaker 21: firefight

but

Speaker 21: the Jordanians were outnumbered and outgunned, and 16 of them were killed by the Israelis

On one

Speaker 39: hand, the incident bolstered King Hussein's reputation, because at least his forces had opposed the Israeli incursion

But now the

Speaker 3: Israelis were pissed, because one of their own had been killed and several wounded

and

Speaker 16: Jordanians were now looking to King Hussein to retaliate, to get one back

And so

Speaker 16: tensions increased between Israel and Jordan, between Jordan and the Palestinians, between Jordan and Syria and Egypt

Well, this was to the

Speaker 16: liking of the Syrian Ba'athists, and so they pushed Fatah to turn up the heat even more. In early 1967, Fatah launched over 100 attacks on Israeli soil, coming

Speaker 45: across all four major borders from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt

Thank you. Many of

Speaker 45: the attacks

Speaker 16: were inconsequential or only damaged property, but nine Israeli civilians and four soldiers were killed. Israel

retaliated in

Speaker 16: the directions that the attacks came from, but these responses were necessarily imprecise, and more often than not came down on people not directly involved with the attacks. So

just imagine that

Speaker 16: you're just a normal Palestinian. trying to get by with your family and one day the Israelis show up and start shooting and a couple of your kids get killed

You know

Speaker 16: there's a conflict going on. You know that the Israeli raid has something to do with that. You

may have

Speaker 16: even heard rumors that Abdul down the street had a cousin staying with him who was supposed to be fed a yin

But your

Speaker 16: kids are dead and you didn't do anything and the people who killed them are the same ones who put you in this refugee camp

To

Speaker 44: the innocent people Caught in the crossfire These attacks by the Israelis Just seemed like terrorist attacks They

Speaker 16: experienced them the same way The Israelis experienced The things we traditionally call Terrorist attacks in their country And so The Arab governments were coming under

Speaker 3: Increasing pressure To do something about this Tensions mounted And in May The

Arab government

Speaker 16: 1967, Israel released an official warning to Syria that if it did not get the insurgents under control, it would take large-scale military action against them

Instead of

Speaker 16: backing down, Syria, Egypt, and Jordan formed a joint military command and increased the concentration of

Speaker 34: forces on their borders with Israel, and the Israelis did the same in response

War seemed to

Speaker 16: be in the air

The UN

Speaker 16: peacekeepers who had occupied the Sinai, standing between Egypt and Israel for the last

Speaker 3: decade, got out of the way. We

know now that the Arab

Speaker 3: states, as usual, were mostly posturing. The

Israelis

Speaker 67: knew it at the time. They knew it from the recordings they'd gotten with the help of the Moroccans, on which they'd heard

Speaker 84: the Arab heads of state discuss how unprepared they were for another war with Israel

Israel's

Speaker 16: own intelligence assessments estimated that they could win the war in less than two weeks if the Arabs attacked, and

in less

Speaker 16: than one week if Israel attacked first. Nasser

and the others

Speaker 16: moved forces up so they could beat their chests on the border, but

there were

Speaker 16: nowhere

Speaker 3: near enough forces for an invasion, and the ones that were present were still deployed in depth in a defensive posture. Unfortunately for them

Israel

Speaker 3: the israelis were not just posturing they were not just beating their chests

and if the arabs

Speaker 41: weren't prepared for war the israelis were not

Speaker 16: going to wait around until they were

and so on the

Speaker 16: morning of june 5th 1967 israel launched a massive surprise attack

Speaker 41: and despite their deployments the arabs were caught completely off

guard and The

Speaker 16: Israeli Air Force destroyed virtually every combat aircraft the Egyptians and the Syrians had on the ground in a matter of hours. And

then with

Speaker 16: total air

Speaker 41: superiority, Israeli planes picked off targets at will while the IDF chased the enemy through the Gaza Strip across the Sinai Peninsula and into

Speaker 16: the West Bank and the Golan Heights. And when the six-day war was over

The

Speaker 16: territory under the control of the Jewish state had increased more than 300

placing more

Speaker 16: than a million Palestinians under Israeli military occupation

There were

Speaker 16: prominent Israelis, including right-wing hawks

who were

Speaker 16: warning at the time that it was a bad idea to bring a million Palestinians under Israeli jurisdiction

even if

Speaker 16: they weren't

Speaker 41: Israeli citizens or technically within Israel's official borders they were going to be held responsible for these people

but other Israeli

Speaker 138: officials were enthusiastic they pointed out that they would no longer have to rely on the Arab regimes to control

Speaker 73: the Fedayeen

Speaker 138: and that

Speaker 73: their own forces would no longer have to make incursions into neighboring countries to go

Speaker 16: attack the terrorists they were right here Instead, they could place

Speaker 3: garrisons in Palestinian areas. They could set up checkpoints and patrol Palestinian villages and towns and treat it like a proper counterinsurgency

Others saw a

Speaker 137: historic opportunity to forge a permanent

Speaker 16: peace

Israel at this

Speaker 16: point looked completely unbeatable, and they held a mountain of bargaining chips. A

top military

Speaker 16: intelligence official circulated a top-secret paper to other government and military leaders, saying

We

Speaker 44: should not look like braggarts, mocking a defeated enemy, debasing him and his leaders

Instead, he

Speaker 44: said, Israel should use the opportunity

Speaker 16: to be magnanimous and call for negotiations with the Arab states from a position of strength

and offer to return

Speaker 3: conquered territory in exchange for a lasting peace, which all sounds great. But in

Speaker 16: reality, that would be a tough sell in any country under the circumstances. It's very rare for nations to call for peace during the exhilaration of finding out that they're invincible. And instead of thinking about peace, many Israelis were looking forward to what victories they might score next

One month after the

Speaker 135: war, a coalition of Israeli politicians, activists, writers, poets

Speaker 16: created the movement for greater Israel and began pressuring the

Speaker 73: government to take advantage of the smashing victory to support the establishment of Jewish settlements in newly conquered territories

There are passages in the

Speaker 91: Hebrew Bible in which God promises that the Jews will inherit all the territory from the Euphrates and Syria and Iraq

to the

Speaker 91: Mediterranean coast and from

Speaker 40: Lebanon all the way down to Egypt

and

Speaker 40: many Zionist romantics and religious zealots believed

Speaker 91: that after 2,000 years of exile, the new state of Israel had an obligation to fulfill that prophecy

In more

Speaker 73: modern times, supporters of the Greater Israel Movement don't take

Speaker 45: things quite that far, at least publicly, and mostly restrict their ambitions to annexing the West Bank and, to a lesser extent, Gaza

The Movement for Greater

Speaker 113: Israel had the support of many prominent Israelis and Diaspora Jews as well. and the movement exerted influence on the rising right-wing in Israeli politics

The head of the

Speaker 135: Mossad, Mayra Amit

was one of

Speaker 135: those who was in favor of using the opportunity to make peace

and he

Speaker 135: wrote in his

Speaker 33: diary, "'What's happening now is a disappointment, a painful

Speaker 21: disappointment. I am apprehensive and worried at this fearful waste of a victory. When I see how matters are being conducted

My

Speaker 21: hands go limp, and I get a terrible feeling

The leaders of the Arab

Speaker 139: countries involved were completely humiliated, totally

Speaker 16: delegitimized

And those

Speaker 16: who had placed their hopes with them were all now looking for alternatives. And

this was the

Speaker 21: opportunity Fatah had been waiting for, and they were ready to take advantage of the opportunity

They

Speaker 16: realized that while the destruction of the Arab militaries made another full-scale military conflict unlikely in the near term, the new occupation regime in Gaza and the West Bank actually provided the perfect environment for guerrilla war

Because now they

Speaker 42: could attack the Israelis without even having to cross the border into Israel. So

while the Arab

Speaker 42: states

Speaker 3: licked their wounds, Fatah just kept doing its thing. carried out dozens of attacks from Gaza and the West Bank in the second half of 1967. They bombed factories

Speaker 16: houses, movie theaters, infrastructure, reaching for targets of

Speaker 117: symbolic importance when possible, but settling for targets of opportunity most of the time

With Israeli

Speaker 3: assassination squads constantly on his trail, Missing him by moments on various occasions, Arafat continued to increase the frequency and intensity of attacks. Over the next 10 months, Fedayeen attacks killed 65 Israeli

Speaker 69: soldiers and

Speaker 3: 50

Speaker 80: civilians, wounding another 249 soldiers and 295 civilians

The period from

Speaker 40: 1967 until Nasser's death in 1970 is known as the War of

Speaker 16: Attrition

There were no

Speaker 16: pitched battles in the War of Attrition, only continual small-scale hit-and-run attacks to wear the Israelis down and stretch out their defensive commitments

Remember, their

Speaker 16: territory had

Speaker 117: tripled in size after

Speaker 16: the 1967 war

And

Speaker 16: the military and security forces that they had going into that war were not built to control or protect that much territory. So the

Speaker 40: Israeli security apparatus had to expand and adapt on the fly as the Arabs were constantly probing, harassing

Speaker 91: attacking

Because of the success

Speaker 91: of the FLN in liberating Algeria from France, the

tactics

Speaker 16: and strategy of the FLN were taken up by national liberation movements around the world

In many

Speaker 16: places

Speaker 73: given enough time, it

ended up

Speaker 73: working. They

were able to make

Speaker 73: things hard enough on the colonial regime and to score enough propaganda victories

Speaker 38: to sap morale back in the colonial regime's homeland. Then

eventually they decided

Speaker 43: that it wasn't worth the effort and they went home

Arafat was

Speaker 43: committed to this

Speaker 16: strategy

But for

Speaker 16: some reason, he never accounted for a simple and pretty obvious

Speaker 37: fact

Speaker 3: that although Israel was a colonizing regime like French Algeria, the Israelis didn't have another country to go back to. They

had no

Speaker 3: choice but to

Speaker 51: keep fighting. And

in a way, it's hard to

Speaker 51: blame the Palestinians for taking that

Speaker 16: path. You know, the whole global left was going in that direction. Militant groups that adopted that strategy got funding and recognition from the Soviets and from non-aligned countries, and again, they'd seen it work

Plus, when you place

Speaker 16: more than a million people under military occupation, the young men in that population are going to have something to say about it

The task of protecting

Speaker 16: Israeli Jews from terrorist attacks was becoming more complicated by the

day. Israeli

Speaker 3: soldiers patrolled the roads, towns, and villages of the West Bank in Gaza, which gave the

Speaker 16: Israelis options that they hadn't had before, but also created risks that hadn't existed before. Also, Israeli civilians began making their way into both territories to establish heavily armed garrison communities in the heart of Palestinian territory. The

vast

Speaker 45: majority of the Zionists who chose to do that The settlers, as you can probably imagine

were driven

Speaker 7: strongly by religion and ideology. And many of them were real fanatics who saw themselves as soldiers in something like a holy

Speaker 16: war

Problems with their new

Speaker 16: Palestinian neighbors began almost immediately. And when things escalated to violence, Israeli military forces were called in to reinforce the settlers. The Israelis

were having particularly

Speaker 16: tough problems

Speaker 3: in the Gaza Strip. which today is one of the most densely populated urban zones in the world. One

Speaker 67: Saturday morning, a 30-year-old advertising executive named Bob Arroyo and his family went for a hike in the hills overlooking the Mediterranean and the Sinai Peninsula, on the far side of Gaza from

Speaker 91: Israel. Arroyo

Speaker 80: and his wife and his two children, five and seven years old, finished their hike and they got into the car to

go home. And

Speaker 51: again, Arroyo was an

Speaker 3: advertising executive, and his two kids were adorable, and their faces were very well-known in Israel because Arroyo had used both of them in popular ad campaigns. And

so as they were

Speaker 73: driving home on a main highway, they passed Palestinian

Speaker 16: villages and refugee camps. At a

certain point

Speaker 16: they were halted at a roadblock, and as soon as they

Speaker 141: stopped, a teenager ran up into their car and threw in a grenade

Speaker 142: Arroyo was severely wounded, managed to crawl out of the car. "'There

were

Speaker 51: two young men nearby, and Arroyo started begging them "'to call for help for his family, which

Speaker 39: was trapped in the car, "'and the car was burning. "'He

said the boys just

Speaker 39: laughed at him

His five-year-old

Speaker 3: daughter died in the car, "'and his seven-year-old son died soon after at the hospital, "'and his wife was severely handicapped for the rest of

her life.' tens

Speaker 3: of thousands of Israelis attended the children's funeral in Jerusalem. When

Israeli intel

Speaker 21: caught the people who had done this, it turned out to be three boys acting on their own

Speaker 81: aged 15, 16, and 17. Many

of the attacks

Speaker 41: originating in the West Bank seemed to be coming from a place called Karameh

where the

Speaker 143: Palestinians had set up a base in the southern region of the Jordan Valley

Every time

Speaker 83: there was an attack, the Israelis would retaliate, often attacking not only the Palestinians

Speaker 40: but Jordanian forces, and their retaliations were taking a toll. In

March of

Speaker 40: 1968, an Israeli school bus ran over a landmine

Speaker 45: killing two adult chaperones and wounding ten children. I've

also seen

Speaker 45: in another source that 28 people were wounded. I'm not really sure where

Speaker 56: the two different figures come from

The

Speaker 44: IDF prepared a large-scale helicopter-borne daylight assault on the Fatah base in Karameh

Arafat himself

Speaker 109: was believed to be there at the time, and the Israeli soldiers had orders

Speaker 16: to kill every young male they found

But the Israeli

Speaker 16: mechanized support units got bogged down in

Speaker 41: thick foliage around the Jordan River, and poor coordination cost them

Speaker 16: the element of surprise. Rather than try to run, which is what Fedayeen always did when the Israelis came in force, Fatah prepared to dig in and repel the assault while Arafat was taken away to a safe location on a motorcycle

Meanwhile, King

Speaker 3: Hussein reluctantly

Speaker 34: dispatched a contingent of the Jordanian army

There was a

Speaker 34: battle, and 33 Israeli soldiers were killed

61 Jordanians

Speaker 16: and over 100 Palestinians have been killed, but that did not matter

The

Speaker 16: Israelis had taken a lot of casualties, and they were forced to withdraw under conditions that they had not chosen

And word went

Speaker 16: out that for the first time, the Palestinians, Fatah to be specific, had

stood their

Speaker 16: ground in direct combat with Zionist forces. The

word karameh means

Speaker 16: dignity, which only

helped

Speaker 3: propel the incident to mythical status

There

Speaker 3: were public celebrations in refugee camps around

Speaker 16: the region. Arab leaders, including Nasser, came out in public support of the Fede Union

Within two days

Speaker 44: of the battle, thousands of recruits showed up to be trained as fighters, and

Speaker 45: not only Palestinians, but Arabs from other countries as well

After Karameh

Speaker 87: Arafat became a folk hero

And

Speaker 87: not just locally

Speaker 3: not just in Palestine, not just in the Arab world, but in the radical era of the 60s and 70s increasingly around the world

His organization

Speaker 3: had originally been set up to be a

Speaker 144: rival of the PLO, but now Fatah managed to take control of the PLO

and

Speaker 116: before long virtually all Fedayeen groups had been brought under its control

The charter

Speaker 145: of the PLO was changed to match the mission of Fatah to

Speaker 57: wage armed struggle against Israel until the Zionist entity was completely defeated. With

the Arab militaries in

Speaker 51: shambles and Palestinian insurgents still causing trouble, the Israelis scrambled to reorient their focus in that direction

The

Speaker 51: military and intelligence agencies were furious at Arafat's narrow escapes, and they

Speaker 41: wanted his blood so bad they were willing to try just about anything. In keeping with the times

Speaker 51: even a little MKUltra mind-control action. A

psychologist in

Speaker 51: the Israeli military told his superiors that

He

Speaker 51: had devised a series of methods

Speaker 16: that would allow them to turn a captured Palestinian into a Manchurian candidate who could be released back into the wild with subconscious orders to kill Yasser

Speaker 146: Arafat or do anything else

Well, apparently the

Speaker 37: Israelis were very desperate. Or maybe they just said, screw it, let's just give this quack a shot, because they actually approved this plan. The doctor provided an ideal profile

Speaker 45: the prisoner he was going to need... and one was selected from among the thousands of Palestinians being held in Israeli jails

The doctor and his

Speaker 45: team were given

Speaker 16: a building in which to conduct their work, and the doctor spent three months using various techniques designed to brainwash his guinea pig

In the third

Speaker 16: month, the

man was

Speaker 16: placed in a room where pictures of Arafat would pop up

and it appeared

Speaker 147: that he had been programmed to shoot them immediately, without

a

Speaker 122: thought

A senior

Speaker 122: military intelligence official told

Speaker 113: Israeli journalist Ronan Bergman what he saw when he'd gone to observe, quote, Fatki, that's the

Speaker 135: codename given to the Palestinian prisoner, Fatki stood there in the middle of the room, and Shalit, the doctor, spoke with him, as if they were just carrying out a normal conversation. Suddenly, Shalit

Speaker 51: banged his hand on the table, and Fatki began to run around the table

He

Speaker 51: reacted automatically to all sorts of gestures by Shalit

Then he

Speaker 51: put him in a room and showed us how Fatki raised his pistol to a firing position every time Arafat's picture popped up from one of the pieces of furniture. It was impressive

Speaker 44: end quote

When the doctor decided

Speaker 44: Fatki was ready and in an ideal hypnotic

Speaker 3: state

they sent

Speaker 3: him back across the Jordan River to rejoin his comrades in Fatah

After

Speaker 71: about five hours, Israeli intelligence got

Speaker 16: word from one of their people in Jordan. Some Palestinian guy had shown up to a police station in Karameh saying that the Zionists had tried to brainwash me into killing Yasser Arafat. So

that didn't work. But, you know

Speaker 122: you gotta give them an A-plus for effort and creativity

Israeli intelligence

Speaker 122: drew up kill lists of wanted terrorists

And

Speaker 122: as the list

Speaker 99: grew, it was obvious that Mossad assassination squads were not going to be enough

And they were

Speaker 99: going to need military support

Ariel Sharon was

Speaker 149: now a major general and commander of

Speaker 16: IDF Southern Command

And he was

Speaker 16: happy to help

As always, he

Speaker 3: took an extremely aggressive approach, to the point that he drew criticism from others in the government

Israel's military

Speaker 3: governor, responsible for civilian affairs in the Gaza Strip

Speaker 40: complained that Sharon was making his job completely

Speaker 16: impossible

He said

Speaker 16: that he was, quote, Moshe Dayan was the Minister of Defense, and he and Sharon did not see eye to eye on what had to be done in the Strip. From Bergman, quote

Dayan wanted

Speaker 16: contacts and connections with the population, whereas Sharon was hunting the terrorists and could only see them through the sights of his rifle

and the

Speaker 16: population did not interest him at all. I heard Sharon declare in front of all the officers, whoever kills a terrorist will get a bottle

Speaker 37: of champagne, and anyone who takes

Speaker 144: a prisoner will get a bottle of soda. I said, good Lord, what kind of policy is this? Who speaks like this? After

all, if

Speaker 144: we do not give them a little assistance, a little prosperity, they'll all turn to the path of terror. End quote

At

Speaker 99: southern command, Chiron created a special assassination squad that reported directly to him, and only to him. The

unit had lists of

Speaker 67: names, some terrorists, others suspected of knowing about or supporting terrorists. They

kidnapped and

Speaker 67: interrogated

Speaker 71: these people, and often tortured them if they failed to cooperate

Sharon's

Speaker 71: men infiltrated Gaza neighborhoods dressed as Arabs, and if they saw someone who fit the description of a wanted terrorist, they just

killed him on the

Speaker 116: spot. The commander of the unit told a reporter, "We exploited the main weak point to these terror

Speaker 143: cells. Because of their Marxist background, they practiced a very high level of need-to-know compartmentalization. Each man knew only the members of his own cell, and not those of other cells

If

Speaker 143: you appear as an armed local and you can speak the target's

Speaker 116: language, he has no way of knowing that it is in fact a trick until it's too late." The

murder of the

Speaker 116: Arroyo children marked a sea change in how the Israelis were going to respond to terrorist attacks

Mayer Dagan

Speaker 143: the commander hand-picked by Sharon to lead his death squad, said

After those

Speaker 143: kids were murdered... Ariel Sharon took the matter of terror in the Gaza Strip personally

In the past, Sharon

Speaker 45: would let the unit develop its own intelligence and come to him with suggested targets and operations when they were ready

But now he started coming

Speaker 71: down to the villa where they were based on the regular to participate directly in selecting targets and planning missions down to the small details

The arroyo

Speaker 143: killings also effectively

Speaker 40: ended the debate inside the Israeli defense establishment about how to handle the Palestinian population in the conquered territories. The

Israeli politicians

Speaker 143: and security officials who were interested in trying to win hearts and minds were shouted down as terrorist appeasers, and Sharon's approach triumphed. Massive forces poured into the Gaza Strip

On

Speaker 143: Sharon's orders, they demolished rows of houses in order to create wide-access roads through the crowded refugee camps. The

people

Speaker 40: whose houses were destroyed were not compensated or provided with any alternate

Speaker 45: accommodations. They were just thrown out and left with nothing. One

night in

Speaker 45: January 1972, Sharon ordered the

Speaker 143: expulsion of thousands of Bedouin from a 2,500-acre area south of Rafa

Thank you. The

Speaker 143: Israeli general, in

Speaker 71: charge of government activities in the occupied areas, was outraged by this. He even threatened to resign, but

he was

Speaker 71: talked out of it and did nothing. Sharon

was given free reign

Speaker 71: to use special

Speaker 34: forces and other clandestine units virtually without restraint to find and kill terrorists before they could do any damage

Speaker 45: Meanwhile, Dagan and his assassination squad continually devised new methods for finding and disposing of wanted Palestinians. One

tactic was to

Speaker 143: ambush them in brothels. Another was to hide in trees in the citrus groves when they knew that terrorists were planning to meet there. They'd

hide up

Speaker 143: in the branches

communicating

Speaker 99: with each other by pulling on fishing cords stretched out between their trees to maintain silence. When

the

Speaker 71: militants turned

up, No

Speaker 71: attempt was made to detain them. They were just shot and killed without warning. Of

course, these

Speaker 71: methods often lead to mistakes

When you're

Speaker 71: targeting people before they can launch an attack, by definition, you're hitting

Speaker 125: them before they've launched an actual attack. Sometimes random Palestinians would happen by and notice

Speaker 143: the Israelis lying in ambush

And the

Speaker 143: Israelis were not about to let them run off and raise the alarm, and there were times when they simply murdered innocent people to prevent that

Another thing they'd

Speaker 143: do is use Arab collaborators to sell booby-trapped grenades to the Palestine Liberation

Speaker 122: Army. The

fuses would be

Speaker 122: clipped from the usual three-second delay to a half-second

ensuring that

Speaker 122: whoever

Speaker 143: used them would blow himself up

On one

Speaker 143: occasion, they borrowed an idea from Britain's famous ploy before the invasion of Italy called Operation Mincemeat

Meyer Dagan

Speaker 149: the commander of this unit

Speaker 143: pretended to be a corpse and was carried by his comrades, two of them Palestinian collaborators and the others disguised as Arabs, into a militant hideout. And once they were all

Speaker 45: inside, Dagan rose from the dead and the team

Speaker 41: threw down and killed everybody in the room. Pretty incredible

About a month

Speaker 41: after the Arroyo killings, two jeeps under Dagan's command were moving down a road that ran

Speaker 80: between the Jabalia refugee

camp and

Speaker 80: Gaza City. Jabalia refugee camp, by the way, is the one that was recently bombed. It was in the

news. Along

Speaker 149: the way, the Jeeps encountered a

Speaker 143: local cab that was loaded with passengers driving in the opposite direction, and Dagan thought he recognized two targets among the passengers, and so he ordered the Jeeps to turn

Speaker 91: around and chase the cab down. The Jeeps caught up and then passed the cab and then cut off the road, and Dagan's soldiers jumped out and surrounded the car. Dagan

approached

Speaker 135: the vehicle with his pistol drawn. One

of the

Speaker 135: targets, Abu Nimr, jumps out, holding a hand grenade the

pin is

Speaker 135: already drawn he says if you get any closer we all die

and so Dagan paused

Speaker 106: for a second or two and then he yelled grenade and he

Speaker 71: charged Abu Nimr and he grabs the hand holding the grenade to keep the guy from releasing the trigger and starts headbutting on Abu Nimr with his helmet until he went unconscious Dagan's men neutralized the rest of the passengers and Dagan kept hold of Abu Nimr's hand as he went to the ground

and

Speaker 71: found the grenade pin and put it back in its slot

After the

Speaker 150: operation, Sharon said of Dagan, his greatest expertise is separating an Arab

Speaker 143: from his head

Well, thanks to the

Speaker 41: tactical leadership of Dagan, Yitzhak Pundak, the IDF military governor who had clashed with Sharon in the past

could not

Speaker 41: deny the effectiveness of Sharon's tactics. But he had other concerns than just military effectiveness

He had to

Speaker 41: worry about political implications and how these operations were affecting Israel's foreign relations and the long-term relationship with the local population

And Sharon was

Speaker 41: making those parts of his job

practically impossible. Bergman

Speaker 151: again, quote, Pundak

later recalled

Speaker 97: reading a report filed by the unit that read

Our

Speaker 97: detail is chasing a wanted terrorist in El Shati, a refugee camp in Gaza. He ran into one of the houses. The unit broke in after him, disarmed him, and killed him in the house. Pundak

says he

Speaker 97: drew the attention of an intelligence officer to the possibility that if such a report reached the

Speaker 143: UN or the Red Cross, it would cause an international scandal. So, what's the problem? said the officer, according to Pundak. Destroy the report

pundak

Speaker 143: took this story to sharon and when he refused to investigate further pundak recalled he told sharon you are a liar a crook and a knave sharon rose and raised his hand as if to slap pundak but pundak wasn't scared if

you do

Speaker 41: that i'll break your bones right here in your office he said

sharon sat

Speaker 41: down pundak says he saluted and declared now i know you're also a coward and left the room

Several

Speaker 143: journalists have collected accounts from Dagan's unnamed men saying they shot people after they surrendered, their hands in the air. One was quoted as saying that he and other soldiers had apprehended a Palestinian man who was wanted for murdering an IDF officer. A Shin Bet agent, who was with them, purportedly said that the man could never be brought to trial

Speaker 71: because the Secret Service would be forced to name the collaborator who had provided the information that led to his capture

the

Speaker 71: soldiers let their captive escape and then shot him as he ran

Speaker 51: another unit veteran said the captive would be led from the house he was captured in into a dark alley off to the side

Speaker 122: where the soldiers would leave a pistol or a grenade in a way that made it very tempting for him to reach out for

it when

Speaker 122: he did they'd

Speaker 71: shoot him sometimes they'd tell him you have two minutes to run and then they'd shoot him on the grounds that he

tried to run away the Other

Speaker 51: former members said that when it came to the list of targets, Dagon had unilaterally annulled the IDF's rule that suspects be given a chance to surrender before being

Speaker 45: killed. Under Dagon's command

Speaker 41: a target was assassinated on sight. All the complaints, rumors, testimonies, to say nothing

Speaker 143: of the many dead bodies, were swept into a closet, locked tightly to prevent any outside inquiry

The