Ask Haviv Anything - Episode 4 - Last Jew Standing: The story of Israeli Jews

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Israeli Jews are the last surviving remnant of dozens of devastated Jewish communities across three continents. How did this history shape them? What do they understand about the world that few others see?Join Haviv Rettig Gur for a deep dive into the historical experience that shaped this largest community of Jews ever.Thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring this episode in honor of those we lost on October 7th.Please join me on Patreon to support this project: https://www.patreon.com/AskHavivAnythingIf you would like to sponsor an episode please email [e-mail]

Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode four of Ask Haviv Anything. Last Jew Standing. Today we're going to dive deep into the history and the experiences that created Israeli Jews. This isn't the story of Israeli Jews. This isn't the totality of the history. This is what we tried to do two episodes ago in episode two for American Jews. We dug into the things that made American Jews what they are.

that explains some of the strangest aspects of American Jewish life and culture and institutions and religion and the detachment that American Jews seem to have from the Jewish history that came before them. And the argument was that those come from a deep place, from things that are from fundamental historical experiences that have been lost in a kind of generational forgetfulness that makes it hard to see. and we dove into the history that American Jews mostly don't know. Some obviously do, and all of our sources were American Jewish historians. But generally the general American Jewish population doesn't know this story that created and shaped themselves. There's an old aphorism. A fish doesn't know it's swimming in water.

We swim in beliefs, in assumptions, in social structures that we don't see. They're too big. assumed they're too much shared between us all. They've been there too long for us to ever talk about them or need to grapple with them, and so we don't see them. Today we're going to dive into the water that Israeli Jews swim in. The historical experiences that created the fundamental assumptions that are so big, Israeli Jews rarely talk about them, rarely really grapple with them. We're going to look at the history of Israeli Jews that isn't actually taught. in the Israeli Jewish education systems

and in curricula and in schools and in youth movements. We're going to look at Zionism and its formation as a social history. What led millions of Jews who were not interested in Zionism? Thought it was a little bit silly, a little bit marginal,

a little bit too radical, let's say in 1910, to become majority Zionist in 1930. Let's move quickly, because there's a lot to talk about, and at some point at the beginning of this podcast, for some ridiculous reason, I promise that these episodes would not be too long. So first of all, obviously, I regret saying that, but also I think that's useful.

So let's move fast. Before we move fast, because it is really profoundly important, thank you to Joe and Shira Lieberman for sponsoring the episode in memory of those who fell on October 7. There's an old aphorism in the IDF that good battles, well-planned, battles produce few heroes. October 7 was a failure, and it produced many, many heroes. I don't know if that's the silver lining of a great tragedy, but they are the light that shines out from that darkness.

And one of them, one of the really extraordinary ones, was warned Officer Ibrahim Choruba. Ibrahim is Bedouin, Muslim, an IDF officer, served as a tracker in the Gaza division. He started out in the IDF as a paratrooper. On the morning of October 7, Ibrahim was one of the few people who ran toward the battle instead of away from it.

He and three soldiers from the Gulani Brigade positioned themselves outside the command and control center in the Nakhal Oz base where a group of female soldiers, observers of the fence, unarmed, were inside that room. He fought to the death, and gave the soldiers the time to report back more details about the Hamas invasion.

Recordings of the battle were recently released and they revealed that shortly before he fell in battle, he told the soldiers who were with him, that fighting with them and defending our shared country was the greatest honor of his life. Remembering him is an honor for the rest of us. his bravery saved lives and he has been nominated

for the IDF's highest award for courage Ibrahim was buried on October 15 in his village of Braal in the north he survived Ibrahim was eulogized by his family at the funeral as a man who loved life a man who loved sports

a devoted family man and we owe him a great debt Yehuda Le Pinsker was a physician Russian-speaking a deep believer in Russia's liberal future during the period of Tsar Alexander II

who was killed in 1881. In 1861, 20 years earlier, Alexander II abolished serfdom in the empire. He had instituted many, many different reforms, expanded Jews' access to cities and areas. Outside the traditional pail of settlement, lowered the bar for Jewish participation in guilds and in many professions.

And Pinsker thought that the future of our world, Russia was modern emancipatory, westernized. In 1864, Pinsker traveled to German lands, not Germany, which wouldn't be founded officially in the consolidation until 1870, but German principalities of Central Europe. He travels to these German lands and he sees emancipation up close and he hears from the Jews living in German-speaking lands of their great expectations from emancipation, from their high hopes for integration. in eighteen seventy one there's a pogrom in odessa and jews are dismayed that russian authorities don't say anything don't turn on the pogromists for four days as they're destroying the jewish community

and then come the major wave of pogroms after the assassination of alexander the second in eighteen eighty one and the main laws that increase the restrictions on the jews kicking them out of professions and jews suddenly find themselves being expelled from moscow and kiev even those jews who those few jews thousands of jews but nevertheless few who had been allowed into these cities because they served some useful function Well, it didn't matter how useful they were, what professions they held. They were kicked out of Moscow and Kiev and many other cities. And Pinsker's hopes crash, and he understands that pogroms were popular and that empire actually had trouble suppressing them when it tried. And he writes a pamphlet in 1881 in German, targeting the German-speaking Jewish elite, the wealthy, the educated, the best integrated, and the pamphlet is called auto-imanscipation.

Essentially the argument that you should not believe in emancipation, you can't receive emancipation from others. You can only emancipate yourself. And the only way to emancipate yourself was by getting out of a Europe that was incapable fundamentally as a fundamental aspect of its religious identity and cultural identity of tolerating the Jew,

and not just the Jew, but the Jew. Herzl would come out of that school of thought, reach it through a different path, his own conclusions, he doesn't come from Pinsker's cultural background, he comes from a different one, Budapest and Vienna. But Herzl would argue that emancipation was the very source of anti-Semitism because once the formal place of the Jew

at the bottom of the European totem pole was removed. The non-Jew who had based his identity on knowing the Jew's place, this was Edward Saeed's argument about Oriental, orientalism, right? That Europe developed its sense of self by projecting onto the East, whether it was Muslims or Hindus, the opposite of that. So the East was effeminate, the East was weak, the East was lazy, the East was backward, and that's how I knew that Europe was masculine and advanced and rational. Well, the Europeans learned to do that on the Jews. Herzl's argument was that as soon as the Jew was no longer

their legal, religiously mandated, official place at the bottom of the totem pole, and was officially equal of opportunity. Usually, sometimes, the laws were always anti-Semitic. There were still anti-Semitic laws in the books, just about everywhere. But formally emancipation was a better, it was an improvement. A Jew was allowed into all kinds of professions and cities and places they had not been allowed into. Well, then social mechanisms, informal but powerful mechanisms of oppression and control and domination came to bear to put the Jew back in their place

because the place of the Jew was an important part of how Christian societies understood themselves. And that's something that we know from as long ago as Augustine, who said the Jew must remain oppressed for all time as a message to my people because they rejected Christ. These deep, deep, defining attributes of European civilization left Jews no path to equality, no path to integration. and so a great integration is to even once proposed a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity.

Theodore Herzl became the driving force of political Zionism, of the argument that Jews needed to leave. There is a history told by elites. Elites write history. That's who writes history to this very day. And because those are the people who write history, they tend to think of history as something that people like them are doing, are leading, or managing.

huge part of history of how history is told is through the eyes and voices of other previous elites and especially intellectual elites. Israeli school kids mostly learn about Ikhad Ha'am and Hez and Boehlov and and Pinsker and Herzl. And, you know, American high schoolers learn about Jefferson and Hamilton and Grant and Lincoln and they tend to not learn

the lived experience of millions of people. So let's dive into it. We've already talked about how Europe was becoming uninhabitable. Beginning, it's a good place to begin. It had started earlier in the 18th century with the pale of settlement imposed by Catherine the Great,

who for the Jews was not so great, where Jews were not allowed to move into inner Russia, into areas of Moscow, into the large cities. They were restricted in the work they could have. the Russian Empire was profoundly afraid of Jews and hated Jews and was worried about Jews moving across the empire and being free in the empire. It, by the way, had similar feelings toward Poles and toward a few other minorities, but none as intensely as Jews. Alexander II is assassinated in 1881. The reformist czar is replaced by a deeply reactionary son,

Alexander III, who passes the May laws, who really oversees a state bureaucracy that is profoundly conspiratorial and anti-Semitic and incompetent. So this is how the historian John Clare of the University of Chicago refers to P.A. Sherivin, the chief of the gendarme, an acting head of the third section, which is the security police. It would come to be called the Okrana, the security police of the empire. Sherivin was expending time and resources, writes Clire, in pursuit of an imaginary international Jewish conspiracy. Literally in the months ahead of the Tsar's actual assassination

by an anarchist group that was totally unrelated to the Jews. On April 6, 1880, he wrote to the Governor's General of the Provinces comprising the pale of Jewish settlement, meaning in Western Russia where all the Jews lived, to urge them to search out a, quote, universal Jewish kahl, a body, this khal is the word in the emerald, empire for the governing bodies of the Jewish communities, a body with objectives which were, quote, inimical to the Christian population. This cahal said to rely upon the support of all Jews,

capitalists and proletarians alike, was described as an important source of material support for the revolutionary movements. It all goes back to the Jews. Sherivin's Judeophobe obsession was fully shared by General N. P. Ignatiev, soon to be his chief as the newly appointed minister for internal affairs. In 1880, Ignatyev declared that there is in St. Petersburg a very powerful Polish Yid group. They hated Poles, they hated Yids, so they assumed they were working together, under whose direct control are banks, the stock exchange, the bar, a large part of the press and other public activities, by many ways and means legal and illegal, they have enormous influence

upon the bureaucracy and the whole course of affairs. In its individual parts, this group is linked to the plunder of the exchequer and to sedition while propagating blind imitation of Europe. Liberalism is the Jews' fault. The Tsar, wanting a more

liberal Russia, a more westernized Russia, is actually not the Tsar. He's not a fault. It's the Jews. It's ironic. Because this this vision of a Jewish conspiracy comes from the top of the imperial

security infrastructure, the imperial bureaucracy, from the security apparatus across the bureaucracy, from the top to the bottom, is deeply anti-Semitic, so anti-Semitic that it's so busy looking for Jewish conspiracies that it actually misses the actual conspiracy to kill the Tsar. But after the death of the Tsar,

the pogromists begin to be felt. Mass riots and violent attacks on Jews across the southern empire, present-day Ukraine, Moldova, Belawers, attack Jews in hundreds of places. Thousands upon thousands of Jews are beaten, are hurt, some are killed. The death toll is actually very low at the beginning. It grows over the next 40 years

until it reaches into the six figures. Grom's become a normative expectation of Jews, and ordinary people in the empire don't fear reprisals. don't think they're doing something that isn't socially acceptable. In most places, the police sometimes try to stop the programists. When they do, the programists attack the chief of police, threaten the police themselves.

Sometimes the police recruit peasants into their ranks to help them subdue the pogromists, and those peasants join the pogromists. Most of the time the police just sit to the side and don't get in the way because they don't think they can stop it and don't want to stop it and think it's entertaining and funny and only Jews are hurt. Grom's become so widespread and come to be seen as such a threat to imperial control and law and order, that Ignatia himself responds angrily. He hates Jews, but he hates chaos more.

How could people loyal to throne and fatherland, he writes, fall into caprice and self-indulgence, acting in ways they themselves do not understand in conformity with the plans of the seditionists? The chaos helps those who would topple the empire. so he doesn't like the chaos. He doesn't like the pogroms, but he can't stop them. Jewish newspapers spread this news all over the empire,

all over Eastern Europe, all over the world. And by the time of the Russian Civil War in 1918, that death toll is already well past 100,000, most of it toward the end. And then there's the anti-Jewish legal regime. The pale of settlement is a law. The Jews can only live in Western Russia. they can't move into inner russia they can't live in the most prosperous cities and even in the pale prosperous growing cities like kiev are restricted to jews in many periods and jews are expelled from them often

the may laws of eighteen eighty two are the government's response to the pogroms the imperial government passes these laws and they close off rural areas to jewish life to jews living there they limit land ownership for jews they restrict university entry for jews to very very small numbers they restrict whole professions to jews the romanian constitution in the late eighteen seventy's is amended to exclude jews from citizenship in romania in bohemia and moravia and in other places in germany and in bavaria there are laws with familian's laws and other laws that limit the numbers of jewish families that can live in any particular town or village so most children of jews have to either migrate away or convert that's a major driver of mid-19th century German Jewish flight to America, of 150,000 or so Jewish migrants. Their guild restrictions, Jews are barred from membership in guilds, and the guilds control whole industries and professions. There's special military conscription laws

in the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These are not small phenomenon. Jews can barely live, can barely study, can barely feed their families, families, can't seek a betterment of their life, can't go to university, can't go into the most lucrative professions. The Nuremberg laws that push Jews out of professional life and economic life and the life of the country under the Nazis were not innovative. Not a single thing in them was brand new. They had borrowed from all these other anti-Semitic laws that were a norm of Central and Eastern Europe for 60 years.

the point of the laws the point of the popular violence that the regime didn't like only because of the chaos they caused they didn't actually suppress the point of all of these things was to push the jews out and it worked millions of jews fled probably three million jews from the russian empire between eighteen eighty one and nineteen twenty four jews from central europe the austro-ungarian empire german principalities fled westward mostly to America, probably around 2.5 million out of 3 million over those 40 years. And then the United States closed its doors. In 1921, it was part of a larger anti-immigrant sentiment. There were laws passed against Chinese and Japanese immigrants. In 1921, the United States passes the Emergency Quota Act. It pegs the number of people allowed from any particular place to 3% of the 1910 census.

That's a lot less than the 120,000 Jews who enter the United States that very year. By 1924, three years later, they passed the Full Quota Act. And by then they lower the percent by a third from 3% to 2%. And they push the census that that percent is of from 1910

when well over a million Jews had already entered America to 1890 before the bulk of the immigration. And the Jewish entry to America went from 120,000 in 1921 to 10,000 in 1924 to something around 3,000 by 1934, when the Nazis are already in power in Germany. America closes its doors. And so does Britain, and so does Canada, and so does Australia. South Africa would pass four distinct Jewish immigration laws. The last one in 1937, specifically targeting German Jews, trying to flee Nazi Germany.

Brazil, Argentina, everywhere Jews could flee. It closed to them. And that's when we see, in the 1920s, the massive pivot of Jewish migration, from Jews heading westward to Jews heading to Israel, to Palestine, to the land of Israel. In 1919, at the end of those 40 years, there's barely 60,000 in the land.

Ten years later, there's a hundred, 75,000. And 10 years after that, 1939, there are 450,000. One of the most pivotal years for understanding Israelis is, first of all, 21 and 24 when America's doors are closed and the hundreds of thousands begin to flee toward the only place available to them. Because the pressure in Europe is only rising, but the really fundamental and profound years 1925, the year after the Quota Act. That's the years Zionism became not just probably undefeatable, but not really something you can even argue against morally. People do argue against immorally, primarily out of ignorance. They refuse to see the fundamental historical fact that would make their argument impossible.

So if you ignore that fact, you can make any argument you want. 1925 was the year when migration to Palestine was higher than migration to America for the very first time. And it wasn't higher because that's where Jews preferred. It was higher because that was the only place left to them. The Jews turned Zionist not through idealism. They turned Zionists through desperation. Until Theodore Herzl, there were very few Zionists. There were a handful of thinkers, bands of activists,

people seen as chicken littles predicting the end of the world. Herzl once went to the opera in Vienna and was mocked as the king of the Jews. Oh, look, the king of the Jews is coming. And really, that mockery made sense. The end of the world was the only thing that could justify a step as extreme as the one that Pinsker or Herzl were proposing, moving to a strange land.

A holy land, a land of belonging and yearning and deep ritual and spiritual attachment, the Seder is about that land, you pray about that land a dozen times if you're an observing Jew, every day, but a strange land nonetheless. And then in 1897, Herzl convenes in Basel the first Zionist Congress, and he gives an order. Everybody shows up wearing suits, the fanciest suit they can afford. The picture is going to be one of respectability, of nobility, of middle-class gravitas, we're not going to let the russian jews coming from the east some of them deeply marxist show up in overalls that's not what's going to happen here i'm joking about overalls but whatever the equivalent of overalls would have been for a russian socialist of the eighteen ninety

everybody's in nice suits we're going to have proclamations we're going to have speeches americans and austrians and british and russian all the different jews all there and then came world war one the terrible death toll for jews in the east maybe a hundred fifty thousand dead every army in the Russian Civil War, the white Russians and the Red Russians and the Ukrainian nationalists come across the Jewish village and murder everybody. The horrors of the 20th century, which may well have been the bloodiest century in Jewish history even without the Holocaust. There's a wonderful book, H. H.U.R.B.M. That specifically focuses on those murders. I think the sub-headline is, the subtitle of the book is a prelude to Holocaust, something like that.

The horrors that the Jews face in Europe, the restrictions, the uninhabitability of Europe only increases for Jews. And the doors close, and the Yeshua, the Jewish community in the land of Israel, only grows. Zionist organizations go from having dozens of members in the 1870s or 80s to having hundreds, and then thousands, and then by the 1920s, tens of thousands. By the 1930s, they already have millions. There were still alternatives until all the doors closed, until the violence of World War I and the Russian Civil War.

Socialism and Bundism and Haredism, all these other ways of preserving Jews of reorganizing Jewish life to face this anti-Semitic crisis. Then by the 1930s, there aren't alternatives. And the Jews in the land are already strong enough that people no longer think it's crazy, no longer think it's unviable.

Folks, I wanted to argue that elites matter. They build institutions, they tell stories that ordinary people use to explain their experience. But Zionism would have failed. Israel would never have been born or it would have been destroyed at its very birth. If not for the great emergency that the millions of ordinary people found themselves in.

That's what makes anti-Zionism a historical fiction, an ahistorical fiction. It isn't the argument that Jews should have chosen a different path. Sure. You can make an argument about where culture should go, where people should be, you can make an anti-nationalist argument about humanity generally. It's the argument that Jews had a different path available to them. They didn't. If they had, they probably, probably would have taken it. Most of the Jews are just ordinary people, fleeing bad circumstances, and hoping to find better ones.

This is how Moshe Smilanski writes about the wave of immigration from the 1880s to the end of the 1890s. He's a Zionist activist in Jaffa. Every ship, he writes of these immigrants, discharged hundreds. These people were divided into various groups. A small number were rich, well-to-do people. Most were poor people. who had nothing, some were typical immigrants who only by mistake had made their way to Jaffa, and some were passing by Jaffa on the way to New York. Those who had some money continued on their way or returned to their beloved Russia, those who had no money remained in the country, with nothing, and became laborers against their will. These became a burden on the Zionist

executive committee. And Minnathen Shinkin, head of the Information Bureau in Jaffa for the Zionist movement from 1906 to 1914 describes those who entered the gates of the country as, quote, miserable paupers, depressed and patched up with bundles like rag merchants, the poorest of the poor who could not possibly be a blessing to the country. Most of the immigrants, Zionist immigrants, were ordinary people just looking to do better by their kids. One of the really heartbreaking stories of the Jewish migration is the desperation of these Jews, which is not different from the desperation and destitution of the similar period of Jews fleeing to the United States. Their letters written by Jews from Eastern Europe to the Zionist

offices in Jaffa, asking them about conditions, asking if it was a good idea to come, asking if they could take care of their families once they'd arrived. The Kohelet family, a very large family, driven to destitution, oppressed by local peasants. They can barely make money, you know, growing vegetables or shoemaking. David Coheleet, the father of the family, writes to the Zionist office in Jaffa. The family does not feel it has any ground to stand on. Life is against it. Besides the poverty, which he describes in detail, they have many kids and they can barely feed them.

He says, you have to put up with the insults of the peasants in the the village and you have to flatter them when your blood is boiling at their cruelty and he goes on to say in light of all this the family is thinking of leaving this country and heading for another country that will treat them in a more welcoming fashion we're not aiming for a life of luxury or asking for easy work we just long for a quiet satisfying life we're not idealists we're willing to make sacrifices provided that we are sure that our future will eventually be secure and stable and that the ground under our feet will not collapse. Will we be able to move to Palestine and settle on the land or even in some city? Will we find what we are looking for in the land of Israel? Or would we be better off heading to other countries because the living conditions in Palestine are not suitable for us? We are afraid that we will fail. In other words, scared away all of the croft, all of the ideology and the idealism, and the elementary school storytelling, right? When that's all gone, we're left with the iron the piece of Zionism you can't wish away, you can't deconstruct.

The piece of Zionism that no academic and no ideologue, and those are often the same thing, can just pretend isn't there, or they can pretend, but not then effectively analyze what they're looking at. This Jew, this Israeli Jew, this ordinary Israeli Jew, is the last Jew on three continents. I just want you to understand that this basic point that ordinary people with nowhere else to go built Israel is fundamental to is the water Israeli swimming, is what they know about the world. They have no other place.

Not they have no other place in some idealistic imagined sort of story about themselves, not because that's their narrative, not because they have indigenity rooted in the Bible. That's, by the way, something I do, believe. I teach it to my kids. I don't advocate fundamentally changing the Israeli education system. But even without any of that, anti-Zionists are in trouble. Because the Muslim world emptied of its Jews. How did that happen? How did almost a million Jews get up and leave the Muslim world? Almost everywhere. Almost to the last person. In Iraq and in Yemen, Jews fled leaving their property

behind. In North Africa, the same forces that would kick out the U.S. European imperialists and colonialists couldn't stomach the presence of Jews. They would end up fleeing, often with violence, often after being told by the anti-colonial and local Arab or Muslim movements that they're not welcome, even if they'd lived in those lands for centuries and millennia. This is a contentious point because the opponents of Zionism don't want to give Zionism this slam dunk of the Arab world and the Muslim world emptying of Jews, that almost all the Jews in the most virulently anti-Zionist places on earth

were made to flee. Folks, if you're a virulently anti-Zionist place, but no Jew can live in you, you're kind of Zionist, in the sense that you are validating the fundamental premise of Zionism. If Jews could live happily and joyfully and with equality and safety in the Arab world, the Arab world would have a case that Jews don't need Zionism,

but they can't. so they don't. I think that if you actually look at the Arab arguments about why the Jews fled, you learn a lot about why the Jews fled because of the ludicrousness of those arguments. When you break them down, you actually discover what happened.

Something important about what happened. This is an enormous topic. Bookshelves have been written about it and you can dive into it and we certainly will in future. But right now, just very briefly, The fundamental Arab argument, Palestinian ideologues, often make this argument, was that the exodus of the Jews from the Arab world, which begins before 1948, but increases dramatically in 1948 with the founding of Israel, was essentially a Zionist conspiracy. And there were a couple nutty Zionist conspiracies. Look up the Lavone affair. But there are a few reasons why it becomes kind of ludicrous to seriously believe that Zionism, the Jews as Zionist actions drove the Jews out of Iraq and Morocco and Tunisia and Algeria and Libya and Egypt and Syria and eventually even cosmopolitan multi-ethnic Lebanon. For one thing, it was total, it was complete.

The biggest Arab Jewish community still extant in the Arab world is Morocco and it's 1% of the community that was there 75 years ago. It was a total erasure of all of it. It included the anti-Zionist Jews. When the Jews of the Arab world flee the Arab world, 75% moved to Israel. The rest moved to the west, to Canada, France, America. Anti-Zionists were forced to flee. Even those deeply uninterested in Israel who wouldn't go to Israel.

The last 200 Jews of Yemen, there are now no Jews in Yemen. Ten years ago, there were the last two hundred. They were virulently, ideologically anti-Zionist. And they had to flee. And now they're in New York. I want you to imagine New York, and imagine this argument made about New York,

that the very last Jew, every Jew, those anti-Zionist activists on college campuses, they make a point of centering the handful of Jews in their movement, of having Shabbat dinners with Shabbat prayers at the encampment at Columbia. well now imagine a new york in which those anti-zionist activists jews flee new york now what do you know about new york is it really anti-zionism and the fourth reason why these arguments are silly is that there was outright pro-nazi propaganda pro-nazi policies pro-nazi rule actually kind of nazi rule in places where jews fled the french control of morocco and el and Tunisia, were Vichy French controlled during the Second World War. Just before the massacre of Jews called the Farhood in 1941, the Ali Rashid regime fell.

That chaos created the Farhud pogrom against Jews that killed 180 Jews in Iraq. Well, that Ali Rashid regime was openly pro-Nazi. In June 1948, a single month after Israel's founding, there was a massacre of 44 Jews and riots in Morocco. and that sparked 18,000 Jews to leave, that created that first sense of terror, that first sense that things were unstable. The year that Morocco gained independence, 60,000 would leave in 1956.

And they only stopped after 1956 because the new government made it illegal to move to Israel. When those restrictions are lifted five years later, 70,000 more would leave. By 1967, a community of 300,000, had shrunk to 50,000. And those 50,000 were mostly not interested in Israel.

They did not go to Israel. They were not Zionist or they were anti-Zionist. They believed they were Moroccans. And then the six-day war, 1967, happened, and the Moroccan population turns on them. And they leave. And they don't leave for Israel. They leave for France.

They leave for Canada. They leave for America. But they can't stay in Morocco. In Iraq during the war, the Nazi embassy, Nazi intellectuals living in Baghdad, were massively influential. Minkomf is translated into Arabic, radio Berlin is broadcast, youth movements run out of the Nazi embassy. They're official anti-Jewish policies. Nazi propaganda is everywhere. There are 100,000 Jews in Tunisia in 1948.

Today they're less than 200. One of the interesting points about the emptying of the Arab world was the way in which this long processing that happened in Europe that we described earlier. Nationalism, the danger to minorities, the flight of minorities, not just Jews, a new Jewish politics forming in response to these new pressures, the politicization of Jewish communities,

the seeking out of solutions, young Jews joining communist parties. All of that happened on fast-forward in the Arab world, in the 30s and 40s. And in the end, No solution works. No nationalism, no communism. Nothing allows the Jews to remain.

Nothing actually welcomes the Jews. No one actually holds the Jews in, except sometimes by force. Zionism, the Zionism that warned of catastrophe, of the untenability of diaspora life in modernizing societies. Zionism wins. And they're half the Jews of Israel. And so half the Jews of Israel come from a Europe that became uninhabitable to them and the other half came from an Arab and Muslim world

that became uninhabitable faster and no other ideologies or solutions or political movements could solve the problem. We're very near the end. I want to tell you two final stories and then we're done here. I don't want to talk about the Holocaust, mainly because you've all heard a lot about the Holocaust and we can get to it later.

But there's one sliver, one piece of the Holocaust that I think is important to convey. And it speaks to the Israeli Jewish experience because the Israeli Jews are the descendants and heirs of the Holocaust, much more than American Jews. Most Holocaust survivors went to Israel. Most Holocaust survivors helped build the Israeli ethos and sense of the world. And it is a simple fact

of the holocaust, and this I take from Goetz Ali in his book Europe against the Jews who lays it out beautifully and tragically and horribly. It is a simple fact that huge numbers of individual Europeans helped Jews. They did, and they are the slivers of light. But no group, no major social or political group, anywhere in Europe, collectively came to the Jews' defense. And in fact, in most places, the Nazis found willing collaborators, and in the few places where they did not have collaboration on the ground of locals, they failed to kill the Jews. So, for example, when the Nazis show up in Belgium, in Flemish Antwerp, they round up two-thirds of the Jews, 65% of the Jews, and they used the local police to do it, because they collaborated in Flemish Antwerp with the

authorities, with the Nazi conquers. But in Brussels, French-speaking Brussels, citizens, officials refused to help. And where they refused to help, the Nazi success rate was halved. It was barely 37% of the Jews. In Hungary, Hungarians deported 437,000 Jews to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. No German was involved in running that operation, not until they reached the Hungarian border. But these were Yiddish-speaking rural Jews from the provinces. when the nazis came and demanded budapest jews assimilated middle-class doctors scientists lawyers the hungarian government refused and that meant that the nazis could not implement large-scale killings in budapest

large-scale deportations there were toward the end but most of budapest jews because of that simple fact survived the war it's the same thing in romania in bulgaria in greece greek collaboration in salon because the Greeks were interested in losing its ethnic minorities and gricifying Salonica, the Nazis were able to take the Jews of Salonica. The Greeks refused to give up the Jews of Athens, and it didn't work. Everywhere the locals didn't cooperate, the Jews were saved, and in almost every place, the locals cooperated, and the Jews were destroyed. That's the peace of the Holocaust. We know so much about the Nazis. We focus on the Nazi centers of command.

on the Nazi policy, on the technology of the genocide, and it's absolutely correct to do that. Without Nazi Germany, engaging in that genocide, it wouldn't have happened. But they would not have succeeded without local help all over Europe. The basic point of Europe becoming uninhabitable to Jews, when the Nazis came asking for the Jews, nearly everyone handed them over. That's the fundamental lived experience of the Jews of Europe. point, the lesson, if you will, of the Holocaust as if something so big can have a lesson. But all these museums exist, arguing that the Holocaust's lesson is don't be intolerant. That's not the point. If you actually live through it, it might be reasonable for you to reach the conclusion that in the end, everybody should have their own place.

And that's the only safety to be found, because you can't beat human nature. Maybe that's the lesson. How do we know it isn't the lesson? Don't be intolerant doesn't seem like it would have held off the Nazi war machine. The deep political impulses that drove Europe to political radicalism and genocide, and again, not just of the Jews, but ideologically primarily of the Jews. And there's one last piece that Israelis remember that the rest of the world has forgotten, even if Israelis remembered in the sense of water they swim in. And that's the deep peace. That's the postscript to the Holocaust,

the story that came after the Holocaust, that for many survivors essentially encapsulated the deepest truth of the Holocaust, that Auschwitz was not the exception. Auschwitz was the logical conclusion of 60 years of emptying of Europe, of Europe becoming uninhabitable to Jews. On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe ends.

david nassau i believe he teaches at cuny he wrote a wonderful book called the last million about the displaced persons of europe after the war he writes germany was in freefall chaos reigned national regional and local military police and political authorities had abandoned their post there was literally no one directing traffic no one policing the streets no one delivering the mail no one picking up the garbage or bringing food to the shops Nobody's stopping the looting, the rape, the revenge-taking, as millions of homeless, ill-clothed, malnourished, disoriented foreigners. Jewish survivors, Polish forced laborers, former Nazi collaborators who fled the East, as the Soviets advanced. All displaced persons jammed the roadways, the town squares and marketplaces, begging, threatening, desperate. this mixed multitude on the roadways of a defeated germany constituted a living moving pallid wreckage collier's columnist w b courtney would write as he accompanied the u s military drive through the german countryside and the jews among all those wretched souls were the worst off they were easily identifiable nassau explains they were distinguishable by their pallor emaciated physiques, shaved heads, lice-infested bodies and the vacant look in their eyes. They had been

the worst treated. All Germany's slave laborers, slave laborers had suffered. The Jews alone, by order of Hitler's deputy Heinrich Himmler himself, were deliberately being worked to death. By October 1st, Nassau writes, more than two million Soviets, one and a half million Frenchmen, 586,000 Italians, 274,000 Dutch, almost 300,000 Belgians and Luxembourgians, more than 200,000 Yugoslavs, 135,000 checks, 94,000 Poles, tens of thousands of other Europeans, had been sent home. They're collected by the U.S. military on the roadways and sent to special collection points, their identities are ascertained, and they're sent home, they're eager. to go home. They give them as much help as they can. Sometimes these people just walk home. They steal bicycles. They hitchhike. They catch a train. Whatever's running. And they just get home. But by the end of this process, a million people are left in the American controlled zones of

Germany and Austria. And in the British controlled zones, a million people who are made up of about 400,000 collaborators with the Nazis. These are Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians. If they go back to places now ruled by the Soviets, they'll be killed, they'll be imprisoned. Nazi collaborators are about 400,000 of the million. About 250,000 of the million are Jews. Jews who tried to go back to Poland but face systematic opposition, violence, brutality, pogroms in the aftermath of the war. And another roughly 250, 300,000 are Polish Catholics, who are afraid of what is essentially deteriorated into a kind of civil war in Poland with the Soviet entry into the country. And so in 1946, with a quarter million Jews,

750,000 others in these DP camps, being fed every day by the United States Army and the British army. It's very expensive. The U.S. and Britain established something called the International Refugee Organization, the IRO. to deal with the very last people, the people who can't go home. The IRO gets to work marketing the last DPs to Western countries, Latin American countries, as a solution to post-war labor shortages, and it worked. Governments come to the camps, they set up little booths, they interview, you know, 700,000 roughly DPs,

and they give them citizenship, passports, and they have new homes. and by the end of the year there are a quarter million Jews left in the camps because the only DPs left are the Jews because nobody who came to the camps wanted the last Jews

Truman begs Congress to lift the quotas just for these last Jews and Congress refuses and that's something that the DPs themselves felt saw Hadassah Rosenzhaft was a survivor and she wrote in her memoir

a few years later, that on May 8th the war in Europe ended. She was in Bergen-Belsen when the war ended. I've often been asked how we felt on that day. Of course we were glad to hear the news of the Allied victory. But we in Belsen did not celebrate on that day. For years I've seen a film on television showing the world's reaction to the end of the war in Times Square in New York and the streets of London and Paris.

People were dancing, singing, crying. embracing each other. They were filled with joy that their dear ones would soon come home. Whenever I see that film, I cry. We in Belsen did not dance on that day. We had nothing to be hopeful for. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere. We were alone. We were abandoned. The D.P. camps would empty, mostly beginning in May 1948. Jews are still living in Buchendwald. In 19, in a in 1947 and seven when they empty of all others. The Jews would find a home in 1948, and they would become one estimate that I have seen.

It's hard to come up with to find detailed numbers, something like a quarter of the IDF in the 1948 war. When the Americans and the British took up this problem of Palestine after the war, and the British are trying to prevent the Jews from moving to Palestine, They're worried about their own standing in the Arab world. They establish the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry that meets the elites of the Arabs and the Jews and visits, among other places, the DP camps.

David Nassau writes about how Foreign Secretary Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, had appointed members, the British members, to the committee, specifically chosen to vote against the DPs moving to Palestine. That was British policy. but then they actually recommended they were specifically appointed to reach one decision and they reached the other one what happened to them committee member richard crossman explains what happened to them they had smelled the unique and unforgettable smell of huddled homeless humanity they had seen and heard for themselves what it means to be the isolated survivor of a family deported to a german concentration camp for slave labor they knew the jews that they were not wanted by the western democracies they knew that far away in palestine there was a national home willing and eager to receive them and to give them a chance of rebuilding their lives not as aliens in a foreign state but as hebrews in their own country

their zionism explains nassau was not a deeply held ideological belief or religious belief but a catastrophic zionism born of the conviction that there could be no viable future in a blood-soaked europe when the anglo-american committee of inquiry arise in frankfort they are given the results of a huge survey by the american refugee relief authorities of the jewish d p's in which they asked them where they want to go 19,311 DPs were asked. Of those 18,702, 97% said Palestine. There was one D.P. camp where Truman's emissary, who went to the camps to report on the situation of the camps again named Earl Harrison, had conducted a survey in which 90% had written Palestine as their first choice, and then he gave them a survey again saying,

if not Palestine, what are your other options? What are your other choices? And 25% wrote crematorium. The Jews of the D.P. camps knew on their flesh in blood what the Jews of Europe had been discovering for 60 years. If they didn't have this place, they had no place at all. That in the end, the word,

world is not trustworthy, that in the end when the chips are down, an international community is a pipe dream. It should exist. We want it to exist. But if we depend on it existing, it will fail us. What do Israeli Jews know? What did they learn from their grandparents and great-grandparents that is so fundamental and basic? They don't even know they know it. It's just too obvious to ever be even discussed. We talked about the water that American Jews swim in with without realizing it, noticing it. What's the water that Israeli Jews swim in? What historical experience shaped them in profound ways

so deep that they're hard to see. Israeli Jews live in a world emptied of Jews, a world in which the Christians of Syria, just 12 years ago, were 10% of Syria. They're today less than 2% of Syria. Nothing about the Jewish experience is unique to Jews. the scale of the holocaust maybe the ideological intensity jews hold a unique place in christian thought and so a unique place in western identity and so maybe but the truth that zionism argued the thing that zionism argued about modernity and modernization and urbanization and industrialization and the danger to minorities in this new world where the sheer bureaucratic technology of the modern state allows a scale of homogenization meaning of genocide that had never been possible

all of that wasn't just true of the jews it's fundamental to the structure of humanity in this age and if the world cared less about the story of the jews and more about the actual suffering of all peoples alike they would have noticed what has happened to yemen quarter million dead of starvation just six years ago they would have noticed the horrors of the world as a whole and not just the ideologically convenient ones israelis look out at a world critiquing the world critiquing them over Gaza. I don't want to get into Gaza. I've written and talked about it extensively in other places. It's totally legitimate to criticize a painful war with human suffering. But Israelis don't believe the world. That doesn't mean that Israel's exonerated in any way, but the fundamental fact is that Israelis simply don't believe, trust. A world community in which they cannot live. Some Israeli elites are always welcome in Silicon Valley. But what about the millions of ordinary people?

What do they know? They know that in Iraq that they had lived in for a thousand years before it spoke Arabic. They cannot live in today. But that Iraq still demands the end of Zionism. They know that Auschwitz wasn't the end of the emptying of Europe. They know that an America afraid of 10 million Jewish refugees closed its doors,

but wouldn't even reopen it for the last 250,000. they know that even if the world looks nice when you're powerful and safe and can defend yourself if you're weak it'll get awfully cruel awfully fast they know it in their bones they know it because it's the story that founded them as a nation elites matter elites created the institutions the economic foundations the political infrastructure the story that ordinary people tell themselves to explain to what's happening to them. But if all you know is elite debates, then you can think that Zionism is one ideological option among 16 others, and, you know, don't pick it, I don't like it. If you know the lived experience of millions of ordinary Jews,

there's no such thing as an anti-Zionist. There's an ignoramus, a genocidal maniac who wishes that all those Jews were dead. And a Zionist, those are the three options. There is no fourth option. What could it possibly be? History offered the Jews no other option. Welcome to the Jews of Israel,

who despite that founding trauma, despite every problem under the sun, including internal weaknesses and failures, discrimination of minorities, among the Jews, deep imbalances and inequalities and discrimination, between Jews and Arabs. Every problem you can imagine.

but despite all of these things a people that built a first world economy out of a third world economy a people that built a modern thriving flourishing place at the moment probably the biggest Jewish community in the history of the world and certainly the most powerful Jews

who would have ever lived out of the realization that they had no other choice that their very existence depended on it If you understand that about Israel, you wouldn't develop a strategy of destroying them through terrorism. Because they're not French Algeria. They're not colonialists. Getting sunburned in a land they don't belong with a place to go back to.

Thank you, everyone. I'll see you in episode five.