Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Origins of Terror in Palestine

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

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

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst, or everything you don't know about the worst people in all history. It's kind of the initial point, but we also go back to our name when looking at kind of the remit of this show. And one of the things we try to do is get like behind the bastards, including the very worst people in the world today. And we've already done an episode on Benjamin Netanyahu prior to October 7th and kind of this most recent escalation into genocide in Gaza. And I didn't really feel like, you know, returning to Netanyahu well was kind of thing the show does best covering like things that are currently happening and like breaking news. That's kind of why we started. It could happen here. Yeah.

Yeah. And among other things in the last year or so, one of the best things we've done there is bring on Dr. Donna Al-Kurd to help us report on and, you know, not just stuff in Palestine, but you've done a lot of really good work for us, Donna. And so I wanted to bring you on as a guest and talk about a subject that I think is in your wheel. house and also really important today. But thank you for coming back. Dennis, should we call you Dr. Elkhard the whole episode? No, no, please don't do that. That would be super awkward.

It is cool. I mean, yeah, but first off, how have you been? And, yeah, plugables and stuff. Yeah, no, I'm doing, I'm existing, you know. As many Palestinians are right now. But I'm happy that I edited this. handbook called a handbook on Arab authoritarianism that just came out and it's open access. And so that has been a shining thing for me right now.

So, yeah, thanks for asking. Oh, that sounds great. I can't wait to read that. I've been doing some, for one of the things I read for this book, which is kind of about, like, the birth of terrorism in Palestine, the Holy Land, prior to the Nakhpa, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. This episode, if you had like an education like me, because I remember as a kid, most of what I was told about, the series of conflicts there was that, like, number one, it's been going on for thousands of years. It's always been happening. And number two, that it's, like, primarily religious and always has been primarily religious in dimension.

That, like, those are the two truths about it. And kind of when people are saying that one thing they're kind of tacitly saying, I think, is that like Muslims and Jews can't live together, right? Like, that is, they don't tend to directly say that, but that's what you're meant to believe if those two first things are true, right? And that they're both crazy. None of this is news to you. And that they're both.

They can't live together, but they're also both crazy. Exactly. Right, right. And none of that's true to the conflict, right? For one thing, this, you could, I mean, yeah, obviously stuff that happened in ancient times is relevant for a variety of reasons just because history is never, you know, discreet, right? But if you go back to like 1880, you can get a really good grounding and everything that's really relevant to the conflict today, right? I mean, maybe you disagree with that. If so, I yield to your experience, but that's kind of been sort of what I've come to feel, like kind of really.

into it, that that's, you really, that's a really good grounding and kind of everything relevant to the day, to the day starts in the late 1800s. Like, it's not that ancient, right? No, no, absolutely. Like, if, if I'm always, anytime I talk about this or anytime I teach about this, like, my main takeaway is, like, this is a very recent conflict and recent in the grand scheme of human history. And it's about nationalism. It's about nationalism. It's about nationalism. It's about nationalism. And yeah, and one of the important things to understand is that prior to the outbreak, I mean, prior to a lot of things, I mean, Zionism being one of them, but nationalism, because it's, I mean, Arab nationalism and also European nationalism

are deeply tied to all of this. Among other things, Jews and Muslims and Christians got along reasonably well in Palestine. For that, you know, never part, like no multicultural society is ever completely devoid of conflict, right? But there's a lot of, I mean, one of our sources for this is a book called Lives in Common that really goes into how different things used to be there and how the fundamental conflict has nothing to do with faith, right? So I wanted to talk about like that, how we got to kind of the point of no return

before the establishment, before, you know, 1948 and before the Nakba, right? Like, how did things and how did the Ottoman Empire and the British mandate kind of help push things along to the point of no return, right? So that's, I think, what we're going to talk about this week. Because, yeah, that's just, I was initially planning to do episodes a little bit different, probably on Monachem Begin or on Vladimir Yovatinsky, but it just seemed to make more sense to cover it this way, in part because I actually didn't feel like just focusing on like one guy and trying to like sort out like how things went so wrong through a single, I just didn't seem like

the right way to do this. No, this is more comprehensive, I would say, yeah. Yeah, we'll see. This is an I-Heart podcast, guaranteed human. Get Bell, Purefure. fiber internet with craved Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for details and to check availability.

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Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So, the story that I'm going to tell this week starts in the 1880s and ends around 1940 with a major terrorist bombing that kind of sets the stage for a lot of stuff going on today. But to start when you. need to go back to Palestine during the Ottoman era. And when we talk about this period, the first thing I need to get across is that people living in Palestine during like the

1800s and even the early 1900s would not have considered Palestinian a useful identity within the territory. Because if you're like Muslim or Christian or Jewish, you're still a Palestinian, like someone identifying themselves as a Palestinian would not tell you what they believed, what community they were a part of necessarily, right? In like 1870, you know. Yeah. I mean, these were Ottoman provinces. They happen to be there. Yeah, different communities happen to be there. Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, in 1880 or so, the majority of residents in any city in Palestine would have identified as Arab, including most Jews. And this is not a category that you see a lot of people claim today, Arab Jew, right? But for a very long time, there were large communities of Arab Jews spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. And in some ways, these episodes are the story of why many of those communities cease to exist, right? because that's also very tied up in the state of Israel and the wars that that happen as a result of that, all that stuff, right? This is one of the communities that kind of, in a number of reasons, not purely ceases to exist, but it also gets transmuted. People stop identifying that way, right? And there's, when we talk about Arab Jews, there's a really, it seems to be kind of muddled distinction between that and like Sephardic Jews, where a lot of Sephardic Jews would have considered themselves Arab Jews and spoken Arabic primarily.

But it kind of varied, right? That was more common, as I understand it, like Hebron, where the majority of the Jewish community in Hebron in this period was extremely Arabic and would have very rarely spoken kind of the language that most Sephardics spoke, which is Spanish derived. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Like Ladino, yeah. Yes, Ladino, right.

It was noted, like, in Hebron, they would only use Ladino in songs that, like, occasionally, right, if there was, like, people in who might have been from, like, another city or something during, like, a religious celebration, right? Whereas in Jerusalem, Ladino was a lot more common, right? So, you know, stuff like that, it is kind of a blurry distinction between Sephardic and Arab Jews. And it's not wrong. And there's this category also, Mizrahim, that kind of slumps Arab and Middle Eastern Jews from Iran and an Arab country is kind of altogether. That becomes kind of a catch-all term, I think, especially after the creation of the state of Israel.

Yes, yes. And I'm not the best. I'm trying to kind of hopefully not screw this up too much. These are very complicated, you know, when we kind of kind of. talk about how these the terms and how identity has shifted in these communities over this period of time. Like it's it's more than we'll totally get into today. But you need to understand that like among other things when it when you're talking about the 1880s in Palestine, when most Palestinians were, be they Arab, you know, or Muslim or Christian or Jewish or whatever,

if they were getting angry at a foreign power in those days, that power was the Ottomans, right? Like those, that was the enemy for a lot of basically everybody, right? Or it was like the the ruler that you just kind of like assumed, well, you probably can't do any better than this, right? This is just life, you know? You were upset about taxes. You were upset about the draft. Right, right.

Exactly. Exactly. And also, the Ottomans are Turks, right? The rulers are foreigners. They're not Arab. And, you know, the empire is a foreign one that's holding a lot of Arabs. It's holding Arabs in some form of bondage, right? And obviously a lot of, you know, Jewish people are not, like the Jewish religion is not,

is also, especially in parts of the, you know, it varies. treatment in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, but they're not considered equal under the law. So they and also Christians have a lot of issues with the Ottomans. But Arab nationalists, which are increasingly becoming a thing in the late 1800s, are also really angry at the Ottomans. Everybody's pretty pissed at the Ottomans. They're not a good empire, especially by this point in time, right? Like, things aren't going.

They're the sick man of Europe is kind of the term people use. So in addition to being foreigners who are drafting people and taxing them, they're also just not holding up super well. Right? And it's kind of increasingly obvious to everybody. But one of the things the existence of the Ottomans does is like a ruler over all the different, you know, religious groups and ethnic groups is that it mitigates a degree of internal conflict because everybody kind of has this foreign power that they all see as like the asshole, right? And it does kind of make people fight less with each other. I do think that's a little bit of what's going on in this period. I think there's some solidarity that comes from everyone being angry at the same foreign power, right?

So Yakov Yehoshua, a Jewish resident of Jerusalem in this time, and a future Israeli, wrote of this period, quote, the residential courtyards of the Jews and Muslims were common. We were like one family. We were all friends. Our mothers poured out their hearts to Muslim women, and they poured out their hearts to our mothers. The Muslim women accustomed themselves to speaking the Ladino language. This is his recollection of what life was like in this period of time. And he's not recalling any kind of religious conflict, really.

Like that's not, that doesn't seem to be certainly his primary memory of this time. It was a lot of solidarity. And it's accurate to note that. And you run across a couple quotes like this in Lives in Common that some Arab Muslims would see Arab Jews or Sephardic Jews as the one of the terms I've heard is like inferior locals. And they don't mean that in a racial or religious sense. They mean that and they have not been here as long. They're locals, but they haven't been here as long. And that's true for a lot of these, especially like Sephardic Jewish communities because you can tell this by the fact that they speak.

Ladino, right, which is derived from old Spanish because many Sephardics were the remnants of the Iberian Jewish community who'd been exiled. And one of the things this actually does is there's a lot of solidarity between some of these Sephardic Jewish communities and some Arab Muslim communities who are descendants themselves of the Arabs that were kicked out of Iberia. And there's this kind of belief pretty widespread that some of these Sephardic communities have done a better job or the best job of maintaining some of like the musical and artistic culture of that, you know, community that was largely driven,

entirely driven out by the Christians, right? So there's this really deep, and we, I don't think these relationships exist very much anymore, but this very deep relationship between these two different religious groups who are both exiles from the same place and wound up in Palestine, which I actually just wasn't aware that that was a dimension of life

in that period of time. I find it really interesting, especially when you think of how far back, you know, the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Iberia is from this point in time. We're talking hundreds of years, and these are still really meaningful community relationships. I just find that fascinating. Now, depending on the city and community, the difference between, like, how these communities

saw themselves and conflicts between them would vary and be blurry. But again, in places like Hebron, the Jewish community spoke Arabic as a first language, and only occasionally included Lidino songs and worship celebrations, right? So it did change depending on where you were. a Jewish resident of the old city in Jerusalem or Al-Quds during this time. Elihu Al-Eyashar wrote that during his youth, quote, we heard Arabic and spoke it utterly freely with our neighbors. Yaakov Al-Azhar, another resident, recalled Muslim women in a mixed religion housing development,

volunteering to draw extra water the day before the Sabbath so as not to disturb their Jewish neighbors. You hear a lot of stories of this, of religion and faith that's like lived in common, and like this really kind of deeply emotionally affecting degree of religious solidarity and even co-celebration of a lot of different religious holidays, as we'll talk about. Now, before we get into some of those more positive stories, there is another fact of life in Palestine in like this period of time, the 1880s, 1890s that we need to address, which is that for a shockingly long time, slavery still existed there, right? People bought and sold enslaved Africans for longer than you'd expect, and this is not just in

Palestine. This is a decent chunk of the Middle East and in North Africa in bits. In his book, Klein, there was an Arab slave trade. Yeah. Yeah. And this is, by the way, slavery is practiced and utilized by Jews and Muslims and Christians in this period of time. There's not seem to be a major religious difference between who is buying slaves. It's a wealth thing. If you can afford it and you don't have a moral issue with it, you have slaves in this period of time. Some people do. It's not super common. Klein notes that the old city had a market where African girls specifically were bought and sold that operated until 1889, even though the Sultan had outlawed the trade in 1846.

Per lives in common, quote, at about 1880, Chaim Aharon Valero bought an Ethiopian girl who was around 10 years old. When the central government enforced the emancipation of slaves in Jerusalem, the girl chose to stay with Valero's family and converted to Judaism. A few hundred descendants of these slaves still live in the old city in what is called the black or slave compound. Not an aspect of history that we talk about a lot, but again. And they consider themselves Palestinian today.

Yeah, absolutely. And it's a, it is, I have heard this occasionally brought up in order to slander like Palestinians today as if it was something that only one religion did. And as that quote makes clear, there were plenty of Jewish slaveholders and old Palestine. It was a money and a morals thing. If you were okay with it, you did it, you know. Coming into the 1880s, the Jewish population in Palestine numbered around 25,000. And Zionism is.

a political movement is not really, there is some immigration from Europe, but it's not really a major political movement until like 1882. And this is when you see a bunch of smaller Jewish organizations in Europe, some of which had been sending migrants to establish farms or might move to cities in Palestine for a period of time before this, start to coordinate on like a large scale, right? And that's part of the story, but not everything, because why is 1881, 1882 when this really gets going? Well, there's a lot of shit going on in Europe that makes it.

seem like a really good idea for a lot of Jewish people to get the fuck out of places like Russia. A big fuel for this wave of migration comes in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by anarchists. Russia blamed the Jews, as they usually did, and a pogrom followed in the city of Kirovorad. And this is like, this is in basically modern-day Azerbaijan, if I'm understanding it. I think, like, it's generally Azeri is like the region that this is like attributed to. I'm not sure specifically what country now, but like that's kind of the area this is occurring in. But it spreads out of kind of that community to the entire pale of settlement. And there's like a year and a half or two of horrific violence against Jews and a large portion.

Yeah, massive. And this kind of, it leads to the czar passing what are called the May laws in 1882, which further restrict where Jews could go and what jobs they can have. And it makes a lot of people want to leave. But per the Oxford Encyclopedia, of the history of terrorism, it does something else, too. This also expedited the consolidation of Jewish nationalism. The most significant essay of the time was auto-imanscipation by Leon Pinsker,

in which he advocated the idea of self-determination for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. Now, it's worth talking about all this and talking about what's happening in Russia as how it helps to fuel Zionism, but it's also worth noting very few of the people who are fleeing Russia and other Jews who are fleeing Russia and other Eastern European countries in this period, choose to go to Palestine. That's about of the huge number of refugees, by the way, a lot of Jews leave Russia in the period immediately after 1881 to D.2. About 3% of them emigrate to Palestine, right?

And this first wave, by the way, it's both not big and also a lot of them don't stay, right? Of that 3% of refugees who come into Palestine, a significant, some people say most, some sources say most, leave pretty soon after. Because it's like a pretty different climate than Russia, you know, like people who are used to growing up there, maybe move to Palestine, they're like, oh, I can't handle this. Huge adjustment, right? Yeah, it's not right. New York's way easier, right? Or somewhere else, you know, because it's hard, and it's hard to farm in the desert, right? Like, it's not the easiest

place in the world, and there's not a massive amount. This is going to be caused, one of the things that causes problems is that some of these refugees who do stay, these early Zionists, a lot, most of them settle in cities, and a lot become very integrated, but many settle in the country and start farms or small number settle in the country and start farms, but even though it's not a lot of them because resources are scarce and because, you know, at this point, by the time you've had an area that's been farmed and, you know, peopled as long as Palestine has, there's not just a bunch of, like, good land that nobody's using, right? And they don't understand, like, indigenous farming, like they're not talking to the locals. They're really not adjusting well,

yeah. They're not adjusting well, and there are conflicts. There's, you know, and in this period, the violence, I don't see a lot of reports about it being like hugely, generally, hugely serious. It's mostly like petty theft and property damage, right? And, you know, there's some complaints from some of these Jewish farmers to the Ottoman authorities, but obviously the Ottoman authorities aren't going to take their complaints seriously. Not that they take a lot of complaints. The Ottoman Empire, not great at addressing the complaints of its people, right? They certainly don't care about these like Zionist immigrants, right? They're the Ottomans in 1880. Yeah. So from these

initial concerns over security arose the first organized Jewish defense group in Palestine, which is called Bar Giora. And Bar Giora ultimately, I don't know if it becomes the Hashemar, or it's more accurate to say the Hashemar is kind of a spinoff of Bargeiora. And then the Hashemar obviously gives away to the Haganah. The Haganah becomes the IDF. You know, you see kind of how things go there. But initially, Bargiora and the Hashimur, they are like left-wing organizations because the primary organizing kind of impetus. behind them are these Jewish labor-foot federations, and a lot of these had started with people kind of organizing their communities back in the old countries, and sometimes organizing, like,

self-defense in those communities from the pogrom back in the old country. And so some of those people who make it over to Palestine, and these are generally like leftists initially start forming these like self-defense groups, right, this very first one. And it's not going to, there's going to be like a right-wing, a major right-wing swing that comes in after this. And some of it is a reaction to the fact that a lot of people, a lot of Zionists who are right-wing are really fed up with a lot of these very left-wing, like, Zionist organizations. And there are conflicts between them, too. There's a left and a right-wing.

Zionism is not like a single thing in terms of what people mean when they say it in this period of time, certainly not right to look at it that way. People will mean a number of different things. That said, the kind of major organizing, like, Sinter, is pretty well represented by Theodore Herzl, right? who is like the big Zionist theoretician thinker of his day. You may have heard of him quoted in the Big Lebowski. In 1897, Herzl announced the first Zionist Congress in Basel, which brought a bunch of

these smaller European Zionist groups together for the first time. In his biography of Monachan Begin, Daniel Gordas makes it clear that Zionism developed alongside and was influenced by other nationalist movements. It was not separated from them. One of the things he does, and obviously Gordis really likes Monachan Beginne, who is a very, I I mean, as a guy, among other things, there's a lot of terrorism in life. But one thing he does point out that I think is valuable is he has includes some quotes from Monacham. And he compares them to different, like, and this is Monarchum, like, quotes that Monarchum has come up with that are like about Zionism.

And he compares them to different slogans and songs of like Polish nationalist groups in the area when Monachan would have been growing up as a kid and points out the similarities. And he's doing this to point out that Zionism cannot be extricated from. Polish nationalism or German nationalism or any other kind of nationalism. Or Arab nationalism. They are all developing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And they're influencing each other, right? Like at the same time, even though a lot of these European, you know, Polish and German nationalists are also often very anti-Semitic.

That also influences the development of Zionism, right? I mean, I'd like to point out that, like, we're talking about a time period, like you said, where, like, there are these empires. And nobody is a citizen, like, it's not a democracy here. Everyone's a subject and an empire and self-determination, like nationalism fills a need, you know, to, like, protect yourself, especially as, like, the international system starts to develop. It's like, we have to declare ourselves a nation and, like, argue for our people's rights. Otherwise, we won't be, you know, kind of legible on the international stage. We've got to, you know, move in this direction. Obviously, there are lots of ills that come from that, but we'll get to that, I'm sure.

We will. And it's, you know, it's also, it's hard to not to understand how, if. if you are a Jew in a place like Russia and you're constantly being told you're not Russian, you're part of a different thing you don't belong here. I can see how some people are like, well, maybe that things, you know, Zionism, right? Maybe that's what I should be doing if I'm not a Russian. If I can't be here, like, what else is there? And obviously, that's not the choice most people make.

Most people choose to go somewhere else for different reasons. But, like, yeah, like, you have to, you can't separate this from all of the other movements at the time. And this is something Gordaists makes a really good point of writing about. his biography it began. Quote, the Jews like the Poles wanted their land back. The Polish anthem declared Poland is not yet lost while we live. We will fight with swords for all that our enemies had taken from us. While the Hatikva, the Zionist's anthem, ended with the words, Our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two millennia to be a free people in our land. And you can see the similarities there. And of course, one of the big differences would be

the Polish people were singing were actively in Poland, right? And the European Zionists singing the haktiva were mostly foreigners singing. about land that other people already inhabited, foreigners to the land they intended to go to, right, who had not been born and raised there. And that is a meaningful difference, right? But you can also see how these things are influencing each other as they evolve. In 1904, the Kishinaf pogrom occurred in modern-day Moldova, which is, of course, then part of the Russian Empire. And I think the cause of this is the most popular paper in Kishinaw publishes a series of articles with titles like Death to the Jews and Crusade Against the Hated

race. I probably don't need to do. read you the text of any of those articles for you to get the idea of like the tenor of them, right? And this raises tensions to a fever pitch. And then there's two murders of children. One is a young boy and one is a young, well, one is a young girl who commits suicide, right? And neither of these have anything to do with the Jewish community. But there are these longstanding myths and rumors that like rabbis are sacrificing Christian children to get their blood to do this kind of ritual, right? This is a huge part of... Literally, that's a blood libel. Like that's the term, right?

Yep, yep, massive part of anti-Semitism history, right? And so when these two young people turn up dead kind of in the same area at the same time, there's just like immediate disinformation campaign to be like, it's the Jews, right? And then you get a pogrom, right? There's a massacre that starts on Easter Sunday. I think 40 to 49 Jewish people are murdered, hundreds more are injured, more than 1,500 homes are damaged. And the pogrom itself influences a lot more people to flee than were directly impacted by the violence. and one of the folks who was very influenced by the Kishina Fagram is Theodore Herzl.

And this happens right before he dies. He doesn't live a lot much after this pogrom, but one of his last acts, and he had, again, not a few years before this, he had held that first Zionist Congress. He's a major Zionist figure. But one of the things that's interesting is he gets so scared after this pogrom that he starts pitching something called the Uganda scheme. And the Uganda scheme was a proposal that existed at this time that had been created by certain British imperial strategists who thought it would be useful to kind of some of the great

game politics they were playing in Africa if they could create like a semi-independent Jewish community, not quite a state, but more independent than a colony in East Africa, right, that could be useful to them as like a, but there were a number of reasons they thought it would be useful, right? None of which had to do with the welfare of anybody in Africa or any of these Jewish people, right? This is purely British power politics, right? And obviously, Herzl and a number of other people are like, well, I guess, you know, maybe this is better than nothing, right? And it doesn't go anywhere. And a lot of Zionists get really

angry at Herzl, because they are very focused on the primacy of Palestine within Zionism. And Herzl is obviously somewhat more flexible where he's like, look, I mean, if they're offering Uganda, and this highlights a really important reality, which is like this whole ideology that is being developed, right, and all of these European Jews that are being influenced to move are under this constant Paul of Doom, that, you know, these are the early warning signs of the Holocaust. And so there's a lot of, among other things, it wasn't definite that the Zionist movement would land on Palestine at this point in time. You can see that by the fact that Herzl does embrace the Uganda plan. And it also shows just how chaotic things are, how scared people are and how little knowledge there is about like where is a good idea to go and like what should be done, right? It's hard to see in this period of time when these pogroms kind of rise up like this natural. It's not surprising that so many Jews leave for like the United States in this period of time. You know, it's really easy to see anyone who's paying attention being like, well, I got to go. Like, I don't know where I need to go, but like Eastern Europe is not the place to be right the fuck now.

Like I'm getting on a bus to anywhere that's not this place, right? And again, most people go to the Americas or elsewhere in Europe. But it's not hard to see why they're leaving so fucking fast. The first and second waves of migration to Palestine during the Ottoman Empire are known as the first and second Alia. between 1903 and 1914, 35,000 to 40,000 Russian Jews moved to Palestine. And it's during this time that Jewish immigrants living near Jaffa create the neighborhoods that are going to form the nucleus of Tel Aviv, which eventually becomes the first, like, Hebrew city, right, in Palestine.

That's what people will call it. It doesn't start, and there's a huge, like, effort to deny that, like, Jaffa really was a city, kind of now. Because the idea that, like, Tel Aviv was, could not. have come into existence without Jaffa and without Jaffa forming a place for a lot of these Jewish communities to start. And I mean, until 1930, Tel Aviv's downtown was downtown Jaffa, basically, because Tel Aviv, like, didn't have one, really.

They needed the economic opportunity that this very thriving city represented. And actually, that's, like, the basis of a lot of the tensions between them and the Palestinians is the, I mean, you already mentioned kind of the labor aspect of it is, like, they were extremely exclusionary. And they were trying to use these economic opportunities in a very kind of directed way. So they were rubbing up against a lot of issues. It's very right. What you said about them being exclusionary is very accurate.

A lot of these communities, number one, they only want to speak European, whatever European language they came in. They're very, and they're not exclusionary just to the Muslims. They're exclusionary to the Arab Jews and the Sephardic Jews who had lived. There's a lot of complaints, a lot of quotes from Sephardic in life's in common that are like, well, these new immigrants don't even speak Arabic. Like, I can't even talk to them. Right?

So there's, the conflict is not like a Muslim Jewish conflict. It is a native immigrant conflict, right? Like, that's what's happening here. Get Bell, Pure Fiber Internet with Crave Netflix and Disney Plus from $94 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com for details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. What's up, fam?

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and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere, too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured, but. some sort of technology. Danny McBride. He loves elephants.

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Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Jews also came to outnumber Muslims in Al Quds or Jerusalem or the Holy City during this period. I think Kuds just means holy, right? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, the holy city. Yeah, the holy, yeah, during this period, right?

And we're talking, I think Jerusalem is about 30,000 people when that balance tips, right? So we're not talking about a massive city, but that change is significant. It shows kind of how these, how meaningful these kind of numbers of people that are coming in from Europe really have started to be. Most of the buildings in Jerusalem at this point in time, when Jews start to outnumber Muslims there, are still owned by Arab Muslims, right? And overall immigration to Palestine remains pretty small. relative to the total population. In 1914, there are about 80,000 Jews in Palestine. And obviously, that includes Sephardic and Arabic. That includes, you know, all of the other categories, not just, you know, Jews who would come in from Europe. And that means that the Jewish population is about a tenth of the total population of Palestine, kind of roughly. Jewish immigration to Palestine is not even all that significant during this period in terms of overall immigration, right? Like other people are coming in and Jews are a big chunk of that. But they're not yet, it's not yet what it's going to be, right? And as more people of foreign origins start showing up and buying property and come to dominate some neighborhoods,

there are a lot of native Palestinian people who start worrying. Now, many of these, and these foreign Jews are often called Ashkenazim, right? That's one of the terms for them. They adopt, some of them do adopt like an Arab Jewish identity. And they do blend into these, especially earlier refugees, blend in to these earlier communities and become very integrated into these cities that are extremely multidisely, multicultural in a lot of ways. But not everyone's always willing to do that and also not everyone's willing to let them, right? There are some real differences between and what people are willing to

accept from what they see as our Jews and what they're willing to accept from these foreigners. And I want to quote now from lives in common again. We knew they were different from our Jews. I mean Arab Jews. We thought of them as foreigners from Europe rather than Jews as such, wrote Gadak Karmie, a Palestinian physician and writer who grew up in West Jerusalem. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind is that like, again, I know I'm harping on this, but these issues are not religious in nature. There are issues of, like, a bunch of Europeans showing up in a place that's not European. And, like, that causes conflict, you know?

And there's a difference between immigrant and settler. Yeah, exactly. Palestine has often, you know, historically, obviously, like, look at where it's placed. It's often, you know, absorbed different communities. Right. But like you said, there's, like, the types that, like, blend in, and then there's the ones that refuse and want to replace. Yeah, because that is a really good point. Because I don't, and maybe I'll certainly yield to, because I'm sure you've considered this more than I.

I don't, I don't feel super like someone who just like is fleeing a pogrom and winds up moving to like Hebron or Jerusalem or, you know, Jaffa and like becomes a member of the community. That's less of a settler thing than someone who like starts a farm and like it starts a separate community. Right. No, exactly. Those are two different kinds of things, right? Absolutely. And the fact that they were, like, especially the ones in Jaffa, for example, like they were disempowering the Palestinian laborer, you know, like that is the issue. It's not the issue that there are new people necessarily. Yeah, quite frankly, it's the issue that happens whenever there's a bunch of immigration from a separate place to a new place. There's always variants of these conflicts, right? Now, this is not entirely the same thing because usually when that happens, like in the U.S., you don't have a bunch of foreign organizations with a bunch of money propped up by, some very wealthy people who are funding a lot of the immigration. And a lot of these Zionist groups

are funded by very wealthy people who are paying for these people to go over there and sometimes paying for them to basically live. And so one of the complaints, again, that a lot of like Arab and Sephardic Jews have is that like these new immigrants, they're often just being paid to live by someone else. And that's also frustrating to me. Because like, I'm a Jew and I've been here forever. Why don't, why don't they have to work? Not that none of them are, not that that's like most people, but these are the conflicts that are occurring, right? That is an attitude a lot of people have, and it's accurate to some of this influx community, right?

And we can see these conflicts starting to breed, right? Even Yakov Yehoshua, who is later the father of a celebrated Israeli novelist, claimed that Ashkenazim tended to prefer their own courtyards, where they did not mix with Muslims or Arab Jews. Quote, Muslim women descended to us from the roofs to while away the evening talking to our mothers. Our children played with their children, and when other children came into the neighborhood to hurt us, our Muslim friends who lived in the courtyard came to defend us.

We were their allies. And that is the recollection of this guy, Yaakov, who is a native to Palestine and Jewish, right? Is that these immigrant communities do not have the same relationship that we do, right? And that quote is lovely, but it does imply something unlovely, which is that there is still some internecine violence here, right? Like the fact that in this neighborhood, their Muslim friends are, like, defending these Jewish kids when they get bullied, means that there also is some bullying, right? And I've run into quotes like that in Monacham Klein's book. And that's not, again, it's going to happen anywhere you have like a multi, think about the United States, right? Think about whatever city you live in.

Like, there's sizable, it's the United States, sizable, non-white, sizable immigrant populations. And if you listen to this show, I hope that you consider those people your neighbors and aren't. a piece of shit and a racist. But you know, whatever city you live in has a not insignificant number of people who are pieces of shit and racist, right? Against, like, folks who are just different. That occurs everywhere there's different kinds of people, right? Any minority groups, yeah.

Right, right. And so the fact that there's some violence like that, I think, says less than the fact that most of these accounts are about people being like, yeah, and our Muslim friends, like, protected us from those folks who were like, you know, assholes or whatever, right? Like, that's, I think, a better picture of life, which is accurate. It's going to sound familiar to anyone who, lives in the United States, right? And that is also Klein's conclusion, right, in lives in common, which is that despite the fact that there are structural inequalities that Jews face under the

Ottoman system in this period of time, in daily life, Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine got along and lived together much more often than they were in conflict, right? Now, that doesn't mean like things were always ideal, when are they ever, and there's a relevant quote from the book there. Relations between young Jews and their Christian and Muslim fellow sometimes grew strained. Shulamit Laskov lived in Baca in the early 1920s, in an apartment that the Kerakorians and Armenian family rented to her parents and to English tenants. She played with the Kerakorian children,

and when she ate at their home, she would occasionally participate in Christian prayers with them, but when they fought her erstwhile friends would sneer Jewish at her. Right? And this is a Christian family, and they normally have good relations, but this is just like people, you know? Like, yeah, I think that it's just human beings. you're always going to encounter pieces like this, right?

And I don't think that should overwhelm the more important story of, like, this really significant degree of social solidarity that exists in this period of time, right? You know, the fact that there's bigotry that crops up an integrated community shouldn't take away from that. But it's more and more of these foreign- Like you said. Oh, so sorry to interrupt. No, no, no, no, no. I was just saying, like, at the end of the day, like you said, like it's their inferior status legally,

which applied also to Christian minorities, like, was an Ottoman issue, not their neighbor's issue. And sorry, I'm smiling, but my family's from Ba'a. So I didn't expect you to come up with a quote from there. Yeah. I think one of the things that's also important to remember here is that while Arab Jews and Sephardic Jews and Christians who were born in Palestine and natives to there were second-class citizens, immigrant Zionist Jews weren't always treated that way,

especially in the latter, near the very end of the Ottomans, they might have endured more protection than Jews were native-born because they're seen as European and because the Ottomans are really scared of pissing off the Europeans, right? Not for any kind of like, you know, because they're necessarily more connected just because they're white, right? And like the Ottomans don't want that smoke, you know? That is a factor here, right? So as more and more of these foreign-born Jewish immigrants moved to Palestine in the pre-World War I years, they start buying up property, not just real property, but in the cities.

And as individuals, oftentimes just because, you know, you want a house. But also a lot of these property and probably the bulk in terms of number are being bought on behalf of and by these large organizations that are often doing it kind of strategically because they want to be able to kind of, oh, we would like this to be a majority Jewish neighborhood. Possibly because it's near in Jerusalem this happens a lot. Oh, we want to kind of buy up as many of these communities near the wailing wall as we can, right? or we want to buy up as many of these communities near this other area that is both of religious significance and that there is some conflict over. And we want to move these people that we're immigrating into. Some of these large organizations are very strategically thinking about the property that they're

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

Quote, for many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and widely neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts, and malarial marshes. Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, described it as a desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds a silent mournful expanse a desolation here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action we never saw a human being on the whole route there was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere even the olive and the cactus tree those last friends of the worthless soil and almost deserted the country and i'm not used to being kind of pissed at mark twain but yeah where was he walking where was he

walking and like he can't have seen all that much in terms of the actual expanse of the country but also I could drive through fucking Oklahoma where I grew up and be like wow a desolate expanse I didn't see a whole person for for hours like yeah man that doesn't mean people don't aren't living there and using the land it was hot as hell maybe they weren't out there to I don't know man it's a siesta time man yeah siesta man lewis french the british director of development wrote this of palestine we found it inhabited by philaheen who live in felaheen are like arab peasants right? We'll talk more about them later. Who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria.

Large areas were uncultivated. The Felaheen, if not themselves, cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor these and other criminals. The individual plots changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the Felaheen's lot was an alteration of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin. And I want to note both how divorced that is from real history. And the history, I've read you so far. I've read you a bunch of accounts, and these are all from like, the 1880s, 1890s, the same basic period of time.

Those two quotes I read about no one being in Palestine. And these are quotes, in a lot of cases, from people who become Israelis who are like, no, there was like a vibrant community that I was a part of, like a vibrant settled community that I was a part of that was mostly non-Jewish, right? We have plenty of accounts like that. This is obviously not true, right? And even that Jewish virtual library article cannot go long without technically admitting to the fact that what they've said previously is not really accurate.

At the very next sentence after the stuff I just read reads, the Arab population at the time was approximately 600,000 compared to 94,000 Jews. Well, that's not nobody. Yeah, they have to admit it, right. That seems like a good number of people. They're just hidden. Yeah. They're not here. Yeah.

One of the things that goes on that kind of obscures this errant and deliberately errant view of reality is that there's just a lot less people in the world. There's a massive boom in the human population that occurs kind of during this, the end of the 1800s, early 1900s. A lot of it has to do with, like, the Haber-Bosch process, with the fact that we figure out how to create a lot of nitrogen for fertilizer. But human being, like, there's way more people in 20 or 30 years from now, the period we're talking about, and there are going to be later.

And so you can see that as like, oh, these Jewish immigrants, these Zionist immigrants brought civilization to Palestine. It's like, no, there's more people everywhere, man. It's just what happened. Like, we figured out how to make fertilizer. I don't know what to tell you. And they just didn't understand, like, how these, like, Falaheen like organized their land.

Yes. You know, like they didn't have, yeah, they didn't have like the property rights system that they were, you know, accustomed to. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. It's a whole thing that they didn't understand or protected to. And they didn't care to, right? Now, that article quoted Lewis French, a British agent who lived in Palestine after the

Ottoman Empire fell and the Westakover governance. And he talked about the Falaheen, these traditional Arab desert peasants, as if they lived in primitive filth and were basically just banned. And I want to read you a different description of these guys from a Sephardic Jewish man named Yosef Mejouhas. And Yosef Mejouhas is a Zionist, although not the kind you're used to hearing about. We're going to talk about what he believed because it's really interesting. And he grows up in pal, obviously, he's a local, right? And he later wrote that when he was a kid, which is kind of around this, I think it's a little later than this, but it's before things really start to get terrible.

He writes that for a 10-year period where he's a young man, he's going to school, he's training. he was, quote, a constant guest in the homes of the fellas. In the evening when I returned from the hater or during vacations and holidays, I would always visit Muhammad and Fatma, as well as Ali and Khadija, my favorite neighbors. They fed me of their bread. I drank of their water, and sometimes they honored me with their conversations and stories as dessert until late at night. I would sleep in their homes.

And in this manner, all their manners, values, way of life, speech, and the stories I loved served as my childhood education. Right? That's a very different picture of the valley, I think. And Mayuhus felt the need to write down his recollections of life and of the Felaheen because during the 20s and 30s, things started to get a lot uglier. And he started to hear a lot of these very racist claims about these people that he'd grown up with and knew was not true. And he starts to witness Jewish and Muslim communities closing off from each other and becoming more hostile. And this frightens and saddens him.

Mayuhaus is a teacher of Hebrew and Arabic as well as French at the Avelina de Rothschild School for Girls. The Rothschilds fund a lot of the Zionist immigration in this period of time. That's not, I know people, when people bringing up the Rothschilds, it's nearly always conspiracy stuff. This is a thing like the Rothschilds do, right? Like they're funding a lot of this because they believe in this. And Mayuhaus thinks it's his duty, because of the kind of Zionist he is, he thinks it is his duty to encourage his co-religionists to admire, learn from, and blend in with the phelaheen. Because they've lived there much longer, right? From the book Lives in Common, quote, Mayujas viewed the philas as the original Arabs, as opposed to the desert nomads.

in the merchants of the cities. The phyllas, he wrote, were the descendants of the Canaanites who are considered the most ancient inhabitants of Palestine. They fully preserved all the ancient customs and mores that the Jews have forgotten because of their exile.

In other words, his view is, we don't need to be separate from these people. We need to learn from them and become part of their community and let them teach us because they're living a more authentic version of ancient Jewish life than us, and we should learn more from them to honor them, right?

That's his attitude as a Zionist, right? Because to him, it means something very different than it does to guys like Herzl. Foreign-born immigrants were likely to see Zionism as a struggle of conquest. In fact, that was probably certainly the dominant after a certain period of time attitude. Whereas Mayu Hus is a local, right? And he believes that Arabs and Jews are spiritual brothers and cousins, right? If European immigrants wanted to thrive in Palestine, he reasoned they need to have a close and respectful relationship with Arabs in order to be successful. How do you know how to live here if you're not going to learn from these people who have lived here for us?

Right? You should do that break here, by the way. Yeah, sorry. Shit. I don't know. Yeah. Here's an ad. Get Bell, purefiber internet with craved Netflix and Disney Plus.

From $94 a month, price guaranteed for two years on internet with a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.com. For details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. What's up, fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay.

And we're the host of everyone. Everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. Because let's be real. Women's sports is giving us way too much to talk about these days. So Kelsey Finler, she became the first female solo rower to go from California to Hawaii. My first thought is like, what's up with the snacks? Like, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments that take over your entire timeline.

And the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest. stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out. She beat Sabalinka. Shout out to you, Naomi. You get the palm, Naomi. You get the palm for that.

Because we're not just interested in what happened. We're interested in why everyone's talking about it. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here.

You know us or rather you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, And yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning, breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters,

revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped to bring it all to life. Guest stars, collaborators and friends,

including director Jonathan Chryssel, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song. I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that.

Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes, Davenport. and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook. Every episode we're trying to help our guests improve their careers by mainly focusing on how they can help us improve our careers.

The show is famously super accessible so you can easily jump into any of our 650 episodes and understand what's going on. We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller. The definition of what is a movie has kind of changed anywhere too, right? What do you think it is now? It's images and words being spoken, captured by some sort of technology. Danny McBride. Oh, that's fantastic.

And you make it on, you make your own. That's great. I call him Terro Reed. It's a good name. They're all named after cast members of American Pie. Yeah. Oh, gotcha. I call, I don't, I never looked up if she was in this, but I call him Leachie Sobiesky.

Yeah. I don't think she was an American Pie, but I still like that. Haven't looked it up. She was prominent around the same time. Yeah. Then Mary Steenbergin. Why are you guys talking to me? I'm worried.

I'm worried. Why are you talking so down to? me that you think I don't understand your little play game. I just really, I get it. I'm trying to set you up for success here. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back.

Sorry, I just, I found that this guy really interesting because I, you don't hear about stories like this, uh, all that often or attitudes like this. Um, and it's interesting, the counterpoint he provides these attitudes that like, these people really meant nothing and had no impact on. on the development of society and civilization, you know, in Palestine. I think it's really important to look at someone who's not creating propaganda post-haste, right? This is somebody who lives in this area and lives in this life and is horrified by what he sees happening in the 20s and 30s. We'll talk about Mayuhaas a little more later.

So as for modern Israeli claims of a barren and empty Palestine, the reality is that prior to the mid-20th century, the area is a lot less populated. but at the end of the 18th, early 19th century, there's a population and it's not even World War I takes a real bite at a population growth in the region, don't get me wrong, but it does start to happen after this period of time. This is also something that modern Israeli scholarship likes to credit Jewish immigration for,

but the reality is this is happening in a lot of ways for the same reasons it's happening in many other places. Near the end of the 1800s, new rail lines open up and connect Palestine to the world, and it brings trade and also brings tourists, right? A lot of European tourists. want to come and see the Holy Land, you know? And those tourists would have seen Jerusalem if they came in like 1900

as an incredibly cosmopolitan city. The Al-Wad neighborhood, to give one example, hosted three churches, three synagogues, and seven mosques. The many Jewish and Muslim holidays were celebrated by members of all faiths in particularly diverse neighborhoods. In the summer 2000 issue of Jerusalem quarterly, Salim Tamari writes about an Ottoman-era Muslim named Wasif Jawaria. Quote,

It was a pre-nationalist era in which religious identity embraced the other in its festivals and rituals. Jawaria narrates that the Feast of Easter slash Pessa as an occasion for Muslim Christian Jewish celebrations. He details the Muslim processions of Palm Sunday, which proceeded from the Abrahamic Mosque in Hebron towards Jerusalem. The festival of al-Nabi Musa is recalled here as a Muslim popular celebration that merges with the Christian Orthodox Easter. The Fantasia of Sabt al-Nur, fire Saturday, commemorating the resurrection of Christ, as seen as the greatest popular Christian celebration in Palestine, closely coordinated with Muslim folk festivals. Purim was celebrated by Christian and Muslim youth and Jewish neighborhoods. Wasif describes in detail the costumes they wore on this occasion.

Twice a year, Muslim and Christian families, including the Jawaria family, joined the Jewish celebrations at the shrine of Simon the Just and Sheikh Jara at the event known as Shathat al-Jahudia, where Haim the Ud player and Zaki, the tambourine player, would sing the accompaniment of Andalusian melodies. Yeah, not a vision a lot of people want you to have of Palestine in 1900. I have to tell you, like, the Palestine that I was born and grew up in, like, even in my lifetime, I'm 35, like, I've seen the progression of, like, that lessening even more. Like, I remember celebrating Christian holidays, and, like, there was a lot of integration. Obviously, the Jewish holidays have been kind of, you know, they've given, they've given, they, they, have kind of a different, you know, salience at this point. But even, even now, like, in the last

35 years, we've seen a huge decline in that, like, and the city has changed so much. So you can imagine how much more it used to be integrated back then. Yeah. Yeah, it's really sad to think about. I mean, yeah. Now, again, obviously, as I've noted, people are not, you know, Jews and Christians are not equal citizens of the Ottoman Empire. They have to pay an extra tax and they don't enjoy all of the same rights, but they're also protected by the state and allowed to worship as long as they accept their faith as subordinate, right? And that alone doesn't really do a fair job of explaining the complex social and religious status quo that would have existed during the last days of Ottoman rule. As Daniel Schrochter, a historian at the University of Minnesota, told Canadian

Jewish news reporter Jodi Shopach, quote, the idea that Jews lived a second-class citizens makes little sense in this context because the idea of citizenship didn't apply in the pre-modern Islamic world. Shroeder said, adding, Islam did see Jews and Christians as inferior, but that didn't prevent peaceful interactions between Jews and Muslims on a quotidian level, right? And it's also important to keep in mind, right? That, like, you can't

really think about equality and citizenship in nearly the same way that you can. Right. Nobody was. Nobody had any rights. And when we say inferior, it's like, it's because Muslims believe in their faith and they see these people who don't believe. It's the same as Christians. They're like, oh, these non-believers,

they're less than us. Yeah. And it's not when people are using it. Again, it's like when they're talking about how long someone's been here. That doesn't mean they don't think you're like a person who has like worth their value. It means that well, your family hasn't been here quite as long, right? In the case of like if you're speaking like a Spanish derived tongue in Palestine, you have it. Right.

Right. Yeah. Not that, you know, that matters. Again, it doesn't generally matter in terms of how people treat each other in this period of time. That said, the fact that like things are you've got all of these. among other things, a lot of wealthier Europeans are coming in, right? A lot of these Zionist immigrants are poor and they're being supported by money by wealthier people, but there's also wealthier immigrants coming in.

And especially since they're white and European, they enjoy better treatment, right? And they're also buying up a lot of property, as we've talked about, for future Jewish residents. And that causes conflict, not just with Muslim residents. In the first decades of Zionist migration, many Arab Jews and Sephardic Jews were extremely prejudiced against these new immigrants, in part because they didn't speak language very well, and in part because they kept to themselves, and often were kind of mean to some of the Sephardic communities. There's a lot of conflict between the different Jewish communities in this period of time. Adding to the irritation that many Sephardic residents

felt was the fact that a sizable number of these new immigrants lived off money donated by wealthier Zionists. In 1891, that's the very first time that prominent Arab citizens of Jerusalem petitioned the government to stop Zionist immigration to Palestine by banning the sale of land to foreign Jews. They're starting to see this as a cultural invasion by Europeans, and the argue that it represents a threat to their culture. And as always is the case with complaints like this, the people who made them most loudly are also the people who profited from the exact immigration they decried. And that's a big part of this, right?

As Monacham Klein writes, the leaders of the Hussein family who lobbied the court to place restrictions on the Zionists also sold them land. Jerusalem's mayor, Tahr al-Husani, approved the sale of land to the Zionists and engaged in such transactions himself. In 1890, Rabat al-Husani sold the colonia lands west of Jerusalem. to the Zionists, where the latter built the farming village of Moza. He also helped Jewish land buyers get around the Ottoman land law stipulation that land which had not been farmed for three years automatically became state property.

Ibrahim Saeed al-Husayni worked for Baron Edmund de Rothschild's land company, J.C.A. He later resigned and signed protests against the Zionists. Salim al-Husani made a fortune in real estate ventures with the Jewish community and partnered in a hotel with Yitzhak Rochak, an Ashkenazi resident of Jerusalem. And we'll hear about Yitzhak and the Roakakak family a little bit less. later, well, actually right now, because Rokok is interesting. His son, Shimon, moves to Jaffa and creates a series of Jewish community organizations, right? And he buys up a bunch of land. And while his father had worked with the Husani family to buy up this land, and he'd be happy to do that,

Roccoq refuses to deal at all with Arabs, right? Like once he's got property and once he, like, owns property, he stops wanting to have any kind of dealings with the Arab community at all, with Muslims at all. Quote, he wanted to keep his distance from them, becoming one of the initiators of the construction of Neveid Siddick, the Jewish neighborhood outside Jaffa's walls that became the nucleus of Tel Aviv. Shimon's son, Israel, was elected mayor of the new city. And this is something that Israel said after being elected mayor of Tel Aviv. Jaffa played no role in world history nor in Israeli history,

and one cannot find there any relic of ancient culture from any period at all, Mayor Rokokokok said. And again, we've just heard that, like, well, the only reason the Rokokokk family had the land that allowed them to do all this in the first place is because of, like, very close business relationships with with Arab Muslims, right? Like, and Jaffa, Tel Aviv starts out of Jop. It's just, it's just, I don't know. I know we're getting a little bit off the topic here, but it really, it's really

frustrating. If people are interested in this element, especially, I would recommend Ilan Paffe's book on Al-Husani's because it's really, I always remember this anecdote that like one of the Al-Husainis also sold the land that later Hebrew University was built on. So it's like a very interesting kind of. of dynamic like I think you're you're right that like they benefited a lot I think also they didn't recognize what was right right what was happening yeah that's part of this too is like there there's this this is you can see a lot of this initially as like relative goodwill of like

well I widen up why wouldn't I sell a house to them and then it becomes like 20 or 50 or 100 and like well wait a second there's something something going on here right right exactly and obviously that doesn't mean there also are people who are pretty aware of what's going on and like but I want to get money right and get my bag that's always a factor too but a lot of people you know it's not immediately clear what's happening too. And I think some of this is just a sign that like, yeah, people weren't really all that shitty, you know, to their neighbors. They were like, well, yeah, these guys want to buy up some buildings. Why not? Right. And there's a class difference, too. It's like, you're a wealthy landowner. The Phenrhaj that lives on your land is going to get

screwed. You don't really care. Yeah. And I do suspect a lot of these Husseinis would have seen these other wealthier, like, Jewish immigrants as more of like their type of people than like, certainly the Falahi, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, anyway, one of the things I didn't want to note about Rocque's statement there where he's like, Jaffa played no role in world history, right, nor Israeli history. One of the things he's doing there, he's not just erasing like Palestinians from local history. He's erasing Arab Jews as well as like Muslim Arabs here because men like Rochak had to in order to make their view of history work.

The reality is that they and their community started out nestled in cities and towns filled with people who had been there for generations. and were only able to get off the ground because of a lot of support from those people, including like the Muslim population. It took a purposeful effort to block these new immigrant Jewish communities off from their neighbors. That was not a natural state of affairs. It was a state of affairs that members, people within these communities, and people leading them had to want to make because they had to stop integration from happening, right? That is also a thing that's happening consciously and being done consciously.

Now, some of the effort and some of the conflict here comes from a lot of these new immigrant, see themselves, they are Europeans, and they want to build new European-style cities. They don't like Arabic cities. They see them as barbaric and backwards. You'll hear that a lot. And that's a major motivation behind many of the settlements that become Tel Aviv. It's created as a European-style city for European Jewish immigrants who did not want to immigrate and didn't want to stop speaking European languages, right? That's like a big motivation for them in this period of time. Now alongside this, 1909 sees the establishment of the Hashomer by Yitzhak Bin Zvi and David.

been Gurian. This was a paramilitary organization meant to guard Jewish settlements, and it's, again, the precursor to the Haganah. And it's often described as, and certainly describes itself as a purely defensive, like militia in this period of time, right? Although if you look at the Haganah's slogan at its establishment, it doesn't sound purely defensive, because the slogan is, Judea was lost by blood and fire, and will rise again by blood and fire, which is like, not super friendly. Like, I'm going to be honest, if some guys moved into my neighborhood and started walking around with guns and that was their motto, I'd be like, I don't know, that doesn't sound all that defensive. Yeah, very alarming. I don't know.

I was suspicious of these guys, I'm sure. We don't have a lot of blood and fire in the neighborhood right now, and I'm not really sure we need any. Oh, my God. It's important to document the prevalence of that attitude even then without acting like it's the only one. Many Jews and Palestine preferred to work within the system. In the latter days of Ottoman rule, the growing Jewish. Jewish community in Jerusalem especially was able to exercise great power by voting together. The Arab elite were fractured and Jewish leaders offered support to families like the Hussein's

who could wield power directly in exchange for quid pro quo benefits. One such benefit was an early attempt to take possession of the Western Wall, a particularly holy site. The Hussein family owned most of the houses on the other side of this alley. And the opposite, there's like an a line of homes that are owned by the Jewish community and a line of homes on the other side that are owned primarily by Muslims, right? by the Husani family and occupied by Muslims. And if the Husseines sell these homes,

they can be bulldozed and the alley broadened, right? And it made kind of an entirely Jewish community, right? Mustafa al-Husani actually sells a number of these properties to Baron Rothschild in 1887, but fears among rabbis of a backlash. And it's rabbis who are like, wait a second, if we let this go through, it's going to like make people really paranoid and racist.

This is probably a bad idea. And the deal does sputter out. In 1897, the Hussein, he's nearly sold the whole alley to Rothschild again from the Al-Wak religious trust until protest from Arab families forces him to stop, right? So they are trying to do this, and there are protests from both the Jewish community and from the Muslim community that stopped this from happening. And that also is really worth acknowledging, right? In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, things come to a head when David Yellen of the Association to maintain historical

sites in the land of Israel, writes to the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman court, and he asks him to pushed the Sultan to sell the Western Wall to the association. Per the book Lives in Common, Yellen did not have the money to do so. He estimated the price would be at least one million French frocks, including a 10% bribe for the relevant municipal officials. But he presumed he could obtain it from Jewish millionaires as soon as the Ottomans agreed to the sale in principle. But this never happens either, because Yellen had greatly overestimated how much money

there was for the cause, right? Now, attempts like this and continued immigration spark unrest and occasionally even violence from the Arab community. In a late attempt to slow this kind of migration, the Ottomans make it law that only someone with a thousand pounds or more in assets can apply for an immigration certificate. And this doesn't really stop anything. It basically creates another opportunity to bribe Ottoman officials.

And one thing that like some rich people who like want to like bring more folks in, they'll like put it, add the name of a poor immigrant on their door to make it look like they're part of the family for long enough for the officials to check to see like, okay, is there someone financially supporting them? There's ways around all this stuff. Right? Up through the start of World War I then, most Arab residents in Palestine had little reason to fear Zionism or believe that Jewish immigration would have a huge impact on their lives. There are people getting frustrated by it. There are conflicts over it. But it's not like the dominant thing happening, right? One of the relatively few people to see into the future accurately was Najib Azuri, a Lebanese Maronite Christian who worked for the Ottoman government during its last days in Jerusalem.

He declared in 1905 that Zionism and Arab nationalism were, quote, doomed to constant struggle until one overwhelms the other. And that is, again, Arab nationalism is really building in this time. Again, we've done our whole series of episodes on Lawrence of Arabia. The Great Arab Revolt occurs during World War I that's happening in this period. It's happening because people are pissed at the fucking Ottomans, right? And so as much as some of these conflicts are going on in these cities, the much broader conflict is these, the much broader conflict Arab nationalists are interested in is, dealing with these fucking Ottomans, right? Like that's by far.

And creating self-determination for Arabs generally. Right, right, yes. And obtaining, I was putting it crudely, but yes, obtaining self-determination. Both things. Both things are true. Right, right. And yeah, also, Arab Christians are also part of this. A lot of Arab Christians are Arab nationals because they're not being treated very well by

the Ottomans, right? They're kind of the godfathers of it, actually. Yeah, yeah, and a lot of very met so. Basically, like, the answer to Arab nationalism is sectarianism. Right. Arab Christians want to be included in the community. So, like, a lot of the big names of Arab nationalism, like Konstantina Sereik and, like, other people like that, they're Christians. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's a really important point. So the people who are most invested in a multicultural Palestine then sometimes find themselves in this period supporting the ailing Ottoman Empire. And this is very weird. Like, Mayusha is one of a number of Zionists who want the Ottoman Empire to last. because they see that it's kind of keeping a lot of conflict from happening within the community, right, within Palestine, right? The fact that there's these Turks who are like, you know, in charge of everything kind of stops a lot of conflict that might otherwise brew up. And Mayusha believes that Zionism is doomed to disaster if the Ottomans fall. He believes that everything, not just Zionism will fail, but Zionism will, like, there will be horrible violence in this place that he loves between these communities that he loves if the Ottoman Empire falls.

And he is right about that, really. Up until the end of World War I, though, most people would have been hard pressed to believe that something like that would really happen. It would be crazy to predict in like 1910 as someone living in Palestine as a normal person that like, oh, the Ottomans are on their last legs. They don't have a full decade left of life. Most people wouldn't have made that guess because the Ottoman Empire had been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so as a result, a lot of Muslim political leaders in this period of time treat Zionism as like a special interest to be courted, right? Salim al-Husani served as mayor of Jerusalem for much of the 1880s and 1890s, and he was elected thanks to Jewish voters. In a speech, he argued that Zionism, quote, is not a political movement but a settlement one,

and I am certain that no intelligent and rational Zionist will consider the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine. Famous, I mean, not last words, but not right, correct ones. Right, right. Yeah, he maybe didn't know enough about the Zionists, different kinds of answers, as he said. enough, right, attention. And unfortunately, one of the people who is very much seeing correctly where things are going is a major right-wing Zionist leader named Vladimir Yabotinsky, right? He had been born in Odessa in modern-day Ukraine in 1880 to an assimilated Jewish family. And Yovatinsky had become a Zionist prior to the Kishnav pogrom, and he had become a

popular speaker and influential organizer. And he responded to that program by initially in Russia advocating and helping to organize the construction of Jewish self-defense groups. He was extremely controversial, as was his slogan, Jewish youth, learn to shoot. And obviously, when he's in Russia being like, I think we might need some guns, hard to argue with the man. Right. I mean, Zionists and non-Zionists said the same. Right.

Yeah. He's not going to stay there long, right? Like, that's just kind of the fact. And we'll talk a lot more about him, about what happens to Zionism, what happens to Palestine, after and during World War I in part two. But, you know, this is the end of part one. How are we feeling?

Wow, we covered so much. We did it. That was a lot. People should like read the books, you know, and stuff that we're talking about, obviously, to get much more comprehensive. But yeah, we got to fly through, what, 60 years? About?

Yeah. Anyway. World events. Yeah. None of what you're new to you. But yeah. All right, anything you want to plug at the end here before we roll out in the part two? Yeah, check out the handbook on authoritarianism in the airboat.

Yes, yes. Bloomsbury Politics. Yeah, awesome. All right, everybody. We'll be back Thursday. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on.

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