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

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

After World War One, the British Mandate takes over in Palestine- and shit really starts to hit the fan, leading to a series of riots,  pogroms, assassinations and the dissolution of the communities that has existed in harmony for generations. 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 Bastars, normally a podcast about everything you don't know, about the very worst people in all of history, where I read a story about a historical monster or some sort of terrible event to a guest who's coming in cold. This week, I'm sort of doing my best to not embarrass myself in front of a guest who knows a lot more about the subject than I do and also is lived through a lot of it. Dr. Donnell. Oh, Karen. Welcome back to the show. Thank you again for your time. Oh, thank you for having me. It is kind of cool that we have several, like, PhDs on staff.

Because James Stout also. Also a doctor. Dr. James Stout. You know, I was declared a doctor by the state of New Jersey one time. My brother's a doctor. That counts. There you go. Yeah.

They don't let me prescribe anything, which really sucks. I mean, he's an oncologist, so we're not even in the same, like, lettering system. But you know what? You don't have prescription abilities, do you, Donna? Unfortunately, political science does not have that. Yeah. I would have gotten a polysy PhD if I could have got prescribed stuff. Robert, this is not the time.

I mean, it's always the time. It's kind of relevant. Oh, I'm just a joke. Yeah, it's kind of relevant. Don, do you want to plug anything up front before we get back into the story? There's the handbook on authoritarianism in the Arab World. That's out with Bloomsbury Politics, open access, so people could just Google and read out. Awesome. Yeah.

That sounds much better. One of the sources for this that I read, which was useful. in some ways is like the Oxford handbook in the history of terrorism, which is very, again, very useful for certain things. And also, like, we're, we're not going to get into this, but in 1946, I think it was the Ergun, which is like the militia associated with Batar, which is like a right-wing Zionist group that is today become, like, its descendant as Netanyahu's party, bomb the King David Hotel and kill a bunch of people.

And the Oxford, it's really fun when you, like, read what the British said about, it's an act terrorism. When you read what like everyone at the Times said about it's an act of terrorism, and then you read the Oxford Encyclopedia of Terrorism, they're like, well, because the targets were primarily governmental, we can't call this an act of terrorism. And I'm like, okay. But if it had been like Arab nationalists who bombed a hotel, it would be terrorism, right? Yeah.

Academics. I can't even. Right. I'm a good one. Let's just put that out there. Facts. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

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IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. We're going to talk about Vladimir Yavatinski, a lot more in these episodes. So as we said last time, this is a guy who grows up in Odessa. He is from a very

young age, really concerned with, like, you know, fighting back against these pogroms by establishing Jewish self-defense groups. And after he's close for a period of time with Theodore Herzl, but he also has some, like, breakoffs with him. And his issue with a lot, he does not get along with most Zionists in his day, because he is really right wing. He does not like these labor unions. He does not like the socialist politics that a lot of these Zionists have. He's very against that sort of stuff. And after Herzl dies in 1904, you have a time. You have a time. Tensky becomes seen as the leader among right wing, a leader among right wing Zionist. He's a very big feat.

He goes by Z. Javatinsky most of his life, but he's still known as Vladimir at this point in time. We'll talk about why that change happens. And, you know, after Herzl dies, he's a political leader for a while. And then, you know, the war starts and he has to take a job as a newspaper editor. And in 1915, he's reporting from North Africa. And he tours a refugee camp in Egypt for Jewish deportees from Ottoman Palestine. And we'll talk about this later, too.

The Ottomans start deporting a lot of these European Jews from Palestine during the war. And per an entry in the International Encyclopedia of the First World War by Ari Dubnov and Brian Horowitz, quote, Soon thereafter, he reached the conclusion that the Ottoman Turks would lose the war and Palestine would fall into the hands of the Entente powers. It was in this context that he came up with the idea of encouraging Jews to volunteer for the British Army and secure a future Palestine for the Jews. And this is unfortunately a really smart play for him. to make, right? He's a really smart guy, and this works very well for him. Yeah, very much unfortunately. And it is worth noting, like, he does kind of see where things are going, right? It's very accurate to say that the entente's going to take over. Yeah. And sinus would not have

really survived without British support. No, not at all. That's a big part of the story we're going to be telling today. So despite the fact that he's got no personal military experience, and he does not actually join this, this, like, Jewish Legion, right? Jebatinsky, close to a guy named Joseph Trumpledore, a Russian Zionist military veteran who had fought in the Russo-Japanese War, which had happened not that much earlier, and had been decorated by the Tsar for his, like, valor in combat and stuff. And the two of them approach a general, a British general named Sir John Grinful Maxwell, who is commanding British troops in Egypt. And they're like, hey, we want to take a lot of these guys who've been like kicked out of Palestine and put in camps in Egypt are willing to fight for the British Empire against the officer. Ottomans, right? And Maxwell's at first, like, I don't know if this is a good, like, you're not really soldiers. Is this really got to help things at all? This might just be more trouble than it's worth.

But he also, like, there's not enough manpower, you know, especially not in that theater. So he's not going to, like, show, he's not going to turn down the potential to have a few thousand more fighters on his hands necessarily, either, right? All of these. And he brings this idea up to some of the other British general officers. And they're all kind of reluctant. As much as they want these fighters, they also don't want to endorse the Zionist idea necessarily, and they also don't want to endorse an offensive on Palestine at the time, which is what these people are really pushing for, is to like let us invade the place we just got kicked out of. And the British don't really want to do that at the moment. But Maxwell agrees to form a Jewish volunteer force that will

fight alongside the British military and other parts of the Turkish front. So as this is all happening, World War I escalates a lot of sectarian hatred and anger that had been slowly building in Palestine for years. The Ottomans who are paranoid about foreign spies and influence issue a declaration immediately after the start of the war that subjects of hostile nations must leave the country. This caused immediate confusion. Some Jewish residents in Palestine were exempted because they'd start, and I should say, some Jewish residents who were had immigrated from Europe are exempted. Because if you had come to Palestine from Europe and you had become a natural citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which there was a way to do, then you didn't get deported,

right? But if you hadn't bothered to do that, they would deport you because the Ottoman's argument was, well, that proves that you were not loyal, right? Because you had an opportunity and you didn't take it. And part of why a lot of Ashkenazim don't take the opportunity to become naturalized Ottoman subjects is, as I've noted, they don't want to integrate, right? And this sometimes extends to failing to make legal arrangements. And a lot of these people are going to suffer it because they don't want to do that during the war years. Amid Pasha, the Ottoman military governor of the Levant, launched the first of two major deportations of Jews from Jaffa in December of 1914.

This is called Black Thursday. That's what it comes to be known. And this is the forced expulsion of about 6,000 Russian-born Jewish immigrants. A total of about 11,277 Jews from Jaffa are exiled to Alexandria, where many of them are put in detainment camps that are, you know, you should assume these are as nice as any enemy subject detainment camps ever are in a war, especially World War I, when people don't really have good medicine. Now, as I noted in episode one, foreign-born Jews in Palestine had previously often benefited from more support than Arab Jews. And we see evidence of this fact even during the

war and the fact that in May of 1915, the New York Sun published an investigation into the cruel treatment of, I mean, they call them Palestinian Jews. These are mostly European Jews would come by the Ottoman government. And this outrage fuels Zionists like Vladimir Yabatinsky, who'd started his career trying to organize Jewish self-defense units in Russia. Well, the Zionist movement officially announced neutrality in the war and moved its HQ to Copenhagen from Hamburg as a result because it doesn't really make much sense for the Zionists to pick a side in World War I. Honestly, didn't make much of a sense for anyone to pick a side in World War I.

It was a stupid fucking war, right? But Yavitinsky, because he's realized that the Ottomans are going to lose the war by 1915, and he gets the approval from Maxwell to create this volunteer force. You know, by 1916 or so, this force is in the field, and it's starting to actually gain combat experience. It's known initially as the Assyrian Jewish Refugee Corps. There are about 650 men in the unit at first. The other nickname they're known by is the Zion Mule Corps, or ZMC.

And Jiamatinsky hates both of these nicknames, by the way. He considers them dishonorable and shameful to his people. But if you know the British military, I actually, it's hard for me to interpret Zion Mule Corps is anything but kind of you could say it's like not super woke but it's a sign of fondness if like that's how I kind of interpret the way the British are naming them maybe other people feel I think there's like some debate about that but this is and when I say fondness I don't mean that in like a good way I mean in the way like the British were fond of a lot of their African like military like tri-tribun like stuff right right they call them fighting races right that was like a term

the British used right that's what I mean by fond right not to say it's not racist or anything. Yabotinsky never fought in the ZMC, but most of the manpower came from Russian-born Jews who'd been expelled by the Ottomans. Now, the unit eventually receives a more official name. It becomes the 38th Battalion of Royal Fusiliers, although it's still more often referred to as the Judean regiment.

The unit motto was first to Judah, which should spell out Yavatinsky's purpose for creating this unit. He wanted Jews to receive combat experience and training so that they could fight their neighbors in Palestine and the British government, if necessary to ensure the birth of the state of Israel. From beginning, Vladimir is like,

not only does this give us combat experience in guns and might get us in good with the British, and that could help because they'll be in charge next and we want them to like us. But even if they don't, if we understand how the British military works, then we can fight them when we need to, right? That's part of his, again, he's a smart guy.

This is really good strategy. Now, the worst deportations from Palestine occur under Jemel Pasha in 1917, And Jemal sees his work as necessary to subjugate the budding Jewish national project in Palestine. He is not just worried that these are unloyal. He's anti-Zionist, right? That's a big motivating factor for this dude. And because Jaffa was home to a large foreign-born Jewish population who were slowly spinning Tel Aviv up from a suburb to a city,

this is where their focus fell on most heavily. Pasha saw himself as a warrior for Islam and he wanted to crush Zionism. But as this article in the Journal of Israel Affairs by Glinda Abramson makes clear, He hated Zionism because it was a nationalist movement, not out of a desire to destroy the Jewish community in Palestine as a whole. Quote, like many Ottoman statesmen, Jemel had witnessed the nationalist movements of the Balkans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,

and he was committed to ensure that nothing similar would emerge in the Levant while he was in charge. In Syria, they used to say, if Shemel Pasha scratched his nose, he was thinking of sending them to exile. If he stroked his beard, he was thinking of whether or not to forgive them. However, if he twirled his mustache, be afraid for the conversation. station was on a path that may lead to death. So kind of a hard guy to get bearings on.

I mean, just to say, like, Arabs see him as extremely repressive. Like Palestinians see him as extremely repressive. So he has, like, different types of repression for different communities. Right. And that is, and that's the really important point. He is not anti-Zionist because he's racist. He's also anti-Arab nationalist. He's anti-any one who doesn't want the Ottomans.

Exactly. Right, exactly. That's this guy's big issue, right? Not to say that I'm sure he believed things that we would call racist, but that's not his motivation. His motivation is the Ottoman Empire, right? Now, one of the diplomats who fought hardest to stop Pasha from doing these violent deportations was, and this shows you how different the times were, the German consul to the Ottoman Empire. Because the Germans and the Ottomans are allies, and the German guy is like, you guys are really being mean to these people. Yeah.

Oh, wow. That's ironic. Yeah. But Pasha would not be swayed. He believed that Zionists wanted to, quote, tear part of the people. body of the Ottoman Empire off, which they did, and he was a diehard Ottoman loyalist. As a result of his persecution and the wartime shortages, investment in the Zionist project overseas and in Palestine halted during this period.

One Jewish exile during this time described the war years in Palestine this way, and I want to emphasize his description would also describe how most Arab Muslims would experience the same period of time as they were also disfavored unloyal minorities fighting an act of war against the Ottoman Empire. Quote, they took products from the shops, flour, sugar, rice, and so on. They ordered the bakers to bake bread without payment until there was no bread or flour left in the city. They ordered all kinds of laborers and workers to work without payment and their families went hungry.

In addition, they grabbed everyone walking in the street, roped them together and took them to dig pits. Once again, without payment or food. They confiscated the warehouses of large and small trees to make boxes to carry the stolen oranges to their camps. They took all the leather and skins from the warehouse to make shoes for the army. So yeah, Ottoman Empire, not cool. Yeah, my family history, like, I don't know, because I'm not a historian, but I don't know if it counts as a famine, but they remember this time as like famine like famine like conditions. Yeah. Oh, it is a famine.

People starve to death. Jews, Muslims, a lot of people starve to death. The population of Palestine drops by, I think, like, four or five percent during this period. Disease, too, is rampant, you know. This is not just Palestine. There's a horrible fucking plague that comes at the end of World War I that kills fucking millions. millions of people, right? So Jemel dissolves the few units of Jewish guards that had existed to protect Jewish

neighborhoods. Doctors were conscripted and taken to the front, so hospitals had to close, which also caused and helped make worse, massive outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid that only got worse as soldiers came home from the war. So by the time of the armist, yeah, here's the exact number. Palestine's population had fallen by 6% in four years. That is catastrophic. Yeah, that is catastrophic.

Like, yeah. Not that counts as far. Yeah, that's the equivalent of like what, like 20 or 30 million Americans in four years dead, something like that, if like it were to happen here at least. Like that's just by back of the eye. But like a lot, right? That's a massive number of people to die. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And obviously, we all lived through. Think about how the pandemic, what it did to American society. Did it make people like more understanding of each other and like less angry? No, we're still messed up. I don't know. Imagine if it had killed like 3,000 times as many people proportionally or something like that, right? Yeah. So when 1919 dawned, the Ottoman Empire was no more in the Balfour Declaration meant the new British mandate had promised to bring some sort of Jewish state into being.

Frustration and rage over this was mixed with nationalist ambitions from Arab Muslims and Christians alike, who grew more hostile to both the British and the Zionists. Many longtime residents of Palestine were distraught by the conflict that came alongside nationalism. In his book, Lives in Common, Klein writes that members of the old Sephardic Jewish community in Jerusalem often expressed a sense of sadness and bewilderment about the death of the old days. Quote, nationalism suddenly intruded on their lives and those of their Muslim neighbors and imposed its hatreds and wars on them. The construction of the national eye involved the rejection of prior identities, including that of being Arab Jews.

and that is it's both really bleak and it's also why as this goes on I was trying very hard to differentiate between European-born Jewish immigrants Sephardic Arab Jews increasingly it's just Arabs and Jews in terms of how people talk about it and think about it and how the international community talks about and thinks about it

that hasn't happened yet certainly not right not by 1918 by any means Right exactly and flattening right and that that is happening and that's you know we obviously there's genocide going on in Gaza right now, and genocide's not the right word for just like the end of an identity. But I don't think there is a good word for what happens when something like that occurs, right? I don't know it. I don't really know what to refer to that as, honestly. Yeah, it's not even

assimilation because it's like a direct result of political ideology. People are still generally there. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the war's end also brings an influx of new foreign-born Zionist leaders, as well as a return of thousands of exiled Jews, including many who came back with arms and military experience, right? By the end of the war, Jabotinsky's Judean division numbered more than 5,000 men. The International Encyclopedia of the First World War summarizes their service this way. Jabotinsky and Patterson's one of the direct leaders of the forces. Relationships with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force higher command were not free of friction, as it clearly contained a number of anti-Semitic officers who made the lives of the legionaires difficult at various points.

The Legion did not arrive for service until after General Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem. They proved useful in the final battles and then in guarding POWs. In 1919, the British government began to decommission the Legion. Javitinsky struggled for the Legion survival, claiming that the absence of Jewish armed forces would lead to violence against Jews. And, you know, first off, one of the reasons why there's conflict, and this is going to be relevant, as much as overall the British mandate is way definitely going to side with the Zionists and enable them, especially in this period, there's at least an equal number of British military officers who are more siding with the Arabs and are very much hesitant to embrace like the Zionist vision of things. And who certainly want like, they don't want it to just be Muslim states, but they want

integrated Arab, independent Arabic states, right? This comes out of like T.E. Lawrence and stuff, right? There's a lot of British officers who are not in this period of time bought into the Zionist thing. The British mandate, though, is very much going to side with the Zionists over Arab nationalists. in many cases. Not that they don't also fight them, kill them. There's a lot of violence between the British mandate and some of these different Zionist groups

as we'll talk about too. So the fact that Jabotinsky thinks that if this military unit is decommissioned, it's going to lead to violence against the Jews, his fears there would seem to be reinforced by the escalating violence of the Ottoman state near the end of the war and the fact that this causes escalating nationalist hostilities too. One of the major Muslim festivals was, and we talked to us a bit, It was Nebimusa, right?

And this is named after a holy site near Jericho, said to be the tomb of Moses. Palestinian Muslims would celebrate for seven days, starting just before Good Friday. And in prior years, as I've talked about, and we read a quote about this in the first episode, the festival was often attended by all faiths. As one Jewish resident of the Holy City recalled, a warm and happy atmosphere prevailed among us. We knew that they were honoring the memory of a prophet and a man of God whom we also accepted. And that is, obviously, one reason why there's so much religious solidarity, Muslims think Moses was pretty important too, right?

So we've got the same stories. It would make you feel really comforted, right? That's like, well, these people believe something different, but we have some commonalities. But during the war, things had curdled. And in 1990, by 1919, the Nebimusa celebration, a lot of the speaking around it, because there's speakers at these events, right, were really anti-Zionists and anti-British, right, because they're Arab nationalists, right? and Arabs are furious that their own nationalist aims have been thwarted.

We talk about this in the Lawrence episodes, but the Arabs get really fucked over by the British after fighting for independence, you know? They had fought as well alongside Britain and the Ottomans, and World War I had ended with the Balfour Declaration, but it had not ended with a similar commitment to their aims, even though they had also fought, right? And so a lot of these people think that the new British mandate is giving preferential treatment to foreign-born Zionist immigrants simply because they're also seen as being European. And they are. In 1920, that's valid. That's valid. Yeah, yeah. You know what else

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We're back. So, as I said, after the war, 1919, kind of the first post-war Nebimusa festival, it's known as like, well, there's a lot of, like, anti-Zionist and anti-British mandate speeches, and things get really tense. And there's, you know, especially, like, uncomfortable for a lot of the, and particularly a lot of even the non-Zionists, like Jewish attendees of the celebrations. And in 1920, the next year, things get uglier. Several Arab leaders give speeches against Zionist immigration, but it's not really known

what the trigger is before rioting breaks out. And this is, like, really bad, but you'll notice, as I read the death toll, this is not like a one-sided thing, right? Like these, whatever else happened, it seems like the amount of force being deployed was, if not entirely accurate. Neither of these size has, like, a massive, like, edge on the other in terms of their ability to deploy violence. Five Jews are killed in the rioting along with four Arab Muslims, and hundreds of people are injured. In the wake of the riot, a number of local Muslim leaders condemn the violence, but a great deal of damage at all. already been done. It's very hard to restore the kind of trust that it existed before something like this. And there's some really heartbreaking quotes in lives in common with especially as like some,

there are some communities that just like clear out entirely. And like the Jews there move in with and start forming in these communities, especially that had been more integrated of like Sephardic Jews and like move in and start living in common with these like Zionist communities because they don't feel safe anymore. And that decreases the amount of like solidarity. the amount of understanding between these communities, and it just, everything is going to get a lot uglier in the wake of this, right? The riots also provide Yabotinsky with an excuse to do what he did best, which is form local self-defense militias and arm them with illegally gotten firearms. And he does that, right? Like, Yavatinsky's very active during the riots, and he is arrested

immediately afterwards by the British and charged with illegally using British military forces, because he'd gathered a lot of these guys who, in some cases, were still British. soldiers and use them in his militias, and he'd taken a lot of weapons that did not belong to him. So he is arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in Ocker. Like most militant true believers, prison only increased his sense of certainty in what he was doing. He changes his name during this brief prison sentence from Vladimir to Ziv, which is a Hebrew name.

It's Z-E-A-A-Postrophe E-V is how it's, at least it's Anglicized, the spelling is usually anglicized as. And he's only in prison for three months. So again, we see... Would a similar guy who was an Arab Muslim have only gotten three Muslims for the same crime? Right? Or would he have been hung or shot, right? Yeah.

Exactly. So we're already seeing, and this is going to tell massively the fact that, and that what you brought up is really important, the fact that, because there are militant Arab nationalist groups, right? And, you know, these are like Palestinian Muslims. And when they do things, they very much often tend to either get killed or imprisoned and always have their guns taken away. Whereas that doesn't always happen to these Zionist groups. and their leaders. And it allows them to continue building power and organization in a way that is forceably denied. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, they not only killed them, they killed them publicly. Yeah. And they really, you know, decimated political leadership during this time. So like,

the anti-British mandate sentiment was very much materially connected to the fact that people were feeling extremely repressed. Absolutely. Absolutely. And don't get me wrong, most of the scientists really hate the mandate, too. It's just they hate it because, like, it's not giving them everything they want at once. Right. Exactly. Different reasons. Yeah. I mean, there are also, like, the mandate will assassinate some Zionist leaders. That does happen, too. And likewise, there are Zionist groups that are assassinating a lot of British officials. That happens a ton. Mostly after a lot of the period we're talking about, but it's starting in this time. So the Hashemar was reformed after the war, and in 1920, and it's an extension called the Hashimur called

the Haganah was created. In its initial conception, the Haganah was a defensive militia. And you'll see that in like the Oxford Encyclopedia of Terrorism. It's not really a terrorist group. It was a purely defensive militia. It was defensive in its main orientation, but purely is not at all accurate, right? Really not accurate. Unless you count ethnic cleansing as like defensive.

Tomato, tomato, tomato. The Haganah's secret 1924 constitution declared that its objective was to protect the Jewish community in Palestine. But again, I should remind you that the precursor of the Haganas motto was, Judea was lost by blood and fire and will rise again by blood and fire. So while the Haganah is on paper at offensive force, over the years they work clandestinely with other militias and gangs and also clandestinely form other militias and gangs that are very much offensive. And they also do offensive, as we'll talk about themselves.

In 1923, Zeev Jabotinsky, now living in Riga, founded a right-wing youth movement called Bittar, which was opposed to both the old. older left-wing labor movement-focused Zionist groups and defensive militias and the British mandate. And again, Batar is the precursor to Benjamin Netanyahu's Lukud Party, right? Like, they're fasts.

They're fascists. And there's a lot of, there's a really good article called Jabotinsky the fascist, right, that talks about a lot of the similarities between some of these, and especially Mussolini's fascist groups. Right, right. Don't they wear brown shirts?

Yes, they do wear brown shirts. Yeah, yeah. And there are attempts to work with, and they do work with to a degree Mussolini's government until Mussolini gets so in bed with Hitler that they have to push more anti-Semitic laws. Like there's a lot of sympathy with the Italian fascists and some of these right-wing Zionist groups. That's a really important thing that's going on right now, too. I'm not talking about it enough in these episodes. There's so much to get over, but that is a really important thing that you should know.

When I say right-wing, I don't mean like kind of conservative on tax policy, right? That's not what I'm talking about here. Their health care policies are a little different, though. Yeah, yeah, they're fascists. They're, like, proto-fascist, fascist, you know, you could, academics will quibble. Like, you know, there's a lot of similarities. They're wearing brown shirts, right? What else do you need to know there?

And as the 20s roared on, violence in the Holy Land only grew more common. And it takes a bunch of different forms from street fights between gangs. And some of these are, you could call them Arab nationalist gangs and Zionist gangs. Some are just like gangs of people who were, like, Jewish and Muslim and live in towns and they're, like, pissed it. They're teenagers fighting or whatever. And some of them are organized militant gangs and terrorist groups that are doing as targeted murders and assassinations of each other, right? And of course, there's also riots periodically, and a lot of these riots will wind up

targeting Jewish neighborhoods. That happens repeatedly over the years, and the violence and the constant tempo violence hardens a lot of people. And it also causes a lot of people to change their minds and beliefs. And in many ways, this is in a tragic, and it makes them a lot meaner and more aggressive, but not always. And this brings me to a really tragic and really complicated story. Have you ever heard of Jacob Israel Dahan?

No. I'm glad I get to tell you, because I hadn't known about this guy either, and he's a really interesting fellow. So Jacob was born in 1881 in the Netherlands, just as the first wave of Zionist migration from Europe began. He became a teacher and a writer, and he published his first novel in 1904, which is, again, the same year as the Kishinaipagram. This book was a fictional account of the author's homosexual relationship with a real scholar, Arnold a Latrino, who was married, although a public defender of homosexuality. So what people generally think is happening is that Dahan is having an affair with this guy who's, like, publicly married, but also like an advocate for queer people and is queer himself. And he writes a book fictionalizing it, but using the real dude's name, which is kind of fucked up. Like, it's really messy.

This man is messy. DeHan is considered one of the greatest. poets in the history of the Netherlands, right? But he's like, he is messy. This man is so fucking messy. He gets fired from his newspaper gig as a result of this book because it causes like a real problem. And also his newspaper gig had been writing a children's column.

So the fact that he's written this book does not make him seem like the best guy to be writing this column because he's like publicly accused a guy of like, you know, it's, it's messy. They also have to alter the book to like take the name of an actual married dude out anyway. His fiancé, because he has a fiancé that he's, like, marrying to, like, hide the fact that he's gay. She, like, actually helps buy up all the copies of his original book to hide it. She's like, I got to get rid of this. I got, I got, I got to hide this shit. Oh, my God.

In 1907, Dahon married a Gentile woman and published a second, this had been the fiancé, and published a second novel about a, and so, first off, by the way, you should see, he marries a Gentile woman. This is not a guy who is a super strict believer. I don't even think he would call himself a believer in 1907, really. He's Jewish, you know, as an identity as an ethnicity, but he's not really faithful in this period of time. So he publishes a second novel, and this one is about a sadomasochistic relationship between a man and a boy. Now, this is going to be relevant to talking about Dahan, but like in this period of time in a lot of countries, pedophilia and homosexuality are the exact same thing under the law. And that causes some really uncomfortable situations and some really uncomfortable writing from a number of figures, European figures in this period of time. Dehan is not the only one.

And we don't really know, like, did he, was he actually like a pederist? Is this just like a thing he wrote about? Because, you know, culturally, a lot of weird stuff's going on at the time. I don't really know how to entirely delineate all of that, right? But this is a complicated man. He is very queer and he is very much in the counterculture of his day. You could not be much more in the counterculture of his day than this guy is. So despite some questionable decision making, he gets a doctorate of law in 1960.

but Dahon can't find prestigious work as a lawyer. So he starts writing and publishing poetry. And his work is noted, I'm not a good judge of poetry from this part of the world, but his work is noted as both being very Jewish and very sexual, right? He's super horny and he's like very much a member of the Jewish community and influenced by it, right? He's very controversial, but his poems are widely celebrated today. He's still considered one of the best poems the Netherlands ever produced. and he starts to develop a degree of respect as a public eccentric, right?

He kind of crosses over from being, oh, this guy is someone you don't want to, this guy is like a weirdo who's into some stuff that we don't approve of and you don't want to talk to him to. This guy's a weirdo we celebrate because he's a great artist, right? He crosses that barrier, you know, during this kind of period of time. Because he's very Jewish and very horny. Very Jewish and very horny. That is how people describe to Han. And very queer.

He visited Russia near the end of the czardom, and this really seems to have a, influence on him, right? Seeing how Jewish people are treated in Russia, he visits prisons and seeing how prisoners are treated by the Tsar, he becomes an activist, right? And his experiences in the East lead him to become both a Zionist and an observant Jew. And this is he's also nearing middle age. So maybe he becomes Orthodox during this time, midlife crisis, right. For an article inherits by David Green. In 1919, Dehan decided to immigrate from Amsterdam to Jerusalem. In a letter to British Zionist leader, Chaim Weisman, he wrote with typical selfish assurance that I am not leaving Holland to improve my condition. Neither materially nor intellectually

will life in Palestine be the equal to my life here. I am one of the best poets of my generation and the only important Jewish national poet Holland has ever had. It is difficult to give up all this. So first off, you can see this is a guy who is a high opinion of himself. And second, this is a guy who seems very committed to the Zionist project. But after he moves to Palestine, he lives through these years we've been talking about, of rap. He comes there as the violence is starting to escalate. He sees the riots and he sees these assassinations and counter assassinations and these beatings as he's teaching law in writing for a Dutch newspaper. And he starts to become critical of the Zionist project, right, as a result of what he's seeing. This violence really turns him off of it.

Eventually, he meets an anti-Zionist rabbi who is this guy is also a really interesting figure, Yosef Chaim Sonenfeld. Sonnenfeld is the guy, the rabbi who founded an ultra-Orthodox anti-Zionist community in power. Palestine called Edda Haradit, and was it spokesman. And he was also, like De Haan, really controversial sexually. He gets accused of being a pedophile today. I don't know how accurate those allegations are. He is definitely a guy who publicly made a habit of trying to shock Christian morals as a protest against homophobia.

And I don't know how to judge him accurately in terms of what he's done, in part because both of these guys are anti-Zionists. There's also a lot of propaganda against them. I don't know like what's true and what's not about their sexuality is and what they did or didn't do. In 1922, Dahon takes a case to defend a hereddy political movement protesting against the need to pay an excise tax that Zionist authorities had placed on Mazzo. So these are anti-Zionist Jews in Palestine who do not want to pay an excise tax that the Zionists

want them to pay, right? He represents them in court, I think, successfully. And he starts becoming more and more of an anti-Zionist activist in Palestine. And because, remember, this guy is a celebrity. I know when I say like a famous poet, that doesn't sound famous today. In like 1922, a famous poet could be pretty goddamn famous. And Dahan is very famous. And so he starts meeting with European political figures and talking about anti-Zionism.

And because he's such a beloved artist, this really starts to worry a lot of Zionists in Palestine. He also meets with Hussein bin Ali, the king of now Saudi Arabia. And they start talking about forming a Palestinian state that would be like multiracial or religious, multi-ethnic, you know, like not a Zionist state, right? Now, obviously, DeHan's not anti-Semitic. He wants the British out, and he wants Palestine to be an independent country. He just is no longer a Zionist. He thinks that Jews and Muslims and Christians and presumably atheist weirdos like him and his friends should all live in relative harmony, right? So he's no longer supporting a Jewish state, and this really is going to cause problems for him. David Green

continues. By now, DeHan had become a liability to the Zionist movement and especially dangerous because of the platform he now had for spreading his views in London, where critical decisions about Palestine were being made. In Jerusalem, he became persona non-grata among Zionists, including his law students. One anecdote has him walking with a Dutch visitor who observed that as people passed them into the street, they were spitting on the sidewalk.

The visitor thought this was a sign of disrespect, to which Dehan responded, according to Dutch historian Ludi Gibbles. Oh, no, they spit on the street out of respect for you, your presence. Otherwise, they would have spit in my face. I mean, he's very honest, you know. Yeah. He knows his situation. Yeah, he does not have illusions.

Early on the morning of June 30th, 1924, as he left the synagogue in Sharzadek hospital on Jaffa Road, Dahan was shot three times. He died immediately. And, you know, this is the British mandate issues a reward for information about the killer. No one ever comes forward. No one's ever caught, right? Obviously. And for a long time, people just. kind of assumed the Haganah had done it, but we didn't know the Haganah had done it until an Israeli

businessman named Abraham Tahomi came forward in the 1980s. We're going to talk about Abraham a little bit later too. Abraham had been with the Haganah in the 1920s, and he claims that when he assassinated De Hohan, he was working under the orders of Yitzhak bin Zvi, the future second president of Israel and an officer in the Haganah at the time. Tohomi insisted, I have no regrets because De Hohan wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism. And I just tell you a lot because Dahan is very much saying we need an independent state that the British don't run. He just doesn't want it to be racist.

He doesn't want it to be exclusionary, yeah. It's an interesting, like, journey that he took to ethno-nationalism. And then I was like, oh, wait. Yeah. It shows like someone who, whatever else you want to say about him, looks at, as soon as he realizes how much violence is going to have to happen for the Zionism. He's like, no, it's not worth it. That's horrible.

I don't want that. I'm a poet. That's not my thing. That's the whole thing with like cultural Zionists, right? I mean, I don't know. I'm not a historian of Zionism. But like, my understanding is they're like, oh, you know, we belong here. We should have some, you know, stake here.

But we should definitely not be exclusionary and ethno-nationalist because that sets us up for too much badness. Yeah. Yeah. As I've tried to say, Zionism doesn't mean one thing. there are a lot of like, you know, cultural Zionists is one, is a good term for the people who like, their idea of what Zionism means is like, well, like the Jewish kind of community that we want to create is not necessarily a political state. It's like a, like an actual community. But it doesn't necessarily require us to have political power and be the only ones with it. That's not what I, a lot of people are advocating for. Obviously, those folks become less common as everything gets hardened and everything gets a lot more violent. And a lot of them get killed. You know, you see if you are one of those kind of people like Dahan who is willing to, like, rethink your ideas and push for a much more integrated and less aggressive thing, then these really aggressive Zionists are going to kill you if they think you're going to get any far. Because that's what happens to Dahan, right? And his death is often called the first political assassination in the Zionist community, the first assassination of a Jew by other Jews, right?

Like that, and it's not going to be the last, by the way. but it is really important because it kind of breaks that barrier. And violence of every kind is going to grow a lot more common in the late 20s and 30s. In Tel Aviv and Jaffa, two cities joined by the hip by the 30s, there were constant conflicts over the fact that Jewish kids would visit brothels and gambling dens run by Arabs in downtown Jaffa, just as Arab kids went to Tel Aviv to do the same thing, right? There are like criminals, there are like Arab Muslim criminals who like run brothels and run drugs and whatnot and illegal dancing.

houses and there's like Jewish like organized criminal gangs that do the same thing and they both tend to have a lot of appeal to like members of the opposite community which causes like the a lot of like the you know particularly the mothers and fathers because they're often kids to start moral panics about oh the Arabs are corrupting our kids the Jews are corrupting our kids right and the reality is that like kids like to go do stuff they're not supposed to and if you're growing up in Tel Aviv going to downtown Jaffa to go like into a brothel is going to seem like the most transgressive thing you can do. It's like the illicit one. Right. Right. Right. Whereas if you're a Muslim growing up in Jaffa,

Tel Aviv's going to have a similar appeal, right? Ultimately, this is very funny, the British solve the problem with all these brothels. First, they crack down on the brothels and, like, close them down. And then that just means all the brothels are illegal. And they realize that like, oh, shit, we're actually having a problem keeping like enough of our soldiers healthy because all of our soldiers are going to the brothels. Obviously, they're soldiers. And so the British mandate establishes a bunch of official brothels so that they can make sure they don't lose too many soldiers to VD. Right.

And they keep, by the way, these brothels are stopped with both, like, Arab and Ashkenazam women, right? Like, that's what the British, part of what the British mandate is doing. Like, they're deliberately, like, recruiting a mix of women to, like, run, like, people these brothels as part of, like, a public health measure, I guess you'd call it, you know? Obviously, there's still illegal brothels, and it's not uncommon. You see brothel owners, including like a lot of Jewish brothel owners will get murdered by Zionist gangs for corrupting the community. The same thing happens. Arab nationalists will murder, you know, Arab brothel owners for similar reasons because these are also people who are becoming more religious hard line, right? Or religiously hard line.

Newspapers publish constant allegations that one community is corrupting the other. There's tons of complaints from like, you know, people in, uh, tell. Tel Aviv that these, these Arab men are coming over to Agolar women and complaints from, like, in Jaffa of, like, these rowdy young Jewish kids are coming in and, like, causing problems, right? Like, you see a lot of those complaints in the newspapers. And sometimes, as much as it turns into, like, conflict, it's also evidence of the fact that these are still deeply tied communities. Young people are hanging out together.

Young people are going over to each other's, like, downtown to party. There's intermarriages, can we just say? There's intermarrying and other kinds of intermarrying. stuff, right? I'm going to quote again from Life's in Common here. Romances sometimes developed between Britons and young women in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Jewish underground militias fought this phenomenon, tracking and on occasion interrogating girls who socialized with British soldiers and civilians and with Arabs. Some were executed on charges of providing intelligence to the enemy. And, you know, there's, we're not going to be talking about it enough, but there

are a lot of, like, mixed relationships, and these are often very common. You have a lot of really awful stories about like when, you know, the violence boils over during the Arab revolt and stuff, you have a lot of families broken up that are, had been interfaith families. Like there's, but there is, that is happening here. And it's a mix of these people just trying to live their lives and also totally unwittingly becoming flashpoints because other members of the community get angry. Yeah, their identities are like too complicated. Can I just plug the episode I did about my great grandmother here?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. it could happen here if people are interested in like one particular story that happens to be my in my family history there's there's that um but it's i mean kind of more broadly i think we need to understand like the the lens of like sexual politics here is an important one to to see the conflict through because it remains like the way that both like the the the british

but also then the israeli government weaponizes kind of maybe less progressive sexual politics in some of these communities is a relevant thing to understand. I mean, it continues until today. Yeah, absolutely. 1929 is a particularly bad year for violence in Palestine after Zionist leaders refused British offers to shared Arab Jewish rep. So there's a lot of talk about like representation and moving towards an independent state in Palestine. Because the mandate, the British never like own Palestine. That's not how they're thinking about it either.

They are from the beginning, know, that they're going to leave at some point. And so the British, you know, they have Zionist leaders and, you know, Arab leaders come to the table. And they're talking about trying to figure out some sort of system. And the British make an offer that would have had shared Arab Jewish representation, right? And the grand Mufti of Jerusalem, you know, and the Arabs are generally in agreement with this. But the Zionists do not. They do not want to come to the table. they don't want shared representation.

So this pisses off the Grand Mufti. It pisses off a lot of people. And the grand mufti starts speaking out about a future Jewish takeover of the Temple Mount, right? And he starts giving speeches telling like they're trying to take over. They're trying to take over the Temple Mount. They're trying to push us out of our home. And there are news articles that are published at the same time

about a series of land purchases that had been made by the Jewish National Fund that inflamed the now decades old arguments over how much land Jewish immigrants should be allowed to buy. This is all further incensed by years of constant conflict over who should be allowed to do what where, particularly at the Western Wall, which is also part of the Al-Axam mosque. Now, there had been friction over this forever, pretty much, at least at times, but in the past, a genuine desire of most Muslims and Jews to let each other do their thing tended to win out. you don't see that staying true by the late 20s. And shit just keeps getting uglier and uglier until August of 1929. And we're talking about, you know, the politics of this, you know, the ongoing back and forth in the religious dimensions of this.

But I also don't want you to forget the fact that everything boils over in August when it's really fucking hot, which is just throughout history, always when riots and stuff tend to be at their worst everywhere. When it's hot, right? Yeah, it's just people. Per an article in Ebsko, quote, The unrest was initially sparked by the installation of a portable screen by Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall on Yom Kippur, aimed at separating men and women during prayer. The location is significant to both Jews as a remnant of the ancient temple and Muslims who view it as part of the Al-Aksa Mosque complex. Following escalating tensions and protests from both sides, violence erupted when rumors spread the Jewish groups intended to attack Muslim holy sites.

The riots escalated over several days, resulting in substantial loss of life, with 249 fatalities recorded. 133 Jewish and 116 Arab alongside hundreds of injuries. The violence extended from Jerusalem to other areas, such as Hebron and Safed, where Jews faced brutal attacks. And obviously, like Jewish communities are being attacked, at the same time, you see in the death toll, this is not, these groups are still not completely out of proportion with each other in terms of their capacity to do violence, right? When you have, like, Zionist militias and these Arab nationalist militias, they're kind

of at parity still. You kind of see that in the death toll, you know? But you say it's more like a fight than like a pogrom, like essentially? Like it's a brawl or something? There are brawls and there are pogroms. There are neighborhoods that are attacked that don't have defense, right? And people are forced out of their homes and lose their houses. And there are also massive street fights and there's counter fights and counterattacks.

I don't know if like pogrom, I don't know who gets to determine that. It's a mix of different kinds of violence. This is happening over days and it happening in multiple cities, right? So it's not the same everywhere, right? But it's not a situation where like it's just one group of people dying, right? Like that's certainly not the case. And this is terrible. And there is a lot of violence against innocent people and a lot of particularly a lot of like civilian Jewish communities.

And this is one of those terrible moments that historians often see as having sort of locked in the worst possible future, right? That this is not necessarily the point of no return, but it's one of the points that makes it very hard for things to get better. right? And the Western Wall Rites are a really important point for things getting worse in Palestine. Afterwards, Jewish militias increase in size and number, and they began building and importing more arms. Anti-Semitic violence rises as to assassinations and property destruction by groups like Ergun. Again, the Ergun is the right-wing militia that Batar, the right-wing party, forms in Palestine. We'll talk about them, too, a little bit more here. Now I should note that an audience

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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?

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Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So 1929, also August of 1929, also sees the horrific Hebron massacre. That's kind of part of this whole swell of violence where this, about 70 people are actually murdered. but because the community in Hebron is tiny, there's only 6 or 700 Jews, I think, in Hebron at this period of time. And because homes are destroyed, the community is basically destroyed.

That's how a lot of people see it. Like huge numbers of Jews in Hebron are, like, forced out of their homes. And a lot of people will say, like, that's kind of the end of the Jewish community as it had existed previously, right? And that's also going to bring a lot more violence. In fact, it's this 1929 pogrom that inspires a debate within the Haganah over how the organization should proceed. Abraham Tahomey, again, the guy who's killed the Han, becomes closely tied to Yabotinsky

and Batar, and he urges a split. And he forms a group initially called the Haganah B, or there's like an apostrophe B. I don't know if it's like literally A-B or if it's, I'm not, you know, Hebrew's not my strong suit here. It's initially just a split off of the Haganah. And it's renamed Etzel. And then in 1931, it's renamed Irgun, or the national military organization. and this becomes the militant terrorist arm of Batar.

Irgun is a terrorist group. There is no other way to look at Irgun as a terrorist group than as a terrorist group, right? And in order to kind of make that clear, I want to talk to you about, you know, what Abraham Tahomi believed. And I'm going to quote from a paper in the Institute for Palestine Studies by Mahar Sharif. Abraham Tahomi declared that political violence and terrorism were legitimate means in the Jewish national struggle for the land of Israel. Pretty simple, right? You don't have to read into him much to call him a terrorist. He does.

Irgun is the largest right-wing gang at the time, but it's not the only one. And in short order, they're going to be joined by like the Stern gang. I think Getzel is the other name of the Stern gang. And there's several others, right? And in short order, these different gangs, as they're often called, we might call them terrorist cells or insurgent groups, you know, that would be a more modern term for them. They start causing problems for the British mandate. They launch a lot of attacks and assassinations on British officers.

and the British are kind of bewildered. They're bewildered both by this 1929 wave of violence, pogrom, or, you know, riots, whatever you want to call them, that really scares the British mandate. That really convinces them that, like, we probably can't stay here. Like, there's a ticking clock on how long we can keep things under wraps here. And it also convinces the mandate, we have to take some major steps to try to turn down the temperature because things are dangerously close to outright war, right? Because they're the British, they pick the word.

ways to try to fix all. Well, not the worst ways, but they do maybe the right thing in ways that are only going to make the situation worse. So they zero went on immigration from Europe of Zionist Jews and land ownership policies as major causes of discord. And obviously, as we've talked about, these are major causes of discord. But they immediately throttle Zionist immigration into Palestine. And that infuriates by the time they do that, you can say, well, of course, you know, what else are they going to do? But when you do that after like years of it, just happening without nearly as much. And there's like tens of thousands of heavily armed and organized Zionist groups in the

country, many of whom had been initially armed and trained by the British, I should say, also. It's just, it's going to just cause more violence, right? They immediately try to crack down on this thing. And the people that they've given guns to and training start fighting them a lot harder, right? This sparks increasing conflict, sometimes deadly between, you know, the British authorities and these different militias. And while the Haganah try not to get involved directly with attacking the British mandate, part of why Ergun and the Stern Gang and these other gangs exist,

and they do have ties to the Haganah, is so that the movement can do attacks in the British Mandate without, like, the Haganah, you know, getting directly involved, right? David Rappaport, who wrote the influential article, the fourth wave, September 11th in the history of terrorism, includes Ergun and Lehi, sorry, Lehi, is the other name of the stern gang, as examples of the second wave of terrorism. The first was the anarchist wave, which had started in Russia in the late 1800s, and the second was an anti-colonial wave.

But there's a lot of people who disagree with Rappaport's claim, because it's not really right to look at the violence of a group like Irgun or Lehi or the Haganah as anti-colonial, like terrorism or anti-colonial insurgency. It's not really anti-colonial violence, period. And I'm going to quote from the Oxford handbook of the history of terrorism. Unlike violent conflicts and other parts of the world during that period, the Jewish struggle for self-determination, Palestine cannot be characterized as anti-colonial for two main reasons. First, while both Ergun and especially Lehigh targeted British officials, Palestine was never part of the British Empire. Furthermore, one of the main initial objectives of the mandate was to facilitate the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. Anticolonial struggles are generally

associated with uprisings of indigenous populations against foreign rule. The vast majority of Jews from the Irgun and Lehigh who struggled for the establishment of the independent state of Israel were immigrants, while their main opponents, namely the Palestinians, were natives of the land. Very important point to keep in mind. I'm surprised if the Oxford handbook was this honest. They did say that at least. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, terrorism studies is just a, no offense, cesspool. So this is, yeah, this is pretty honest. Yeah. Yeah, that part of it was, right? I have some issues with that. But yeah. Now, all of these pressures keep building and building,

as does the violence, until things come to ahead again in the Great Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939. Sometimes you'll hear it called the Great Palestinian Revolt. I want to quote now from an article in the journal Origins by Ori Yehudai. Historians date the beginning of the great 1936 to 1939 Arab as it came to be known to the killing of two Jews by Palestinian Arabs knew the town of Tukharm on April 15, 1936, followed by Jewish retaliation against Palestinians that expanded into riots in Jaffa and Tel Aviv. So that's like a really short summary of kind of what happens. Everything I've discussed over these last two episodes also is part of why this revolt happens, right? This increasing anger at the mandate, this increasing anger at Zionism, all of the violence between these different communities that have occurred.

All of that is a big part of what leads to this revolt. We're talking 50 years at this point. Right, 50 years. Basically nationalism being suppressed on one side. Right, right. And another cause also can't be divorced from is the coming of Nazism, Germany, which causes a massive surge in Jewish immigration into Palestine that makes them more than a quarter of the population by 1936. To quote from a Uri Yudai again, the Zionists

built their settlements on land purchased from Arab owners living in Palestine or in neighboring Arab countries. The transactions had a devastating impact on Palestinian society as they often involved the removal of Palestinian peasants from the land. The distress of thousands of uprooted peasant families, coupled with frustration over the failure of traditional leadership to halt Zionism, led to a grassroots uprising launched by younger nationalist activists. On April 25, 1936, Palestinian political parties

temporarily put aside their differences and created a coordinating body called the Arab Higher Committee, or AHC, headed by Haji Amin al-Husaini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And the first thing that happens and what's called now the Great Arab Revolt is a six-month general strike

that is peaceful, right? This is an attempt of, by a large, organized body of Palestinian Arabs to address their grievances with the British mandate via a general strike, which is what everyone says should be the right way to do something like this, right? You like peacefully but like firmly state your demands and without using violence, create a way to disrupt life so that the people who are running things make concessions to you, right? Like that's like how you're supposed to try to improve things.

Like in the West, that's what we say, right? rather than violence, right? But nothing, like the British not only ignore them, they outright refuse the demands of this committee, right? Because the committee is demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land purchase and an independent national government. Now, there's room, as there always has been, for negotiation here, but the British refuse. And after six months of peaceful striking, a rebellion breaks out. And it turns into a general uprising against the British and the Zionists. And it gets very ugly. There's a number of different rebel groups. Some of them can't carry out attacks on Jewish civilians, too. This is a really brutal time, but that's not the majority or even all of what's happening, certainly. The violence convinces the British that the mandate is untenable and that they're going to need to create a Jewish state immediately. And they drop plans to do this. The initial plans would transfer because of where they're, and I think their initial idea for this Jewish state they want to make is about 17% of Palestine, right? And because of the way they draw it up, it's going to require the transfer, that's the term they use, of 200,000.

Arab Palestinians out of this new Jewish territory. And about a thousand Jews are going to need to vice versa. So you see, I mean, that's a really good, I look right there at just the discrepancy between how the mandate treats these two sides is it. They think it's reasonable to ask 200,000 Arab Muslims to leave their homes in exchange for like a thousand Jews doing the same on the other side, right? Right. Which is like, I just think those numbers are kind of useful to look at next to each other, right?

So the Zionist leadership accepts everything the British offer except the size of their borders, which is worth noting. The Palestinian leadership says, no, this isn't really an offer. Why would we do that? Why would we do that? Like, what? What? The rebellion goes on until fall of 1938 when the British send in a big old army to murder their way out of the problem. Orie summarizes, the British sent 20,000 troops to Palestine and used harsh measures against the rebels,

including house demolitions and executions. They outlawed the AHC, arrested and expelled activists, and disarmed the Palestinians. Their vote was suppressed by the summer of 1939, leaving a toll of approximately 5,000 Arab, 415 Jewish, and 100 British deaths. And this is the most lopsided death toll we've seen. Obviously, the British are largely responsible for that. But, you know, what you've seen here, the British have sent a couple really important messages with how they've dealt with this.

First, they've told the Palestinians that peaceful protest is not going to get you shit. And second, they've told the Zionists that your arms and militias are acceptable and your years of militant organizing are working. These are not great messages to send. This is going to cause problems for everybody. Now, once World War II gets started, a great number of Jewish fighters in Palestine, again, sign up to fight with the British. And they do this for both the incredibly understandable reason of wanting to fight the Nazis. and for the same reason, Jabotinsky had wanted a Jewish Legion in World War I so that they could get more arms and experience for their upcoming war of independence.

But the conflict with the British doesn't end just because they're ostensibly on the same side of this growing war. In 1940, the central office for Jewish immigration chartered three ships to take Jewish refugees from Romania to Palestine. Once these ships docked, the British refused to let the refugees off. They had enacted by this point the white paper policy to curb Jewish immigration, and they planned to deport these people, and not, by the way, back to Romania. And to do so, transferred all of the Jewish refugees from these three ships to one boat called the Patria, which was docked at Haifa and bound for Mauritius. That's where they were going to unload these people so they weren't going to be in Palestine, right? So you've got this boat full of – have you heard of the Patria case, by the way?

No. This is a new to me. Yeah, this is a really important point. This is kind of the point we're going to end on. I didn't really know about this either. So you've got this boat and it's got these refugees from the Holocaust, right? Like docked at Haifa and the British are going to send it off to Mauritius. And there's a massive debate within the Haganah over what to do here.

Now, during World War II, the Haganah's unofficial motto was fight the white paper like there is no world war and help the British like there is no white paper. So they wanted to stop these people from being deported, right, for a lot of reasons. But when you get into the habit, as the Haganah has by this point, of stockpiling guns and explosives, Every problem starts to look like maybe guns and explosives are the solution, right? That's just a human universal. I want to quote now from an article in the Museum of the Jewish People. Amateurism, negligence, and perhaps even an inherent subconscious disrespect for the refugees blinded their eyes. The Haganah commanders acted against experts' advice and placed a bomb in the rickety side of the old ship rather than under the machines area where there would be no passengers.

And their idea here, at least the claim that the Haganah makes, is that we would. wanted to set off a small explosion so that they would have to evacuate the ship. And once they've evacuated these refugees into Palestine, it'll be a lot easier to keep them here, right? There's, you can certainly run into theories that they intended it to be as big as it was. But whatever the cause is, and the official stance is that they fucked up and were just really bad with their explosives, they completely screw up. And they blow this boat to kingdom fucking calm and they kill 267 Jewish refugees.

Holy shit. Right? It is a horrible catastrophe. And it is still today known as the Patriot Disaster is seen as the largest catastrophe in which Jews caused the death of other Jews. 267 total people die in the bombing. They're not actually all Jewish, but the vast majority of them are. And another 172 are injured. And the Haganah again says that we miscalculated.

This was a horrible fuck up. On humanitarian grounds, though, the British respond to this by saying, okay, all of the survivors get to stay. And so what message has the mandate sent the Haganah? by bombing away, yeah. Exactly. Right. And this is where I'm going to end things. Again, it's an arbitrary point.

Any point I would pick is, but I think by this point, you see everything that's going to lead us in to the Nakhba, to 48. Like, everything has been established now. There's not really a turning back point. And a lot of it is because of what the messages the British have sent, both that they've cracked down and debilitated and killed so many of these Palestinian leaders. And they've just continued to use. yield and aid and abet, you know, the Hagen, even while they're carrying out terrorist attacks that in a lot of cases kill, you know, British civilians and their own civilians, right? The lesson they have sent is bombing and violence is the way to get what you want, and we

will give you everything if you just do a little bit more of it. That's what the British are saying in 1940, right? And everything that comes after that is, I think, pretty, I mean, I wouldn't say predictable, but you get, I think, kind of where everything else happens at this point. I think the discrepancy is also like really important to highlight here because when 1948 happens, I think a lot of maybe pro-Israel readings of that event or propaganda around that event is that, oh, all of these Arab countries attacked Israel. But in fact, they were armed like three to one.

Yeah. And it's because of this discrepancy that's like continued through time that the British have allowed for them to like build up their material. material power. So even with those Arab countries coming in in 1948 when Israel declares itself after Palestinians are ethically cleansed, like it's nothing compared to what the Israeli gangs are able to do, which are not the IDF and all of that. Yeah, which become the IDF in this period. And obviously there continue to be conflicts between like the Irgun and the Haganah because they're not in agreement about, among other things, Irgun wants to be the military of Israel, right, at a certain point.

And, you know, there's, I did debate, should I have taught, ended this more at like the bombing of the King David Hotel, but I don't, you know, which is something people should be aware of, you know, that's another, and that I think was Irgun and Monarchan began was like a major figure in sort of helping to mastermind that terrorist attack. But I, you know, by this point in time, you've seen both like the community that had existed previously, you know, in the 17, or in the 1880s that we started talking about, has been forcibly broken down and also broken just because, like, the massive changes that have swept the culture have meant that, like, people don't feel the same about who they are

anymore in a lot of cases. Right. And it's very difficult to say you're an Arab Jew. Right. When there's not really space for you in either nationalism, essentially. Yeah. And then, of course, I mean, we're not even getting to the part of, like, all of the Arab Jewish migration that happens in the aftermath of Israel's creation and how the state treats

them. Yeah. I mean, today, I think there are over 50% of the population of Jewish Israelis, but you wouldn't know that. Like, there's so much similarity between them and their Palestinian enemies, essentially, but because of, like you said, the identity has been erased. Right. And that's why there aren't Arab Jewish communities and a lot of these different Middle Eastern

and North African countries that had existed up until the 40s is because, after the establishment of the state of Israel, both there's reprisals against them. They also feel safe from moving to Israel. But yeah, as you said, there's like a, it causes, there are huge within Israel, like, sectarian divides between different points of origin, right? And none of that goes away, you know, and the, it's all, it's all just,

I keep thinking back, the thing I can't really get out of my head because I hadn't really known about this kind of relationship is the, the relationship between these Arab Muslims who were descended from the people who got kicked out of, you know, modern day Spain and Portugal, Liberia, and these Sephardic Jews who are the same, right? And this beautiful awareness they have that, like, we're part of each other's past. And, you know, even though that they're not the same religion, they've preserved a lot of our past even better than we did. And so, like, we have this degree of love towards them. That doesn't, I don't think that exists anymore.

That interrelated, those communities interrelated, like that, I, which is really. The Palestinians have been erased, essentially, but like, do you know what's a really interesting anecdote around this community is there was a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon who kind of remembered vaguely that her grandmother had like very specific customs around certain holidays and like kind of strange things that her neighbors didn't share? Turns out her grandmother was originally from this Jewish community that was expelled from Spain. So the Palestinian refugee in Lebanon was able to get Spanish citizenship on the basis of being a descendant of a Jew. Right. Yeah. I mean, absurd. Yeah.

Absurd. And also like just one more piece of evidence that like the long history of like interrelationship and like community like intercommunal existence is way older than sectarian hatred. You know? Like yeah, it's just sad. Maybe it's not to rethink nationalism. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it didn't work out great.

Maybe. Maybe it was mostly bad. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. You know what's not mostly bad. The book you just helped put together. Oh, that's right. The handbook on authoritarianism in the Arab world is out now with blooms of politics.

I'd also recommend my, again, my episode for it could happen here about my great-grandmother. And if people are interested in the Arab Jewish. question, look up the Israeli Black Panthers. Yeah. Very interesting little anecdote there. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's going to do it for us at Behind the Bastards this week.

And, yeah, come back next week. We'll talk about, I don't know, probably a dictator or something. I'll give you guys, I'll give you guys a fun one. I'll give you guys a fun one. They're none of them are fun ones. I'll give you guys a different one. Sounds good. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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