Dan Snow's History Hit - Israel, Gaza and the West Bank: A History

Episode Date: November 3, 2023

In light of the complex and tragic situation unfolding in Gaza and Israel, this episode looks at the past 100 years of the history of the region of Palestine. As well as explanation from Dan, we hear from experts who have been on the podcast before to explain the background to the conflict we're seeing today. Historian Simon Sebag-Montefiore explores why Jerusalem is so important to both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Yara Hawari, a senior policy analyst for Al-Shabaka, describes the Palestinian perspective of the Mandate of Palestine after the First World War and Benny Morris, a former professor of History at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, provides insight into the Israeli mindset during the first crucial months of the State of Israel established in 1948. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world-renowned historians like Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW. Download the app or sign up here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!You can take part in our listener survey here.

Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The attack began with rocket fire on the morning of the 7th of October. It was a Saturday, the Sabbath in Israel. It was a special Saturday. Israelis were wrapping up the seven day long Jewish festival of Sukkot. It's a festival that marks the end of harvest, the end of the agricultural year. But this year, it will be remembered for something very different indeed.

That morning, alarms sounded across the country as a barrage of rockets fired from the Gaza Strip hit numerous targets in Israel. the Gaza Strip hit numerous targets in Israel. Next, Palestinian gunmen from Hamas, a group that controls the Gaza Strip, labelled a terrorist organisation by most Western governments, penetrated the barriers at the Gaza-Israel border. According to the BBC, once they were on Israeli soil, they headed to villages, farms, communities nearby, moving from house to house, breaking in, committing unspeakable crimes, killing and taking hostages, men, women, the elderly and children. Men, women, the elderly and children.

It's been reported that Israeli TV and radio stations were inundated with calls from desperate people hiding in homes, whispering about gunmen outside or even inside, who were pleading for help. Meanwhile, as the sun rose over the Supernova Music Festival taking place in the desert, about three miles from the Gaza border, videos posted to social media and verified by the BBC and The Guardian show revelers dancing to trance music as black dots appear on the horizon. At first, there was a suggestion that these could have been the small explosions of Israeli air defenses, intercepting, neutralizing incoming rocket fire from Gaza. Most people didn't notice.

They continued dancing. At 9.30 a.m., though, another verified video shows festival security trying to get people to leave as quickly as possible. Crowds of people move fast but there's confusion. Then there are gunshots and panic. Those dots on the horizon were in fact motorized hang gliders. They were used by Hamas gunmen to strike deep into Israel. Later videos show the full scale of the horror, revelers running for their lives through fields, Hamas gunmen jumping from trucks and vans, shooting into the crowd, others dragging hostages away in cars and motorbikes they plead for their lives. The final images from the festival are a terrible contrast. They're suddenly still and

quiet. The scenes are of abandoned cars, of a festival site strewn with bodies under fairy lights and symbols of peace. Reuters has now put the death toll from these attacks at well over a thousand. This was a sophisticated coordinator tag. According to Hamas, it was a full invasion, and it's one that seems to have taken Israel completely by surprise. Not long after, Israel responded. The Israeli defence forces pummeled Gaza with airstrikes. Israel say they're trying to target known Hamas positions, but Hamas is deeply embedded in the areas where civilians live. Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on earth. There are two million people packed into an area the size of the Isle of Wight or Philadelphia. Hamas have deliberately weaved

their security infrastructure into that of civilian Gaza. Their schools, blocks of flats, healthcare centres. It's impossible for Palestinian civilians not to become collateral damage. Hundreds of Palestinians, men, women and children, whole families have been killed in the subsequent bombardments, the airstrikes, their homes flattened. As I'm recording this, troops are massing on the frontier between Israel and Gaza, and a full ground invasion seems set to take place, as the Israeli government seems intent on carrying out its threat to destroy the

ability of Hamas to ever launch anything like this ever again. In the meantime, Palestinians have no water, no electricity, and nowhere to hide. no electricity and nowhere to hide. The leadership of Hamas have issued several and often contradictory statements about the objectives of the attack. It does seem that they wanted to end Israeli violations. By that, they seem to mean countering the actions of the right-wing Israeli government in the occupied West Bank. And they also wanted to take hostages in order to secure the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody. Israel and Palestine have dominated the global news agenda since I was born. The names, the places, the politicians, they're seared into the memory of

anyone who's followed the news over the decades. Israel, just to orientate ourselves, it sits on the east shore of the Mediterranean, boundaried roughly by the Sinai Desert controlled by Egypt to the southwest, the River Jordan to the east, and the hilly country to the north where it borders Lebanon and Syria. The so-called Gaza Strip is a little piece of territory on the Mediterranean coast with its own short border with Egypt. The West Bank is a much larger chunk of territory on the West Bank of the Jordan which, as you'll hear, was controlled by the Arabs until 1967. There's a large population of Palestinians but the Israelis have been building settlements there for the last

50 years, a process widely regarded as illegal by the UN and the EU and many governments, including that of the UK. Although, of course, Israel disagrees. My parents were both journalists. They spent a huge amount of time in the region. We talked about it over many, many family dinners. One of my earliest memories is my mother's sadness when her great friend and colleague was killed working for Canadian TV as Israeli troops battled Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. My dad wrote a biography of King Hussein of Jordan and got to know him quite well. We used to go to Israel as kids, loved it there. We met friends that dad had made within the Israeli government. I always remember one man showing me where he'd lost the tops of his fingers. He'd been the tank turret on the Golan Heights during the surprise Syrian

attack in 1973. He ducked down to avoid a shell blast. He survived, but his fingers gripping the rim of his hatch were shredded. We sat down with Jewish families for dinner, and the following day we'd be meeting Palestinians in the West Bank and in Jordan. I'll never forget visiting Hebron on the West Bank, where a Jewish settler had just massacred Palestinian worshippers in a mosque. I went to that mosque, and I watched as Jewish and Muslim worshippers were praying, venerating the same cenotaph, that of the patriarch Abraham, but they were separated by a wall. They had to use different routes in and out of the same space. And I think that site in Hebron sums it up pretty succinctly. Both Palestinians and Israelis lay claim to the same religious

tradition and the same piece of land. The true tragedy, as one historian put it to me, is that you have two peoples with equally valid claims over the place we now call Israel and the Palestinian territories. Just over 100 years ago, towards the end of the First World War, Britain took control of what they called Palestine. British forces forced out the Ottoman Turkish who had ruled over it for centuries. They were aided by an Arab uprising, the one which propelled Lawrence of Arabia to such fame. At that time, this territory, Palestine, was predominantly inhabited by Muslim Arabs and there

were minority Jewish, Christian and other communities like the Druze. During the war, during the First World War, Britain had made hasty promises. Jews had been assured that the British supported the foundation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Those British promises encouraged Jews from all over the world, who we can loosely call Zionists, to believe that they could return to the land from which they had been ejected by the Romans many centuries before. They could build a new homeland, a new Israel. But during the war, the British had also promised the Arabs that they could have their own kingdom. The British, the UN, the international community have sought to reconcile these two promises ever since.

have sought to reconcile these two promises ever since. And the century since then has seen division, terrible violence, wars, some small steps towards peace, but no clear solution. In this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit, I'm going to attempt to look back at that history. This is the story of how we arrived here from the moment the British

established rule over Palestine through to the birth of Israel after the Second World War, and what Palestinians simply refer to as Al-Nakbar, or the catastrophe. It's the story of the emergence of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, how those distinctions became more complicated during the Cold War era conflicts like the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. I'll explore the more recent history too, the attempts at peace, renewed violence, and bring us all the way up to the present. And I'm very lucky to be able to call upon people who are a lot smarter than me, who've come on the podcast over the years. Simon Sebag Montefiore, wonderful historian who's helped me understand the enormous complexity of the region. He's a particular expert in the history of Jerusalem,

a city that is a holy place for all three major monotheistic religions. Dr Yara Hawari is a writer and senior policy analyst for Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian independent and non-profit think tank, and Benny Morris is a former professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. As you'll hear, people disagree about the history. So much is contested, just like the land itself. In Israel and the Palestinian territories, history is not a luxury hobby. History determines your every day, where you live and work, who you can love, who you can meet up with, who you can vote for. And for too many, it determines whether or not they will grow old,

whether or not they'll get to watch their family grow and thrive around them. Here, history isn't the story of what happened in the past. Here, it's not even past. Let's start, inevitably, with Jerusalem. The ancient city, venerated by worshippers all over the world, it sits at the heart of this story. Geographically, it lies between the majority Jewish lands to the west and the majority Arab to the east. The city itself for years in the 20th century was split down the middle between the Jewish-controlled west and the Arab east.

But Jerusalem is much more just a city on a hill. It's a symbol too, a contested one. As you walk around Jerusalem, you realise what it really means to simultaneously host some of the holiest sites of the world's major religions. Sometimes they're next door to each other. Sometimes they're overlapping. The third holiest shrine in Islam, where the prophet was believed to ascend to heaven to converse with God, is on Temple Mount, on the Dome of the Rock. That sits on top of the site of the ancient Jewish

temple, where the Jews believed that Adam was created at the beginning of the world and Abraham attempt to sacrifice his son. The power of that divine connection for the Jews is reflected in the fact that today the holiest Jewish site in the world is the retaining wall of that temple. So you have two faiths worshipping at the same structure, separated by metres. And a block or two away from that you get Christian pilgrims carrying wooden crosses following the footsteps of Jesus as he made his last journey through the city to his crucifixion. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital. Both insist it is central to their religion and culture. Simon Sebag Montefiore came on the podcast back in 2020 to talk about the importance of the holy city.

I mean, the strange thing about Jerusalem is like, how has this sort of small mountainous town on the blistered, boiling hot, waterless mountains and deserts of Judea, how has this become, you know, the capital of the capital of two peoples, three religions, and the most famous city on earth? And how has that happened? And the fact is, it's to do with holiness. You know, it's become the holy city. But it wasn't always thus. It probably started as a sort of Canaanite mountaintop shrine, like millions of others.

What made it significant throughout its history has been political decisions by leaders, often leaders not even in Jerusalem. But obviously the first to make that decision was David by placing the capital there, his son Solomon building the temple there. That made it politically the capital of the Jewish people, which then divided into two kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. Okay, so let's quick, why did they do that? Is it quite a useful defensive position? Is it strategically well placed? Strategically well placed in the sense that it's on a mountain it's on mountains it's a

mount moriah um and um and and of course it's a classic place for an ancient you know an ancient temple um as well and of course you know the the old city the it is it is very fortifiable and that's that but it's miles away from the the main sort of trading route i mean for example when alexander the great marched down he just marched straight past to egypt he didn't you know because you march down the coast is where the main trade and it's it's far inland so it's not a natural pace for a capital but what's made it special um was first of all this decision of david's some people say, is the proof that David existed? If you're a believer, you believe that David existed. If you believe in archaeological

rationalism, as we do as historians, you use the Bible, of course, as part of the proof. But archaeology seems to suggest that David did exist, that there was a city there. And what period are we talking? 1000 BC. 1000 BC. 1000 BC. And we know for a fact that about 40 or 50 years after the death of King Solomon, that an Egyptian pharaoh, Sheshon, actually extorted vast amounts of gold from the temple in Jerusalem. So we know that the temple actually did exist, the Jewish temple did exist, you know, within 50 or so years of the semi-historical, semi-mythical kingdom of David and Solomon.

And then, of course, it was the capital of Judah, the Jewish kingdom of Judah, ruled by the David family, the Davidian family, until it was destroyed in 586 by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. And it was this destruction. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. And it was this destruction. The strange thing about Jerusalem is that destruction has constantly been key in its creation as the great holy city. And it was this destruction in 586 that meant the Jews went into exile and they started to write down the stories of Jerusalem, which became the Torah, the Bible, the books of David, whatever you want to call it. And that book, the Bible, the Old Testament, was the making of Jerusalem because that ultimately translated into Greek, used as the basis for Christianity, used as the basis for Islam, providing an authentic narrative of holiness,

a heritage of holiness for the second and third of the Abrahamic religions. That made the Bible the universal book, and it made Jerusalem the universal city. It's thanks to that book, the fact that the Jews wrote it down, they told that story, and they never gave up hope of returning to Jerusalem. It's that that's made Jerusalem the holy city of history. And when did they manage to return? Well, they returned quite soon because they were exiled to Babylon, but within about 50 years, Cyrus the Great of Persia had conquered the Babylonian Empire and inherited Jerusalem.

And he introduced a new, he was a very interesting character, Cyrus, and his dynasty. They introduced an idea of a world empire, but where local religions would be tolerated, providing they recognised the great king as total ruler, supreme ruler. So they let the Jews return, rebuild the temple, and that was the second temple. So that lasted till the conquest of Alexander the Great. Alexander the Great tolerated the Jewish religion as well.

But one of his Hellenic successors tried to ban and crush the Jewish religion there. That led to a huge revolt, the Maccabees, about 160 BC. And that led to an independent Jewish state again, which was called the Hasmonean Kingdom or the Maccabean Kingdom. And that lasted 100 years, ending with the Roman hegemonyony and then we're in Roman times and Herod the Great. So but what stage did people start to realise that the Jews were were quite distinct? There was an enormous amount of syncretism which is that you need to borrow other people's religion merging of gods and you know as we know best with the Roman for example with the Roman and Greek ones there's a

lot of sort of fusion between the Greek and the Roman gods and so on. But the Jews were already stood out. And by the time that in 160 BC, for example, when the Seleucid king Antiochus tried to crush and ban the Jewish religion altogether, by then it was pretty clear that the Jews still stuck to this monotheistic religion, which was totally out of the spirit of the times. And I guess that's been part of the Jewish heritage throughout history, has been this kind of almost stubborn belief in the Jewish religion and loyalty to it.

And it's then given Jerusalem that special tint, because even those of us that aren't Jewish or aren't religious think, God, there must be something going on there, because that's a profound attachment to this place. Well, the interesting thing is, I mean, a lot of the argument now about Israel and Palestine, I mean, I think the background to it is to understand that both sides are denying the narrative of the other. The Palestinians officially are trying to say

there was never a Jewish kingdom to say there was never a Jewish kingdom there, there was never a King David, there was never a temple on the site of the Temple Mount, the sacred esplanade, where the Dome of the Rock stands today. And at the same time, the sort of Jewish right, the Likud part of Israeli politics, is constantly arguing that the Jews have been there for 3,000 years. There's never been a Palestinian state. The whole thing is an invention of history. And both have got to recognise the narratives of the other. Because the archaeologists and historians on both sides know perfectly well that yes, there was a Jewish state, there were several Jewish states,

there was a Jewish capital in Jerusalem, there were two Jewish temples, three really if you include Herod the Great's, fantastic temple which was the one that Jesus knew. So our mission as historians, the reason why it's worth having this conversation is just for people to understand that yes, the Jews have been there for 3,000 years.

The Muslims have been there for 1,500 years. The Christians have been there for 2,000 years. People only have to live in a city for 50 years for it to be their home. So it's not in doubt that both these peoples and both these religions have fantastically authentic, long and fascinating histories. And the only way they can make peace is literally to recognise each other's narratives. During its long history, Jerusalem's been attacked at least 50 times, captured almost as many. There are over 20 major sieges. It has been sacked, raised, rebuilt. The oldest part of the city was settled in the 4th millennium BC, making Jerusalem one of the

oldest cities in the world, with a long and tangled history. For about 400 years, Jerusalem and the area known as Palestine was occupied by the Ottoman Turks, apart from a brief interlude in the 19th century when it was occupied by the Egyptians. But that long period of Islamic rule came to an end in 1917. The British swept through Palestine. They captured Jerusalem. Within a year the war was over, the Ottoman Empire collapsed. Like the Romanovs and the Habsburgs, the end of the First World War meant the end of the Ottomans. Centuries of continuity brought to a sudden close. The obvious question was what next? What would take its place?

During the First World War, the British were hard-pressed against the Turks. As I said, they've made a number of promises. Dare I say, a little short term in nature, they had a war to win. The Arabs living in the area were certain that Great Britain had promised them independence. The so-called Hussein McMahon Correspondent was an exchange of letters in 1915 and 1916 between Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt, and Hussein bin Ali, then Emir of Mecca. In them, the British made commitments to Arab self-government in return for Arab support against the Ottomans during the war. But at the same time, also in 1916,

but at the same time also in 1916 the British and French had made a secret deal to divide up what we now loosely call the Middle East effectively adding the former Ottoman territory to their already vast empires. On top of that the British also then expressed support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine in a letter written by Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Arthur Balfour in 1917. The famous Balfour Declaration. Jews up to that point had been a minority living across the Middle East under Ottoman rule. There were particular clusters in Palestine by the coast and around Jerusalem. The British had wanted to court the international Jewish community because they believed it might help the war effort. They were thought to be influential in America, for example, and Britain

needed all the help it could get. The First World War had ravaged the region, as well as destruction caused by fighting. The population had been devastated by the dislocation, the famine, the epidemics, and the punitive measures taken by the Ottomans against Arab nationalists. At the end of the war, the area which includes modern-day Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, now all that was completely occupied by the British, who set up a military administration. It became known as the Palestine Mandate. In April 1920, in the spirit of their secret wartime deal, the British and French divided up the former territories controlled by the defeated Ottoman Empire between them.

Syria and Lebanon to the north was mandated to France and Palestine, pretty much everything to the south, was placed under British control. A truly independent Arab kingdom did emerge but it was snuffed out within months as the French asserted control of Syria. The British did allow client Arab kingdoms to rule over Jordan, Iraq and a chunk of the Arabian Peninsula under British oversight naturally. In the region known as Palestine, ship after ship was disgorging Jewish settlers onto quay sides. Encouraged by the British Balfour Declaration, Jews were arriving to make that homeland a reality. This was a chance to escape the prejudice, the outright persecution they were experiencing elsewhere in the world. These Zionists wanted to build a Jewish

homeland in the historic land of Israel, where they could live in safety and peace. Many were able to bring savings with them. Many were supported by Jewish communities in rich countries like Britain and the US. They were able to purchase land, build businesses. The Jewish population hugely increased, and they quickly grew to dominate the local economy. The Arab community in Palestine was outbid and outmanoeuvred. Some areas became majority Jewish thanks to the new arrivals. Gangs of kids fought. Farm farmers clashed over fence lines, sectarian violence flared up between the Jewish and Arab communities. There were tit-for-tat beatings and murders. One cycle of violence flared up into a full-scale Arab uprising.

From 1936 to 1939, Arabs attacked Jewish settlements and British occupying troops, believing the latter were giving tacit support to the former. The British in return used savage reprisals in an attempt to pacify the region. Villages were levelled in British air raids. It was the largest overseas deployment of British military power between the two world wars. overseas deployment of British military power between the two world wars. Following the second world war and the genocide, the holocaust against the Jews in Europe, there was obviously a hugely increased desire on the part of many Jews to emigrate to a safe haven in Palestine. At the same time, those dreadful events encouraged the Jewish leadership in Palestine to ramp up plans for that homeland. They wanted to be masters of their own fate.

They didn't want to be under anyone's control but their own. They began a guerrilla war against the British occupiers. Now, the Second World War had also exhausted and effectively bankrupt the British. They were retreating from empire and this was one difficult, complex conflict that they were only too happy to walk away from. At the beginning of 1947, the British announced that they were handing the entire problem to the newly formed UN. The best solution the UN, the world powers, could come up with at that point was for partition, splitting the territory between Arabs

and Jews. Jerusalem itself would be an international city. Now let's hear from Yara Hawari. She's a senior policy analyst at Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian independent not-for-profit think tank. She is going to give us a Palestinian perspective on this bit of history, how the Palestinians came to see that Jews benefited hugely from the British rule in Palestine. What we saw happening during the British mandate, especially towards the latter part, was this massive influx of European Jews who had been inspired by the cause of Zionism to move to Palestine. And so in the last few years of the mandate, this really shot up. But on the eve of when the British pulled out, it was still a Palestinian majority country.

And obviously, the Second World War has taken place, appalling genocide against Jewish people within Europe. So the British mandate would have seemed like a safe haven. And that's how it was portrayed and sort of marketed. In the beginning, it's very interesting. At the beginning of the Zionist movement, it was actually rejected by many Jews around the world, especially Jews in Western Europe, saw themselves very much as part of the European people, as part of European culture. And Zionism was very much a fringe idea.

And actually, people didn't want to move to what they considered this sort of backwater in the Middle East, this very uncivilised place. And so what happened with World War II, obviously, with the pogroms in Europe and the Holocaust, was that it effectively gave a lot of Jews no option but to immigrate and to flee. And they saw, you know, Zionism became more and more attractive to a lot of people. So we really saw Jewish settler moves to Palestine increase in those latter years. Under the British, how was land apportioned? All these new people arriving, were they buying land? What was the process before 1948? So the relationship between the British

mandate and Palestinians and Jewish immigrants is incredibly important to look at. The British made a lot of promises to the Arabs in the region, including the Palestinians. And actually, the mandate was set up, supposedly to lay the way for Palestinian sovereignty. It was a very colonial term, that they were supposed to be helping the locals establish some kind of country. At the same time, they were facilitating Jewish immigration, and they were actually integrating Jewish immigrants into their administrative system. So Jewish immigrants in that period had quite high up positions within the British administration and had quite a lot of access to all different kinds of things, including sensitive intelligence. And this was because,

quite frankly, of very racist notions that Palestinians were not quite of European standard and couldn't be trusted and certainly weren't civilised enough to take part in the British mandate on that level. So the British mandate was integrating Jewish settlers very much into that system. And so they were in some areas buying land, but they were also taking a lot of land. Palestinians obviously lived in Palestine for centuries. And the way that they managed and had land was based very much on familial connections. They didn't necessarily have all these papers and title deeds because these lands have been in our families for centuries. And we know who owns what land. We didn't need all these title deeds. That's not to say Palestinians don't have title deeds. Many of them do. So there was this combination of sort of buying up some land which was facilitated through

the British mandate, through these higher up positions that they were gaining, but also theft. As the British come to the end of their imperial journey at 1948, what happens when the British leave? So a lot of Palestinians describe this quite simply as the British handed over the keys and the weapons to the Zionists and the Zionist militias. The British had a very speedy exit indeed. There was no handover notes on the country. There was no, you know, sort of making sure that everything was okay, they quite literally pulled out. They couldn't handle the situation and they didn't want to handle the situation. You listen to Dan Snow's history at There's More Coming Up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. It was the British withdrawal and the UN partition plan that helped shape the political contours of Israel and

the Palestinian territories that we still see to this day. I'm looking at a map of the UN plan now. The Jews were to be given the areas in which they're already well established. Eastern Galilee, which is over near the Syrian border by the Sea of Galilee, that was going to be part of the Jewish zone. It was already the site of lots of Jewish farms and kibbutzes and communities. The Jews were also given the coastal plain south from Tel Aviv. The Palestinian Arabs were given what we now call the West Bank, the West Bank of the Jordan, and a strip of the Mediterranean coast around the town of Gaza. The Jewish leaders were happy to accept the proposition,

but the Arabs didn't. Yara Hawari explains why. This is really sort of commonly thrown back in the Palestinian space, you know, why didn't you accept partition? You could have had so much more than what you had. And there are two sort of important points to note in response to that question. Firstly, you're asking an indigenous population who have lived there for centuries to part with more than half of their land. This isn't, you know, sort of dividing a cake between two people and saying, fair is fair, you take half, the other people will take half. These are basically

indigenous people who are being told we're going to take away more than half of your country and give it to people who have just arrived. So the rejection of the partition plan by the Palestinians and by the Arabs in general was very, very natural. It was a very natural response to someone saying we're going to take away your land and give it to someone else. Now, the second important point is that the Zionists would not have stopped at that portion. We know through their correspondence in the military archives, we know simply because of the ideology of Zionism, that they wanted the whole of Palestine. And in hindsight, we can see that now. We can see that Israel, you know, really is the only sovereign

entity from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. They're continually annexing more and more Palestinian land. So I think on the Zionist side, it was never within their interests or their stated goals to stop at that partitioned Jewish state. The British left on the 14th of May 1948. And immediately afterwards, David Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish agency, proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. US President Harry Truman recognised the new nation on that same day. Now, many of the state of Israel. US President Harry Truman recognized the new nation on that same day. Now many of the Arabs saw Israel simply as an extension of European empire, as a vestige of colonialism. But Benny Morris, a former professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, gave me the Israeli perspective.

I would say this, that there were some colonial features in Zionism. The fact that the Europeans were settling in the third country and eventually carved part of that out for their own state. But in the main, it's an incorrect comparison. Colonial states, Britain's colonial empire and settlements in the area of the Americas and in India and elsewhere, were an extension of a mother country projecting its power and its sons to another area to take over that area for political or economic gain. Here we have no imperial power basically sending Jews anywhere. It's the Jews themselves in what the Jews regard as a national liberation movement decided to end their exile, some of the Jews, and began streaming towards Palestine to establish a state of their own in the area they regarded as their ancient homeland, which it was. Some of them also viewed the Arabs who lived there as basically usurpers and conquerors, because the Arabs had never been here before the 7th century. They conquered the country in the 7th century. They came out of Arabia with swords

flashing and took over the area from Byzantines. It wasn't under the control of Jews at the time, but they conquered a land which wasn't theirs. After the 7th century, they lived there, of the time, but they conquered a land which wasn't theirs. After the 7th century, they lived there, but basically as conquerors for 1400 years. And then along came the Jews. The Arabs, of course, blamed them for conquering the country, but the Arabs conquered it before them, as incidentally, the Hebrews and Jews did 2000 years before that. That's how history works. So, the British flag came down on the 14th of May, 1948. The State of Israel is declared, but the following day, the neighbouring Arab kingdoms invaded. Troops from Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and others struck from at least four different directions.

Iraq and others struck from at least four different directions. The state of Israel faced extinction in the first hours of its existence. The war that followed was the first Arab-Israeli war. By its end, Israel had won an unlikely victory against a powerful array of Arab countries. The victory saw Israeli forces in control of about three quarters of the area of what had been the British territory in Palestine. They now controlled much more land than they would have been allotted in the UN partition plan that even captured the western portion of the city of Jerusalem. But just as important as the lines on the map was the effect on the demographics, on the population. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left the areas captured by advancing Israeli troops. Some left their own accord, some were

forced out. The Palestinians simply call this process the Nakbar, the catastrophe. Some of these Palestinians fled into neighbouring countries where for the most part they've been denied citizenship. They and their descendants have been forced to remain as Palestinian refugees, ostensibly to protect their identity and the right of return to their homeland. Although many critics claim that their host Arab nations could have been more generous with allowing them to become citizens. What is certainly true is that ever since 1948, the so-called right of return has been one of the key sticking points to any lasting peace settlement. Here's Benny Morris again. It turned into a conflict between the Arab states and the

newborn state of Israel, which Israel eventually won that war and established itself as a state. In the course of that war, something like 700,000 Palestinians were uprooted from their homes, most of them incidentally ending up in other parts of Palestine in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A minority, about a third, ended up in Arab states outside in Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon. There is an argument ever since what caused them to flee. Was it a systematic expulsion or was it a call, as the Israelis claimed, a call by Arab leaders for them to leave, which prompted them to leave. The truth lies probably somewhere in between, though I would say more leaning towards the Arab explanation. There was a war and the Jews

in the course of that war drove out those 700,000 from their homes and then refused to allow them to return to those homes and lands which they had abandoned. Some of them were actually expelled by Israeli troops. Some of them were ordered expelled by Israeli troops. Some of them were ordered out by their own people, their own leaders, for tactical and strategic reasons. Most of them just fled in the face of battle, as people do. But as I say, the Israeli state refused to allow them back, saying that they would become a disloyal minority in the Jewish state. They had actually begun a war against the Jews. Why should one expect them to become loyal citizens of a Jewish state living under Jewish leadership?

So the Jews said, no, we're not going to allow them back. And this has been Israeli government policy consistently, every Israeli government since 1948, not to allow the refugees to return to their lands. Today, incidentally, of those 700,000 who became refugees, a small number remain, are still alive. But there are five to six million Palestinian refugees on the UN rollbooks because they had children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And uniquely, Palestinians, descendants of original refugees, are recognized by the UN as refugees. And Israel, of course, doesn't want to be swamped by Palestinian returnees, because it would turn instantly from a Jewish majority state into an Arab majority state, which would mean no Jewish state. Let's hear from Yara Hawari, also describing that process.

There was a huge flight of Palestinians from historical Palestine. Their estimates are somewhere between 750,000 to 800,000. And that's a huge chunk of the population. That's the majority of the population. And these people fled to neighboring countries. They fled to Lebanon in a huge amount. They fled to Jordan, Syria. A small amount fled to Egypt. Behind them, they left over 400 Palestinian villages, which were subsequently destroyed, wiped out by Zionist forces. And these refugees today live, you know, they live in these host countries. They also have obviously expanded all over the world. And they number in their millions now, because of course, you know, their descendants are also considered refugees. these refugees called UNRWA, the UN Refugee Works Agency, specifically for Palestinian refugees that was set up in the early 1950s. And they manage the sort of affairs, the refugee camps, the services. And for the listeners, this might be a sort of a recognisable name because Donald Trump cut the US funding to this UN body during his term. And these refugees are denied the right of return. This is a right that's

enshrined in international law, that refugees have the right to return to their homelands, to their countries of origin, to their homes of origin. And they are also entitled to due compensation if their homes and properties have been taken or destroyed. So by 1949, Israel had succeeded in capturing enough territory for its leaders to believe that they could build a viable state. More Jews now arrived in this new Israel, doubling the population. Among them was a huge number of Jews expelled from places like Iraq. Jewish populations across North Africa and the Middle East faced persecution, partly as a result of the anger stirred up by the events in Palestine.

Nationalism was on the march right across the region. There was violence. People were forced to move. Many in power rejected the heterodox communities of the past, wanting to create new nation-states bound by common language, ethnicity and religion. At the end of that war, Jordanian forces occupied the land that we know as the West Bank. The Egyptians were occupying Gaza, which was now overcrowded with Palestinian refugees. Jerusalem was divided between Israeli force in the west and Jordanian forces in the east of the city. But this was a truce, a ceasefire, not a peace. There was no lasting peace agreements. Both sides blamed the other.

The Arabs refused to recognise the state of Israel in its current form, which meant that only the dead had seen an end to war. Israel invaded Egypt in 1956 as part of the Suez Crisis alongside Britain and France, but the Americans forced them to return to their pre-war positions. The next major landmark is 1967 and the lightning six-day war. In response to Egyptian threats and warlike preparations, in June 1967 the Israelis launched an astonishing pre-emptive strike which shattered the Egyptian military. Israeli tanks rolled into action and within days the Egyptians withdrew behind the Suez Canal. The Gaza Strip and the whole of the Sinai Desert were now in Israel's control. Jordan, rather half-heartedly, joined in on the Egyptian side as an ally and paid a terrible price. Israel retaliated by conquering the whole of the West Bank territories, East Jerusalem included.

When Syria joined it, Israel quickly drove the Syrians off the Golan Heights, the hilly ground that sits on the border between the two. Israel's stunning victory made it a significant regional power. Its enemies were humiliated and both sides now faced a choice. Could there be a deal where Israel handed back these occupied territories, returned to its pre-1967 war borders in return for recognition of Israel, peace, normality? Or would Israel hold on to its conquests, build settlements on much of them, create a greater Israel. The latter plan was popular with many Jewish settlers, but it did mean ruling over these occupied territories, which were full of Palestinian Arabs. This time the war had been so short and decisive,

there'd been no mass movement of Palestinians as there had been in the 1940s. In the space of just a week, Israel had conquered a lot of territory in which there were plenty of Palestinian Arabs who were staying put, but weren't happy about it. Benny Morris explains. Those are the two turning points in Middle East history, in effect, the 1948 war and then the follow-up war of 1967, in which, as you say, Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem, critically, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. The Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt in exchange for a peace agreement,

also a breakthrough event. In 1979, Israel and Egypt signed peace in exchange for all of Sinai returning to Egypt. The Israeli government in June 1967 refused to decide about the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. They were willing to give back the Golan to the Syrians in exchange for peace and demilitarization of the territory. They were willing to give back the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for demilitarization and peace with Egypt, but they refused to decide about the future of the Palestinian inhabited territories, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Some were for annexing the territories, some were for keeping them under prolonged, indefinite Israeli control. Some were also for giving them back to the Arabs in exchange for

peace, but that didn't happen because of this division in the cabinet. And this essentially remained a division among Israel's citizens for the following 50 years. In other words, Israelis cannot decide to give back the territories. Israel has made it much more complicated by allowing first the Israeli labor governments, then Israeli right-wing governments, by allowing massive Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. by allowing massive Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. So as you heard from Benny Morris there, Israel did give Sinai back to Egypt in exchange for recognition. The so-called Yom Kippur War of October 1973 helped this process along. Even though Israel had won, a surprise Egyptian attack across the Suez Canal, combined with a surprise Syrian attack in the Golan Heights, had shaken Israel.

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When Egypt had been ready to do a deal, Israel was happy to swap land for peace. But the West Bank was a different story. It was not a largely empty expanse of desert. It was land that Israeli settlers believed should be developed into towns and farms. Many insisted that Israel had a historic claim to these territories dating back to biblical times. As Benny Morris says, Palestinian land on the West Bank was appropriated. New settlements built. Concrete and barbed wire fenced off Palestinians from their fields. Shiny new houses appeared on their land. The Palestinians, well, they fought back in the only way they could, using terror, the last resort of people who feel they have no other recourse. Stabbings, shootings, brick throwing, bombing. The so-called Intifada, the uprising,

was a time of riots, violent protests from the late 80s to the early 90s. Israeli security forces beat, even shot, rioters in retaliation, which unleashed still more fury. It was a seemingly unending cycle of blood vengeance. There were flashes of optimism, of progress. In the 1990s, a number of agreements known as the Oslo Accords were signed between the Israeli and Palestinian leadership. Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin and the Palestinian Liberation Organization negotiator Mahmoud Abbas agreed to recognize each other for the first time. Both sides pledged to end their decades-long conflict These accords were signed at the White House, overseen by President Bill Clinton

The Oslo Accords were supposed to bring about Palestinian self-determination in the form of a Palestinian state alongside Israel It seemed that Israel was prepared to give up at least some of the land that it had captured in 1967 to secure a lasting peace. Yara Hawari explains how Palestinians came to see that these accords were not delivering what they'd initially promised, and instead led to the current situation of a largely occupied West Bank and a Hamas-controlled Gaza. Now what you were referring to then is that infamous shaking of hands on the White House lawn with a very smug-looking Bill Clinton. And what it was,

was the Oslo Accords. It's frequently referred to as the Oslo Process. It was a signing of a peace agreement and it was celebrated all around the world as finally the end to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Very interestingly so, Edward Said, the Palestinian academic, the day after it was signed, called it a Palestinian Versailles. And he did so because he read the fine print. He looked at the details of that agreement and he recognised in it complete Palestinian capitulation. What the media reported on at the time was that this was going to be a phased process to the development of or the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. And so it would be following along the lines of the two-state solution,

with a Palestinian state and an Israeli state living side by side. In reality, what it did was it divided up the West Bank into these areas called A, B and C. Areas A would be under the Palestinian Authority Control, which was a new governing body, which was also established by Oslo. It was supposed to be this interim government. Area B would be this sort of joint area of control between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli army. And then Area C, which is 60% of the West Bank, which includes the Jordan Valley, which I mentioned earlier, West Bank, which includes the Jordan Valley, which I mentioned earlier, which is this incredibly fertile piece of land, that would be under sole Israeli military control. So what this did was it banterstonized the West Bank. It created this sort of Swiss cheese of the West Bank and where

these pockets of Palestinian Authority control, which was the most densely populated areas, sort of surrounded by Area C, which were Israeli military control. So that meant that Palestinians traveling in between sort of major population zones, cities, towns, or whatever, would have to travel through Area C. And of course, what is this in Area C is heavily militarized infrastructure, checkpoints, military barracks. So this means that at any point in time, Israel can effectively close down the West Bank, can shut Palestinians into just areas A, they can't get to each other, they can't travel, they're basically encased in their small bantust stands. Further to that, the Oslo Accords also had a lot of economic provisions. And this was known as the Paris Protocol, which dictated basically the barriers of what the Palestinian economy would face.

The Palestinian economy doesn't really exist. It's actually a misnomer. You can't have an economy under occupation. What the Paris Protocol did was it imposed this unequal customs union, which granted Israeli businesses direct access to the Palestinian market, but it restricted Palestinian goods entry into the Israeli one. It gave the Israeli state control over tax collection. And then it further entrenched the use of the shekel, the Israeli currency in the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza. And so this left the newly established Palestinian authority

with absolutely no means to impose fiscal control or to adopt any kind of macroeconomic policies. So in summary, this effectively meant that Israel had direct and indirect control over the levers of the Palestinian economy. And we see this very much playing out today. I just want to return briefly to Area C because it's incredibly important. Area C is, as I mentioned, 60% of the West Bank. It's under total Israeli control. It's where most of the Israeli illegal settlements are. And this includes 95% of the Jordan Valley, which is the main area where the West Bank had their agriculture and is now heavily cultivated by these Israeli illegal settlements. A lot of produce from Israel actually comes from the Jordan Valley, which is illegally occupied.

And it's estimated that the loss of this access to Area C costs the Palestinian economy hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And so in summary, I mean, we could talk about the Oslo Accords for hours. But in summary, you know, it gave this veneer of a peace agreement, of a sort of staged interim approach to a Palestinian state. But really, it entrenched further Israeli control over Palestinian lives in the West Bank and Gaza. In the years that followed, that Palestinian leadership, perhaps unsurprisingly, given what you lay out, found it difficult to sell that deal to the Palestinians, particularly Hamas emerges, takes control of Gaza.

Hamas was established sort of in the late 1980s at the beginning of the first Palestinian intifada or uprising? Hardliners on both sides rejected Oslo. Palestinians criticised it for the reasons Yara has outlined. They pointed out as well to the lack of a right of return for refugees, a lack of compensation for land and property taken by Israel, stretching right back to 1948. On the other side, some Israelis were furious that the government was doing deals with men of violence, people who'd killed Jews in acts of terror, or that the government was prepared to hand over land which they saw as historically Israeli. In November 1995, the Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin

was assassinated by a far-right Israeli who despised the Oslo process. It was one of those rare moments in which everyone at the time knew for certain would be a historic turning point. And it was. His successors were unable, or unwilling, to persuade Israelis that they could have peace and security if they gave up the claim on even some of the West Bank and Gaza. Another intifada tore through the region in the early years of the 21st century. Every bomb, every shooting discredited those who spoke up for compromise and peace. Instead, they played into the hands of the hard men,

who promised only uncompromising struggle. The centre ground of Israeli politics seemed to drift inexorably to the right, and Palestinian politics certainly became more radicalised. Hamas had emerged in Gaza in the 1980s. It was one of the largest of several Palestinian militant Islamic groups. Its name is an Arabic acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement. Under its charter, it's committed to the destruction of Israel, not returning Israel to its pre-1967 borders or the borders set out in that original UN partition plan, but Israel's total destruction. UN partition plan, but Israel's total destruction. In 2005, the Israelis dismantled a couple of dozen settlements they'd had in the Gaza Strip, and they evacuated their forces from Gaza. Defending those settlements, occupying the Strip, had become simply more trouble than it was worth.

The Israeli government opted for a policy of unilateral disengagement. They would just leave. They'd cauterise the border with armed force. They'd control the airspace and the sea. The Palestinians could do what they liked in Gaza. They would be contained. Well, that policy has not worked. Hamas took the credit for forcing Israelis to withdraw from Gaza with their

uncompromising defiance. The Palestinian people, well, they seemed desperate for anything that might signal improvement in their fortunes. Many of them voted for Hamas in the 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council. The following year, Hamas fought a short, sharp battle against their rivals Fatah and seized total control in Gaza. Since then, Hamas militants in Gaza fought a series of conflicts with Israel. They almost always begin with rocket barrages aimed at southern Israel. There are sniper attacks, there are border raids. Despite attempts to prevent weapons reaching Gaza, Hamas have still been consistently able to strike at Israel. The attacks of this week were a shocking demonstration of Hamas' ability to organise

and arm themselves in Gaza. Following the atrocities, Israel has declared that there is now a state of war between Israel and Hamas, and they've massed troops on the frontier with Gaza. Many international observers have hoped that some form of partition is still possible, but they're realistic enough to know that it won't be along the lines of 1948 or even 1967. The Clinton plan in the late 1990s came up with what it thought was a viable two-state solution. The Palestinians would be compensated for land taken by Israeli settlers in the West Bank with chunks of the Negev Desert. But I think as our expert guests have explained,

what is convenient, what is logical for international onlookers, is not so for people on the ground, whose family have sat in the shade of that particular olive tree for generations, for settlers who have built homes and communities from scratch, for farmers who have tended olive groves just as their forebears taught them, for shepherds who know every ravine and watercourse, just their forebears taught them, for shepherds who know every ravine and water course, for people whose brothers and sisters have died fighting for their right to live in the place where they choose. On both sides, there are those who don't want partition. There are those who claim all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan exclusively as their own.

in the Jordan, exclusively as their own. There are people for whom the other group must simply be moved, or worse, eradicated. And we know how enticing, bold, simple solutions can be in a complex world of overlapping claims. The past few years have not been great ones for nuance. Within the state of Israel and the Palestinian territories, these arguments are played out. Every atrocity, every child's body shared on social media undermines the case for compromise. Benny Morris gave me an insight into how the debate over the West Bank within Israel, even before the latest round of fighting, is a prime example of this. There are about half a million Jewish settlers today in the West Bank, alongside something like two to three million Arabs, and these half a million make it almost

impossible for Israel to disengage, to leave the West Bank, because many of these 500,000 wouldn't agree to it. There would be a civil war among the Jews if the decision was taken to force them to leave. In addition to that, Israelis, and this has always been true, calculate that leaving the West Bank is not going to actually solve the problem because the Palestinians want all of Palestine. The leaders of the Palestinian people, Hamas, and incidentally, the Fatah, the so-called secular wing of the Palestine national movement, both of them want all of Palestine. They don't really hide this from anybody. I'm finishing up the recording of this podcast. It is late

Monday afternoon, and Israeli ground troops are apparently very, very close to launching a ground assault into Gaza. Young men and women will enter a cauldron of urban warfare. Hamas have dug a warren of tunnels and bunkers across that strip. Death will come from above and below, from in front and behind. It's going to be a war of sudden ambush. It's going to be a story of vehicles trapped in narrow streets their crews incinerated by improvised explosive devices helicopter gunships and fixed-wing fighter bombers are going to bring down apartment blocks and they're going to rearrange the rubble of previous strikes hospitals already full will overflow with civilian casualties tazeh has seen Hamas launch another barrage of rockets

from the Gaza Strip into Israel. Even more Israeli children will cry out for their parents. They'll cower in shelters and they'll weep over the dead. And I fear that a new generation will discover all over again that while you may fight and kill an enemy, it's a lot harder to destroy, to defeat an idea. Too many Israelis and Palestinians have such different ideas about how and if they should live in this small strip of land enclosed by mountains, sea, river and desert.

And until they reconcile those ideas, there will always be people ready to fight, murder, maim and die for them. Thank you. you