Dan Snow's History Hit - What is Zionism?

Episode Date: April 13, 2024

Dan delves into the complex history of Zionism, exploring its multifaceted origins and the various ideological strands that have shaped it over the years. From its early beginnings in the 19th century to its pivotal role in the establishment of the State of Israel. With expert insight and analysis from Peter Bergamin, lecturer at the University of Oxford and a visiting Scholar of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, they examine the impact of Zionism on the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and explore how Zionism continues to influence the region's dynamics today.Dan also hears from Rachel Cockerell who tells the story of The Galveston Movement which saw thousands of Jews escaping persecution in the lead-up to WWI, flee to Texas to establish a new Jewish homeland.For more information, Peter Bergamin's latest book is 'The Making of the Israeli Far-Right'Rachel Cockerell's book about The Galveston Movement is called 'Melting Point'Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm going to take you back now to the very dawn of the 20th century, a time filled with so much promise, so much optimism about a bright future. One of those places that was a hotbed of optimism, and for whom the 20th century wouldn't turn out quite as planned, was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a great melting pot of different cultures sprawling across Central and Eastern Europe. Artistic and literary and philosophical crucible at the time. The streets of its capital, Vienna, buzzed with remarkable energy and new ideas fizzed from there out across Europe. I think a reflection of that is that there was a brief period at the beginning of the 20th century when Stalin, Hitler, Freud, Tito all lived in Vienna together. Well,

not together. They weren't housemates, but they were all perhaps rubbing shoulders on the mean streets. They went about their business, dreamt their big ideas. And one of those ideas that emerged from Vienna was called Zionism. It was fostered by a Jewish author, a playwright. He was sick of being confronted with everyday antisemitism on the streets, even of Vienna, this great cosmopolitan city. He was called Theodor Herzl, and he decided that overwhelming antisemitism would make dreams of Jewish assimilation impossible. He decided that in this new century of competitive nation-states with their emphasis on national character, identity, language, history, he decided that the Jews would need to reach for their own nation-state. In 1896, he published the pamphlet Der Judenstaat, which elaborated his vision

for a Jewish state, a Jewish homeland. His ideas spread fast, as ideas could in that period. They attracted enormous international attention. Jewish people were trying to work out whether they thought of themselves as a people with a culture, a history, or whether they were simply followers of a religion. Herzl almost immediately became a huge, important voice in this conversation, a figure in the Jewish world, a divisive one. a figure in the Jewish world, a divisive one. Not everybody liked Herzl's idea. Many Orthodox Jews rejected Zionism. They believed that the Jews would only return to Zion, the land promised them by God, with the eventual coming of the Messiah, and that Jews should not force God's hand. There were other voices, for example, Lionel de Rothschild, a British banker,

There were other voices, for example, Lionel de Rothschild, a British banker, a conservative politician, part of the prominent Rothschild banking family. He was an MP. He would go on to found the Anti-Zionist League of British Jews. He believed the best course of action for Jews was to assimilate, to become fully integrated, an inseparable part of the societies in which they found themselves living. Even Zionism itself soon split into branches. Other Jews were hugely inspired by movements of national liberation. For example, Jews followed Garibaldi as he fought for a unified Italy. Still other groups were drawn to ideas of socialism and even communist revolution in Russia. years of socialism and even communist revolution in Russia. But beyond the pontificating of intellectuals, there was a very strong desire among everyday Jews, particularly from the east of Europe, and that was to escape, to get away from the savage hand of antisemitism, the pogroms

particularly of the Russian Empire, and go to their own country to build a new society unlike the ones that they'd been forced from. Understandably, many Zionists began looking at the region of Palestine, the area on the Mediterranean coast, with the Sinai Desert to the south, the Jordan River to the east, and Syria to the north and northwest, roughly where we today find Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip. There'd been a Jewish presence in that region in biblical times. But a series of catastrophes, of rebellions, savage repression, of exile under the Romans, meant that Jews had spread all over, all over the world in fact, by the 20th century. They'd become an enormous diaspora. And Jews in Palestine

were outnumbered by Christians and Muslim Arabs who also saw the land as their own. So this was an unusual nationalist movement, if I can call it that. This was not people rising up against foreign dynastic rule. This was a group of people coming together, yes, but who would then have to emigrate to the place that they had chosen to be their national home. And that, of course, is what marks Zionism out. And their pursuit of a Jewish state on the contested land claimed by both Jews and Arabs is at the root of the ongoing violence in the region. The devastating war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza,

the constant Israeli bombing that controls Gaza. The constant Israeli bombing that's left the Palestinian population in Gaza in crisis with little or no food, little shelter and barely any aid available. It's at the root of the appalling cross-border raid carried out in October of last year and the hostages that still remain in captivity. When I'm recording this podcast, the UN Security Council has just called for an immediate ceasefire, but Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu has repeatedly stated that Israel will not stop until it is satisfied that it has annihilated Hamas from the map. In the short term, we wonder how many more Palestinians will be killed and stretching off into the future, how many more generations of Jew and Arab will find themselves fighting and dying? As ever, we want to help you make sense of the news agenda by diving into the deeper history that informs what we're seeing

today. So I've invited Peter Bergman onto the pod. He's a lecturer in Oriental Studies at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He's a visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. He is going to explain Zionism to me, its origins and the way it has shaped the Middle East and has in turn been shaped by it. We're also going to hear from Rachel Cockrell, whose own family history tells us the story of a different kind of Zionism, a bit of what-if history. The Zionists who looked elsewhere other than Palestine to build a Jewish state, from Angola to Uganda, then to Texas.

Hope you find the episode useful. minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black white unity till there is worse than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Peter, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a word that everybody uses. It reminds me of that 18th century saying about the papacy. Everyone was against it, but no one knew exactly what it was. So let's make sure we know exactly what it means. What is Zionism? So it's a great question, Dan.

Thanks. It's a good way to start. You know, you're absolutely right, what you say. It's really misunderstood today. I would say Zionism is kind of used pejoratively today, kind of like, you know, red meter, liberalism or something, you know. But really, in effect, it's nothing more than just Jewish nationalism. And it started around the end of the 19th century and was catalyzed by an increasing kind of ethno-nationalism

that would say, unlike the French revolution nationalism at the beginning of the 19th century, that was kind of really built on this idea of civic nationalism. So if you fulfill your civic duties, so you pay your taxes, you join the army, you don't break the law, you are a citizen of the nation. But from the 1848 failed revolutions onwards, we see this kind of conservative backlash to liberal ideals, and that nationalism itself begins to take a more primordial ethnic turn. And so to define oneself or one's nation, I suppose, along ethnic lines, it was also necessary to define what one's nation was not using the same reasoning. And so the Jews, especially within Germany and German-speaking countries, found that they were often now not part of this idea of the ethnic nation anymore. Related to this, of course, we see the end of 1879 is the first time the term's used,

but we see the beginning of what we now call modern political antisemitism, which is a little bit different from, let's say, medieval anti-Judaism, because you could no longer convert away from being a Jew. So your Jewishness was racial and therefore unalterable, no matter how hard you try to, let's say, dress it up or hide it using, let's say, their words. So the Jews kind of finally decided themselves to organize along nationalistic lines. Why do we call it Zionism? Well, the Jews are a little bit unique, because if you compare them with the other small nation nationalisms which are springing up, certainly coming out of the First World War with the breakup of empire, the Jews were really not

resident in the land that they considered to be their nation. They'd been expelled in year 70 of the Common Era at the end of the Jewish wars with the Romans. And although there was a Jewish population ever since then in what we call now Israel-Palestine, the great majority of the Jews had been dispersed either towards Spain or the Sephardi Jews, Europe, Ashkenazi Jews, or in other Middle Eastern countries, what we now call today the Mizrahi Jews. So I suppose the word Zionism was just a way to unite these Jews who kind of embraced this particular type of nationalism under one banner. And again, I think as you say, it's the words that's a little bit misunderstood today. But if we understand the context, it's not that all different from, let's say, Albanian or Serbian nationalism, you know, small nation nationalism from around that same period.

You know, I spoke about Zionism being a reaction to this kind of ethnic nationalism, small nation nationalism from around that same period. I spoke about Zionism being a reaction to this kind of ethnic nationalism, but of course, it was also an embrace of it. What are the Jews? Are they a religion? Are they a people? Are they a political nation? In fact, there are all of those. And why? Why are the Jews unique? Well, they're the only hangover really from the ancient world. So you have the ancient world where all tribes organized themselves or understood themselves as a nation, a people, a religion, and all had political, what we would call today, political sovereignty over a geographical territory. You know, the ancient Egyptians were not dissimilar.

They worshiped their gods. They also saw themselves as people, and they also had political sovereignty over their land. The ancient Jews, the same. But the Jews are really, certainly from that region, the only hangover, as it were, and they also had political sovereignty over their land. The ancient Jews, the same. But the Jews are really, certainly from that region, the only hangover, as it were, and what a hangover, this kind of ancient way of organizing oneself or identifying. So the Jews are in fact not just a religion, they're not just a culture, they're not just a nation, they're all of these things. There's no value judgment to that, but it does make it, the question of Jewish nationalism,

certainly emancipated Jewish presence in Europe, even more complicated, I would say. There were obviously different currents within the international Jewish community, weren't there? I mean, I've read authors from the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th, who thought that Zionism was actually quite dangerous because they believed the key thing for Jews to do was to focus on integration. Zionism didn't sound like a movement in the Jewish mainstream. It's the refusal of these evolving European ethno-nationalist states, the pogroms. I guess they made it clear that in these new nation states, Jewish people weren't welcome. This idea of emancipation, as we saw over the long 19th century, became like a double-edged sword. All these liberals who were for the idea of Jewish emancipation realized over time that they just did it out of liberal ideology.

I mean, the most famous is Richard Wagner, the composer, who wrote an essay called Judaism and Music, in which he says exactly that. He goes, you know, it was just more of an idea than an actual thing itself, because we actually came into contact with Jews. He literally says we were repulsed by the actual people. We like we actually came into contact with Jews. He literally says we were repulsed by the actual people. We liked the people, but not the people. I would say, sadly, Wagner summed it up for many people. I think that was the point. This liberal ideology was nothing more than an ideology. And from 1848, and we see a conservative backlash towards everything liberal. And in fact, Theodor Herzl, who we would say is not the first Zionist, but the first person to really give Zionism direction, was as assimilated a Viennese Jew as was possible.

He was the foreign correspondent for the Viennese newspaper called the Neue Freie Presse, which was a Jewish liberal paper. And he lived in Paris and he covered the Dreyfus trial. So, okay, so you've got the Dreyfus affair in France, where a Jewish French army officer is framed for a crime and treated appallingly. You know, France was really the first country to emancipate its Jews 100 years before, when Dreyfus was being marched to the courthouse or wherever. People shouting, you know, not death to the traitor, but death to the Jew. That's been disputed now, that people actually shouted that. But the point is, that was the perception, that they were saying death to the Jew and not death to the traitor.

I guess that was it for Herzl. He just said, non-Jewish Europeans will continue to see Jews as Jews and not as citizens. And so he was Jewish. His wife was Jewish. His kids were Jewish, but they weren't practicing. They were as cosmopolitan as many Viennese Jews at the time, but they made him realize no matter how much you assimilated or acculturated in the communities where you lived, you were still seen as Jews. For Herzl, that was a turning point. And Herzl kind of said, you know, wouldn't it be great if you just leave us alone? But then he said, but they won't leave us alone, the Gentile nations.

And that's literally from the Judenstaat, the Jewish state, the quote, it says, Sie werden uns nicht in Ruhe lassen, in German. He said, but they won't leave us alone. And so he said, you know, it's time. So he kind of sought a way to, supposed to reconcile his own Jewishness with his cosmopolitanism. And I would say, even say Viennese cosmopolitanism. And I lived in Vienna for many, many years. And it's amazing to see how what we call, you know, the Viennese Fremde Siegle was really

disproportionately influenced by Jews who were fairly recent immigrants, who were the children of fairly recent immigrants. You have Gustav Mahler leading the opera house, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, the authors. I mean, massive influence of Jews in Vienna. And it was really the center of European cosmopolitan society, I would say. But there's still this conundrum. What do we do with the Jews? And this is really the idea of what we might call the Jewish question. And Herzl busied himself with this question. And it was what I said before, you know, are we a religion? Are we a nation? Are we a whatever? And we're in fact all of those things. And that was the

conundrum. And he tried to resolve this conundrum by suggesting that the Jews get their own state. And tell me about Herzl. I mean, he's a journalist. How did he progress this dream? He was a journalist. He had the very first hipster beard. I mean, he was certainly charismatic. 1896, Herzl writes The Jewish State. The following year, he convenes the first Zionist Congress in Basel, where they actually form what you might call a board of directors. And Herzl, it should be remembered now, is what we might call today a political Zionist. That means he sought diplomatic sanction before statehood. So he wanted the international community to kind of sanction the idea of Jewish state, really, before the state itself kind of

kicked into action, I suppose, if you want to put it that way. He went on a diplomatic mission. So in 1898, he meets Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem, and they got along very, very well, but the Kaiser did not support the movement. In 1901, he's granted an audience with the Ottoman Sultan, because of course, it was the Ottomans who ran the country in those days, who also didn't really go for the idea. Let's just remind ourselves, let's check in on those Jews who were already moving to Palestine. It is, at this point, it's a part of, it's a province of the vast Ottoman Empire. There had been what we called Zionist immigration already to the land of Israel, which is the Jewish word for the biblical land of Israel. Before we had, there was a state

already from 1881. And this is in fact, part of the Ottoman Empire. And the Jewish communities that come into being or that kind of start to spring up post-1881 that we would maybe today call the result of Zionist immigration, all kind of spring up beside existing Arab communities. So we have the Hebron Arab city, but then we have a Jewish community in Hebron that's kind of beside it. Jerusalem, this idea of West Jerusalem today. West Jerusalem started in around 1880. I mean, I have friends whose families came from Syria in 1880 to what we now call West Jerusalem, which is very modern. West Jerusalem is about 150 years old, because the old city of

Jerusalem, East Jerusalem, is the bit that was the biblical Jerusalem, but it had a lot of people living there. By the way, it had a Jewish majority from 1835, according to the British census. So it's not like there weren't Jews there, but there weren't Zionist Jews there, if you want to put it that way. The Jews that did go to what we call the Land of Israel before that were generally religious.

Places in Europe would send representatives of their community. It was called Halukah. They'd send one smarty pants from every village to go and study in the land of Israel. But this idea of what we call today kind of modern, unmodern, I put, yes, it was quotation marks, settlements took place parallel to villages that already existed and the land was purchased. But in 1903, we have a very interesting development. And then Britain offers a piece of what they call the Uganda Plan. It's really part of modern-day Kenya, but it was in East Africa. A small portion of land for Jews to settle on. Herzl himself actually says, yes, this is a great idea.

But it was really shouted down. It was a massive bone of contention at the Zionist Congress. Some people supporting it, some people saying, no, we have no connection to Africa. And then Herzl dies in 1904. The idea is buried along with Herzl, I suppose, if you want to put it that way. This idea of Zionism, Jewish nationalism as directed towards the ancient Jewish homeland is really what wins out. And there were many other territorial suggestions, by the way. So in addition to this East Africa plan that was eventually rejected, over a period of time, there were something like 37 other territorial options, all of which got rejected in favour of where the Jews had once been. In the early 20th century, in the years

preceding the First World War, thousands of European Jews fled hideous persecution. Many went to the United States, which was seen as a vast open country with no limit on immigration and apparently plentiful land. At the same time, though, the Zionist movement was trying to work out where it thought people should go. Some held out for Palestine, the only possible Jewish homeland from which the Jews had been expelled millennia before. But others, perhaps more pragmatically, suggested looking elsewhere. This was the era of European imperial domination. The world was in some ways their oyster. Perhaps they could start a Jewish colony or enclave, working with the British, the French,

some imperial power, some just Australia, Angola. Leaders of the Zionist territorial movement, like David Jockelman and the British author Israel Zangwill, set their sights on somewhere quite different, on Galveston, at the time a small port town recently ravaged by an enormous hurricane on the Texan coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It had space, had the rule of law, it had a decent port, you could get there. Perhaps it was a final destination or perhaps a staging post until their goal of securing Palestine could be achieved. And now I talk to Rachel Cockrell. She's David Jockelman's great-granddaughter and she's recently written a very well-received book about the Galveston movement, the immigration of thousands of Jews to Texas, where they and their descendants never moved on.

They ultimately did become part of the great American multicultural experiment. And fittingly, her book is called Melting Pot. Rachel, paint the picture for me right at the beginning of the 20th century. Where are people and communities and groups thinking about going? America was becoming an option from 1900 to 1910. There were about a million Jews in New York. They were mainly concentrated in the Lower East Side of New York. If a Gentile New Yorker were to walk through the streets of the Lower East Side in around 1905, Gentile New Yorker were to walk through the streets of the Lower East Side in around 1905, it would be like stepping into another world. You would hear Yiddish and German and a bit of Russian, a bit of Polish spoken. All the signs of, you know, all the restaurants and theatres

and synagogues would be in Yiddish or in Russian. There would be all these strange smells. I mean, journalists at the time wrote about the total strangeness of walking through the Lower East Side at that time. So more established German Jews who had maybe arrived in America around 1890 looked at what was happening on the Lower East Side and saw a future in which New York overflowed with Jews. One person said, you can't keep on pouring Jews into New York or New York would burst. They thought that this would lead to anti-Semitism spreading across New York and maybe across America. And one American banker, Jacob Schiff, said, this we must not risk. So these German Jewish bankers wanted the Jews to come to America, but they didn't want them to come to New York. So they thought, what if we bypass New York? What if the immigrant ships coming across the Atlantic take a sharp left turn in the sea and sail down to the Gulf of Mexico and land in Texas instead, where hopefully

they will spread out across the middle of America? So we'll be saving these Jews from persecution in Russia, but they won't be crowding and crowding into New York and filling it up. And tell me about the key people, one of whom was your great-grandfather. Yes, one of whom was my great-grandfather. He lived in Russia, well, the Russian Empire at the time, so he actually lived in Ukraine, but at that time you just call it Russia. And he traveled across the western parts of the Russian Empire, finding Jews who were about to set off to New York and persuading them that Texas was a far better idea. And often their response when he said, oh, you should go to Texas

was, but I want to go to America, which really by that they meant, but I want to go to New York. That was how interchangeable the word New York and America were at the time. They thought New York and America were a word for a small town at the edge of the new world, which was filled with their cousins and their friends, which they desperately wanted to go to. But he, you know, my great grandfather handed out these pamphlets talking about how wonderful Texas was and it's so much warmer and there are so many more opportunities there. The head of the movement was a person called Israel Zangwill. He was a novelist and a playwright. He wrote a play called The Melting Pot,

which is why we all use that phrase now. He popularized that phrase in this play that President Roosevelt went to see when it premiered in Washington, and it was sort of talked about all across America. I think Zangwill would be quite horrified by how completely he's been forgotten. He was constantly on the front page of the Times and the New York Times. He was hilarious and brilliant and magnetic and friends with Jerome K. Jerome and George Bernard Shaw and all sorts of people. So Zangwill was a novelist, abandoned his career as a novelist for the sake of Zionism, and then abandoned Zionism to found the Galveston movement. And so then these ships arrive in Galveston, are they just arriving in Texas and then spreading out? Or is there a sense, let's try and build a national home here? Did it have

sort of geographical boundaries? Was there a place that they thought they could stake out? Well, I think Zangwill wanted, he originally actually wanted one of the states in the southern parts of America to transform into a Jewish homeland. So he actually approached the American government and said, can I buy a state and get rid of all the non-Jews and just have it as a Jewish colony? For obvious reasons, this was horrifyingly anti-American to have an enclave or a colony in America. And so that idea went nowhere. So the rule was that when these Jews got to Galveston, they weren't really allowed to stay in Galveston because there was this fear that if they stayed, they would either recreate the problems of the Lower East Side of New York and create a sort of Jewish ghetto, or they might

create a Jewish state. So the day they arrived in Galveston, they would be put on a train to some other place, so that really they were dispersed and scattered across the Midwest of America. Sometimes they would go to Omaha, Nebraska, or Kansas City, or wherever else. And sometimes places with very small Jewish communities, which meant they had to sort of melt into the melting pot of America far more quickly than a Jew arriving in New York. Okay. So despite some of their ambitions, they were so discouraged from banding together and forming a kind of a tight national community in this Texan landscape. Yeah, I mean, it's quite sad, really,

because if you worried you were arriving in New York, you'd be surrounded by your countrymen. It was like a little piece of Russia that had been transported to America, whereas arriving in Galveston, Texas, and being sent to maybe some, you know, one horse town was totally different. How many people are we talking? Well, so 10,000 immigrants landed in Galveston between 1907 and 1914, when the movement came to an end. And if you think about, you know, that's 10,000 people, if they all had however many children, you know, three children each, I won't be able to do the maths about, you know, that's 10,000 people, if they all had however many children, you know, three children each, I won't be able to do the maths, but you know,

hundreds of thousands of people are in America because of this movement. What was the impact on Zionism? Did people point to this and say, look, it hasn't worked, we absolutely need to go to Palestine? Or was there any lasting impact? Well, it kind of had worked. In 1914, 10,000 people had gone to Galveston, Texas, and nowhere near that number had gone to Palestine in that time. Israel Zangl actually said in a speech, let us hear no more of Palestine as a field of immigration, because Texas possesses a town called Palestine, and to there we will conduct our immigration from now on. So really, it was thought that there was either no need for Palestine now, or at least this could be a temporary solution.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Zionism. More coming up. To be continued... 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 to the First World War when we see the British government really embracing Zionism. The war is chaotic, the war is catastrophic, and inevitably war, as it does, throws up lots of previously kind of unimaginable scenarios. It's an extraordinary thing that His Majesty's government announces in 1917

through the so-called Balfour Declaration that they support the establishment of a Jewish state. They support Zionism. Sure. The Balfour Agreement was really just a letter that says that His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment of Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object. It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political statute enjoyed by Jews in any other

country. So that was both ways. It was meant to protect both people already living in Palestine, no matter what they were, Christians, Jews, Arabs, or Muslims, and also Jews in other countries, so they wouldn't have to be compelled to go to this new country. But of course, in November 1917, it was nothing more than a letter. How on earth does that come about? It's an amalgamation of a whole bunch of different ideological strands that would have been fermenting, I would say, for a long time, not least of which I would say is the idea of Victorian exploration that

happened in the second half of the 19th century, and especially to the Holy Land, the Middle East, the Holy Land. There was a real enamorment with what they called the Orient, but especially the Holy Land, obviously. And we shouldn't forget one really important thing, this combination of that explorative excitement, but also it wasn't possible much before then. But this is combined with a Protestant millenarianism and, in fact, messianism. So the Jews, in fact, according to Christian theology, have a utility. When the Jews start going back to the biblical land of Israel, as they call it, I believe, the ingathering of the exiles, this signifies first for the Jews, the beginning of the messianic age, and for Christians, the second Messianic age, right? The second coming of Jesus, but on both sides, Messianic. So there's a certain interest that is not just political, but has a very, very strong religious dimension. You can imagine

Britain going, wow, if we can manage to secure the holy places, you talk about India being the jewel in the crown, think of what this could mean on a completely different level. So the outbreak of war in 1914 creates a really unique situation for everybody. But of course, with the Jews, you've got Jews fighting Jews in the First World War, which did not happen in the Second World War. So it's a unique situation for Jews as a real problem too, and also fighting communism. I mean, there's a lot of things going on. The Jews are quite prominent in the communist movement in the Russian Revolution. There's a whole lot of stuff going on on both sides. And we shouldn't forget, perhaps, either, that the Zionist organization has offices

in Berlin, Vienna, and London, seeks to really focus on London more, and certainly during the course of the war. And even in 1950, we see the Germans thinking that they might come out in support of Zionism. And Britain kind of goes, well, hey, there's a competition for taking in support of Zionism. And Britain kind of goes, well, hey, there's a competition for taking on support of Zionism. I wouldn't say that this is the major factor, but it did play into it. And I would say in this country, you get this tension between the more established Jewish communities that came in after Cromwell and were doing very well versus the new immigrants that started to come in from 1880, who settled in the East End, were very poor,

mainly from the Russian Empire, spoke Yiddish, and were not yet acculturated into British society. And that's the group that takes over the Zionist organization or the English Federation of Zionists in the 1910s. And then they kind of push it for Britain to adopt the Zionist platform. So you get a lot of things coming together. I would say even in a more cynical way, for the British nationalists, some of the people who supported Zionism did so for very cynical reasons because they were quite anti-Semitic. They were like, oh, we'll get the Jews out. If they get their own nation, they can go to their own and they'll get out of ours. So they supported Zionism perhaps for not the reasons one would want. But there's a whole bunch of strange bedfellows,

let's put it that way. And he talked about the Balfour Declaration, the 2nd of November 1917, is only that, it's a declaration, you know, because it's a letter from Balfour to Lord Rothschild, one of his MPs and kind of representative of the Jewish community. But we look at it as a turning point. But I think I would say two things to that. The real turning point had come in 1903, with Britain offers a little bit of East Africa, that was already a massive step. And we forget about that today because of Balfour. As a political move, it wasn't all that dissimilar. But second of all, the Balfour Declaration was only a letter because on November 2nd, 1917, Britain had no control over the territory. Now, five weeks later, that changes. So we see Allenby march into Jerusalem on, I think,

the 11th of December. The Ottomans had capitulated the day before. So the political tide changes 180 degrees in the span of five weeks. So the Balfour Declaration is interesting because it was a promise, but it was a promise that couldn't be fulfilled the day it was written. However, that changes very rapidly to 1920 at the San Remo Conference. We see Britain awarded what they now call the mandate for Palestine and Transjordan, as well as Iraq. And the mandatory system was a new system, whereas Britain and France kind of carved up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire and, in fact, acted as tutelary powers. That was the word they used because, of course, these nations were not yet ready to govern

themselves. And I say that rather sarcastically because this is how they sold it to the League of Nations and sold it to the delegates of the Paris Peace Conference. You see the founding of the League of Nations. You see Wilson's 14 points, which highlight the importance of national self-determination in the breakup of empire. We forget that, of course, today, this is really the cornerstone of liberal ideology, the individual writ large, the individual nation. So forget about empire. We're looking at Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Jews, Zion, right? So this, at the time, was seen as a real liberal undertaking and top-down liberalism, the League of Nations and all of that.

Okay, good point. I hadn't thought of that. And I suppose Lloyd George, Prime Minister Lloyd George, being Welsh, he had a fondness for small nation nationalism or identity, autonomy. Let's whiz forward now. Do you have a huge influx of Jews into Palestine following that Balfour Declaration in the 1920s and 30s? And are they moving there because of the strength of this new idea? Is Zionism very exciting to these people? Or is it just straightforwardly a choice about security? I talked about the first two immigration waves, 1881, 1903. We have a third one in 1919, just refugees from the First World War. 1924, financial crisis in Poland. And 1933, obviously, Hitler. They're all kind of catalyzed by realpolitik, but not all good realpolitik for the Jews,

obviously, otherwise they would stay. But I always say those are the big ones. But I would say Hitler's the one that really gets all of Europe going, maybe this is what we need to do. I mean, I would say not immediately. We don't realize this now, half of the German Jews got out, 300,000 out of 600,000. It's not amazing, but it's more than probably one would think. And 60,000 of these go to Palestine. So the rest went to America or Britain or something. Palestine, which has already enjoyed, like I said, already four waves of Jewish immigration before that, now has something like 380,000 Jews by 1936. And that's a lot when you consider that's now one to three, one Jew to three non-Jews, whereas maybe 20 years

before it would have been one to seven. So it really explodes the population. And so we see, of course, a lot of Palestinian Arab unease. We see 1920 already, the first riot, anti-Jewish riot coordinated to be at the same time as the San Remo conference, another one a year later, which prompts actually Churchill in 1922, who is colonial secretary, to issue a white paper that was kind of a caveat to the Balfour Declaration, despite the fact that I said it was only a letter, does get codified into the wording of the mandate for Palestine. So it is actually quoted in the mandate for Palestine. So it becomes then legal. It becomes a real diplomatic legal mission for Britain if they are to undertake the mandate.

That is part of their role. By the way, Britain had, during the war, made conflicting promises to both Jewish and Arab groups. So we're saying, we'll help you establish an Arab state, saying to the Jews, we'll help you establish an independent Jewish state. So there's a lot of, let's say, self-interest all around. But by 1922, Churchill, again, the colonial secretary, issues a white paper that says, although we said we'd establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, we did not say that all of

Palestine would be a Jewish national home. And they create already in 1921, Transjordan, which creates a massive split in the Zionist organization because they said, well... 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.

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The biblical land of Israel is in what we might call today Jordan. It's on both sides of the River Jordan. The general Zionists and the labor Zionists, who are the majority in the Jewish settlement of Mandate Palestine, they accept it begrudgingly, but they accept it. But then they splinter off and somebody called Zev Jabotinsky from 1922 founds the first, what we might call right of center group. Because Zionism until then was really basically socialist or kind of liberal. After that, it becomes a little bit conservative in terms of territorial maximalist desires. So they said, well, no,

we want the whole thing. And so this is where you see the beginning of what we might call the Zionist party that sees territorial maximalism as its goal, formed by someone called Zev Jabotinsky, the revisionist Zionist movement. So I should back up a little bit. I said Herzl was a political Zionist. He believed in statehood before settlement. After he died, we start to see the opposite happen. We see the beginning of what we call practical Zionism. So they thought, well, if we settle, they'll eventually give us a state. So there's a bit of a contradiction. Jabotinsky called his party the revisionist party because he wanted to revise Zionism back to the political Zionism of Herzl. He was a statesman. I mean, people disagree to the level some people

call it fascist, some people call it liberal,ends on who you are. But he said, well, we were promised this whole area. Jabotinsky really wasn't religious, but for him, he said, for us, the Jews, it's a question of starvation. We already have six or something Arab states, but for the Jews, we don't have one. Now let's get to the Second World War. You have the astonishing, monstrous slaughter of Jews on an industrial scale in Europe. What effect did that have on the Zionist movement? I think maybe go back a little bit about this, because in 1936, the German immigration waves already come into Palestine, and we see the Jewish population come up to almost 400,000, as I said, and we see the Arabs rebel. They said, this is enough. They stage a general

strike. Then they start to really undertake anti-British paramilitary action. We might call it that today, although they weren't so well organized. So much so that in 1936, the British government convenes the Peel Commission, finds that for the first time, these groups are not going to get along. There's no way we're going to have one country. We have to partition. So the first time we have this idea of partition raised is in the Peel Commission Report, and therefore also population transfer. So Jews who are living in the Arab section will go to the Jewish section and vice versa. Now, I don't use words like ethnic cleansing. I find them very loaded. But this is where we get this idea. Let's say population transfer is first raised. So for the

Jews, in a way, even though it's kind of cordoning off some of the land that they thought they might get, it is nonetheless the very first time that they can speak about statehood, as opposed to just the territory, because they weren't sure what they were going to get. And so they kind of go with this and they run with it. Nonetheless, the Arab revolts have been full swing. So by 1939, they convene the St. James Palace Conference, where they attempt to get everyone sitting together. The Zionist and Arab groups do not speak directly. They speak kind of at other tables because they refuse to meet.

But the crux of it all is that we get the issuing of the 1939 white paper, which limits Jewish immigration to 75,000 over the next five years, at which point it should stop altogether unless the Arabs agree. And we knew that that was not going to happen. So you can imagine what this means in April 1939, with Hitler going crazy. The Zionist groups are going, we've had enough of the British. All of the Zionist groups are united for once and say, this is just enough now. We're going to fight the British. And what happens, of course, is that history preempts what they're going to do, because September 1939, we see the beginning of the Second World War. So the Zionist groups, although they are absolutely fierce with the British, say, we're going to support you as if there were no white paper.

We're going to fight the white paper as if there were no war, and we're going to fight the war as if there were no white paper. I believe that's the quote they use. But as the war progresses, and as this kind of right wing started by Jabotinsky goes really to the right in the early 30s, they kind of are less willing to play ball. So they stage what they would call a revolt. At some point during the war, Menachem Begin, who later becomes Prime Minister of Israel, but is at that point still living in Poland, he takes over the leadership of what they call the Irgun, which is the underground paramilitary group. I might mention that the Jewish community had underground paramilitary groups protecting them.

There was a more accepted one called the Haganah, the defense, which eventually became the Israeli defense force. They were aligned with the labor Zionist majority, and in fact, who were running the administration. And then you have the Irgun, the two kind of right-wing groups, the Irgun, which is numbered about 5,000 members, and then the Stern Gang, the Lechi, which numbered a few hundred only, which is very, very extreme. They declare a revolt on the British government, February 1st, 1944, something like 500 events in three or four years, bombings, kidnappings, shootings, that really after the end of the war really escalates. In Britain, in July 1945, we see the election of the Attlee government

with Ernest Bevan as its foreign secretary, kind of strongly socialist, anti-imperialist, who say we don't need to have an imperial presence, but we should have a political presence, a strategic presence. So they just kind of rebrand it, I suppose, in a different way. But Bevan does not understand why Jews in Europe should not just be repatriated to their host nation.

So he doesn't understand why German Jews shouldn't just go back to Germany. Bevin just really doesn't get it. But to jump forward to 1946, Britain just says, you know, we've had enough. We've got this anti-British Jewish campaign against us. We just don't have it in us anymore. They refer the question of the Palestine mandate to the newly formed United Nations, who formed the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, who then send yet another fact-finding committee to Palestine. And this is where I would say the public relation game is lost for Britain,

because in the middle of this, because of the quotas Britain put on immigration, we have a lot of illegal immigrant ships setting off for Palestine, many of which are diverted. A few sink by accident because they're not very seaworthy. But we have a really famous incident where it's called the SS Exodus, where 4,500 refugees set out from, I believe, France. They're turned back or Britain intercepts the boat, tows it to Haifa Harbor. They embark and I think two or three people end up getting killed in a fracas that ensues. What they do is they put the people onto three other boats, send them back to France from where they came. The passengers, all of whom were concentration camp survivors, refuse to alight, and the French government refuses to coerce them.

So they end up re-diverting the boats back to Hamburg. It is the biggest public relations disaster for the British government, because you can imagine sending a whole bunch of concentration camp survivors back to Germany because you refused to take them in the land that you said you would create a Jewish national home. Their words, not mine, right? So, I mean, this is a massive public relations disaster. Britain just says we've had enough. The United Nations finally says, we suggest the partition of the land into a Jewish state and Arab state with Jerusalem to

be administered internationally. That's on November 29th, 1947. The Jewish community is accepted. Arab communities do not. The next day, a veritable civil war breaks out in Palestine. Britain decides a couple of weeks later that on May 15th, they're going to pull out and do nothing for the next few months. I would say not just out of stubbornness, but because they can't help either side without looking like they're taking favorites. Who knows what you would do in the same situation, but it's quite a difficult call for Britain. But Britain pulls out on midnight, May 14th, 1948, with no government in place.

That day, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community, declares unilaterally the founding of the state of Israel. The American government recognizes it the next day. And then we have what we might call international war, right? We said the Arab countries invade. We have the Israeli war of independence, the Palestinian Nakba, which by the end, perhaps on shaky legs at first, kind of do see the beginning of a Jewish state. So I guess that's, it's a bit of a cooked tour through everything that happened. It's a lot more complicated than that. Peter, can we finish up with something that is oft talked about at the moment? What are your feelings about this distinction that people want to make about being anti-Zionist rather than

anti-Semite? How should we navigate these waters? Yeah, that's a good question. I would say you ask 10 people, you get 10 opinions. As an academic, I kind of go back and forth all the time, and it really depends on the particular situation. But I would say perhaps if we can apply the double standard test, if it fails the double standard test on whatever side, there's perhaps a reason for that. So if you're an internationalist that says there should be no nationalism, and you're anti-Zionist and you're anti-every nationalism, why not? But if you're kind of going, hey, I'm strongly nationalist, but just not the Jews, or just not the past Indians, then I would call you to kind of question that reasoning, right? So if there's a lack of consistency in one's reasoning,

just question that for whatever reason. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Zionism. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Zionism. Thank you to our guests, Peter and Rachel. I hope you found this useful. See you next time. you