Guerrilla History - Intelligence Briefing: The One Kingdom Solution?

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

Guerrilla History- Intelligence Briefings will be roughly a twice monthly series of shorter, more informal discussions between the hosts about topics of their choice.  Patrons at the Comrade tier and above will have access to all Intelligence Briefings. This Intelligence Briefing will be an early-release episode for our patreon members, about a fantastic essay by Adnan and Professor Margaret Pappano titled "The One Kingdom Solution?:  Diplomacy, Marriage, and Sovereignty In The Third Crusade".  Here, we talk about the story of a proposed cross-confessional marriage during the Third Crusade as a diplomatic tool, and weave in the current situation in Palestine using this information. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea. Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod.  Your contributions make the show possible to continue and succeed!  Please encourage your comrades to join us, which will help our show grow. To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter at @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter at @Red_Menace_Pod.  You can find and support these shows by visiting https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/. Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.          

You don't remember Den Van Booh? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to a guerrilla history intelligence briefing. Guerrilla history is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history

and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present. I'm your host, Henry Huckimacky, and I'm joined, as always by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing well. Great to be with you, Henry. Always nice seeing you. I'm also joined by. Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Happy to be here as always. Yeah, it's always a pleasure

to see you as well. So just a reminder for the listeners, intelligence briefings are our roughly twice monthly Patreon episodes. About one a month will be a Patreon exclusive, whereas the other one will be early release on our Patreon. This is going to be an early release, but instead of having about a week or two gap in between going up on our Patreon and coming out on our general feed, we're only going to have about a one-day gap. And that's because of the timeliness of the topic of this interview given the events that are taking place in Palestine currently. So the topic that we're going to be talking about today is a paper written by a certain professor Adnan Hussein, as well as Professor Margaret Papano. Adnan, you and Professor Papano, you and Professor Papano,

wrote a paper called the one kingdom solution, diplomacy, marriage, and sovereignty in the Third Crusade. Since it's your paper, why don't we open up by have you maybe historicize this paper, orient us in the historical context of the time period, and then let the listeners know what the general idea and the general purpose of this paper was. Sure, Henry. I mean, the reason why we wrote this paper was because in the typical character, of the history of the Crusades, it's understood as some kind of inveterate, unresolvable, religious conflict,

where there were no opportunities or no ability by the participants to reconcile differences or imagine and even understand the perspective from the other. And that kind of logic and that kind of characterization of conflict in Palestine is, something that bedevils us today as well.

So it seemed really interesting or useful to think a little bit more about an episode, a very curious episode that occurred during the course of the Third Crusade as part of the treaty negotiations to try and end the Third Crusade with some sort of longer lasting solution. So the point here is that there was an interesting marriage proposal as part of the negotiations that would have imagined Richard the Lionheart,

King of England, Richard I, having his sister, Joan of Sicily, she is the widowed queen of a multi-religious, multi-confessional, multi-ethnic kingdom of Sicily. We could talk a little bit about what Sicily was like, to have her be married to Salahideen, or Saladin, as he's known in the West, his brother, Al-Adil, who was a major general and major prince, you might say, of Muslim, you know, polities in the area, and to conclude the truce by having a marriage alliance. So for those who don't know, this is in the midst of the Third Crusade, there were two major efforts by Latin Christians to conquer the Holy Land. The First Crusade, which was preached in 1095 in Claremont by Urban II,

ends up launching a major military venture with several different armies that made their way overland through the Balkans, you know, Eastern Europe and the Balkans overland through the Anatolian Peninsula and the lands of the Byzantine emperor who claimed right over Palestine, having been part of the Byzantine Roman Empire. empire and they managed to conquer Jerusalem in 1099 July 15 1099 and established there the crusader kingdoms four different principalities the kingdom of jerusalem the kingdom of Tripoli the county of ant sorry the county of tripoli county of antioch and the county of edessa

and these were all supposed to be under the king of jerusalem but the county of but they were somewhat independent. By the 1240s, there had been major reversals and setbacks because of Muslim response under a Turkic figure named Zenghi, a Turkic general. He conquers the county of Edessa,

which is in sort of south-eastern Anatolia. It was the furthest east of these crusader principalities. And as a result of that, Latin Europe under the popes and various kings organized what was called the second crusade, which was to try and reverse some of these losses, but they ended up doing something a little bit strange. They decided, well, let's expand past the Jordan River and let's invade and take the city of Damascus, which was the major polity, one of the two major polities or major cities in the Levant,

where they saw that if they could defeat the Zengids, in Damascus, they would then be able to dominate the entire region of greater Syria. That was an utter disaster. And as a result, the Latin kingdom was weakening in the face of more organized Arab Muslim responses, really by these Turkic tribal warriors. So that by 1187, Saladin Saladin,

who had become the most, prominent of these emirs or generals had captured and conquered Egypt from a different set of rulers, the Fatimid caliphate, and had combined it with Syria into a much larger and strong state that was putting huge pressure on these Latin kingdoms along the coast, the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and he defeated the combined armies of the Latin kingdoms at this famous battle of hattin or the horns of hattin captured the true cross you know the major relic that they had brought out with them in battle because no crusade army had ever lost a battle if it was carrying the crusade the true cross apparently but in this case he captured the cross they were utterly

destroyed and in 1189 a few months later he ends up besieging jerusalem and they surrender it So this huge major military loss and subsequently the loss of Jerusalem ended up being the, you know, the conditions for a renewed call for crusade that was answered by Philip Augustus of France, Richard de Lionheart, and also was supposed to involve Frederick Barbarossa from the Holy Roman Emperor of Germany. So the three titans, you might say, of Latin Europe, were coming to try and recapture Jerusalem. So that's the context in which this, you know, military assault takes place, first with besieging and taking the city of Acre that had been also captured by Salahedin. And then after 1191, there was a bit of a stalemate, and that's when the negotiations that we discuss in this marriage proposal. gets forwarded as part of the stale-made attempts to end and resolve the situation. Adnan, I'm going to follow up quick. So, of course, the main thrust of the story is involving this potential marriage

taking that would take place between the brother of Saladin and the sister of Richard the Lionhearted. But apparently, and correct me if I'm misunderstanding this, but apparently, basically, basically all of the contemporaneous accounts came from Arabic sources. There was almost none from the crusader side. Was this because they were trying to whitewash Richard in order to portray him as a true crusader who would never negotiate with those infidels or, you know, is this what's going on? Are they trying to whitewash Richard as like this true crusader who would never go to negotiations

or, you know, as Ronald Dragon would say, we don't negotiate with terrorists. Is this the ancient version of we don't negotiate with terrorists here? I think so. I mean, I think there is a principle that you see that crusader ideology imagines that the only solution is conquest of these territories through military means, that any truce that is made has to be on the terms of the Latin Crusoe.

Saders. And so you find, for example, some negotiated settlements that took place with Salahadine even before the start of the Third Crusade are bemoaned by the political elites, somebody like Archbishop William of Tyre, who writes an important chronicle and is a key figure in the administration of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem during this period of the late 12th century. he absolutely bemoans that they have concluded a treaty that was on equal terms, you know, that imagine that there were sort of equal rights and that there was parity in the terms of the agreement and that this was a departure from previous practice. So what we're dealing with here is not only a sort of perspective on statecraft in the Crusader kingdoms, but also a kind of culture

of crusading warfare, which is about conquering Jerusalem and doing so through military means. It's something that suits the culture of these nobles who are martial military elites. And it's seen as undignified and perhaps even shameful, you know, to conclude negotiations rather than to achieve victory through military arms. So that's kind of the culture that you're dealing with. here. And Richard, by engaging in negotiations, which we do have evidence that he was engaging in negotiations, we don't have evidence of the specific marriage proposal appearing in Latin or old French contemporary accounts of the Third Crusade. But we know that negotiations were happening from both sides, both the Arabic and the Latin sources. And when these negotiations are

portrayed in the Latin or old French sources for the Third Crusade, there is an awful lot of frustration, it's criticism of Richard that is being forwarded, that he's becoming too cozy with the other side. And so I think that's part of the reason why it's not mentioned. It is mentioned in a later source that is deeply hostile to Richard the Lionheart. And as a result, it's used in in some ways to smear him, right? So it provides evidence in a way that perhaps this proposal was actually true because we can see it being mentioned on both sides, the both sets of sources, but in one case it is used entirely to undermine Richard's image as a noble crusading warrior. So one of the things that happens is as a result of his negotiation, there's an awful lot of

popular concern grumbling in the camp and get lots of murmurings that make their way into the source that people are unhappy with Richard's leadership. They're dissatisfied with how he's conducting himself through these negotiations. And as a result, Richard to prove his bona fides goes off on some raids in some neighboring villages just to slaughter as many, you know, know, Saracens, the Muslims as they're known as, as he can and bring back their heads as trophies to the camp to show, hey, you know, I may be involved in these negotiations, but I haven't changed. I'm still a ruthless crusading warrior, and we're here to kill the Saracens. I'm just doing this because instrumentally may be helpful, but I haven't lost any of my zeal and bigger

in prosecuting holy war. Yeah, so as you say, the very existence of these negotiations are incredibly controversial on the side of Latin Christiandom because the very idea that you would negotiate with your inferiors is absurd to many of these people. But in your article, your essay, you go into the negotiations themselves, sort of often out of sight of popular pressure and this reactionary viewpoint. Lots of gifts were exchanged. And of course, the main focus of the article is this proposed proposal, right? And there's different historical accounts of how serious this proposal was of marrying off Joan of Sicily. Would that require conversion on the side of the Muslim brother, et cetera? Could you talk a little bit about the role

that maybe just like broadly the gifts and stuff that were going back and forth that kind of found that interesting and then maybe hone in on the wedding proposal itself and the different takes on it? Sure. And I said say right off the bat that of course there were pressures on the Muslim side as well, like a concept of being a pious, holy warrior, and that is the image of Saladin that we have in some of the sources that want to aggrandize him, and clearly some of the authors of those positions of what was called the Neo-Jihad, and we can talk about that as well, felt that him agreeing, Salahideen agreeing, was also somewhat embarrassing or unworthy. So there were pressures on both sides. It's just that it was so extreme on the crusaders that

they didn't even want to mention that this was happening on that level. However, as you point out, there is evidence, even from the Latin Crusader sources, that there were negotiations taking place in diplomatic contacts, envoys being sent as emissaries with proposals back and forth. And some of these started off even just as a matter of the kind of courtesy of chivalry of nobles. And this is, in fact, important in this emerging 12th century culture of courtly romance of chivalric ideals that we see in Europe that are also paralleled by ideals among Arab warriors of gentlemanly generosity and respecting the enemy as a worthy foe. And so that there were these kinds of cultural conventions in both of these noble elite martial cultures that could,

actually intersect in some way. So you have, for example, Richard, during a period of illness in the Siege of Aker, writing and saying, oh, you know, I'm not feeling great. I got this fever. I would love to have some, you know, ice, you know, some colds sort of. So what we hear is that Salahadine dispatches sherbet, you know, sorbet or something like this, some kind of iced drink, you know, and sends his doctor to Richard says, oh, well, if you're not feeling well, I would trust my doctor. He's wonderful. Let me send him to you. And so you have some of these courtesies developing of, you know, noble elites respecting one another. But things develop even further than that to close relationships developing on some level between al-Aidil,

Salahideen and Richard. Salahedin, while he was engaging with sending these emissaries and some gifts, did not want personally to be part directly of the negotiations. He kind of wanted to be above it is maybe a status, sort of establishing his status as somebody of higher standing in some ways, but he deputized his brother, who did have a lot of authority and was a general in his own right, to basically be the first go-between in direct negotiations and contact with Richard.

So they seem to have spent some time together, even in a spot that seems between enemy lines, as it were, between their camps, they set up a place where they would meet, and it seems like they even had, you know, song, you know, music, Arabic music, you know, they brought some performers because Richard was curious about, you know, Arabic music. They ended up having what sounds like a pretty interesting multicultural, multi-ethnic cuisine feast where they brought their delicacies from either side. And in this context, created something like a friendship, right? This is what the sources say.

Now, they understand that they're on warring sides. There's a lot of politics involved, even in this diplomatic relationship. and gift giving exchange. It's not just honest and innocent sort of companionship. It is sizing one another up, learning a little bit more about the other side. And all of the mirrors for princes, for example, or manuals of statecraft, both in medieval Europe and in the medieval Islamic world, talk about how important it is to trade envoys and what diplomatic envoys are for. there to represent you as strong and, you know, with all of these values of sobriety and courage and determination, but they're also at the same time, they're like spies to collect intelligence

information that might be useful to bring back to your court. So you're sizing up the other leader, their retainers, and so on. So we know that it was a sort of friendship because they might be trading gifts and enjoying one another's company and even developing some sympathies with one another, but there are also political stakes involved in this back and forth. I want to zoom in from the negotiations surrounding the marriage proposal to what the impact of the marriage proposal would have been if it had been carried out. So there's a couple of related points that I want to ask about. One is the power dynamic that would take place within that marriage.

How would the power dynamic between Saladin's brother and Richard the Lionhearted's sister have been, as a couple, within that marriage? How would the claims to Jerusalem have been sorted out by that marriage in terms of Christian and Muslim claims to Jerusalem? And just pulling out one point that I have Mark down here in my notes, can you talk about the role? of looking at this marriage is a marriage, again, potential marriage, one that was unrealized, of parody and reconciliation versus one of conquest and subordination. So I guess those are three semi-related questions. Can you tackle that? Well, I'll try to remember all of them, and I feel like I didn't really even get to Brett's question about the implications of it. But your follow-up is getting at some of those key points, which is, you know, what kind of

you know, what kind of marriage are we talking about and how would it have worked? And, you know, these are important questions and tried to wrestle with them. Obviously, the sources don't give you full access to everybody's thoughts on this. And it wasn't realized. So we have to think that there were certainly some barriers here that had to be overcome and weren't possible to overcome in the context of the crusade. So I think the first thing is to understand marriage was a very different kind of institution, right, from what we think of it, you know, today. This is about the time period where in medieval Europe, marriage is becoming developed

as a sacrament in the Catholic Church. So new ideas that are based on Christian ideals are being imputed to marriage in new ways or reinforcing what had always been, of course, the social relationship of uniting families, right? So there's less about these individuals, and typically it's about families creating alliances, and that's especially the case in what we might think of as diplomatic marriages

that, you know, solemnize and confirm or seal a political agreement, right? So there are a lot of questions that could have come up from a religious and cultural perspective that you have to say on some level would be overwritten by the needs of diplomacy and state agreement. So yes, of course, there are all those concerns, but if the two parties agree, then they will make it happen. And we see that there are other cases of marriages between Muslim and Christian rulers that create pacts or alliances, particularly in medieval Spain, where there were a lot of small principalities and polities that were competing with one another in the Iberian Peninsula. And sometimes Muslims and Christians would be allies against, you know, other Muslims and Christians

on either side of it, right? So you could have a very complex circumstance. The other issue is, well, what was really being imagined here? And here I'm, you know, I would say that it wasn't meant to be representing Muslim dominance in the relationship. As far as I can tell, as far as we can tell from the evidence, the way in which it was described and talked about in the Muslim sources was not celebrating it as a victory over the Latins, but as a resolution of the conflict that would create a noble marriage, a royal marriage, between, you know, very highly ranked figures who would have co-sovereignty in some ways over a combined kingdom that would combine, as I said, territories that were formerly under Muslim rule, as well as maintaining the nobility of the Latin Crusader kingdoms on their, you know, conquered estates and so on.

It was not saying that they all had to leave, but rather that they would have a sovereign themselves who was a Latin Christian and that they could keep their religion, keep their status within a new combined polity with Joan of Sicily as queen of Jerusalem and as their ruler in this kind of combined kingdom. One kingdom with these two rulers of different confessions representing sovereignty for the Christians and sovereignty for the Muslims. That's at least how it seems to be imagined and how it's discussed in those sources. And we think that because there are other occasions where some of these Arab Muslim sources, the same chronicler that looks at it very much as a question of parity, talked about the subordination of those that had been conquered and that included that many of these women were taken and sort of enslaved or enrolled as concubines into the households of Muslim. warriors as war captives right that's the kind of thing that could happen and in this case it was

not happening because instead it was imagined as you know somehow representing a parity among the two the two communities and the two armies so just a quick follow-up so again we're talking about this this shared claim to jerusalem right as a result of this potential marriage but i also want to throw on just one other wrinkle into that to allow you to kind of branch outwards as well as dive deeper. So my question is regarding the commonality of cross-confessional marriages at this time. So one thing that you mentioned in this paper is that the first king of Navarre had arranged for the marriage of his daughter to this Al-Mansur, who was the Muslim leader of Kordoba. and that had taken place prior to this.

And I'm just curious because it's not mentioned in here, and I'm wondering if you have any information on it, were these cross-confessional marriages relatively commonplace at this time, at least in the Iberian Peninsula, which, again, that would be where the King of Navarre was located, was in the Iberian Peninsula. Were they common, at least in that location at the time? And when they took place, was it mostly these kind of transactional marriages

or diplomatic marriages? or were they more common just generally at this time than we would generally perceive? Keeping in mind that, you know, record keeping at this time perhaps was not the greatest. Well, that is the problem, is that obviously we don't know a lot about common everyday people lower down the hierarchical social order. And even nobles, you don't always get a lot of information about them. You know, they can't memorialize their life. You know, it's not like today where everybody writes, you know, autobiographies or there's so much record keeping or there's social media, you know,

like somebody wants to do biographical work on the modern people. There's too much information. We know too much. We've made so much public and recorded, whereas that's exactly the opposite cases for this period where only, you know, major land transactions or something that would come to the notice of a chronicler in a monastery or serving in a court. And thus they would pay attention to the deeds of the upper nobility, the monarchs, and so on. So what we know about in terms of cross-confessional marriages typically comes from episodes that conclude a major political conflict, make an alliance or a treaty or a pact. And while I wouldn't say that this was the norm of cross-confessional marriages to ratify or seal

alliances, it did happen regularly enough that we know it was an option available within the political culture and that it was regarded as legitimate to do this, right? So I would say that it happened frequently enough that it's a feature of a multi-religious society with multiple different polities or, you know, fiefdoms that where in order to conclude agreements, they need to find ways to have agreements be respected across confessional and religious lines. So, you know, and this is the same, you know, even in intra-Christian or intra-Muslim kinds of alliances, you would have marriages, you would have oaths, people making oaths on what's pious and are holy to them to say that they would adhere to the terms of the agreement and so on.

So this is one technique that was available. It's just that it wasn't that common, obviously, in the Latin Crusader kingdoms for maybe a couple of reasons. One is that they had a much shorter history of interreligious contact and cross-cultural encounter. We're really only speaking about 1099 to the 1290s, 1291. And also that the nature of those polities that were forged out of some concept of holy war obviously tended to polarize confessional identity and religious identity and difference in ways that maybe until you have the Reconquista as a clear ideology in the 13th century, you don't have in the Iberian Peninsula or other parts of the Mediterranean where there are mixed society. So that might have imposed some limits on it as well. One of the things that I think is interesting about what makes this possible is that during this time period, somewhat uniquely for Latin Christian polities, you know, airs did go through the female line very frequently.

There were a number of important queens of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, immediately preceding this marriage proposal. And as a result, maybe it wasn't so outlandish for the Latin Crusaders to think that having somebody like Joan of Sicily be their queen wouldn't be perfectly legitimate and normal because they had gone through several other cases of this of co-rulorship between the heir-designate

being the daughter of a former, you know, former king of Jerusalem who would be married to somebody outside of the ruling kind of strata or ruling family and would be a co-ruler. And we have right at the same time, we have Isabella who has married this noble Count Conrad of Montferrat, who is a real adventurer and is trying to take over the status as king of Jerusalem by marrying Isabella because she was. was the last remaining daughter of Amalric the first. So you have this as a norm that's possible in the kingdom of Jerusalem in particular. And if anything, marrying like an elite Muslim nobleman was not nearly as bad as Conrad of Montferrand, who was a twice adulterer. I mean, he had two previous marriage or two current marriages possibly. There are some rumors that he was married already to two women before he managed to intervene, break the marriage.

of Isabella and Humphrey of Toran and marry her himself. So that was pretty scandalous during that period. So this might not have been the most scandalous of the available political options at the time. So you've touched on, and Henry mentioned it as well, the role that Jerusalem played in these negotiations, but even more broadly, I'm really interested in maybe even connecting it up with the present.

In the negotiations, there seemed to be some ignorance on the side of Christendom, on the side of King Richard as to the role that Jerusalem played in Islamic history specifically. And Saladin put forward this idea that actually means more to us than it does to you Christians. And to this day, Jerusalem remains a sort of hot spot for religious and sectarian conflict. During the Trump administration, he moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem against Palestinian resistance. And right now in East Jerusalem, there are these.

settlements, people being kicked out of their house, and it's really sparked off this latest round of conflict and aggression between the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation. Rather than diving into the details of this negotiation, which you're free to do, I'm just wondering more broadly, what role does Jerusalem play in Christian history, and Islamic history, and if you want to touch on it, Jewish history as well? Well, that's a big question because it is, variously been understood as the central or most important symbolic site with its holy places for each of these three religions in various ways. And some of them can be easily reconciled in the sense that they're not on the same shrine. So for example, the church of the resurrection

that contains the holy sepulchre as the major christian object of devotion the tomb of of christ is obviously in a different spot within the within jerusalem whereas uh where al-aqsa the mosque al-aqsa mosque and the dome of the rock the you know really emblematic gold domed uh structure that are up on what jews consider and have in judaism uh considered the site of the Temple Mount where the Temple of Solomon existed. That's in the same place. So there you have some very competing and apparently irreconcilable if there's an aspiration like there is among extreme right-wing, you know, Zionist groups to rebuild the Temple of Solomon, which, of course, wasn't very important in diasporic, exilic Judaism because that was something that would happen

and only at the end of time with the return of the Messiah, where the temple would be rebuilt. But diasporic Judaism remembered the importance of the temple would often go and visit the remains on pilgrimage in Jerusalem, but didn't really have the aspiration of itself building that temple. But now with extreme right-wing groups, they would like to destroy the Al-Azza and Dome of the Rock and rebuild the Temple of Solomon. So we have competing kinds of claims, and that has bedeviled the history of Jerusalem over this long period. The reason why I was interested in this episode is because it seemed that there was a willingness to try and find a way to accommodate multi-religious sovereignty in the city. And that's really what these conflicts are about is religiously based ideas of political sovereignty. That's the way in which they want to express it, is control over the city, control over the holy places.

And the very idea that some other religious community has access or has control over religious sites or has autonomy in the city is somehow undermining of this full and complete sovereignty that they wish for. So that's what was so interesting here is that by the end of their, by the end of the Third Crusade, it seems that Richard, and Salaheddin both acknowledge some kind of principle that the other religious community has to have access to their holy sites and even some of their own independent administration of them, that this has to be portrayed and represented somehow meaningfully in a shared sovereignty and some kind of mixed sovereignty system. And that's why in concluding the Third Crusade, even though this marriage proposal didn't go through with the full kind of one kingdom solution that, you know, we sort of imagine they might be considering by the end, the actual

treaty that ends the Third Crusade acknowledges Christian access of pilgrims to their holy sites and was willing to afford, you know, some kind of control and some sort of territory within Jerusalem as under Christian Christian control. So when we come to today, I think it's very instructive in some ways to see medieval people in the midst of Holy War being able to contemplate more cosmopolitan and accommodating solutions than a lot of the actors in our present time. It's really quite stunning that the kinds of nationalism that we're witnessing and dealing with that are religiously based here are really very exclusivistic. And the medieval world, there might have been aspirations to these sorts of things, but it was not really possible

to just get rid of your opponents. That was not easy to do. But now with like technology and surveillance and modern military and, you know, it seems that people feel that it may be possible to utterly dominate control and eliminate an opponent. And that is what is emboldening, it seems to me, a real culture of impunity. And that is very dangerous and lead to extreme, you know, major consequences. And that's why something different about today is that, you know, I think the fact that Israeli police forces allowed and encouraged some of these right-wing groups to Jewish groups to go in, Zionist groups, to go in and intimidate kind of Muslim worshippers, you know, on the, at Al-Axa,

and to actually tear gas people in prayer in the Al-Aksa mosque during the last days of Ramadan at one of the most, like, holy nights, the 27th night of Ramadan is considered the holiest night during the year. And then, you know, the celebration at the end of the, at the, you know, fast of Ramadan, the Edil Fitter celebrations have been completely marred under, you know, bombardment of Gaza and so on. And this is being broadcast to Muslims globally, you know, 1.5 Muslim, a billion Muslims around the world. And where in the last, like, decade or so, we've seen perhaps a waning of political state powers of Muslim governments expressing solidarity for the Palestinians and caring for Palestinian human rights, witnessing, for example, the recent agreements by the United Arab Emirates or Bahrain that have essentially sacrificed the Palestinian cause for their own expediency, geopolitical, and for commercial agreements and so on, whereas people may have thought,

well, solidarity among Muslim governments in the Middle East and so on is waning for the Palestinian cause. The fact that they have done this on at al-Axa during Ramadan and during the Eid ends up recreating, you might say, the concerns that Muslims globally have in it. So that was certainly, we'll see whether this has more consequences, but I think the whole history of the politics of these sacred sites is something that is easily exploitable in the contemporary and inflaming, you know, greater attention and greater interest in, you know, the Palestinian struggle here by Muslims who maybe for the last decade or so have not been prioritizing the Palestinian struggle for, freedom and liberation and their human rights in the way that they had perhaps in the past. That might return as a result.

Before we totally shift into talking about the contemporary issues and how this potential one kingdom solution of the past could be applicable to modern society, before we get into that, there is one other historical topic that I want to bring up from this piece. Before we jump into that, and Brett, if you have any other historical, based, you know, follow up after this before we shipped into the contemporary issues. But one thing that I'm curious of having re-explained to me, I guess, and just as a brief aside, Adnan, as I had told you previously, during my undergrad, I was in the Middle Eastern Student Association and I went to at least 100 seminars in conjunction with that organization

and probably close to a dozen dealt with the topic of jihad and the misconceptions of jihad. So, yeah, NSA is listening to this podcast now because I'm mentioning going to seminars about jihad. But yes, it's true I went to about a dozen of them, kind of demystifying the concept and the historic meaning of jihad versus what it's currently constructed as both in religious fundamentalist groups as well as how the West. view was jihad. But you mentioned in this piece something that I heard about in one of the seminars, but really I don't remember it very well, which is

this concept of neo-jihad that was surrounding, it was in the mood of the people surrounding this Third Crusade. Can you remind me and let the listeners know about what this spirit of neo-jihad was all about at the time? Sure, yeah.

I mean, I did mention a little bit about crusading culture, crusading warfare as a concept of holy war and how this noble elite adopted, you know, what kinds of attitudes came with it, right? Is this, was valuable in understanding the perspective of the Latins. We should mention that there was during this period a revival of discourses on jihad or sanctifying, you know, struggle as a kind of counter-crusading, movement. When they, you know, Muslim commentators noticed that there were a lot of religious symbols involved with the crusader armies. They, when they captured the city, they, you know,

were having difficulty with the siege. So they brought out relics and processed, you know, in a holy fashion for, you know, some period of time. And their symbols and the fact that their slogans, battle cries were dais LeVolt, right? God wills it. So Muslims in response figured that there's this religious zeal in forming the crusade movement and crusade armies. And so they worked to revive concepts of holy war that had not been that important or popular for several centuries since the early Muslim conquests. And so that's why it's called the Neo-Jihad, is this kind of revival and reformulation of ideas of religiously sanctified struggle in response to the Crusades.

And jihad means struggle. So it means extending effort. And it was a word that was, it's not very common in the Quran, actually, but later Muslim commentators developed this concept as a, you know, as a mode of military struggle. as well as internal struggle, right? So it could be, so there's a famous hadith or statement of the prophet that, you know, the lesser of the concepts of struggle of jihad

is, you know, waging war or fighting in self-defense. It's like the physical battling. And the greater jihad is this turn inward to perfect the soul, right? So you have this kind of relationship between this religious concept of struggle, and that it can be directed in different manners. And so there were all kinds of rules and conventions

on how legitimate military struggle, a kind of concept of just war developed. And this is one era or episode in that history of changing ideas and implementations of this doctrine and this legal formulation to combat the evident religious enthusiasm of the crusades. So it was kind of a counter-crusading motif.

and discourse, which is important for contemporary people in this sort of global war on terrorism era to understand that there have been lots of different views on it, that there are different epochs and uses of it historically that it hasn't always been a very important or significant part of Muslim religious devotion, but that in certain periods for self-defense or seeing that over history during the colonial era, there were jihads called, for example, in West Africa to fight against the British or the French. And so it has had these different meanings at different times. It's somewhat, you could somewhat compare it to Crusade on some level, but it has a much broader set of significations that include some of these that are really

abandoning the world in order to, you know, struggle with oneself in a spiritual perspective as well. So it has all of those ranges of meaning and possibility. Yeah, it's incredibly interesting, fascinating history. The existence of the crusade gives rise to this counterforce simultaneously to its emergence, which is, you know, interesting in dialectical terms. But I want to kind of shift and move towards the present. We've certainly, hinted at contemporary relevances for this discussion and you named the essay itself the one kingdom solution which is clearly this sort of illusion or gesture to the concept of a one state solution versus a two state solution. I'll probably like start this just with a couple thoughts

of my own and toss it over to you all to hear your thoughts. You know, we often hear in the U.S. particularly the this idea of the two state solution. It's almost like the only other option other than what we're seeing with conflict and aggression is a two-state solution. But in so many ways, it sort of accepts the premises of Israeli settler colonialism. It accepts the displacement of Palestinians from their land, at least huge chunks of it, etc. We can go down the line why this two-state solution is not really a viable option at all. And what's being put up in its place or a counter idea is this one-state solution, that no, we don't need two separate states, but rather people of different religions can live in community if everybody has equal human rights, equal civil rights, equal representation, and that would require the annihilation of the contradiction between colonized and colonizer.

Now, a lot of the ways, especially in the West and amongst ignorant people, and even like lots of liberals that this conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is set up is as if the primary contradiction is religious, right? is as if the primary contradiction is between Muslims and Jews. And that is not the case at all. The primary contradiction is between the colonizer and the colonized. And the secondary contradictions are sort of downstream effects of that primary contradiction, which I just think is important to keep in mind, especially as you wade through the rhetoric in America around this conflict. So just I guess I'm throwing out there if you want to talk about why you named it that

and your ideas on the one state versus two state solution. Yeah, no, I agree completely with you that there's a failure of imagination and thinking that the only possible way to resolve this is the two-state solution. And, of course, as many commentators have pointed out, that that may never have been the best solution, certainly not the one that fulfills commitments to universal human rights, recognizes the principles of the right of return of refugees, and so on, but it certainly seems impossible now under the current circumstances of renewed

colonization in occupied territories that it's very hard to imagine how with the current facts on the ground one could really separate these peoples into two separate nations and two separate states and countries. And of course, whether that's even desirable. The reason why it's not considered desirable and not, you know, part of the political, you know, discourse that's acceptable is because we are accepting the presumptions typically when we're talking about it of the need for an ethnic, exclusive Jewish state, right? I mean, if you accept that, then, of course, there's no way to imagine anything other than either the current situation or, at best, two separate States. But what you were alluding to, and what I think we were trying to get to in this article

and by calling it the One Kingdom solution is saying, well, you know, might there not be the possibility for a more inclusive arrangement that respects sovereignties and cultures and religions that are different but doesn't politicize them, right? So the question is, is really how do you have shared in multiple sovereignty so that people do feel that they have control over, you know, what's important to them, but doesn't put one community in a dominant position over others that undermines their equal human rights, right, and in political rights. And so that's what we were trying to imagine and found in this episode a way to think through, at least through this mirror of the medieval, which we would think would be so less advanced and progressive and equitable

because we're thinking about religion as exclusivist forms of identity that are irreconcilable and irresolvable. And it's partly because people today constantly try and frame it in religious terms, as you pointed out, Brett, that they want to ignore the politics of what happens with a settler or colonial project, what it means to have a colonizer and colonized and to dispossess a people and to continue to rule over them and deny them political and human rights, and think that it's our irresolvable because these religious communities could never reconcile. And so what we were thinking about was that here you have a case of medieval religious figures who were able to imagine a kind of political solution that respected,

different religious identities, but that was operating on the principle of some kind of parity and shared sovereignty. So it's not that this was a model for what we should do for today. Obviously, we don't want kings, we don't want queens, we don't need any of those sort of hierarchical forms, but if we're really to see a solution to the situation, I like you, think that we have to respect, start from the position of everybody's human rights, then you work and build for what else you can do to accommodate those, but you cannot have one community enjoying full political citizenship and rights and another being dispossessed and no reparations, no, you know, a resolution for the historic claims that they have that have been denied through settler colonial

dispossession. So the perspective that I'm coming to this from is one of, of course, my ultimate goal is a classless, stateless society, understanding, you know, I'm not a utopian. I know that we're nowhere near that right now. But I, based on that being my end goal, you know, at some point in the distant future, I have a problem with the idea of forcibly constructing multiple ethno states rather than a multi-confessional state based on human rights, as you were mentioning Adnan. So I'm just chipping in with my two cents that, you know, I agree with everything that's being said here. But as somebody who obviously is far more knowledgeable in the situation and the region more broadly than I am, how would a unitary, or not unitary, but a single state

solution look like in your eyes, you know, not asking you to play, you know, fix the Middle East here. But when we're, if we wanted to take this perspective of let's center human rights and ensure that everyone in the area has those same rights and those same protections. What is the political structure of something like that look? Because, again, you know, I have problems trying to think through this problem, just not knowing as deeply on this issue as I wish that I did and hopefully someday will. Well, you know, as you say, this is authority issue where you're not going to have, you know, a simple solution, a program of action that we could just, you know, say, here's your constitution,

here's your political structure of the government now just implemented. But, you know, one thing that I do think is important is that so much of this discussion is often done in the abstract and is waged as like, well, how would you do this? And how would you reconcile this? And, you know, and partly that is an abstract exercise that foregrounds the problems rather than the possibilities. because you have to start with some real possibilities that come from recognizing everybody's human rights. And that's where I would start. The reason why I would want to start there

is because clearly, because of the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and even globally, especially in the modern world, but it has deep roots in, you know, Europe's treatment of its religious and ethnic others that it couldn't bring into full citizenship. And as a result,

we had persecution of Jews as Jews, you know, for centuries that obviously that history requires that you recognize that there be some kind of safe haven and homeland where they have the right to be Jewish and free from persecution, right? That's just something that has to be acknowledged because of our history. And frankly, part of the reason also of bringing in the crusader period, is one thing is people think that these problems have just been the same and were irresolvable for a thousand years, when, of course, we can see that we're talking about very different kinds of conflict at different stages. But the other part is that very often in the U.S. and in Europe, we think, well, this is dealing with them.

Jews and Muslims, and they can't get along and resolve this difference, and forgetting about our own complicity and long history in the region, whether it was under the British and the mandate period and creating some of the problems in the shape that they are existing today, or even if you go back to the, you know, medieval period, is that the first Zionists in some ways are, you know, the Christians because they want to come and establish a sacred polity that represents their particular orientation in the Holy Land,

and they colonize this area. It's really quite an analogy in some ways with what happens, with European Jews coming and establishing during the era of colonialism, a settler colonial polity there. But if we start with that recognition, but say that that can't be to the exclusion of others' rights, but acknowledge it, you can start building from there some kind of, you know, binational, you know, that recognizes Hebrew and Judaism as an official language and religion and also Islam and Christianity and Arabic, you know, as an official language and religion, and do it on the basis of one person, one vote. I mean, it's a very simple principle. If we keep with the principles of

justice and say, you know, democracy requires everybody have one person, one vote. Nobody's going to be privileged in this in this circumstance and you have to bring all the people back you know and ask them that's the other thing is seldom do we actually ask um Palestinians who have been made refugees of the conflict since 1948 well what do they want you know we talk about it in the abstract could we do this oh no we can't have the right river of return because that would destroy the you know how would that be accommodated and all of that to start from the principle that they it has to be recognized. That's a principle of justice. Then actually go ask people what do they want and try and repair the situation that way rather than foreclosing and forestalling the discussion

by making objections to abstract, you know, arrangements. I'm a historian, so I like to go with the evidence. What, you know, what do people actually want? And nobody has asked them, really. I think that's part of the problem with why these things have been unresolved. Nobody wants to ask them because they're afraid, you know, they want to have the objection that it's impossible to satisfy, you know, their demands. And that's how these negotiations have gone and prevent a solution is just by positing, it would be impossible to meet the other side's demands without actually saying, well, what are those demands? What do they want? How do we solve this situation? Yeah, great, great points all around. And speaking a little bit more to Henry's

question imagining the future classless stateless societies our goal how do we get there certainly breaking already existing nation states or areas into ethno-nationalist little territories is a step backwards whereas moving toward a unified sort of society based in human rights is a step toward the goal that we want to get to and you know the problem of of not realizing that there's these intermediary steps and thinking about how to move forward as opposed to backward toward the right direction, you know, there are people on the left that have these idealist or utopian or even a priori commitments that muddy the waters around their analysis and lead down dead ends. And one of those is this sometimes on the anarchist side of things,

not always, but sometimes you can hear this idea that Palestinian state or any talk of even a one-state solution is a non-starter for them because it involves a state and all states are bad. And you see how that hyper-simplistic, a priori analysis to a complicated historical process, just it leaves us nowhere. It gives us no direction to move in or, you know, any meaningful steps to take. And the other question here is, of course, of self-determination. Jewish people deserve it as much as Palestinians deserve it and vice versa. And, you know, the defense of Israeli settler colonial occupation can sometimes be dressed in the progressive language of self-determination for Jews. But if your quote unquote self-determination relies on the on the the the erasing of any possibility of

self-determination for a whole other group of people then it's not really self-determination in the progressive and revolutionary sense that we talk about it another point is of course the the rhetoric around what's going on and as you mentioned aden on this idea of that they've been fighting for millennia and it's almost like throwing your hands up in the air and liberals are just as guilty of this as conservatives of like well what can you do you know they've been fighting forever and i think it's an outgrowth of this idea that it's really about judaism and Islam as the primary contradiction and so how can you really solve that um you know and whenever you hear that you know on media i would your suspicion should turn on your ears should perk up hold on what do you mean by that

because it's a lazy way out of of the conversation and then this idea also that israel has a right to exist which joe biden just came out recently and and said out loud and you hear that all the over and over again. Israel has a right to exist. One, I think it's interesting, just the very idea that a state has a right to exist. I mean, by what framework is that right granted, particularly an ethno-nationalist state has a right to exist? That completely obscures the right for Palestinians to have any say over their life, any democratic voice in these proceedings, and any self-determination themselves. So these are things that when you hear you should become suspicious of and a little plug podcast citations needed did a really interesting episode recently

debunking five talking points that you hear when these conflicts really become acute and break out and they dismantle them one by one so if you're interested in more of this sort of rhetoric and how the media in the west obscures the realities on the ground i would recommend that i don't really have a question other than to put those things on on the table and i would love anybody That's a great point about the states having a right to exist. Did the apartheid state of South Africa have a right to exist? Now, obviously, South African peoples have a right to exist. They have all kinds of human rights that we would all want to respect.

That includes whites and blacks. And that was the ANC's position and solution was that everyone should have equal rights as citizens of South Africa. But you wouldn't say that South Africa had a right to exist as an exclusive white, you know, state under apartheid, nor would you say that the United States in the U.S. South or, you know, as a result of its three-fifths rule and its constitution has a right to exist. I mean, it has to change if it's to exist to accommodate principles of universal human rights, right? So that's a tricky thing that when they say Israel has a right to exist, they mean it has a right to maintain its exclusivist Jewish Zionist character that makes sure

that others who don't enjoy this ethnic and religious identity don't have equal rights under the law or in politics. Obviously, that's not something if you actually think of what it means, you would realize that you can't really approve that on principled grounds. So I guess I'll ask the final question and then odd nonsense, since you've been answering all of our questions, we'll give you the opportunity to just give the listeners your final word, take home message, whatever you want them to take home at the end of this conversation. But first, I've got a question, and this is for both of you,

because it's tangentially related to something that had been brought up in the last couple of questions, which is how do we move past the current construction? How do we move past this dogmatic ideal of a two-state solution? How do we move towards eventually a stateless class of society? All of this. And the thing that comes to my mind is, and I'm asking you to play France Fanon here, both of you, how do we reconcile the fact that, as you mentioned, Brett, the Palestinians are colonized people. The Israelis are colonizers in this situation.

whether you're, you know, a two-state solution proponent, one-state solution proponent, whatever, you have to admit. I mean, that's a starting point. You have to admit that the Palestinians are colonized peoples living in a colonized land, colonized by the Israelis. If you don't start from that starting point, you're missing the point. And that is the principal conflict, as you stated, and that is a very important thing for people to understand. However, and this is the question then, as we're trying to move forward, forwards to a egalitarian society with equal rights for everybody, something based on human rights, universal human rights, regardless of their confession, regardless of their ethnicity, their race,

their place of origin, et cetera, et cetera. As we move towards that, we're going to inevitably run into the issue that the Palestinians as a colonized people have had this psychological trauma as a result of being colonized people. And the Israelis psychologically have this impact of being a colonizing people. How do we reconcile that psychological, I don't want to say trauma, because it's only traumatic for the Palestinians, of course, in this instance. But how do we reconcile these psychological differences as a result of colonization of this region in order to move past the current construction and move past this in I think all of our eyes inadequate to state solutions so whoever wants to take that first please play france fanon for me i can i can throw out some initial

thoughts clear this is very very complicated um you know that the psychology of it is very interesting and when you have a settler colonial society trying to maintain its hegemony it gives rise to fascism it gives rise to what we're seeing in israel and these in the form of settlers themselves becoming a violent extension of the apartheid occupying state. Mob violence, brutal beatings, you know, the other night the mob violence of destroying Palestinian businesses, hearkening back to ironically Crystal Knock and how that played out in the Weimar Republic transitioning into Nazi Germany. You know, that core contradiction gives rise to a certain psychology on the Israeli far right

that seems impossible to overcome without the annihilation of that contradiction between colonizer and colonized that gives rise to it in one place to start, as in so many of these instances, and it's very true for the U.S. too, if it ever wants to mature enough to begin facing its own brutal history, is reparations for the past material harm that has been caused, and then the psychological aspects of it are much more difficult, but are, sort of come along with that broader process of healing of rec of recognizing past wrongs of having this genuine discussion rooted in egalitarian respect for each side about you know the the really true traumas that jewish people have faced for millennia and particularly during world war two and the very real traumas that palestinians have faced as a result of their jewish occupation and of their their land and becoming an apartheid state and their ongoing genocide and oppression. No easy answers here, but it takes a genuine effort to get beyond the colonizer colonized dichotomy, first of all, a genuine effort to take admission of the historical wrongs and

seek to write them as much as is possible, which is never fully possible, but as much as is possible. And then that creates, that clears the field, if you will, to have a genuine in discussion about how to move forward as equals. But, yeah, beyond that, I don't have the answers. Well, those were some great answers. I can't add much. I would say that the reparations piece is really important because it's acknowledging principles of justice,

admitting and acknowledging historical wrongs that were committed and then trying to do something about them. And I think that's also an important component of the psychological rebuilding, the culture that needs to be created is one where we rewrite these historical narratives. Because right now, each community has its own narrative about what this 48 and beyond means for them. And there needs to be a new narrative that can acknowledge what's happened and allows each side to be able. able to understand something in a much more complex way, you know, I think it's very hard, for example, to ask in these circumstances for Palestinians to recognize the problem of anti-Semitism. However, it's important to recognize and understand that that's the experience

that made them victims and thus because of Zionism and colonialism turned them then into oppressors. And though there has to be some way of elongating the perspective to be able to acknowledge that wrongs were done to the Jews that force them to, you know, need someplace as a safe haven, that that does not legitimize in any way what has happened in dispossessing the Palestinians. But if you're going to create a reconciled one society, one state, it's going to have to be built on some acknowledgement that not the fault of the Palestinians, but they have to understand that that's why there is this kind of paranoid, you know, sense of persecution that has led them, you know, something that Mahmoud Mamdani

talked about in some of his work, famous and important political science, Marxist political scientist in a book, when victims become killers, is, you know, you have this traumatizing of the oppressor, you know, that they then think that the solution to their, and the trauma that they have experienced is to then become a full subject by colonizing others, because this is the sick sort of ideology of Western European colonial nationalism was that you, you know, Jews cannot become full subjects and full citizens within Europe. We won't allow you to. We don't recognize you as equals.

We'll still marginalize you. So in order for you to become full citizens, full political subjects, you have to go somewhere else is what they thought. You have to go create your own state and not just create your own state, be a conquering people, enter into history in this martial way. And that is the problem that we're dealing with is it's one particular way of having responded to millennia of oppression and racism is that the Palestinians have been made victims. of that for other people's anti-Semitism. And that's, I think, the real injustice of the situation. So when we move to a solution, that history has to be understood as well in this environment. But I think the bigger problem is that Zionists have to understand, you know,

Palestinians having been made victim of a kind of form of Jewish nationalism or Jewish supremacy and how wrong that is, because many will not. recognize as a result of their own history that they are colonizers. And, you know, in the 1960s, 50s and 60s, Zionism was portrayed sort of internally, and it was accepted very often in Europe and North America as a kind of liberation movement because obviously it was responding to European and North American anti-Semitism. But that is such a perversion, you know, of the era of the 50s and 60s liberation struggles. But there were people who genuinely were so confused that they thought that this was like this era of liberation struggles.

So the last thing that just I would say in conclusion is really coming back to our audience in Europe, North America, you know, we tend to think that we're not involved. This doesn't really concern us so much. But we are totally complicit in this situation. the support military and other financial aid and diplomatic cover and support from the United States in particular makes every American citizen involved, whether they want to have been or not. And that's something that we have to realize that Americans have a role to play in dismantling this terrible oppressive occupation and that our government could put pressure upon the Israeli government to recognize Palestinian human rights merely by making conditional all of the support that we've been providing over the years

to the tunes of billions upon billions of dollars in military support, selling them weapons, providing them intelligence, being their greatest protectors from international law and being subject to the international criminal court. If we actually practiced our supposed commitments to international law, both for ourselves and for the allies that we allow to violate it, then this situation wouldn't be so long-lasting. That's a great note to end on, I think. So thanks, Adnan.

Why don't you tell the listeners how they can find this essay that, again, and you and Professor Margaret Popano wrote if it is, you know, easily accessible for them. Well, it's called the One Kingdom Solution, Diplomacy, Marriage, and Sovereignty in the Third Crusade. And it's in a collection called cosmopolitanism in the Middle Ages. So you can look up that title and find this essay in that book. Excellent. And I highly recommend it. It was a very fun read as a matter of I know that, you know, reading about a called off marriage during the Third Crusade may not sound like the sexiest reading topic in the world, but actually it was a very

enjoyable read and very informative. So thank you, Adnan, and thank, thanks to Professor Margaret Papano for writing this essay because I did learn quite a bit from it, and it was very thought-provoking. So thanks for that. Now that we wrap up, why don't we have you each tell the listeners how they can find you on social media and the projects that you're doing? Adnan, why don't we start with you? How can the listeners find you on social media and your other podcast? Well, they can find me on Twitter at Adnan A-Husain, H-U-S-A-I-N, and also check out the

Mudjilis, M-A-J-L-I-S, my other podcast on Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim Diasporic, histories, cultures, and so on. We're going to be interviewing, for example, in an upcoming episode in a week or two, Dr. Timothy Brennan, who wrote this new biography of the great Edward Said, places of mind. And so we'll be talking with him about Edward Saeed and his study of him. Very timely, given the topic that we were just talking about in the current events. Brent, why don't we have you tell the listeners how they can find you on social media and all of the work that you do? Sure. One real quick point I wanted to make when we're talking about reparations and solving this historical issue. The U.S. and the Brits have a role to play

in the paying out of reparations. British colonialism was the starting point for this whole thing, and U.S. government has and continues to fund the occupation in brutal, brutal ways. So they have a role to play in the paying of reparations process, not just putting it all on Israel. That's a very important point. Excellent. For sure. And I think that would go to meaning solve some of these issues in a broader way and not feel like it's just Israeli Jews that have a culpable role here. But for my show,

you can go to Revolutionary Left Radio.com, find all the shows on Red Menace. We have an episode coming out later this week on settler colonialism, and what we're going to do is we're going to go back and through the text that we've already covered on Red Menace, pull out so many lessons, and apply them to the current situation with Palestine

and U.S. settler colonialism, how it feeds into Israeli settler colonialism, et cetera. And on Rev. Left, I got on Julie Reza Cole to talk about her book, Epidemic Empire, which covers centuries of the metaphors and languages around plagues and contagions and how they feed into the war on terrorism, colonialism, Orientalism, and racism. And we touch on the current conflict as well in that episode. So if you're at all interested in that, check that out as well. I can already tell off the top of my head, just thinking about the metaphors that I know regarding epidemics and infectious disease, that World War II and the Nazis are going to be fairly prominently featured in that episode. It's just a guess on my part.

I think you'll really like it too because she takes the science of epidemiology very seriously throughout the text. And it's fascinating. Excellent. Looking forward to it. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck. 1995. You can find me on Patreon where I write about immunology and public health, patreon.com forward slash Huck1995. And as for our show, Gorilla History, you can find us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A,

2-R-S, underscore pod. And you can support the show on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history, again, with two R's. And I will mention, we also are uploading our videos now, or the audio, onto YouTube. You can find all of those previously uploaded audio files on YouTube on the Rev Left Radio YouTube channel. And we recently just made an Instagram page that we're dipping our toe into. You can find that Gorilla with 2R's underscore history because Gorilla underscore Pod was not available. So I don't know. Somebody decided Gorilla underscore Pod was going to be their handle. And it's not us, sadly. But in any case,

You can follow us there. Always appreciate seeing things that our listeners are doing. So on that note, we're going to close that out, and we'll be back on Friday. This Friday, we'll be dropping a full episode with Nick Estes. So be sure to keep your eyes peeled for that. So until then, listeners, solidarity. You know what I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.