Part One: The Origins of Terror in Palestine

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards

Episode: Part One – The Origins of Terror in Palestine

Host: Brett Weinstein
Guest: Dr. Donna Al-Kurd
Date: August 4, 2026
Duration: ~74 minutes

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode explores the complex origins of conflict in Palestine, tracing the roots of modern "terror" and violence to nationalistic, economic, and demographic changes during the late Ottoman era and early Zionist migrations (1880s–1940). The hosts aim to deconstruct the myth that the region's tensions are ancient, perpetual, or solely religious, and instead focus on how relatively recent waves of nationalism, imperial collapse, and migration transformed intercommunity relations and identities in the Holy Land.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Debunking Myths: Conflict Is Not Ancient or Primarily Religious

• Widespread Western Assumptions:

  • The dominant narrative claims the Palestinian conflict is age-old and religious in nature.
  • Brett: "If you go back to 1880, you can get a really good grounding and everything that's really relevant to the conflict today. Like, it's not that ancient, right?" (03:06)
  • Donna: "Anytime I talk about this or anytime I teach about this, like, my main takeaway is, like, this is a very recent conflict... and it's about nationalism." (03:12)

• Shared Life Before Nationalisms:

  • Under Ottoman rule, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in close proximity and often solidarity.
  • Identities like “Palestinian” or “Arab Jew” had different, fluid meanings.

• Notable Quote:

  • "The residential courtyards of the Jews and Muslims were common. We were like one family. We were all friends. Our mothers poured out their hearts to Muslim women, and they poured out their hearts to our mothers.” – Yakov Yehoshua, Jewish resident of Jerusalem (10:09)

2. Social Structures, Identities, and Early Communities (Ottoman Era)

• Linguistic & Cultural Fluidity:

  • "Arab Jews," "Sephardic Jews," and "Mizrahim" categories were common and more inclusive.
  • In places like Hebron, Jewish communities spoke Arabic, not just Ladino.
  • Sephardic Jews and Muslim Arabs sometimes bonded over shared displacement from Iberia.
  • Donna: “And there's this category also, Mizrahim, that kind of lumps Arab and Middle Eastern Jews... especially after the creation of the State of Israel.” (09:18)

• Common Adversary:

  • The Ottoman state was a distant, often oppressive authority, facilitating solidarity across faiths.

• Persistence of Slavery:

  • Slavery lingered into the late 19th century and was practiced across communities, not bound to one religion or class. (15:16)
  • Donna: "And they consider themselves Palestinian today?"
  • Brett: "Yeah, absolutely." (16:10)

3. The Rise of Zionism and European Nationalism

• Triggering Events:

  • Pogroms in Russia (e.g., 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II) spurred Jewish migration and the consolidation of Jewish nationalism.
  • Only about 3% of Jews fleeing Russian violence came to Palestine—the majority went elsewhere.

• Zionism as European Nationalism:

  • Zionism was deeply influenced by other nationalist movements (Polish, German), and many early Zionists were left-wing, labor-focused, or self-defense driven.
  • Analogous nationalist slogans between Poles and Jews illustrated shared motivations for self-determination, but with crucial differences (Poles fighting for ancestral land, most Zionists were outsiders to Palestine).
  • Brett: "You can't separate this from all of the other movements at the time. Gordis makes a really good point of making, of writing in his biography of Begin..." (23:53)

4. Immigration Waves and Social Friction

• Aliyahs and Integration:

  • First and Second Aliyahs (1882, 1903–1914): Jewish migration to Palestine grows but is still a minority phenomenon.
  • Many newcomers fail to integrate, sparking conflict over land, labor, and culture.
  • Cities like Jaffa are economic magnets but become sites of increasing tension as European Jews establish exclusionary, European-styled enclaves (nucleus of Tel Aviv).

• Conflict Is Not Solely Muslim-Jewish:

  • Native-vs-immigrant (including between Arab Jews and Ashkenazim) tensions were often sharper than religious divides.
  • Memorable exchange:
    • Brett: "The conflict is not like a Muslim Jewish conflict. It is a native immigrant conflict. Right? Like that's what's happening here." (30:24)

5. Property, Economy, and Land Issues

• Land Purchases and Power Dynamics:
  • Large organizations (backed by wealthy families like the Rothschilds) purchased land for new Jewish immigrants, sometimes displacing native peasants (fellaheen).
  • Both Jewish and Arab elites engaged in speculative deals, sometimes facilitating the very processes they later condemned.
  • Narratives of Palestine as “empty” or “barren” are debunked by firsthand accounts and statistical evidence.
  • Brett: "The reality is that prior to the mid 20th century, the area is a lot less populated. But... there’s a population. And it’s not even... WWI takes a real bite out..." (54:05)
  • Donna: "They just didn't understand how these like, Falaheen, like, organized their land... There was absentee landlords, and it's a whole thing they didn't understand—or pretended to and didn’t care to." (46:47)

6. Nationalisms Collide and Social Integration Erodes

• Transformation of Social Life:
  • Increased migration, rising national consciousness, and foreign capital led to hardening ethnic and religious lines.
  • Leaders like Yosef Meuhas advocated for Jewish-Arab integration, seeing fellaheen as spiritual ancestors, but these views were marginalized as exclusionary settlement models took over.
  • Shared holidays and festivals among Muslims, Christians, and Jews began fading as boundaries hardened.
  • Jawariya’s account:
    • "It was a pre-nationalist era in which religious identity embraced the other in its festivals and rituals..." (55:00)
  • Donna: "Even in my lifetime… I've seen the progression of... lessening even more. Christian holidays, a lot of integration... We've seen a huge decline in that." (56:51)

7. Early Paramilitaries and the Escalation of Violence

• Organizations Like Hashomer:
  • The founding of Jewish paramilitaries, initially defensive, foreshadowed future militarization.
  • Slogans like “Judea was lost by blood and fire and will rise again by blood and fire” signaled an escalation of rhetoric. (65:35)

8. Complicity, Misjudgment, and Missed Warnings

• Elite Collaboration & Underestimation:

  • Prominent Arab families (like the Husseinis) sold land to Zionist organizations, failing to foresee long-term impacts.
  • Some voices (Najib Azouri, 1905) saw the inevitable clash between Jewish and Arab nationalisms, though most considered such fears exaggerated at the time.
  • Salim Al Husseini: "Zionism is not a political movement, but a settlement one. And I am certain that no intelligent and rational Zionist would consider the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine." (71:40)

• Rise of Hardline Zionism:

  • As the episode closes, focus shifts toward Vladimir Jabotinsky and the transition to right-wing, militant Zionism in the early 20th century.

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Notable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• "This is a very recent conflict...and it's about nationalism." – Dr. Donna Al-Kurd (03:12)
• "We were like one family...our mothers poured out their hearts to Muslim women, and they poured out their hearts to our mothers." – Yakov Yehoshua (10:19)
• "The conflict is not like a Muslim Jewish conflict. It is a native immigrant conflict. Right? Like that's what's happening here." – Brett Weinstein (30:24)
• "There’s a category also, Mizrahim, that kind of lumps Arab and Middle Eastern Jews..." – Dr. Donna Al-Kurd (09:18)
• "You can see these conflicts starting to breed, right. Even Yaakov Yehoshua...claimed that Ashkenazim tended to prefer their own courtyards, where they did not mix with Muslims or Arab Jews." – Brett Weinstein (37:35)
• “The idea that Jews lived as second-class citizens makes little sense in this context, because the idea of citizenship didn’t apply in the pre-modern Islamic world.” – Historian Daniel Schroeder (57:29)
• "Even in my lifetime, I've seen the progression of that lessening even more...a huge decline in (integration)." – Dr. Donna Al-Kurd (56:51)
• “Salim Al Husseini...argued that Zionism, ‘is not a political movement, but a settlement one. And I am certain that no intelligent and rational Zionist would consider the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine.’ Famous...not correct.” – Brett Weinstein (71:40)

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Important Timestamps (MM:SS)

• 00:06 – Podcast intro and framing of episode’s focus
• 03:00 – Myths about the conflict’s origins and duration
• 07:03 – Life in Ottoman Palestine; concept of Palestinian identity
• 09:18 – Discussion of “Mizrahim” and diversity within Jewish communities
• 15:14 – Slavery in Ottoman Palestine
• 19:13 – Rise of Zionist immigration after Russian pogroms
• 23:18 – Nationalism and cross-influences among movements
• 29:35 – Founding of Tel Aviv and economic exclusion
• 34:12 – Jewish communities become majority in Jerusalem; new social frictions
• 41:27 – Social integration, intercommunal relationships, and lived experiences
• 46:47 – Land use, fellaheen practices, and outsider misunderstandings
• 54:05 – Changing population and the “empty land” myth
• 56:51 – Decline of shared holidays and social integration (recent personal experience, Donna)
• 65:35 – Formation of Hashomer, escalation to defense organizations
• 71:40 – Misjudgment by local elites and pivotal moments before WWI

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Style & Tone

The episode blends rigorous historical analysis with personal anecdotes, primary-source vignettes, and sharp skepticism of official or propagandistic histories. The hosts emphasize complexity, ambiguity, and the lived realities of ordinary people, while maintaining irreverent humor.

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For Further Exploration

• Books Mentioned:
  • "Lives in Common"
  • "The Handbook on Arab Authoritarianism" (edited by Dr. Donna Al-Kurd)
  • Menachem Klein’s works
  • Daniel Gordis's biography of Menachem Begin
  • Ilan Pappé’s history of the Husseinis

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This episode offers a comprehensive, nuanced debunking of easy narratives, laying out the groundwork for understanding how Palestine became a land of division, and how both cultural richness and subsequent tragedy emerged from late imperial collapse and modern nationalism.

Transcript

[Brett Weinstein]

Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst or everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history. It's kind of the initial point, but we also go back to our name when looking at kind of the remit of this show. And one of the things we try to do is get like, behind the Bastards, including like the very worst people in the world today. And we've already done an episode on Benjamin Netanyahu prior to. To October 7th and kind of this most recent escalation into genocide in Gaza. And I didn't really feel like returning to Netanyahu. Well, was kind of thing the show does best, covering things that are currently happening and breaking news. That's kind of why we started. It could happen here. Yeah, yeah. And among other things in the last year or so, one of the best things we've done there is bring on Dr. Donna Al Kurd to help us report on and you know, not just stuff in Palestine, but you've done a lot of really good work for us, Dada. And so I wanted to bring you on as a guest and talk about a subject that I think is in your wheelhouse and also really important today. But thank you for coming back, Dennis.

[Guest or Ad Voice]

Should we call you Dr. Elkhard the whole episode?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

No, doctor, please don't do that. That would be super awkward.

[Brett Weinstein]

It is cool. I mean, yeah. But first off, how have you been? And. Yeah, pluggables and stuff.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah, no, I'm. I'm doing. I'm existing, you know, as many Palestinians are right now. But I'm happy that I edited this handbook called the Handbook on Arab Authoritarianism that just came out and it's open access. And so that has been a shining thing for me right now. So, yeah, thanks for asking.

[Brett Weinstein]

Oh, that sounds great. I can't wait to read that. I've been. I've been doing some I. For one of the things I read for this book, which is kind of about like the birth of terrorism in Palestine, the Holy Land, prior to the Nakba, prior to the establishment of the state of Israel. This episode, if you had like an education like me, because I remember as a kid most of what I was told about the series of conflicts there was that like, number one, it's been going on for thousands of years. That's always been happening. And number two, that it's like primarily religious and always has been primarily religious in dimension that like those are the two truths about it. And kind of when people are saying that one thing, they're kind of tacitly. Saying, I think, is that, like, Muslims and Jews can't live together. Right. Like, that is. They don't tend to directly say that, but that's what you're meant to believe. If those two first things are true. Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And that they're both crazy.

[Brett Weinstein]

None of this is news to you. And that they're both crazy.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

They can't live together, but they're also both crazy. Exactly.

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[Brett Weinstein]

And none of that's true to the conflict. Right. For one thing, this, you could. I mean, yeah, obviously stuff that happened in ancient times is relevant for a variety of reasons, just because history is never discreet. Right. But if you go back to 1880, you can get a really good grounding and everything that's really relevant to the conflict today. Right. I mean, maybe you disagree with that. If so, I yield to your experience. But that's kind of been sort of what I've come to feel like kind of reading into it, that that's a really good grounding and kind of everything relevant to the day starts in the late 1800s. Like. Like it's not that ancient, right?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

No, no, absolutely. Like, if I'm always. Anytime I talk about this or anytime I teach about this, like, my main takeaway is, like, this is a very recent conflict, and recent in the grand scheme of human history. And it's about nationalism.

[Brett Weinstein]

It's about nationalism.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

It really boils down.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, it's about nationalism and. Yeah. And one of the important things to understand is that prior to the outbreak, I mean, prior to a lot of things, I mean, Zionism being one of them, but nationalism, because it's, I mean, Arab nationalism and also European nationalism are deeply tied to all of this. Among other things, Jews and Muslims and Christians got along reasonably well in Palestine for that. Never. No multicultural society is ever completely devoid of conflict. Right. But there's a lot of. I mean, one of our sources for this is a book called Lives in Common that really goes into how different things used to be there and how the fundamental conflict has nothing to do with faith. Right. So I wanted to talk about that, how we got to kind of the point of no return before 1948 and before the Nakba. Right. How did things. And how did the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate kind of help push things along to the point of no return? Right. So that's, I think, what we're going to talk about this week because. Yeah, that's just. I was initially planning to do episodes a little bit different, probably on Menachem Biggin or on Vladimir Yavatinsky. But it just, it seemed to make more sense to cover it this way in part because I actually didn't feel like just focusing on like one, one guy and trying to like sort out like how things went so wrong through a single. It just didn't seem like the right way to do this.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

No, this is more comprehensive, I would say. Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, we'll see.

[Becca and Tanya (Podcast Hosts)]

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[Brett Weinstein]

So the story that I'm going to tell this week starts in the 1880s and ends around 1940 with a major terrorist bombing. That kind of sets the stage for a lot of stuff going on today. But to start, we need to go back to Palestine during the Ottoman era. And when we talk about this period, the first thing I need to get across is that people living in Palestine during, like, the 1800s and even the early 1900s would not have considered Palestinian a useful identity within the territory. Because if you're, like, Muslim, Christian or Jewish, you're still a palace. Like, no one. If, like, someone identifying themselves as a Palestinian would not tell you what they believed, what community they were a part of, necessarily. Right. In, like, 1870, you know.

[Becca or Tanya]

Yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, these were Ottoman provinces. They happened to be there. Yeah. Different communities happened to be there.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, in 1880 or so, the majority of residents in any city in Palestine would have identified as Arab, including most Jews. And this is not a category that you see a lot of people claim today, Arab Jew. Right. But for a very long time, there were large communities of Arab Jews spread throughout the Middle east and North Africa. And in some ways, these episodes are the story of why many of those communities cease to exist. Right. Because that's also very tied up in the state of Israel and the wars that happen as a result of that, all that stuff. Right. This is one of the communities that kind of, in a number of reasons, not purely ceases to exist, but it also gets transmuted. People stop identifying that way. Right. And when we talk about Arab Jews, there's a really. It seems to be kind of muddled distinction between that and, like, Sephardic Jews, where a lot of Sephardic Jews would have considered themselves Arab Jews and spoken Arabic primarily, but it kind of varied. Right. That was more common, as I understand it, in, like, Hebron, where the majority of the Jewish community in Hebron in this period was extremely Arabic and would have very rarely spoken kind of the language that most Sephard spoke, which is Spanish derived. We'll talk about that.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Like Ladino.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yes, Ladino. Right. It was noted, like, in Hebron, they would only use ladino in songs that, like, occasionally. Right. If there was, like, people in who might have been from, like, another city or something during, like, a religious celebration. Right. Whereas in Jerusalem, ladino was a lot more common. Right. So, you know, stuff like that, it is kind of a blurry distinction between Sephardic and Arab Jews.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And it's and there's this category also, Mizrahim, that kind of lumps Arab and Middle Eastern Jews from Iran and in Arab countries kind of all together, that becomes kind of a. A catch all term, I think, especially after the creation of the State of Israel.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yes, yes. And I, I'm not the best. I'm trying to kind of hopefully not screw this up too much. These are very complicated. You know, when we kind of talk about how these, the terms and how identity has shifted in these communities over this period of time, like, it's more than we'll totally get into today. But you need to understand that, like, among other things, when you're Talking about the 1880s in Palestine, when most Palestinians, be they Arab, you know, or Muslim or Christian or Jewish or whatever, if they were getting angry at a foreign power in those days, that power was the Ottomans, right? Like that was the enemy for a lot of basically everybody, right? Or it was like the ruler that you just kind of like assumed, well, you probably can't do any better than this. Right? This is just life.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

You know, you were upset about taxes, you were upset about the drugs, Right?

[Brett Weinstein]

Right, exactly. Exactly. And also the Ottomans are Turks, right? The rulers are foreigners. They're not Arab. And you know, their empire is a foreign one that's holding a lot of Arab sea. It's holding Arabs in some form of bondage. Right. And obviously a lot of, you know, Jewish people are not like the Jewish religion is not. Is also. Especially in parts of the, you know, it varies treatment in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, but they're not considered equal under the law. So they. And also Christians have a lot of issues with the Ottomans. But Arab nationalists, which are increasingly becoming a thing in the late 1800s, are also really angry at the Ottomans. Everybody's pretty pissed at the Ottomans. They're not a good empire, especially by this point in time, right? Like, things aren't going. They're the sick man of Europe is kind of the term people use. So in addition to being foreigners who are drafting people and taxing them, they're also just not holding up super well. Right. And it's kind of increasingly obvious to everybody. But one of the things the existence of the Ottomans does is like a ruler over all the different, you know, religious groups and ethnic groups is that it mitigates a degree of internal conflict because everybody kind of has this, this foreign power that they all see as like the. The asshole, Right. And it does kind of make people fight less with each other. I do think that's a little bit of what's going on in this period. I think there's some solidarity that comes from everyone being angry at the same foreign power, right? So Yakov Yehoshua, a Jewish resident of Jerusalem in this time and a future Israeli, wrote of this period, quote, the residential courtyards of the Jews and Muslims were common. We were like one family. We were all friends. Our mothers poured out their hearts to Muslim women, and they poured out their hearts to our mothers. The Muslim women accustomed themselves to speaking the Ladino language. Right. This is his recollection of how, like, what life was like in this period of time. And he's not recalling any kind of religious conflict, really. Like, that doesn't seem to be certainly his primary memory of this time. It was a lot of solidarity. And it's accurate to note that. And you run across a couple quotes like this in Lives in Common. That some Arab Muslims would see Arab Jews or Sephardic Jews as one of the terms I've heard is like inferior locals. And they don't mean that in a racial or religious sense. They mean that in that they have not been here as long. They're locals, but they haven't been here as long. And that's true for a lot of these, especially, like, Sephardic Jewish communities, because you can tell this by the fact that they speak Ladino, right? Which is derived from Old Spanish, because many Sephardics were the remnants of the Iberian Jewish community who'd been exiled. And one of the things this actually does is there's a lot of solidarity between some of these Sephardic Jewish communities and some Arab Muslim communities who are descendants themselves of the Arabs that were kicked out of Iberia. And there's this kind of belief pretty widespread, that some of these Sephardic communities have done a better job or the best job of maintaining some of, like, the musical and artistic culture of that, you know, community that was largely driven or entirely driven out by the Christians. Right? So there's this really deep. And I don't think these relationships exist very much anymore, but this very deep relationship between these two different religious groups, who are both exiles from the same place and wound up in Palestine, which I actually just wasn't aware that that was a dimension of life in that period of time. I find it really interesting, especially when you think of how far back the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Iberia is from this point in time. We're talking hundreds of years, and these are still really meaningful community relationships. I just find that fascinating. Now, depending on the city and community, the Difference between how these communities saw themselves and conflicts between them would vary and be blurry. But again, in places like Hebron, the Jewish community spoke Arabic as a first language and only occasionally included lidino songs and worship celebrations. Right. So it did change depending on where you were. A Jewish resident of the Old City in Jerusalem or Al Quds during this time. Elihu Aliyashar wrote that during his youth, quote, we heard Arabic and spoke it utterly freely with our neighbors. Yaakov Alazar, another resident, recalled Muslim women in mixed religion housing in a mixed religion housing development volunteering to draw extra water the day before the Sabbath so as not to disturb their Jewish neighbors. Like, you hear a lot of stories of this, of religion and faith that's like lived in common and like this really kind of deeply emotionally affecting degree of religious solidarity and even co celebration of a lot of different religious holidays. As we'll talk about now, before we get into some of those more positive stories, there is another fact of life in Palestine in like this period of time, the 1880s, 1890s, that we need to address, which is that for a shockingly long time, slavery still existed there. Right. People bought and sold enslaved Africans for longer than you'd expect. And this is not just in Palestine. This is a decent chunk of the Middle East. And in North Africa, in bits in

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

his book Climate Change, there was an Arab slave trade.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah. And this is by the way, slavery is practiced and utilized by Jews and Muslims and Christians in this period of time. There's not seem to be a major religious difference between who is buying slaves. It's a wealth thing, if you can afford it and you don't have a moral issue with it. You have slaves in this period of time. Some people do. It's not super common. Klein notes that the Old City had a market where African girls specifically were bought and sold that operated until 1889, even though the sultan had outlawed the trade in 1846. Per Lives in Common quote in about 1880, Chaim Aharon Valero bought an Ethiopian girl who was around 10 years old when the central government enforced the emancipation of slaves in Jerusalem. The girl chose to stay with Valero's family and converted to Judaism. A few hundred descendants of these slaves still live in the Old City in what is called the black or slave compound. Not an aspect of history that we talk about a lot, but.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And they consider themselves Palestinian today?

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, absolutely. And I have heard this occasionally brought up in order to slander like Palestinians today, as if it was something that only one religion did and as that quote makes clear, there were plenty of Jewish slaveholders in old Palestine. It was a money and a morals thing. If you were okay with it, you did it. You know, coming into the 1880s, the Jewish population in Palestine numbered around 25,000. And Zionism as a political movement is not really. There is some immigration from Europe, but it's not really a major political movement until like 1882. And this is when you see a bunch of smaller Jewish organizations in Europe, some of which had been sending migrants to establish farms or move to cities in Palestine for a period of time before this start to coordinate on like a large scale. Right. And that's part of the story, but not everything. Because why is 1881, 1882, when this really gets going? Well, there's a lot of shit going on in Europe that makes it seem like a really good idea for a lot of Jewish people to get the fuck out of places like Russia. A big fuel for this wave of migration comes in the wake of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by anarchists. Russia blamed the Jews, as they usually did, and a pogrom followed in the city of Kirovorad. And this is like, this is in basically modern day Azerbaijan, if I'm understanding it. I think, like, it's generally Azeri is like the, the, the region that this is like, attributed to. I'm not sure specifically what country now, but like, that's kind of the area this is occurring in. But it spreads out of kind of that community to the entire Pale of Settlement. And there's like a year and a half or two of horrific violence against Jews in a large portion, yeah, massive. And this kind of. It leads to the czar passing what are called the may laws in 1882, which further restrict where Jews could go and what jobs they can have. And it makes a lot of people want to leave. But per the Oxford Encyclopedia, the History of Terrorism, it does something else too. This also expedited the consolidation of Jewish nationalism. The most significant essay of the time was Auto Emancipation by Leon Pinsker, in which he advocated the idea of self determination for the Jewish people in their ancient homeland. Now it's worth talking about all this and talking about what's happening in Russia as how it helps to fuel Zionism. But it's also worth noting very few of the people who are fleeing Russia and other Jews who are fleeing Russia and other Eastern European countries in this period choose to go to Palestine. That's about. Of the huge number of refugees, by the way. A lot of Jews leave Russia in the period immediately after 1881, 82, about 3% of them emigrate to Palestine. Right. And this first wave, by the way, is it's both not big and also a lot of them don't stay. Right. Of that 3% of refugees who come into Palestine, a significant. Some people say most, some sources say most leave pretty soon after because it's like a pretty different climate than Russia. You know, like people who are used to growing up there maybe move to Palestine, they're like, oh, I can't handle this huge adjustment. Yeah, it's not.

[Becca or Tanya]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

New York's way easier.

[Becca and Tanya (Podcast Hosts)]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Or somewhere else, you know, because it's hard. And it's hard to farm in the desert. Right. Like, it's not the easiest place in the world and there's not a massive amount there's going to be. Cause one of the things that causes problems is that some of these refugees who do stay, these early Zionists, a lot, most of them settle in cities and a lot become very integrated, but many settle in the country and start farms, or small numbers settle in the country and start farms. But even though it's not a lot of them because resources are scarce and because, you know, at this point, by the time you've had an area that's been farmed and, you know, peopled as long as Palestine has, there's not just a bunch of like good land that nobody's using.

[Matt Altman]

Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And they don't understand, like indigenous farming. Like, they're not talking to the locals. They're really not adjusting well.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, they're not adjusting well. And there are conflicts. There's, you know, and in this period, the violence, I don't see a lot of reports about it being like hugely, generally hugely serious. It's mostly like petty theft and property damage. Right. And you know, there's some complaints from some of these Jewish farmers to the Ottoman author. But obviously the Ottoman authorities aren't going to take their complaints seriously. Not that they take a lot of complaints. The Ottoman Empire, not great at addressing the complaints of its people. Right. They certainly don't care about these, like, Zionist immigrants. Right. They're the Ottomans in 1880. Yeah. So from these initial concerns over security arose the first organized Jewish defense group in Palestine, which was called Bar Giora. And Bar Giora, ultimately, I don't know if it becomes the Hashimur or it's more accurate to say the Hashimur is kind of a spin off of Bar Giora. And then the Hashimer obviously gives away to the Haganah, the Haganah becomes the idf. You know, you see kind of how things go there. But initially Bar Giora and the Hashimer, they are like left wing organizations because the primary organizing kind of impetus behind them are these Jewish labor federations. And a lot of these had started with people kind of organizing their communities back in the old countries and sometimes organizing like self defense in those communities from pogrom back in the old country. And so some of those people who make it over to Palestine, and these are generally like leftists initially start forming these self defense groups. Right. This very first one, and it's not gonna. There's going to be like a right wing, a major right wing swing that comes in after this. And some of it is a reaction to the fact that a lot of people, a lot of Zionists who are right wing are really fed up with a lot of these very left wing like Zionist organizations. And there are conflicts between them too. There's a left and a right wing. Zionism is not like a single thing in terms of what people mean when they say it in this period of time. Certainly not right to look at it that way. People will mean a number of different things. That said, the kind of major organizing like Sinter is pretty well represented by Theodore Herzl, right, who is like the big Zionist theoretician thinker of his day. You may have heard of him quoted in the big Lebowski. In 1897, Herzl announced the first Zionist congress in Basel, which brought a bunch of these smaller European Zionist groups together for the first time. In his biography of Menachem Begin, Daniel Gordas makes it clear that Zionism developed alongside and was influenced by other nationalist movements. It was not separated from them. One of the things he does, and obviously Gordis really likes Menachem Begin, who is a very, I mean as a guy, among other things, does a lot of terrorism in life. But one thing he does point out that I think is valuable is he has include some quotes from Menachem and he compares them to different like and this is Menaka like quotes that Menachem has come up with that are like, about Zionism. And he compares them to different slogans and songs of like Polish nationalist groups in the area when Menachem would have been growing up as a kid and points out the similarities. And he's doing this to point out that Zionism cannot be extricated from Polish nationalism or German nationalism or any other kind of nationalism or Arab nationalism. They are all developing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And they're they're influencing each other. Right. Like at the same time, even though a lot of these European, you know, Polish and German nationalists are also often very anti Semitic, that also influences the development of Zionism. Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

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

[Brett Weinstein]

I'm sure we will. And it's hard not to understand how if you are a Jew in a place like Russia and you're constantly being told you're not Russian, you're not, you're part of a different thing, you don't belong here. I can see how some people are like, well, maybe that thing's, you know, Zionism, right. Maybe that's what I should be doing if I'm not a Russian, if I can't be here, like, what else is there? And obviously that's not the choice most people make. Most people choose to go somewhere else for different reasons. But like, yeah, like you have to. You can't separate this from all of the other movements at the time. And this is something Gordis makes a really good point of making, of writing about in his biography of beginning. The Jews, like the Poles, wanted their land back. The Polish anthem declared, poland is not yet lost. While we live, we will fight with swords for all that our enemies had taken from us. While the Hatikva, the Zionist anthem, ended with the words, our hope is not yet lost, the hope of two millennia to be a free people in our land. And you can see the similarities there. And of course, one of the big differences would be the Polish people were singing, were actively in Poland, right. And the European Zionists singing the Haktiva were mostly foreigners singing about land that other people already inhabited. Foreigners to land they intended to go to. Right. Who had not been born and raised there. And that is a, that is a meaningful difference. Right. But you can also see how these things are influencing each other as they evolve. In 1904, the Kishineff Pogrom occurred in modern day Moldova, which is of course, then part of the Russian Empire, and I think the cause of this is the most popular paper in Kishinev, publishes a series of articles with titles like Death to the Jews and Crusade against the Hated Race. I probably don't need to read you the text of any of those articles for you to get the idea of like, the tenor of them, right. And this raises tensions to a fever pitch. And then there's two murders of children. One is a young boy and one is a young. Well, one is a young girl who commits suicide. Right. And neither of these have anything to do with the Jewish community, but there are these long standing myths and rumors that like rabbis are sacrificing Christian children to get their blood to do this kind of ritual, right? This is a huge part of ancient

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

blood libel, like that's the term.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yep, yep. Massive part of anti Semitism history, right. And so when these, these two young people turn up dead kind of in the same area at the same time, there's just like immediate disinformation campaign to be like, it's the Jews, right? And then you get a pogrom, right? There's a massacre that starts on Easter Sunday, I think 40 to 49 Jewish people are murdered, hundreds more are Injured, more than 1500 homes are damaged. And the pogrom itself influences a lot more people to flee than were directly impacted by the violence. And one of the folks who is very influenced by the Kishineff pogrom is Theodor Herzl. And this happens right before he dies. He doesn't live a lot, like much after this pogrom, but one of his last acts, and he had again, not a few years before this, he had held that first Zionist Congress. He's a major Zionist figure. But one of the things that's interesting is he gets so scared after this pogrom that he starts pitching something called the Uganda scheme. And the Uganda scheme was a proposal that existed at this time that had been created by certain British imperial strategists who thought it would be useful to kind of some of the great game politics they were playing in Africa. If they could create like a semi independent Jewish community, not quite a state, but more independent than a colony in East Africa. Right. That could be useful to them as like a. There were a number of reasons they thought it would be useful, right. None of which had to do with the welfare of anybody in Africa or any of these Jewish people.

[Tony Ayo]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

This is purely British power politics, right. And obviously Herzl and a number of other people are like, well, I Guess you know, maybe this is better than nothing, right? And it doesn't go anywhere. And a lot of Zionists get really angry at Herzl because they are very focused on the primacy of Palestine within Zionism. And Herzl's obviously somewhat more flexible where he's like, look, I mean, if they're offering Uganda, and this highlights a really important reality, which is like, this whole ideology that is being developed, right? And all of these European Jews that are being influenced to move are under this constant pall of doom that, you know, these are the early warning signs of the Holocaust. And so there's a lot of, among other things, it wasn't definite that the Zionist movement would land on Palestine at this point in time. You can see that by the fact that Herzl does embrace the Uganda plan. And it also shows just how chaotic things are, how scared people are, and how little knowledge there is about, like, where is a good idea to go and, like, what should be done, right? It's hard to see in this period of time when these pogroms kind of rise up like this natural. It's not surprising that so many Jews leave for, like, the United States in this period of time. You know, it's really easy to see anyone who's paying attention being like, well, I gotta go. Like, I don't know where I need to go, but, like, Eastern Europe is not the place to be, right? The fuck now. Like, I'm, I'm. I'm getting on a bus to anywhere that's not this place, right? And again, most people go to the Americas or elsewhere in Europe, but it's not hard to see why they're leaving so fucking fast. The first and second waves of migration to Palestine during the Ottoman Empire are known as the first and Second Aliyah. Between 1903 and 1914, 35,000 to 40,000 Russian Jews moved to Palestine. And it's during this time that Jewish immigrants living near Jaffa create the neighborhoods that are going to form the nucleus of Tel Aviv, which eventually becomes the first, like, Hebrew city, right, in Palestine. That's what people will call it. It doesn't start. And there's a huge, like, effort to deny that, like, Jaffa really was a city kind of now, because the idea that, like, Tel Aviv was, could not have come into existence without Jaffa. And without Jaffa forming a place for a lot of these Jewish communities to start. And I mean, until 1930, Tel Aviv's downtown was downtown Jaffa, basically because Tel Aviv, like, didn't have one really.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

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

[Brett Weinstein]

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

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Right?

[Brett Weinstein]

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[Brett Weinstein]

So Jews also came to outnumber Muslims in Al Quds or Jerusalem or the Holy City during this period. I think Quds just means holy, right?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yes. Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

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

[Guest or Ad Voice]

Right?

[Brett Weinstein]

That's one of the terms for them. They adopt. Some of them do adopt, like, an Arab Jewish identity. And they do blend into these, especially earlier refugees, blend into these earlier communities and become very integrated into these cities that are extremely multicultural in a lot of ways. But not everyone's always willing to do that, and also not everyone's willing to let them. Right. There are some real differences between what people are willing to accept from what they see as our Jews and what they're willing to accept from these foreigners. And I want to quote now from Lives in Common, again, we knew they were different from our Jews. I mean, Arab Jews. We thought of them as foreigners from Europe rather than Jews as such, wrote Ghata Karmi, a Palestinian physician and writer who grew up in West Jerusalem. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind, is that like, again, I know I'm harping on this, but these issues are not religious in nature. They're issues of, like, a bunch of Europeans showing up in a place that's not European and like, that causes conflict,

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

you know, and there's a difference between immigrant and settler, like.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Palestine has often, you know, historically, obviously, like, look at where it's placed. It's often, you know, absorbed different communities. But like you said, there's the types that blend in and then there's the ones that refuse and want to replace.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, because that is a really good point because I know. And maybe I'll certainly yield to how. Because I'm sure you've considered this more than. I don't feel super like someone who just is fleeing a pogrom and winds up moving to Hebron or Jerusalem or Jaffa and becomes a member of the community. That's less of a settler thing than someone who like, starts a farm and starts a separate community and doesn't want to let it. Right, Those are two different kinds of things.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Right, absolutely. And the fact that they were, especially the ones in Jaffa, for example, they were disempowering the Palestinian laborer. That is the issue. It's not the issue that there are new people necessarily.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Quite frankly, it's the issue that happens whenever there's a bunch of immigration from a separate place to a new place. There's always variance of these conflicts. Right. Now, this is not entirely the same thing because usually when that happens, like in the US you don't have a bunch of foreign organizations with a bunch of money propped up by some very wealthy people who are funding a lot of the immigration. And a lot of these Zionist groups are funded by very wealthy people who are paying for these. These people to go over there and sometimes paying for them to basically live. And so one of the complaints, again, that a lot of like Arab and Sephardic Jews have is that like these new immigrants, they're often just being paid to live by someone else. And that's also frustrating to me because, like, I'm a Jew and I've been here forever. Why don't they have to work? You know, not that none of them are. Not that. That's like most people, but these are, these are the conflicts that are occurring. Right. That is an attitude a lot of people have. And it's accurate to some of this influx community. Right. And these are. We can see these conflicts starting to breed. Right. Even Yaakov Yehoshua, who is later the father of a celebrated Israeli novelist, claimed that Ashkenazim tended to prefer their own courtyards where they did not mix with Muslims or Arab. Arab Jews. Quote, Muslim women descended to us from the roofs to while away the evening talking to our mothers. Our children played with their children. And when other children came into the neighborhood to hurt us, our Muslim friends who lived in the courtyard came to defend us. We were their allies. And that is, that is the, you know, the recollection of this guy Yakov, who is a native and to Palestine and Jewish. Right, is that these immigrant communities do not have the same relationship that we do. Right. And that quote is lovely, but it does imply something unlovely, which is that there is still some internecine violence here. Right. Like the fact that in this neighborhood, these Muslim, their Muslim friends are like, defending these, these Jewish kids when they get bullied means that there also is some bullying. Right? And I've run into quotes like that in Menachem Klein's book, and that's not. Again, it's gonna happen anywhere. You have like a multi. Think about the United States, right? Think about whatever city you live in. Like, there's, there's sizable, it's the United States, sizable non white, sizable immigrant populations. And if you listen to this show, I hope that you consider those people your neighbors and aren't a piece of shit and a racist. But, you know, whatever city you live in has a not insignificant number of people who are pieces of shit and racists, Right. Against, like folks who are just different. That occurs everywhere. There's different kinds of people, right?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Any minority group.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, right, right. And so the fact that there's some violence like that, I think says less than the fact that, that most of these accounts are about people being like, yeah, and our Muslim friends protected us from those folks who were like, assholes or whatever. Right. That's, I think, a better picture of life, which is accurate. It's gonna sound familiar to anyone who lives in the United States. Right. And that is also Klein's conclusion in Lives in Common, which is that despite the fact that there are structural inequalities that Jews face under the Ottoman system in this period of time, in daily life, Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine got along and lived together much more often, often than they were in conflict right? Now. That doesn't mean, like, things were always ideal. When are they ever. And there's a relevant quote from the book there. Relations between young Jews and their Christian and Muslim fellows sometimes grew strained. Shulamit Laskov lived in Baka in the early 1920s in an apartment that the Karakorians, an Armenian family, rented to her parents and to English tenants. She played with the Karakorian children, and when she ate at their home she would occasionally participate in Christian prayers with them, but when they fought, her erstwhile friends would sneer Jewess at her. Right. And this is a Christian family and they normally have good relations. But this is just like people, you know, like. Yeah, I think that it's just human beings. You're always going to encounter pieces like this. Right. And I don't think that should overwhelm the more important story of like this really significant degree of social solidarity that exists in this period of time. Right. You know, the fact that there's bigotry that crops up in integrated communities shouldn't take away from that. But as more and more at the

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

end of the day, like you said. Oh, so sorry to interrupt.

[Brett Weinstein]

No, no, no, no, no, I was

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

just saying like at the end of the day, like you said, their inferior status legally, which applied also to Christian minorities, like was an Ottoman issue, not their neighbor's issue. And sorry I'm smiling, but my family's from Ba' a, so I didn't expect you to, yeah. Come up with a quote from there.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. I think one of the things that's also important to remember here is that while Arab Jews and Sephardic Jews and Christians who were born in Palestine and natives to there were second class citizens, immigrant Zionist Jews weren't always treated that way, especially in the latter. Near the very end of the Ottomans, they might have endured more protection than Jews who were native born because they're seen as European and because the Ottomans are really scared of pissing off the European Europeans. Right. Not for any kind of like, you know, because they're necessarily more connected just because they're, they're white. Right. And like the Ottomans don't want that smoke, you know, that is, that is a factor here. Right. So as more and more of these foreign born Jewish immigrants move to Palestine in the Pre World War I years, they start buying up property, not just real property but in the cities and as individuals oftentimes just because, you know, you want a house, but also a lot of these properties and probably the bulk in terms of number are being bought on behalf of and by these large organizations that are often doing it kind of strategically because they want to be able to kind of, oh, we would like this to be a majority Jewish neighborhood possibly because it's near, in Jerusalem. This happens a lot. Oh, we want to kind of buy up as many of these communities near the Wailing Wall as we can. Right. Or we want to buy up as many of these communities near this other area that is both of religious Significance and that there is some conflict over and we want to move these people that we're immigrating into. That's. Some of these large organizations are very strategically thinking about the property that they're buying that way. And we have to deal with a couple of things when we talk about the purchase of property in Palestine by these immigrants. Right. If you read a lot of Israeli centered histories of Palestine, you will come across the claim, this is very common up to the present day, that nearly all of the territory that became the state of Israel was uninhabited when these, these, these Zionist immigrants start showing up. Right. This attitude is represented well. From an article I found in the Jewish Virtual library titled the Arabs in Palestine. Quote, for many centuries, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated and widely neglected expanse of eroded hills, sandy deserts and malarial marshes. Mark Twain, who visited Palestine in 1867, described it as a desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds. A silent, mournful expanse. A desolation here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of action. We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus tree, those last friends of the worthless soil and almost deserted the country. And I'm not used to being kind of pissed at Mark Twain, but first

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

off, where was he walking?

[Brett Weinstein]

Where was he walking? And like, he can't have seen all that much in terms of the actual expanse of the country. But also, I could drive through fucking Oklahoma, where I grew up and be like, wow, a desolate expanse. I didn't see a whole person fucking for hours. Like, yeah, man, that doesn't mean people aren't living there and using the land. It was hot as hell. Maybe they weren't out that day. I don't know, man.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

It's a siesta time, man.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, siesta, man. Louis French, the British director of development, wrote this of Palestine. We found it inhabited by fellaheen who live. And fellaheen are like Arab peasants, right? That's. We'll talk more about them later. Who lived in mud hovels and suffered severely from the prevalent malaria. Large areas were uncultivated. The fellaheen, if not themselves cattle thieves, were always ready to harbor arbor. These and other criminals. The individual plots changed hands annually. There was little public security, and the fellaheen's lot was an alteration of pillage and blackmail by their neighbors, the Bedouin. And I want to note both how divorced that is from real history and the history I've Read you so far, I've read you a bunch of counts of accounts, and these are all from, like the 1880s, 1890s, the same basic period of time. Those two quotes I read about no one being in Palestine. And these are quotes in a lot of cases from people who become Israelis who are like, no, there was, like, a vibrant community that I was a part of, like a vibrant settled community that I was a part of that was mostly non Jewish. Right. We have plenty of accounts like that. This is obviously not true. Right. And even that Jewish virtual library article cannot go long without technically admitting to the fact that what they've said previously is not really accurate. The very next sentence after the stuff I just read, the Arab population at the time was approximately 600,000 compared to 94,000 children. Well, that's not nobody.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

You have to admit it.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. That seems like a good number of people.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

They're just hidden. Yeah. They're not here.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. One of the things that goes on that kind of obscures this errant and deliberately errant view of reality is that there's just a lot less people in the world. There's a massive boom in the human population that occurs kind of during this, the end of the 1800s, early 1900s. A lot of it has to do with, like, the Haber Bosch process, with the fact that we figure out how to create a lot of nitrogen for fertilizer. But human beings, like, there's way more people in 20 or 30 years from now, the period we're talking about. And they're all going to be later. And so you can see that as like, oh, these Jewish immigrants, these Zionist immigrants, brought civilization to Palestine. It's like, no, there's more people everywhere, man. It's just what happened. Like, we figured out how to make fertilizer. I don't know what to tell you.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And they just didn't understand, like, how these, like, Falaheen, like, organized their land.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yes.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

You know, and I want to talk about it. Yeah. They didn't have, like, the property rights system that they were, you know, accustomed to. And there was absentee landlords, and it's a whole thing that they didn't understand

[Brett Weinstein]

or pretended to and they didn't care to. Right. Now, that article quoted Louis French, a British agent who lived in Palestine after the Ottoman Empire fell and the west took over governance. And he talked about the fellaheen, these traditional Arab desert peasants, as if they lived in primitive filth and were basically just bandits. And I want to read you a different description of these guys. From a Sephardic Jewish man named Yosef Meijas. And Yosef Meiuhas is a Zionist, although not the kind you're used to hearing about. We're gonna talk about what he believed because it's really interesting. And he grows up in pal. Obviously he's a local, right? And he later wrote that when he was a kid, which is kind of around this. I think it's a little later than this, but it's before things really start to get. Get terrible. He writes that for a 10 year period where he's a young man, he's going to school, he's training, he was, quote, a constant guest in the homes of the fellas. In the evening when I returned from the Hater or during vacations and holidays, I would always visit Muhammad and Fatima as well as Ali and Khadija, my favorite neighbors. They fed me of their bread, I drank of their water, and sometimes they honored me with their conversations and stories as dessert. Until late at night I would sleep in their homes. And in this manner, all their manners, values, way of life, speech, and the stories I loved served as my childhood education. Right? That's a very different picture of the fellaheen, I think. And Mayujas felt the need to write down his recollections of life and of the fellaheen because during the 20s and 30s things started to get a lot uglier and you started to hear a lot of these very racist claims about these people that he'd grown up with and knew was not true. And he starts to witness Jewish and Muslim communities closing off from each other and becoming more hostile. And this frightens and saddens him. Meijas is a teacher of Hebrew and Arabic as well as French at the Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls. The Rothschilds fund a lot of the Zionist immigration this period of time. That's not. I know people. When people bring up the Rothschilds, it's nearly always conspiracy stuff. This is a thing like the Rothschilds do, right? Like they're funding a lot of this because they believe in this. And Meuhas thinks it's his duty because of the kind of Zionist he is. He thinks it is his duty to encourage his co religionists to admire, learn from and blend in with the fellaheen because they've lived there much longer. Right? From the book Lives in Common, quote, Meuhas viewed the fellas as the original Arabs as opposed to the desert nomads and the merchants of the cities. The fellas, he wrote, were the descendants of the Canaanites who are considered the most ancient inhabitants of Palestine. They fully preserved all the ancient customs and mores that the Jews have forgotten because of their exile. In other words, his view is we don't need to be separate from these people, we need to learn from them and become part of their community and let them teach us because they're living a more authentic version of ancient Jewish life than us and we should learn more from them to honor them, right? That's his attitude as a Zionist, right? Because to him it means something very different than it does to guys like Herzl. Foreign born immigrants were likelier to see Zionism as a struggle of conquest. In fact, that was probably certainly the dominant and after a certain period of time attitude. Whereas Mayuhas is a local right and he believes that Arabs and Jews are spiritual brothers and cousins, right? If European immigrants wanted to thrive in Palestine, he reasoned they need to have a close and respectful relationship with Arabs in other in order to be successful. How do you know how to live here if you're not going to learn from these people who have lived here forever? Right

[Guest or Ad Voice]

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[Brett Weinstein]

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[Brett Weinstein]

We're back. Sorry. I just, I felt that this guy really interesting because you don't hear about stories like this all that often or attitudes like this. And it's interesting the counterpoint he provides, these attitudes that like these people really meant nothing and had no impact on the development of society and civilization in Palestine. I think it's really important to look at someone who's not creating propaganda post haste. Right. This is somebody who lives in this area and lives in this life and is horrified by what he sees happening in the 20s and 30s. We'll talk about Mayuhas a little more later. So as for modern Israeli claims of a barren and empty Palestine, the reality is that prior to the mid 20th century, the area is a lot less populated. But at the end of the 18th, early 19th century there's a population and it's not even World War I. Takes a real bite out of population growth in the region, don't get me wrong. But it does start to happen after this period of time. This is also something that modern Israeli scholarship likes to credit Jewish immigration for. But the reality is, is this is happening in a lot of ways for the same reasons it's happening in many other places. Near the end of the 1800s, new rail lines open up and connect Palestine to the world. And it brings trade and also brings tourists. Right. A lot of European tourists want to come and see the Holy Land, you know. And those tourists would have seen Jerusalem if they came in like 1900. As an incredibly cosmopolitan city, the Al Wad neighborhood, to give one example, hosted three churches, three synagogues and seven mosques. The many Jewish and Muslim holidays were celebrated by members of all faiths in particularly diverse neighborhoods. In the Summer 2000 issue of Jerusalem Quarterly, Salim Tamari writes about an Ottoman era Muslim named Wasif Jawariya. It was a pre nationalist era in which religious identity embraced the other in its festivals and rituals. Jawahriya narrates that the feast of Easter Pesa as an occasion for Muslim Christian Jewish Jewish celebrations. He details the Muslim processions of Palm Sunday which proceeded from the Abrahamic Mosque in Hebron towards Jerusalem. The festival of Al Nabi Musa is recalled here as a Muslim popular celebration that merges with the Christian Orthodox Easter. The Fantasia of Sabt Al Nur Fire Saturday commemorating the resurrection of Christ is seen as the greatest popular Christian celebration in Palestine. Closely coordinated with Muslim folk festivals, Purim was celebrated by Christian and Muslim youth and Jewish neighbors, neighborhoods. Wasif describes in detail the costumes they wore on this occasion. Twice a year, Muslim and Christian families, including the Jawariya family, join the Jewish celebrations at the Shrine of Simon the Just and Sheikh Jarrah at the event known as Shafat al Yahudya, where Haim, the oud player and Zaki, the tambourine player would sing the accompaniment of Andalusian melodies. Yeah. Not a vision a lot of people want you to have of Palestine in 1900.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I have to tell you, like the Palestine that I was born and grew up in, like, even in my lifetime, I'm 35, like I've seen the progression of like that lessening even more. Like I remember celebrating Christian holidays and like there was a lot of integration. Obviously the Jewish holidays have been kind of, you know, they've given, they have kind of a different, you know, salience at this point. But, but even now in the last 35 years, we've seen a huge decline in that and the city has changed so much. So you can imagine how much more it used to be integrated back then.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, it's really sad to think about. I mean, yeah. Now again, obviously, as I've noted, people are not Jews and Christians are not equal citizens of the Ottoman Empire. They have to pay an extra tax and they don't enjoy all of the same rights, but they're also protected by the state and allowed to worship as long as they accept their faith as subordinate it. Right. And that alone doesn't really do a fair job of explaining the complex social and religious status quo that would have existed during the last days of Ottoman rule. As Daniel Schrockter, a historian at the University of Minnesota, told Canadian Jewish news reporter Jody Shopak, quote, the idea that Jews lived as second class citizens makes little sense in this context because the idea of citizenship didn't apply in the pre modern Islamic world, Schroeder said, adding, Islam did see Jews and Christians as inferior, but that didn't prevent peaceful interaction between Jews and Muslims on a quotidian level. Right. And it's also important to keep in mind, right. That like you can't really think about equality and citizenship in nearly the same way that you can.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Right. Nobody was, nobody had any rights. And when we say inferior, it's like it's because Muslims believe in their faith and they see these people who don't believe it's the same as Christians. They're like these non believers. They're less than us. Like it's the same thing.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. And it's not when people are using it. Again, it's like when they're talking about how long someone's been here. That doesn't mean they don't think you're like, like a person who has like worth or value. It means that, well, your family hasn't been here quite as long, right? And in the case of like, if you're speaking like a Spanish derived tongue in Palestine, you have it right. Like, right. Not that that matters in terms, again, it doesn't generally matter in terms of how people treat each other in this period of time. That said, the fact that like things are, you've got all of these, among other things, a lot of wealthier Europeans are coming in, right? A lot of these, these, these Zionist immigrants are poor and they're being supported by money, by wealth. Also wealthier immigrants coming in and especially since they're white and European, they enjoy better treatment, right? And they're also buying up a lot of property as we've talked about, for future Jewish residents. And that causes conflict not just with Muslim residents. In the first decades of Zionist migration, many Arab Jews and Sephardic Jews were extremely prejudiced against these new immigrants, in part because they didn't speak the language very well and in part because they kept to themselves and often were kind of mean to some of the Sephardic communities. There's a lot of conflicts, conflict between the different Jewish communities in this period of time. Adding to the irritation that many Sephardic residents felt was the fact that a sizable number of these new immigrants lived off money donated by wealthier Zionists. In 1891, that's the very first time that prominent Arab citizens of Jerusalem petitioned the government to stop Zionist immigration to Palestine by banning the sale of land to foreign Jews. They're starting to see this as a cultural invasion by Europeans and they argue that it represents a threat to their culture. And as always is the case with complaints like this, the people who made them most loudly are also the people who profited from the exact immigration they declined, decried. And that's a big part of this right. As Menachem Klein writes, the leaders of the Husseini family who lobbied the court to place restrictions on the Zionists, also sold them land. Jerusalem's mayor Taher Al Husseini approved the sale of land to the Zionists and engaged in such transactions himself. In 1899, Rabba Al Husseini sold the colonial lands west of Jerusalem to the Zion Zionists, where the latter built the farming village of Motza. He also helped Jewish land buyers get around the Ottoman land law stipulation that land, which had not been farmed for three years, automatically became state property. Ibrahim Said Al Husseini worked for Baron Edmund de Rothschild's land company, jca. He later resigned and signed protests against the Zionists. Salim Al Husseini made a fortune in real estate ventures with the Jewish community and partnered in a hotel with Yitzhak Rukak, an Ashkenazi resident of Jerusalem. And we'll hear about Yitzhak Rukak and the Rukak family family a little bit later. Well, actually, right now, because Rocock is interesting, his son Shimon moves to Jaffa and creates a series of Jewish community organizations, right? And he buys up a bunch of land. And while his. His father had worked with the Husseini family to buy up this land and be happy to do that, Rakak refuses to deal at all with Arabs, right? Like, once. Once he's got property and once he. He, like, owns property, he. He stops wanting to have any kind of dealings with the Arab community at all, with more Muslims at all. He wanted to keep his distance from them, becoming one of the initiators of the construction of Nevad Tzedek, the Jewish neighborhood outside Jaffa's walls that became the nucleus of Tel Aviv. Shimon's son, Israel, was elected mayor of the new city. And this is something that Israel said after being elected mayor of Tel Aviv. Jaffa played no role in world history, nor in Israeli history, and one cannot find there any relic of ancient culture from any period at all. Merakok said. And again, we've just heard that, like, well, the only reason the Rocok family had the land that allowed them to do all this in the first place is because of, like, very close business relationships with Arab Muslims, right? Like, and Jaffa, Tel Aviv starts out of Jaffa. It's just. It's just. I don't know. I know we're getting a little bit off the topic here, but it's really frustrating.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

If people are interested in this element, especially, I would recommend Ilan Pape's book on Al Husseinis, because it's really. I always remember this anecdote that, like, one of the Al Husseinis also sold the land that later Hebrew University was built on. So it's like a very interesting kind of dynamic. Like, I think you're right that, like, they've benefited a lot. I think also they didn't recognize what was. What was happening.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, that's part of this, too. It's like, this is. You can see a lot of this initially as, like, relative goodwill of like, well, why wouldn't I sell a house to him? And then it becomes like 20 or 50 or 100. And like, well, wait a second. There's something going on here. Right, Right, exactly. And obviously that doesn't mean there also are people who are pretty aware of what's going on. And like, but I want to get money. Right. And get my bag. That's always a factor too. But a lot of people, you know, it's not immediately clear what's happening too. And I think some of this is just a sign that like, yeah, people weren't really all that shitty, you know, to their neighbors they were like, well, yeah, these guys want to buy up some buildings. Why not? Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And there's a class difference too. It's like, you're a wealthy landowner, the finesse that lives on your land.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Is gonna get screwed. You don't really care.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. And I do suspect a lot of these Husseinis would have seen these other wealthier, like Jewish immigrants as more of like their type of people than like certainly the Falahi. Right?

[Becca or Tanya]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. Yeah. Anyway, one of the things I did want to note about Raqak's statement there, where he's like, Jaffa played no role in world history. Right. Nor, nor Israeli history. One of the things he's doing there, he's not just erasing like Palestinians from local history, he's erasing Arab Jews, Jews as well as like Muslim Arabs here because men like Rakak had to in order to make their view of history work. The reality is that they and their communities started out nestled in cities and towns filled with people who had been there for generations and were only able to get off the ground because of a lot of support from those people, including like the Muslim population. It took a purposeful effort to block these new immigrant Jewish communities off from their neighbors. That was not a natural state of affairs. It was a state of affairs that members people within these communities, communities and people leading them had to want to make because they had to stop integration from happening. Right. That is also a thing that's happening consciously and being done consciously. Now some of the effort and some of the conflict here comes from a lot of these new immigrants see themselves, they are Europeans and they want to build new European style cities. They don't like Arabic cities. They see them as barbaric and backwards. You'll hear that a lot. And that's a major motivation behind many of the settlements that become television. It's created as a European style city for European Jewish immigrants who did not want to immigrate and didn't want to stop speaking European languages. Right. That's like, a big motivation for them in this period of time. Now, alongside this, 1909 sees the establishment of the Hashomer by Yitzhak bin Zvi and David Ben Gurion. This was a paramilitary organization meant to guard Jewish settlements, and it's, again, the precursor to the Haganah. And it's often described as. And certainly describes itself as a purely defense, defensive organ, like militia in this period of time. Right. Although if you look at the Haganah slogan at its establishment, it doesn't sound purely defensive because the slogan is, judea was lost by blood and fire and will rise again by blood and fire. Which is, like, not super friendly.

[Guest or Ad Voice]

No.

[Brett Weinstein]

Like, I'm gonna be honest, if some guys moved into my neighborhood and started walking around with guns and that was their. Their motto, I'd be like, I don't know. That doesn't sound all that defensive.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah, very alarming. I don't know. I'm suspicious. A lot of blood and fire.

[Troy Millings]

Sure.

[Brett Weinstein]

We don't have a lot of blood and fire in the neighborhood right now, and I'm not really sure we need any. Oh, my God. It's important to document the prevalence of that attitude even then, without acting like it's the only one. Many Jews in Palestine preferred to work within the system. In the latter days of Ottoman rule, the growing Jewish community in Jerusalem especially, was able to exercise great power by voting together. The Arab elite were fractured, and Jewish leaders offered support to families like the Husseinis, who could wield power directly in exchange for quid pro quo benefits, benefits. One such benefit was an early attempt to take possession of the Western Wall, a particularly holy site. The Husseini family owned most of the houses on the other side of this alley and opposite, there's, like, a line of homes that are owned by the Jewish community and a line of homes on the other side that are. That are owned primarily by Muslims. Right. By the Husseini family and occupied by Muslims. And if the Husseinis sell these homes, they can be bulldozed and the alley broadened. Right. And it made kind of an entirely Jewish community community. Right. Mustafa Al Husseini actually sells a number of these properties to Baron Rothschild in 1887. But fears among rabbis have a backlash. And it's rabbis who are like, wait a second. If we let this go through, it's going to, like, make people really paranoid and racist. This is probably a bad idea. And the deal does sputter out. In 1897, the Husseinis nearly sold the whole alley to Rothschild, again from the Al Waqf religious trust, until protest from Arab families forces him to stop. Right, Right. So they are trying to do this, and there are protests from both the Jewish community and from the Muslim community that stop this from happening. And that's. That also is really worth acknowledging. Right. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, things come to a head when David Yellen of the association to Maintain Historical Sites in the Land of Israel writes to the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman court and he asks him to push the Sultan to sell the Western Wall to the association. Per the book Lives in Common, Yellen did not have the money to do so. He estimated the price would be at least 1 million French francs, including a 10% bribe for the relevant municipal officials. But he presumed he could obtain it from Jewish millionaires as soon as the Ottomans agreed to the sale in principle. But this never happens either, because Yellen had greatly overestimated how much money there was for the cause. Right now, attempts like this and continued immigration spark unrest and occasionally even violence from the Arab community. In a late attempt to slow this kind of migration, the Ottomans make it law that only someone with a thousand pounds or more assets can apply for an immigration certificate. And this doesn't really stop anything. It basically creates another opportunity to bribe Ottoman officials. And one thing that, like, some rich people who, like, want to, like, bring more folks in, they'll, like, put it, add the name of a poor immigrant on their door to make it look like they're part of the family for long enough for the officials to check to see, like, okay, is there someone financially supporting them? There's ways around all this stuff. Right up through the start of World War I. Then, most Arab residents in Palestine had little reason to fear Zionism or believe that Jewish immigration would have a hu impact on their lives. There are people getting frustrated by it. There are conflicts over it, but it's not like the dominant thing happening. Right. One of the relatively few people to see into the future accurately was Najib Azouri, a Lebanese Maronite Christian who worked for the Ottoman government during its last days in Jerusalem. He declared in 1905 that Zionism and Arab nationalism were doomed to constant struggle until one overwhelms the other other. And that is, again, Arab nationalism is really building in this time, again we talk. We've done our whole series of episodes on Lawrence of Arabia. The Great Arab Revolt occurs during World War I. That's happening in this period, and it's happening because people are pissed at the Ottomans. Right. And so as much as some of these conflicts are going on in these cities, the much broader conflict is these, the much broader conflict Arab nationalists are interested in is dealing with these fucking Ottomans. Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Like that's self determination for Arabs general, generally.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right, right, yes. And obtaining, I was putting it crudely, but yes, obtaining self determination. Yeah, both things.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Both things are true.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right, right. And yeah, also Arab Christians are also part of this. A lot of Arab Christians are Arab nationals because they're not being treated very well by the Ottomans. Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

They're kind of the godfathers of it, actually.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah, In a lot.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Very much. So basically, like the answer to Arab nationalism is sectarian.

[O]

Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Arab Christians want to be included in the community. So like a lot of the big names of Arab nationalism, like Constantine and like other people like that, they're Christians.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a really important point. So the people who are most invested in a multicultural Palestine then sometimes find themselves in this period supporting the ailing Ottoman Empire. And this is very weird. Like Mayusha is one of a number of Zionists who want the Ottoman Empire to last because they, they see that it's kind of keeping a lot of conflict from happening within the community. Right. Within Palestine. Right. The fact that there's these, these Turks who are like, you know, in charge of everything kind of stops a lot of conflict that might otherwise brew up. And Meyusha believes that Zionism is doomed to disaster if the Ottomans fall. He believes that everything, not just Zionism, will fail, but Zionism will. Like there will be horrible violence in this place that he loves between these communities that he loves if the Ottoman Empire falls. And he is right about that, really. Up until the end of World War I, though, most people would have been hard pressed to believe that something like that would really happen. It would be crazy to predict in like 1910, as someone living in Palestine as a normal person, that like, oh, the Ottomans are on their last legs. They don't have a full decade left of life. You, most people wouldn't have made that guess because the Ottoman Empire had been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. And so as a result, a lot of Muslim political leaders in this period of time, time treat Zionism as like a special interest to be courted. Right. Salim Al Husseini served as mayor of Jerusalem for much of the 1880s and 1890s, and he was elected thanks to Jewish voters. In a speech, he argued that Zionism, quote, is not a political movement, but a settlement one. And I Am certain that no intelligent and rational Zionist would consider the establishment of a Jewish government in Palestine famous. I mean, not last words, but not right correct ones. Right, Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah. He maybe didn't know enough about the Zion different kinds of system.

[Brett Weinstein]

As you said, enough.

[Guest or Ad Voice]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Attention. And unfortunately one of the people who is very much seeing correctly where things are going is a major right wing Zionist leader named Vladimir Yavotinsky. Right. He had been born in Odessa in modern day Ukraine in 1880 to an assimilated Jewish family. And Yabotensky had become a Zionist prior to the Kishine pogrom. And he had become a popular speaker and influential organizer. And he responded to that pogrom by initially in Russia advocating and helping to organize the confederate construction of Jewish self defense groups. He was extremely controversial, as was his slogan, Jewish youth learn to shoot. And obviously when he's in Russia being like, I think we might need some guns. Hard to argue with the man. Right?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, Zionist and non Zionist said the same. Right?

[Brett Weinstein]

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

[Guest or Ad Voice]

Wow.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

We covered so much.

[Brett Weinstein]

We did.

[Coldwater Creek Ad Voice]

That was a lot.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yada yada. People should like read the books and stuff that we're talking about, obviously to get much more comprehensive. But yeah, we gotta fly through what 60 years about. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, none of which are new

[Tony Ayo]

to you, but yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

All right. Anything you want to plug at the end here before we roll out into part two?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah. Check out the handbook on authoritarianism in the Arab world.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yes, yes.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Bloomsbury Politics.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Awesome. All right, everybody, we'll be back Thursday.

[Becca and Tanya (Podcast Hosts)]

Woo.

[Guest or Ad Voice]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of behind the Basterds are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com BehindTheBastards we love about 40% of you, statistically speaking,

[O]

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Unique.

[Coldwater Creek Ad Voice]

It's the standard Coldwater Creek has honored for over 40 years, derived from a rich Mountain west heritage and designed for today in styles that are distinctively Coldwater Creek. For a wardrobe you can count on season after season, visit coldwatercreek.com, shop new arrivals and save 15% on purchases $75 or more with code iHeart.

[Becca and Tanya (Podcast Hosts)]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Guaranteed human.