Part Two: The Origins of Terror in Palestine

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards

Episode: Part Two: The Origins of Terror in Palestine
Date: August 6, 2026
Host: Brett Weinstein
Guest: Dr. Donna Al-Kurd

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Overview

This episode continues a deep dive into the origins and escalation of terrorism and violence in Palestine, tracing the transformation of diverse communities under Ottoman, British, and Zionist influences during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Brett Weinstein is joined by Dr. Donna Al-Kurd, who brings both personal connection and academic expertise to unpack the personalities, policies, and pivotal events that led to the fracturing and radicalization of Palestinian and Jewish societies, the rise of militant Zionism, and the roots of the conflict that would shape the region into the modern era. The tone balances dark humor, frank analysis, and an emphasis on voices and stories often glossed over in mainstream histories.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Zionist Militancy, British Support, and Vladimir Jabotinsky

• Jabotinsky's Political Shift and Motivations (04:26–06:21)

  • Born in Odessa, exposed to pogroms.
  • Broke with mainstream Zionists over his right-wing, anti-socialist stance.
  • Pushed for a Jewish fighting force to ensure future statehood, even against the British if needed.
  • "He wanted Jews to receive combat experience and training so that they could fight their neighbors in Palestine and the British government if necessary..." (11:05, Brett)

• Formation of the Jewish Legion

  • Organized Jewish volunteers to fight with the British in WWI, citing the Ottomans' impending defeat.
  • British ambivalence: wanted military help but wary of endorsing Zionism.

• Ottoman Repression of Both Arab and Jewish Nationalism (13:27–13:48)

  • Governor Cemal Pasha violently opposed all ethnic nationalism.
  • “He is not anti-Zionist because he’s racist. He’s anti anyone who doesn’t want Ottoman charge.” (13:39, Brett & Donna)

• Impact on Palestine’s Society

  • Wartime famines and conscription devastated both Arabs and Jews.
  • By the war’s end, entrenched suspicion, famine, and loss eroded shared identities.

2. British Mandate, The Fracturing of Communities, and Weaponizing Identity

• Post-War Nationalism and the Role of British Policy (16:55–18:25, 21:11–22:19)

  • Balfour Declaration sowed resentment: local Arabs and longstanding Jewish communities lamented the loss of a multi-faith, multicultural society, replaced by nationalist “hatreds and wars.”
  • Increasingly, European Jews viewed as separate from so-called “Arab Jews”.
  • “Nationalism suddenly intruded on their lives... imposed its hatreds and wars on them.” (16:57, Brett quoting Klein)

• Rise of Armed Militias and Militant Factions

  • Jabotinsky establishes self-defense militias, leading to the formalization of the Haganah.
  • British policy both empowers and undercuts differing communities, often enabling Zionist militarization.

• Legal and Social Double Standards

  • Jewish militant leaders (e.g., Jabotinsky) often given brief prison sentences; Arab nationalists faced death or long imprisonment.
  • “Would a similar guy who was an Arab Muslim have only gotten sentenced for the same crime or would he have been hung or shot?” (27:01, Brett)

3. Internal Jewish Dissent and First Political Assassinations

• Jacob Israel De Haan’s Story (33:28–42:29)
  • Dutch-Jewish poet and openly gay icon.
  • Immigrates to Palestine as a Zionist but becomes a leading anti-Zionist after seeing escalating violence.
  • Assassinated on orders of Zionist militia leaders: “I have no regrets, because De Haan wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism.” (41:59, Brett quoting Tahomey)
  • His assassination marks the first intra-Jewish political killing in Palestine.

4. Everyday Life: Intercommunal Relations and Social Conflict

• Ongoing Jewish-Arab Integration Amidst Rising Violence (45:03–48:41)

  • Youths of all backgrounds mingled in social spaces, brothels, and criminal underworlds, causing parental and nationalist anxieties.
  • British establishment of sanctioned brothels to control VD among soldiers, using women from both communities.
  • Interfaith relationships, families, and social ties persist but come under attack as violence escalates.

• Weaponization of Sexual/Moral Politics

  • Underground militias monitor and punish Jewish women associating with Arabs or British, some executed as “collaborators.”
  • “The lens of, like, sexual politics here is an important one to see the conflict through…” (47:56, Donna)

5. Land, the Western Wall Riots, and the Rise of Terrorist Organizations

• 1929: Shared Representation Rejected, Violence Explodes (48:41–53:20)

  • Zionist leaders refuse British proposals for shared Arab-Jewish governance; Grand Mufti stirs fears over the Temple Mount.
  • Escalates into the 1929 Western Wall riots: 249 dead (133 Jewish, 116 Arab), multitude wounded.
  • Violence includes street battles, pogroms, and the infamous Hebron Massacre.

• Birth and Growth of Irgun and Terror Tactics (57:05–62:44)

  • Splinter groups like Irgun and Lehi (Stern Gang) turn to overt terror, not just anti-colonial resistance but pursuit of an ethno-nationalist state.
  • “Irgun is a terrorist group. There is no other way to look at Irgun than as a terrorist group.” (57:32, Brett)
  • Oxford Handbook of Terrorism affirms their violence is not truly anti-colonial, given their immigrant/settler role and targeting of indigenous Palestinians.

6. The Great Arab Revolt and British Repression

• 1936-1939 Revolt (62:44–67:02)

  • Triggered by ongoing dispossession, failed peaceful general strike, and mass immigration of Jews (now 25% of population).
  • British violently suppress uprising—house demolitions, executions, and expulsion of activists.
  • Death toll: ~5,000 Arabs, 415 Jews, 100 British.

• Enduring Lessons: Violence is Rewarded

  • British response signals to Palestinians that peaceful protest is useless, to Zionists that armed struggle works.
  • “First, they’ve told the Palestinians that peaceful protest is not going to get you shit. And second, they’ve told the Zionists that your arms and militias are accepted and your years of militant organizing are working.” (67:04, Brett)

7. WWII, The ‘Patria’ Disaster, and the Finalization of Militant Realities

• Patria Ship Tragedy (69:06–70:40)

  • Haganah attempts to prevent British deportation of Holocaust refugees by bombing a ship (to force its evacuation), but botch the job; 267 killed.
  • British relent and allow survivors to remain—a message that violence “wins.”
  • “The Haganah… wanted to set off a small explosion so that they would have to evacuate the ship... They completely screw up and they blow this boat to kingdom fucking come and they kill 267 Jewish refugees.” (70:39, Brett)

• Cumulative Effects and Irreversible Divides (72:10–76:28)

  • British policies enable Zionist military buildup and organization while decimating Palestinian leadership.
  • The events and decisions of these decades set the stage for the Nakba and Israel’s founding by making certain outcomes—like ethnic cleansing and lack of coexistence—almost inevitable.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the flattening of Jewish/Arab identities:
  “I keep thinking back... to the relationship between these Arab Muslims who were descended from the people who got kicked out of modern day Spain and Portugal, and the Sephardic Jews who are the same. ...I don’t think that exists anymore.” (74:26, Brett)
• On the logic of British repression:
  “They’ve told the Palestinians that peaceful protest is not going to get you shit. And [to] the Zionists that your arms and militias are accepted and your years of militant organizing are working.” (67:04, Brett)
• On nationalism’s legacy:
  “Maybe it’s time to rethink nationalism. I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t work out great. Maybe, maybe it was mostly bad.” (76:28, Donna & Brett)

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Notable Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:01–02:29: Light banter, academic credentials, and the difficulty of framing “terrorism.”
• 04:26–06:21: Shift from Ottoman to British control, Jabotinsky’s militarization.
• 11:15: Introduction of British naming and racist attitudes toward soldiers.
• 13:27–14:48: Cemal Pasha’s repression—Arabs and Jews alike.
• 21:11–22:21: Nebi Musa festival as a flashpoint in intercommunal relations.
• 33:28–41:13: Jacob Israel De Haan’s story from radical Zionist to assassinated anti-nationalist.
• 45:03–48:41: Social integration and the weaponization of “morality.”
• 48:41–53:20: 1929 riots, land disputes, and breakdown of attempts at compromise.
• 57:05–62:44: Hebron massacre, rise of Irgun and the normalization of terror.
• 62:44–67:02: The 1936-39 Arab revolt, British counterinsurgency, and birth of partition ideas.
• 69:06–70:40: Patria disaster and its implications.
• 72:10–76:28: The consequences of repression and the loss of shared Arab-Jewish identity.

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Closing Thoughts & Recommendations

The episode concludes with an acknowledgment of the irreversible transformations and tragedies set in motion by colonial “divide and rule,” the opportunistic empowerment of one side, and the weaponization of trauma, identity, and violence. Both hosts recommend further reading on the subject, including the new Handbook on Authoritarianism in the Arab World (Dr. Al-Kurd), as well as examining the contemporary legacies of these fractured histories such as the Israeli Black Panthers and stories of Arab Jewish migration.

“Maybe it’s time to rethink nationalism. I don’t know. We’ll leave it at that.” (76:28, Donna)

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End of summary.

(Note: All time codes are approximate and intended as reference points to guide deeper listening of key moments.)

Transcript

[Brett Weinstein]

Call Zone Media. Welcome back to behind the Bastards. Normally a podcast about everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history, where I read a story about a historical monster or some sort of terrible event to a guest who's coming in cold this week. I'm sort of doing my best to not embarrass myself in front of a guest who knows a lot more about the subject than I do and also has lived through a lot of it. Dr. Donna Al Kurd, welcome back to the show. Thank you again for your time.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Oh, thank you for having me. It is kind of cool that we have several, like, PhDs on staff because

[Brett Weinstein]

James, Steve Stout, also.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Also a doctor.

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

Doctor.

[Brett Weinstein]

You know, I. I was declared a doctor by the state of New Jersey one time. My brother's a doctor.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

That counts.

[Brett Weinstein]

There you go. Yeah, they don't let me prescribe anything, which really sucks.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, he's an oncologist, so we're

[Brett Weinstein]

not even in the same, like, lettering system. But you know what? You don't have prescription abilities, do you, Dana?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Unfortunately, political science does not have that.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, I would have gotten a Poli Sci PhD if I could have got prescribed stuff. Robert, this is not the time. I mean, it's always the time.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

It's kind of relevant. No joking.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, it's kind of relevant. Don, do you want to plug anything up front before we get back into the story?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

There's the handbook on authoritarianism in the Arab world that's out with Bloomsbury Politics open access, so people could just Google and read them.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, that sounds much better. One of the sources for this that I read, which was useful in some ways, is like the Oxford Handbook in the history of terrorism, which is very, again, very useful for certain things. And also, we're not gonna get into this, but in 1946, I think it was the Irgun, which is like the militia associated with Batar, which is like a right wing Zionist group that is today become like its descendant is Netanyahu's party, bombed the King David Hotel and kill a bunch of people. And the Oxford. It's really fun when you read what the British said about it. It's an act of terrorism. When you read what like everyone at the time said about it's an act of terrorism. And then you read the Oxford Encyclopedia of Terrorism, they're like, well, because the targets were primarily governmental, we can't call this an act of terrorism. And I'm like, okay, sheesh. But if it had been like Arab nationalists who bombed a hotel, it would be terrorism.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Right?

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Academics. I can't even.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I'm a good one. Let's just put that out there. Facts

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

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[Brett Weinstein]

We're going to talk about Vladimir Yabotinsky a lot more in these episodes. So as we said last time, this is a guy who grows up in Odessa. He is from a fairly young age really concerned with like you know, fighting back against these pogroms by establishing Jewish self defense groups and after he's close for a period of time with Theodore Herzl. But he also has some like breakoffs with him. And his issue with a lot he does not get along with most Zionists in his day, because he is really right wing. He does not like these labor unions. He does not like the socialist politics that a lot of these Zionists have. He's very against that sort of stuff. And after herzl dies in 1904, Yabotinsky becomes seen as the leader among right wing. A leader among right wing Zionists. He's a very big feature. He goes by Ziv Jabotinsky most of his life, but he's still known as Vladimir at this point in time. We'll talk about why that change happens. And you know, after Herzl dies, he's a political leader for a while and then, you know, the war starts and he has to take a job as a newspaper editor. And in 1915 he's reporting from North Africa and he tours a refugee camp in Egypt for Jewish deportees from Ottoman Palestine. And we'll talk about this later too. The Ottomans start deporting a lot of these European Jews from Palestine during the war. And per an entry in the International Encyclopedia of the First World War by Ari Dubnov and Brian Horowitz, quote, soon thereafter he reached the conclusion that the OT and Turks would lose the war and Palestine would fall into the hands of the Entente powers. It was in this context that he came up with the idea of encouraging Jews to volunteer for the British army and secure a future Palestine for the Jews. And this is unfortunately a really smart play for him to make. Right. He's a really smart guy and this works very well for him. Yeah, very much unfortunately. And it is worth noting, like he does kind of see where things are going. Right. It's very accurate to say that the Entente is going to take over.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah. And Zionism would not have really survived without British support.

[Brett Weinstein]

No, not at all. That's a big part of the story we're going to be telling today. So despite the fact that he's got no personal military experience, he does not actually join this Jewish legion. Right. Jabotinsky grows close to a guy named Joseph Trumpledore, a Russian Zionist military veteran who had fought in the Russo Japanese War, which had happened not that much earlier and had been decorated by the Tsar for his like, valor in combat and stuff. And the two of them approach a general, a British general named Sir John Grenfell Maxwell who is commanding British troops in Egypt. And they're like, hey, we want to take a lot of these guys who've been like brought kicked out of Palestine and put in camps in Egypt, are willing to fight for the British Empire against the Ottomans Right. And Maxwell's at first like, I don't know if this is a good, like you're not really soldiers. Is this really gotta help things at all? This might just be more trouble than it's worth. But he also like, there's not enough manpower, you know, especially not in that the. So he's not going to like show. He's not going to turn down the potential to have a few thousand more fighters on his hands necessarily either. Right. All of these. And he brings this idea up to some of the other British general officers and they're all kind of reluctant. As much as they want these fighters, they also don't want to endorse the Zionist idea necessarily. And they also don't want to endorse an offensive on Palestine at the time, which is what these people are really pushing for is to let us invade the place we just got kicked out of. And the British don't really want to do that at the moment. But Maxwell agrees to form a Jewish volunteer force that will fight alongside the British military and other parts of the Turkish front. So as this is all happening, World War I escalates a lot of sectarian hatred and anger that had been slowly building in Palestine for years. The Ottomans, who are paranoid about foreign spies and influence, issue a declaration immediately after the start of the war that subjects of hostile nations must leave the country. This caused immediate confusion. Some Jewish residents in Palestine were exempted because they'd start. And I should say some Jewish residents who had immigrated from Europe are exempted because if you had come to Palestine from Europe and you had become a naturalized citizen of the Ottoman Empire, which there was a way to do, then you didn't get deported, right? But if you hadn't bothered to do that, they would deport you. Because the Ottoman's argument was, well, that proves that you were not loyal, right? Because you had an opportunity and you didn't take it. And part of why a lot of Ashkenazim don't take the opportunity to become naturalized Ottoman subjects is as I've noted, they don't want to integrate. Right. And this sometimes extends to failing to make legal arrangements. And a lot of these people are going to suffer because they don't want to do that. During the war years, Ahmed Pasha, the Ottoman military governor of the Levant, launched the first of two major deportations of Jews from Jaffa in December of 1914. This is called Black Thursday, that's what it comes to be known. And this is the forced expulsion of about 6,6000 Russian born Jewish immigrants. A total of about 11,277 Jews from Jaffa are exiled to Alexandria where many of them are put in detainment camps that are, you know, these are, you should assume these are as nice as any enemy subject detainment camps ever are in a war, especially World War I, when people don't really have good medicine. Now as I noted in episode one, foreign born Jews in Palestine had previously often benefited from more support than Arab Jews. And we see evidence of this fact even during the war in the fact that In May of 1915 the New York sun published an investigation into the cruel treatment of PAL or of, I mean they call them Palestinian Jews, these are mostly European Jews would come to pass right there by the Ottoman government. And this outrage fuels Zionists like Vladimir Yabotinsky who'd started his career trying to organize Jewish self defense units in Russia. Well, the Zionist movement officially announced neutrality in the war and moved its HQ to Copenhagen from Hamburg as a result. Because it doesn't really make much sense for the Zionist to pick a side in World War I. Honestly didn't make much of a sense for anyone to pick a side in World War I. It was a stupid fucking war, right? But Yabotinsky, because he's realized that the Ottomans are going to lose the war by 1915 and he gets the approval from Maxwell to create this volunteer force by 1916 or so. This force is in the field and it's starting to actually gain combat experience. It's known initially as the Assyrian Jewish Refugee Corps. There are about 650 men in the unit at first. The other nickname they're known by is the Zion Mule Corps or zm. And Jabotinsky hates both of these nicknames by the way. He considers them dishonorable and shameful to his people. But if you know the British military, I actually, it's hard for me to interpret Zion Mule Corps as anything but kind of, you could say it's like not super woke, but it's a sign of fondness. If like that's how I kind of interpret the way the British are naming them. Maybe other people feel. I, I think there's like some debate about that. But this is, and when I say fondness, I don't mean that in like a good way. I mean in the way like the British were fond of a lot of their African like, like military, like tribe,

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

kind of like your call, right?

[Brett Weinstein]

They call them fighting races. Right. That was like a term the British used, Right. That's what I mean by font, right? Not to say it's not racist or anything. Yabotinsky never fought in the zmc, but most of the manpower came from Russian born Jews who'd been expelled by the Ottomans. Now the unit eventually receives a more official name. It becomes the 38th Battalion of Royal Fusiliers, although it's still more often referred to as the Judean Regiment. The unit motto was first to Judah, which should spell out Yavatinsky's purpose for creating this unit. He wanted Jews to receive combat experience and training so that they could fight their neighbors in Palestine and the British government if necessary to ensure the birth of the State of Israel. From the beginning, Vladimir is like, not only does this give us combat experience and guns and might get us in good with the British and that could help because they'll be in charge next and we want them to like us. But even if they don't, if we understand how the British military works, then we can fight them when we need to. Right? That's part of his. He's a smart guy. This is really good strategy. Now the worst deportations from Palestine occur under cemal Pasha in 1917. And Cemal sees his work as necessary to subjugate the budding Jewish National Project in Palestine. He is not just worried that these are unloyal, he's anti Zionist. Right? That's a big a motivating factor for this dude. And because Jaffa was home to a large foreign born Jewish population who were slowly spinning Tel Aviv up from a suburb to a city, this, this is where their focus fell on most heavily. Pasha saw himself as a warrior for Islam and he wanted to crush Zionism. But as this article in the Journal of Israel affairs by Glinda Abramson makes clear, he hated Zionism because it was a nationalist movement, not out of a desire to destroy the Jewish community in Palestine as a whole. Quote. Like many Ottoman statesmen, Djemmel had witnessed the nationalist movements of the Balkans of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and he was committed to ensure that nothing similar would emerge in the Levant. While he was in charge of in Syria. They used to say if Djemal Pasha scratched his nose, he was thinking of sending them to exile. If he stroked his beard, he was thinking of whether or not to forgive them. However, if he twirled his mustache, be afraid for the conversation was on a path that may lead to death. So kind of a hard guy to get bearings on.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, just to say, like Arabs see him as extremely repressive, like Palestinians see him as extremely repressive. So he has like different types of repression for different Communities. Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

And that is. And that's the really important point. He is not anti Zionist because he's racist. He's also anti Arab nationalist. He's anti anyone who doesn't want the Ottoman charge.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And it's a threat to Ottoman.

[Brett Weinstein]

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

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

But Pasha would not be swayed. He believed that Zionists wanted to, quote, tear part of the body of the Ottoman Empire off, which they did. And he was a diehard Ottoman loyalist. As a result of his persecution and the wartime shortages, investment in the Zionist project overseas and in Palestine halted during this period. One Jewish exile during this time described the war years in Palestine this way. And I want to emphasize his description would also describe how most Arab Muslims would experience the same period of time as they were also disfavored unloyal minorities fighting an act of war against the Ottoman Empire. Quote, they took products from the shops. Flour, sugar, rice, and so on. They ordered the bakers to bake bread without payment until there was no bread or flour left in the city. They ordered all kinds of laborers and workers to work without payment, and their families went hungry. In addition, they grabbed everyone walking in the street, roped them together, and took them to dig pits once again, without payment or food. They confiscated the warehouses of large and small trees to make boxes to carry the stolen oranges to their camps. They took all the leather and skins from the warehouse to make shoes for the army. So, yeah, Ottoman Empire, not cool.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah. My family history, like, I don't know, because I'm not a historian, but I don't know if it counts as a famine, but they remember this time as, like, famine, like, conditions.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Oh, it is a famine. People starve to death.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Jews, Muslims, a lot of people starve to death. The population of Palestine drops by, I think, like 4 or 5% during this period. Disease, too, is rampant. You know, this is not just Palestine diseases. There's a horrible fucking plague that comes at the end of World War I that kills fucking millions and millions of people. Right. So Jimmel dissolves the few units of Jewish guards that had existed to protect Jewish neighborhoods. Doctors were conscripted and taken to the front, so hospitals had to close, which also caused and helped make worse massive outbreaks of dysentery and typhoid that only got worse as soldiers came home from the war. So by the time of the armistice. Yeah, here's the exact number. Palestine's population had fallen by 6% in four years. That is catastrophic.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah, that is catastrophic.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, that counts as a equivalent of. Yeah, that's the equivalent of like what, like 20 or 30 million Americans in four years dead, something like that. If like it were to happen here, at least, like, that's just by back of the, like a lot. Right. That's a massive number of people to die. Yeah, yeah. When? 1990. And obviously we all lived through. Think about how the pandemic, what it did to American society. Did it make people, like, more understanding of each other and like less angry?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

No, we're still messed up. I don't know.

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

Yeah.

[Brett Weinstein]

Imagine if it had killed like 3,000 times as many people proportionally or something like that.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. So when night. Yeah. When 1919 dawned, the Ottoman Empire was no more. And the Balfour Declaration meant the new British mandate had promised to bring some sort of Jewish state into being. Frustration and rage over this was mixed with nationalist ambitions from Arab Muslims and Christians alike, who grew more hostile to both the British and the Zionists. Many longtime residents of Palestine were distraught by the conflict that came alongside nationalism. In his book Lives in Common, Klein writes that members of the old Sephardic Jewish community in Jerusalem often expressed a sense of sadness and bewilderment about the death of the old days. Quote, nationalism suddenly intruded on their lives and those of their Muslim neighbors and imposed its hatreds and wars on them. The construction of the national eye involved the rejection of prior identities, including that of being Arab Jews. And that is both really bleak. And it's also why, as this goes on, I was trying very hard to differentiate between European born Jewish immigrants, Sephardic Arab Jews. Increasingly it's just Arabs and Jews in terms of how people talk about it and think about it and how the international community talks about it and thinks about it. That hasn't happened yet. Certainly not. Right. Not by 1970.

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

Disappearing.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right, exactly. And flattening. Right. And that is happening. And that's, you know, obviously there's a genocide going on in Gaza right now, and genocide's not the right word for just like the end of an identity. But I don't think There is a good word for what happens when something like that occurs, right? I don't know it. I don't really know what to refer to that as, honestly.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah, it's not even assimilation because it's like a direct result of political ideology.

[Brett Weinstein]

People are there. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the war's end also brings an influx of new foreign born Zionist leaders as well as a return of thousands of exiled Jews, including many who came back with arms and military experience. Right. By the end of the war, Jabotinsky's Judean division numbered more than 5,000. The International Encyclopedia of the First World War summarizes their service this way. Jabotinsky and Patterson was one of the leaders, one of the direct leaders of the forces. Relationships with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force Higher Command were not free of friction as it clearly contained a number of anti Semitic officers who made the lives of the Legionnaires difficult at various points. The Legion did not arrive for service until after General Allenby's conquest of Jerusalem. They proved useful in the final battles and then in guarding POWs. In 1919, the British government began to decommission the Legion. Jabotinsky struggled for the Legion's survival, claiming that the absence of Jewish armed forces would lead to violence against Jews. And you know, first off, one of the reasons why there's conflict and this is going to be relevant as much as overall the British Mandate is way, definitely going to side with the Zionists and enable them, especially in this period. There's at least an equal number of British military officers who are more siding with the Arabs and are very much hesitant to embrace like the Zionist vision of things and who certainly want like, they don't want it to just be Muslim states, but they want integrated Arabs, independent Arabic states. Right. This comes out of like T.E. lawrence and stuff, right? There's, there's a lot of British officers who are not in this period of time bought into the Zionist thing. The British Mandate though is very much going to side with the Zionists over Arab nationalists in, in many cases. Not that they don't also fight them, kill them. There's a lot of violence between the British Mandate and some of these different Zionist groups as we'll talk about. So the fact that Yabotinsky thinks that if this military unit is decommissioned, it's going to lead to violence against the Jews. His fears there would seem to be reinforced by the escalating violence of the Ottoman state near the end of the war and the fact that this causes escalating nationalist hostilities too. One of the major Muslim festivals Was as we talked about this a bit, was Nebi Musa, right? And this is named after a holy site near Jericho said to be the tomb of Moses. Palestinian Muslims would celebrate for seven days, starting just before Good Friday. And in prior years, as I've talked about, and we read a quote about this in the first episode, the festival was often attended by all faiths. As one Jewish resident of the holy city recalled, a warm and happy atmosphere prevailed among us. We knew that they were honoring the memory of a prophet and a man of God whom we also accepted. And that is obviously one reason why there's so much religious solidarity. Muslims think Moses was pretty important too, right?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

We've got the same stuff in previous years.

[Brett Weinstein]

It would make you feel really comforted, right, that like, well, these people believe something different, but we have some commonalities. But during the war, things had curdled. And in 1919, by 1919, the Nebi Musa celebration, a lot of the speaking around it, because they're speakers at these events, right, Were really anti Zionist and anti British. Right? Because they're Arab nationalists, right? And Arabs are furious that their own nationalist aims have been thwarted. We talk about this in the Lawrence episodes, but the Arabs get really fucked over by the British after fighting for independence. You know, they had fought as well alongside Britain and the Ottomans and World War I had ended with the Balfour Declaration, but it had not ended with a similar commitment to their aims, even though they had also fought. Right. And so a lot of these people think that the new British mandate is giving preferential treatment to foreign born Zionist immigrants simply because they're also seen as being European. And they are in 1920. That's valid. Yeah, yeah. You know what else is valid? Sponsors. There's not a.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

This is like a horrible episode to do ad breaks.

[Brett Weinstein]

This is a really bad episode for ad breaks. How do you transition? Yeah, I don't know.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

We're doing our best here. Friends.

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[Brett Weinstein]

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[Brett Weinstein]

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[Brett Weinstein]

We're back. So as I said after the war, 1919 kind of the first post war nebi Musa festival, it's known as like well there's a lot of like anti Zionist and anti British mandate speeches and things get really tense and there's you know especially like uncomfortable for a lot of the particularly a lot of even the non Zionist like Jewish attendees of the celebrations. And in 1920 the next year things get uglier. Several Arab leaders give speeches against Zionist immigration but it's not really known what the trigger is before rioting breaks out. And this is like really bad. But you'll notice as I as I read the death toll, this is not like a one sided thing right like these, whatever else happened it seems like the amount of force being deployed was if not entirely accurate. Neither of these size has like a massive like edge on the other in terms of their ability to deploy violence. Five Jews are killed in the rioting along with four Arab Muslims and hundreds of people are injured in the wake of the riot. A number of local Muslim leaders condemned the violence but a great deal of damage had already been done. It's very hard to restore the kind of trust that had existed before something like this. And there's some really heartbreaking quotes in lives in common with especially as like some there are some communities that just like clear out entirely and like the Jews there move in with and start forming in these communities especially that had been more integrated of like Sephardic Jews and like move in and start living in common with these like Zionist communities because they don't feel safe anymore. And that Decreases the amount of like solidarity and the amount of understanding between these communities. And it just. Everything is going to get a lot uglier in the wake of this. Right. The riots also provide Yabotinsky with an excuse to do what he did best, which is form local self defense militias and arm them with illegally gotten firearms after. And he does that. Right. Like Yabotinsky's very active during, during the riots and he is arrested immediately afterwards by the British and charged with illegally using British military forces because he'd gathered a lot of these guys who in some cases were still British soldiers and used them in his militias and he'd taken a lot of weapons that did not belong to him. So he is arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in Acre. Like most militant true believers, prison only increased his sense of certainty in what he was doing. He changes his name during this brief prison sentence from Vladimir to Zev, which is a Hebrew name. It's Z E apostrophe. Evie is how it's. At least it's anglicized. The spelling is usually anglicized as. And he's only imprisoned for three months. So again we see. Would a similar guy who was an Arab Muslim have only gotten sentenced for the same crime or would he have been hung or shot? Right, exactly. So we're already seeing, and this is going to tell massively the fact that. And what you brought up is really important, the fact that because there are militant Arab nationalist groups, Right. And these are like Palestinian Muslims and when they do things, they very much often tend to either get killed or imprisoned and always have their guns taken away. Whereas that doesn't always happen to these Zionist groups and their leaders. And it allows them to continue building power and organization in a way that is forcibly denied. Exactly, exactly.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah. I mean they not only killed them, they killed them publicly.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And they really decimated political leadership during this time. So the anti British mandate sentiment was very much materially connected to the fact that people were feeling extremely repressed.

[Brett Weinstein]

Absolutely, absolutely. And don't get me wrong, most of the Zionists really hate the mandate too. It's just. They hate it because it's not giving them everything they want at once.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Right, exactly. Different reasons.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. I mean there are also like the mandate will assassinate some Zionist leaders. That does happen too. And likewise there are Zionists groups that are assassinating a lot of British officials. That happens a ton, mostly after a lot of the period we're talking about, but it's starting in this time. So the Hashimer was reformed after the war and in 1920 and it's an extension called the Hashimer, called the Haganah was created in its initial conception, the Haganah was a defensive militia. And you'll see that as I in like the. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Terrorism, it's like it's not really a terrorist group. It was a purely defensive militia. It was defensive in its main orientation, but purely is not at all accurate. Right. Really not accurate.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Unless you count ethnic cleansing as like defensive.

[Brett Weinstein]

Self defensive. Ethnic.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Tomato.

[Brett Weinstein]

Tomato, yeah. The Haganah Secret 1924 Constitution declared that its objective was to protect the Jewish community in Palestine. But again, I should remind you that the precursor of the Haganah's motto was Judea was lost by blood and fire and will rise again by blood and fire. So while the Haganah is on paper a defensive force, over the years they work clandestinely with other militias and gangs and also clandestinely form other militias and gangs that are very much offensive. And they also do offensive stuff as we'll talk about themselves. In 1923, Zev Jabotinsky, now living in Riga, founded a right wing youth movement called Bitar, which was opposed to both the older left wing labor movement focused Zionist groups and defensive militias and the British Mandate. And again, Bitar is the precursor to Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party. Right. Like one follows the other, right? Yeah, they're fascists and there's a lot of. There's a really good article called Yabotinsky the Fascist Right, that talks about a lot of the similarities between some of these and especially Mussolini's fascist groups. Because don't they wear brown shirts? Yes, they do wear brown shirts. And there are attempts to work with, and they do work with to a degree, Mussolini's government. Until Mussolini get so in bed with Hitler that they have to push more anti Semitic laws. Like there's a lot of sympathy with the, the Italian fascists and some of these, these right wing Zionist groups. That's a really important thing that's going on right now too. I'm not talking about it enough in these episodes. There's so much to get over. But that is a really important thing that you should know that when I say right wing, I don't mean like kind of conservative on tax policy. Right. That's not what I'm talking about.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Health care policies are a little different.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah, they're. They're not. Yeah, they're fascist. They're like proto fascist fascist. You know, you could. Academics will quibble, but like, you know, there's a lot of similarities. They're wearing brown shirts, right? What else do you need to know there? And as the 20s roared on, violence in the Holy Land only grew more common. And it takes a bunch of different forms from street fights between gangs. And some of these are, you could call them Arab nationalist gangs and Zionist gangs. Some are just like, gangs of people who are, like, Jewish and Muslim and live in towns. And they're, like, pissed, right? They're teenagers fighting or whatever. And some of them are organized militant gangs and terrorist groups that are doing targeted murders and assassinations of each other. Right. And of course, there's also riots periodically, and a lot of these riots will wind up targeting Jewish neighborhoods. That happens repeatedly over the years. And it really. The violence and the constant tempo violence hardens a lot of people, and it also causes a lot of people to change their minds and beliefs. And in many ways, this is in a tragic, and it makes them a lot meaner and more aggressive, but not always. And this brings me to a really tragic and really complicated story. Have you ever heard of Jacob Israel De Haan?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Mm, no.

[Brett Weinstein]

This I'm. I'm glad I get to tell you, because I hadn't known about this guy either. And he's a really interesting fellow. So Jacob was born in 1881 in the Netherlands, just as the first wave of Zionist migration from Europe began. He became a teacher and a writer, and he published his first novel in 1904, which is again the same year as the Kishineff Pogrom. This book was a fictional account of the author's homosexual relationship with a real scholar, Arnold Aletrino, who was married, although a public defender of homosexuality. So what people generally think is happening is that Dehaan is having an affair with this guy who's, like, publicly married, but also, like, an advocate for queer people and is queer himself. And he writes a book fictionalizing it, but using the real dude's name, which is kind of fucked up. Like, it's really messy. This man is messy. Dahan is considered one of the greatest poets in the history of the Netherlands. Right? But he's like, he is messy. This man is so fucking messy. He gets fired from his newspaper gig as a result of this book because it causes, like, a real problem. And also his newspaper could get him in writing a children's column. So the fact that he's written this book, it does not make him seem like the best guy to be writing this column because he's, like, publicly accused a guy of, like, you know, it's messy. They also have to alter the book to, like, take the name of an actual married dude out anyway. And his fiance, because he has a fiance that he's, like, marrying to, like, hide the fact that he's gay. She actually helps buy up all the copies of his original bookside.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I gotta get rid of this.

[Brett Weinstein]

I gotta hide this shit.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Oh, my God.

[Brett Weinstein]

In 1907, DeHaan married a Gentile woman and published a second. This had been the Feast fiance and published a second novel about a. And so, first off, by the way, you should see, he marries a gentile woman. This is not a guy who is a super strict believer. I don't even think he would call himself a believer in 1907, really. He's Jewish as an identity, as an ethnicity, but he's not really faithful in this period of time. So he publishes a second novel, and this one is about a sadomasochistic relationship between a man and a boy. Now, this is going to be relevant to talking about Dahan, but in this period of time, in a lot of countries, pedophilia and homosexuality are the exact same thing under the law. And that causes some really uncomfortable situations and some really uncomfortable writing from a number of figures, European figures, in this period of time. DeHaan is not the only one. And we don't really know, like, did he. Was he actually, like, a pederist? Is this just, like, a thing he wrote about? Because, you know, culturally, a lot of weird stuff's going on at the time. I don't really know how to entirely delineate all of that. Right. But this is a complicated man. He is very queer, and he is very much in the counterculture of his day. You could not be much more in the counterculture of his day than this guy is. So despite some questionable decision making, he gets a doctorate of law in 1916. But DeHaan can't find prestigious work as a lawyer, so he starts writing and publishing poetry, and his work is noted. I'm not a good judge of poetry from this part of the world, but his work is noted as both being very Jewish and very sexual. Right. He's super horny, and he's, like, very much a member of the Jewish community and influenced by it. Right. He's very controversial, but his poems are widely celebrated today. He's still considered one of the best poems the Netherlands ever produced. And he starts to develop a degree of respect as a public eccentric. Right. He kind of crosses over from being, oh, this guy is someone you don't want to. This guy is like a weirdo who's into some stuff that we don't approve of. And you don't want to talk to him to. This guy's a weirdo. We celebrate because he's a great artist, right? He crosses that barrier, you know, during this kind of period of time, because he's very Jewish and very horny. Very Jewish and very horny. That is how people describe Dahan and very queer. He visited Russia near the end of the Tsardom. And this really seems to have an influence on him, right? Seeing how Jewish people are treated in Russia. He visits prisons and seeing how prisoners are treated by the Tsar. He becomes an activist, right? And his experiences in the east lead him to become both a Zionist and an observant Jew. And this is. He's also nearing middle age, so maybe he becomes Orthodox during this time. Midlife crisis, right? Per an article inherits by David Greene, in 1919, DeHaan decided to immigrate from Amsterdam to Jerusalem. In a letter to British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, he wrote with typical self assurance that I am not leaving Holland to improve my condition. Neither materially nor intellectually will life in Palestine be the equal to my life here. I am one of the best poets of my generation and the only important Jewish national poet Holland has ever had. It is difficult to give up all this. So first off, you can see this is a guy who has a high opinion of himself. And second, this is a guy who seems very committed to the Zionist project. But after he moves to Palestine, he lives through these years we've been talking about of rap. He comes there as the violence is starting to escalate. He sees the riots and he sees these assassinations and counter assassinations and these beatings as he's teaching law and writing for a Dutch newspaper. And he starts to become critical of the Zionist project, right? As a result of what he's seeing, this violence really turns him off of it. It eventually he meets an anti Zionist rabbi who is. This guy is also a really interesting figure. Joseph Chaim Sonnenfeld. Sonnenfeld is the guy, the rabbi who founded an ultra Orthodox anti Zionist community in Palestine called Edda Haredit and was its spokesman. And he was also, like Dehaan, really controversial sexually. He gets accused of being a pedophile today. I don't know how accurate those allegations are. He is. Is definitely a guy who publicly made a habit of trying to shock Christian morals as a protest against homophobia. And I don't know how to, like, judge him accurately in terms of what he's done. In part because both of these guys are anti Zionist, there's also a lot of propaganda against them. I don't know, like, what's true and what's not about their sexualities and what they did or didn't do. In 1922, Dahan takes a case to defend a Haredi political movement protesting against the need to pay an excise tax that Zionist authorities had placed on Matzo. So these are anti Zionist Jews in Palestine who do not want to pay an excise tax that the Zionists want them to pay. Right. He represents them in court, I think successfully, and he starts becoming more and more of an anti Zionist activist in Palestine. And because, remember, this guy is a celebrity. I know when I say, like a famous poet, that doesn't sound famous Today, in like 1922, a famous poet could be pretty goddamn famous. And Dehaan is very famous. And so he starts meeting with European political figures and talking about anti Zionism. And because he's such a beloved artist, this really starts to worry a lot of Zionists in Palestine. He also meets with Hussein Bin Ali, the King of now Saudi Arabia, and they start talking about forming a Palestinian state that would be like multi racial or religious, multi ethnic, you know, like not a Zionist state right now. Now, obviously, Dahan's not anti Semitic. He wants the British out and he wants Palestine to be an independent country. He just is no longer a Zionist. He thinks that Jews and Muslims and Christians and presumably atheist weirdos like him and his friends should all live in relative harmony. Right. So he's no longer supporting a Jewish state, and this really is going to cause problems for him. David Greene continues. By now, Dahan had become a liability to the Zionist movement and especially dangerous because of the platform he now had for spreading his views. In London, where critical decisions about Palestine were being made. In Jerusalem, he became Persona non grata among Zionists, including his law students. One anecdote has him walking with a Dutch visitor who observed that as people passed them into the street, they were spitting on the sidewalk. The visitor thought this was a sign of disrespect, to which Dehaan responded, according to Dutch historian Ludi Gibbels. Oh, no. They spit on the street out of respect for you, your presence. Otherwise they would have spit in my face.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, he's very honest, you know.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yes, he knows his situation. He. Yeah, he does not have illusions. Early on the morning of June 30, 1924, as he left the synagogue in Sharzadec Hospital on Jaffa Road, Dahan was shot three Times, he died immediately. And, you know, this is. The British mandate issues a reward for information about the killer. No one ever comes forward. No one's ever caught. Right. Obviously. And for a long time, people just kind of assumed the Haganah had done it. But we didn't know the Haganah had done it until an Israeli businessman named Avraham Tahomey came Forward in the 1980s. We're going to talk about Abraham a little bit later, too. Abraham had been with the Haganah in the 1920s, and he claims that when he assassinated Dahan, he was working under the orders of Yitzhak bin Zvi, the future second president of Israel and an officer in the Haggadah at the time. Dahomey insisted. I have no regrets, because Dahan wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism. And that just tell you a lot, because Dahan is very much saying, we need an independent state that the British don't run. He just doesn't want it to be racist.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

He doesn't want it to be exclusionary. Yeah, it's an interesting, like, journey that he took to ethno nationalism. And then I was like, oh, wait, yeah, it shows.

[Brett Weinstein]

Like, someone who whatever else you want to say about him, looks at, as soon as he realizes how much violence is going to have to happen, he's like, no, it's not worth it. That's horrible. I don't want that. I'm a poet. Like, that's not my thing.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

That's the whole thing with cultural Zionists.

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

Right?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, I don't know. I'm not a historian of Zionism, but, like, my understanding is they're like, oh, you know, we belong here, we should have some stake here. But we should definitely not be exclusionary and ethno nationalists because that sets us up for too much badness.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah. As I've tried to say, Zionism doesn't mean one thing. There are a lot of, like, you know, cultural Zionists is a good term for the people who like. Their idea of what Zionism means is like, well, like, the Jewish kind of community that we want to create is not necessarily a political state. It's like an actual community. But it doesn't necessarily require us to have political power and be the only ones with it. That's not what a lot of people are advocating for. Obviously, those folks become less common as everything gets hardened and everything gets a lot more violent and a lot of them get killed. You know, you see, if you are one of those kind of people like Dahan, who is willing to, like, rethink your ideas and push for a much more integrated and less aggressive thing, then these really aggressive Zionists are going to kill you if they think you're going to get any far. Because that's what happens to Dahan. Right? And his death is often called the first political assassination in the Zionist community, the first assassination of a Jew by other Jews. Right, like that. And it's not going to be the last, by the way, but it is really important because it kind of breaks that barrier. And violence of every kind is going to grow a lot more common. In the late 20s and 30s in Tel Aviv and Jaffa, two cities joined by the hip. By the 30s, there were constant conflicts over the fact that Jewish kids would visit brothels and gambling dens run by Arabs in downtown Jaffa, just as Arab kids went to Tel Aviv to do the same thing. Right. There are, like, criminals. There are, like, Arab Muslim criminals who, like, run brothels and run drugs and whatnot and illegal dancing houses. And there's, like, Jews, Jewish, like, organized criminal gangs that do the same thing. And they both tend to have a lot of appeal to, like, members of the opposite community, which causes, like, the. A lot of, like, the, you know, particularly the mothers and fathers, because they're often kids to start moral panics about, oh, the Arabs are corrupting our kids, the Jews are corrupting our kids. Right. And the reality is that, like, kids like to go do stuff they're not supposed to. And if you're growing up in Tel Aviv, going to downtown Jaffa to go, like, into a brothel is going to seem, like, the most transgressive.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

It's like, the illicit one.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right, right, right. Whereas if you're a Muslim, growing up in Jaffa, Tel Aviv's gonna have a similar appeal. Right. Ultimately, this is very funny. The British solve the problem with all these brothels by crack. First they crack down on the brothels and, like, close them down. And then that just means all the brothels are illegal. And they realize that, like, oh, shit, we're actually having a problem keeping, like, enough of our soldiers healthy because all of our soldiers are going to the brothels. Obviously, they're soldiers. And so the British mandate establishes a bunch of official brothels so that they can make sure they don't lose too many soldiers to vd, Right? And they keep, by the way, these brothels are stocked with both, like, Arab and Ashkenazim women. Right? Like, that's what the British Part of what the British mandate is doing. Like, they're deliberately like, recruiting a mix of women to, like, run, like, people these brothels as part of, like, a public health measure, I guess you'd call it. You know, obviously there's still illegal brothels, and it's not uncommon. You see brothel owners and like, including, like, a lot of Jewish brothel owners will get murdered by Zionist gangs for corrupting the community. The same thing happens. Arab nationalists will murder, you know, Arab brothel owners for similar reasons because these are also. People are becoming more religious hardline. Right. Or religiously hardline. Newspapers publish constant allegations that one community is corrupting the other. There's tons of complaints from, like, you know, people in Tel Aviv that these. These Arab men are coming over to ogle our women. And complaints from, like, in Jaffa of, like, these rowdy young Jewish kids are coming in and, like, causing problems. Right. Like, you see a lot of those complaints in the newspapers. And sometimes as much as it turns into, like, conflict, it's also evidence of the fact that these are still deeply tied communities. Young people are hanging out together. Young people are going over to each other's, like, downtown. There's intermarriages and there's intermarrying and other kinds of inter. Stuff. Right. I'm gonna. I'm gonna quote again from Life's in Common here. Romance is sometimes developed between Britons and young women. In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the Jewish underground militias fought this phenomenon, tracking and on occasion, interrogating girls who socialized with British soldiers and civilians and with Arabs. Some were executed on charges of providing intelligence to the enemy. And, you know, there's. We're not going to be talking about it enough, but there are a lot of, like, mixed relationships. And these, These are often very common. You have a lot of really awful stories about, like, when, you know, the violence boils over during the Arab revolt and stuff, you have a lot of families broken up that are. Had been interfaith families. Like, there's. But there is. That is happening here. And it's a mix of these people just trying to live their lives and also totally unwittingly becoming flashpoints because other members of the community get angry. Yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Their identities are, like, too complicated. Can I just plug the episode I did about my great grandmother here?

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

For it could happen here. If people are interested in, like, one particular story that happens to be my. In my family history, there's that. But it's. I mean, kind of more broadly, I think we need to understand, like, the lens of, like, sexual politics here is an. An important one to, to see the conflict through because it remains like the way that both, like the, the British, but also then the Israeli government weaponizes kind of maybe less, less progressive sexual politics in some of these communities is, is, is a relevant thing to understand. I mean, it continues until today.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, absolutely. 1929 is a particularly bad year for violence in Palestine after Zionist leaders refused British offers to shared Arab Jewish. So there's a lot of talk about like representation and like moving towards an independent state in Palestine. Cause the Mandate, the British never like own Palestine. That's not how they're thinking about it either. They are from the beginning know that they're going to leave at some point. And so the British, you know, they have Zionist leaders and you know, Arab leaders come to the table and they're talking about trying to figure out some sort of system and the British make an offer that would have had shared Arab Jewish representation, right? And the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, you know, and the Arabs are generally in agreement with this, but the Zionists do not, they do not want to come to the table. They don't want shared representation. So this pisses off the Grand Mufti. It pisses off a lot of people. And the Grand Mufti starts speaking out about a future Jewish takeover of the Temple Mount, right? And he starts giving speeches saying like, they're trying to take over, they're trying to take over the Temple Mount. They're trying to push us out of our, of our home. And there are newsletters, news articles that are published at the same time about a series of land purchases that had been made by the Jewish National Fund that inflamed the now decades old arguments over how much land Jewish immigrants should be allowed to buy. This is all further incensed by years of constant conflict over who should be allowed to do what where, particularly at the Western Wall, which is also part of the Al Aqsa Mosque. Now, there had been friction over this forever, pretty much, at least at times. But in the past, a genuine desire of most Muslims and Jews to let each other do their thing tended to win out. You don't see that staying true by the late 20s. And shit just keeps getting uglier and uglier until August of 1929. And we're talking about, you know, the politics of this, you know, the ongoing back and forth in the religious dimensions of this. But I also don't want you to forget the fact that everything boils over in August when it's really fucking hot, which is just throughout history, always when riots and stuff tend to be at their worst everywhere it. When it's hot, right? Yeah, it's just people. Per an article in ebsco, the unrest was initially sparked by the installation of a portable screen by Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall on Yom Kippur aimed at separating men and women during prayer. The location is significant to both Jews as a remnant of the ancient temple and Muslims who view it as part of the Al Aqsa mosque complex. Following escalating tensions and protests from both sides, violence erupted when rumors spread that Jewish groups intended to attack Muslim holy sites. The riots escalated over several days, resulting in substantial loss of life, with 249 fatalities recorded, 133Jewish and 116Arab, alongside hundreds of injuries. The violence extended from Jerusalem to other areas such as Hebron and Safed, where Jews faced brutal attacks. And obviously, like Jewish communities are being attacked at the same time. You see in the death toll. This is not. These groups are still not completely out of proportion with each other in terms of their capacity to do violence. Right. When you have like Zionist militias and these Arab nationalist militias, they're kind of at parity still. You kind of see that in the death toll. You know, would you say it's more

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

like a fight than like a pogrom? Like essentially like it's a brawl or something.

[Brett Weinstein]

There are brawls and there are pogroms. There are neighborhoods that are attacked that don't have defense. Right. And people are forced out of their homes and lose their houses. And there are also massive street fights and there's counter fights and count counterattacks. I don't know if like pogrom. I don't know who gets to determine that. It's a mix of different kinds of violence. This is happening over days and happening in multiple cities. Right. So it's not the same everywhere. Right. But it's not a situation where like, it's just one group of people dying. Right. Like, that's certainly not the case. And this is, this is terrible. And there is a lot of violence against innocent people and a lot of, particularly a lot of like civilian Jewish communities. And this is one of those terrible moments that historians often see as having sort of locked the worst possible future. Right. That this is not necessarily the point of no return, but it's one of the points that makes it very hard for things to get better. Right. And the Western Wall riots are a really important point for, for things getting worse in Palestine afterwards. Jewish militias increase in size and number and they began building and importing more arms. Anti Semitic violence rises, as do assassinations and property destruction by groups like you're to going again. That's the Irgun is the right wing militia that batar the right wing party forms in Palestine. We'll talk about them too a little bit more here now I should note ad break here. Oh yeah, I should also do a fucking ad break I guess.

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

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[Brett Weinstein]

Adam Devine, Blake Anderson and Honors Holm from this is Important. You know those moments when you realize you've been adulting too hard. Like getting excited about a new vacuum, making a spreadsheet for a group trip, saying let's circle back and meaning it. That's when you need a slice. And trust us, we all need a slice. Slice is a soda you remember back and better for you. And yes, it's still soda. The full flavor, the fizz, the whole thing. But now it has grown up. Benefits 5 grams of sugar or less plus prebiotics, probiotics and post. I personally love the orange soda flavor cause it takes me back to my childhood. So you get real soda flavor, real fizz and real benefits without making some sad adult compromise. Grab a slice when you want something full flavored, low sugar, gut friendly and way more fun than whatever responsible thing you are about to do. Slice a better soda for fun's sake. This is Matt Altmix from How to Money and we are all about comparing prices to save money on so many things in so why wouldn't you compare prices for your next ride share? Taking a few seconds to check Lyft can save you real money on your next ride. And I did this last time I caught a ride home from the airport after some travel and guess who came out on top?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

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[Brett Weinstein]

So don't just price check with flights and phone plans and your groceries. Comparing rideshare prices will help you to save money every time you ride. Save money. Check Lyft. And we're back. So 1929 also August of 1929 also sees the horrific Hebron massacre. That's kind of part of this whole swell of violence where this about 70 people are actually murdered. But because the community in Hebron is tiny, there's only six or seven hundred Jews I think in Hebron at this period of time. And because homes are destroyed, the community is basically destroyed. That's how a lot of people see it. Like huge numbers of Jews in Hebron are like forced out of their homes. And a lot of people will say like that's kind of the end of the Jewish community as it had existed previously. Right? And that's also going to bring a lot more violence. In fact, it's this 1929 pogrom that inspires a debate within the Haganah over how the Organization should proceed. Abraham Tahomei, again, the guy who's killed the Han, becomes closely tied to Yabotinsky and Batar and he urges a split. And he forms a group initially called the Haganah Beach B, or there's like an apostrophe B. I don't know if it's like literally a B or if it's. I'm not, you know, Hebrew's not my strong suit here. It's initially just a split off of the Haganah and it's renamed Etzel. And then in 1931, it's named, renamed Irgun, or the national military organization. And this becomes the militant terrorist arm of Batar. Irgun is a terrorist group. There is no other way to look at your gun as a terrorist group than as a terrorist group. Right, right. And in order to kind of make that clear, I want to talk to you about, you know, what Abraham Tahomei believed. And I'm going to quote from a paper in the Institute for Palestine Studies by Maher Sharif. Abraham Tahomey declared that political violence and terrorism were legitimate means in the Jewish national struggle for the land of Israel. Pretty simple, right? Like, not a. You don't have to read into him much to call him a terrorist. He does. Irgun is the largest right wing gang at the time, but it's not the only one. And in short order, they're going to be joined by like the Stern Gang. I think Getzel is the other name of the Stern Gang, and there's several others. Right. And in short order, these different gangs, as they're often called, we might call them terrorist cells or insurgent groups, you know, that would be a more modern term for them. They start causing problems for the British Mandate. They launch a lot of attacks and assassinations on British officers. And the British are kind of bewildered. They're bewildered Both by this 1929 wave of violence, pogrom or know, riots, whatever you want to call them, that really scares the British Mandate. That really convinces them that, like, we probably can't stay here like this. There's a ticking clock on how long we can keep things under wraps here. And it also convinces the Mandate we have to take some major steps to try to turn down the temperature because things are dangerously close to outright war. Right. Because they're the British, they pick the worst ways to try to fix all that. Well, not the worst ways, but they do maybe the right thing in ways that are only going to make the situation worse. So they zero in on immigration from Europe of Zionist Jews and Land ownership policies as major causes of discord. And obviously, as we talked about, these are major causes of discord. But they immediately throttle Zionist immigration into Palestine. And that infuriates. By the time they do that, you could say, like, well, of course, you know, what else are they going to do? But when you do that after like years of it just happening without nearly as much, and there's like tens of thousands of heavily armed and organized Zionist groups in the country, many of whom had been initially armed and trained by the British, I should say also, it's going to just cause more violence, right? They immediately try to crack down on this thing and the people that they've given guns to and training start fighting them a lot harder, right? This sparks increasing conflict, sometimes deadly, between, you know, the British authorities and these different militias. And while the Haganah try not to get involved directly with attacking the British Mandate, part of why Irgun and the Stern Gang and these other gangs exist and they do have ties to the Haganah is so that the movement can do attacks in the British Mandate without like the Haganah, you know, getting directly involved, right? David Rappaport, who wrote the influential article the Fourth Wave September 11th in the history of Terrorism, includes Irgun and Lehi, sorry, Lehigh is the other name of the story. Stern Gang as examples of the second wave of terrorism. The first was the anarchist wave which had started in Russia in the late 1800s, and the second was an anti colonial wave. But there's a lot of people who disagree with Rappaport's claim because it's not really right to look at the violence of a group like Irgun or Lehi or the Haganah as anti colonial like terrorism or anti colonial insurgency. It's not really anti colonial violence, period. And I'm going to quote from the Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism Terrorism. Unlike violent conflicts in other parts of the world during that period, the Jewish struggle for self determination, Palestine cannot be characterized as anti colonial for two main reasons. First, while both Irgun and especially Lehi targeted British officials, Palestine was never part of the British Empire. Furthermore, one of the main initial objectives of the Mandate was to facilitate the implementation of the Balfour Declaration. Anti colonial struggles are generally associated with uprisings of indigenous populations against foreign rule. The vast majority of Jews from the Irgun and Lehi who struggled for the establishment of the independent state of Israel Israel were immigrants, while their main opponents, namely the Palestinians, were natives of the land. Very important point to keep in mind.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I'm surprised that the Oxford Handbook was this honest.

[Brett Weinstein]

They did say that at least. Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, terrorism studies is just a no offense cesspool. So this is. Yeah, this is pretty honest.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, yeah, that part of it was right. I have some issues with that, but yeah. Now all of these pressures keep building and building, as does the vice silence until things come to a head again in the Great Arab revolt of 1936-1939. Sometimes you'll hear it called the Great Palestinian Revolt. I want to quote now from an article in the journal Origins by Ori Yehudai. Historians date the beginning of the great 1936-1939 Arab revolt, as it came to be known, to the killing of two Jews by Palestinian Arabs near the town of Tulkarm on April 15, 1936, followed by Jewish retaliation against Palestinians that expanded into riots in Jaffa and Tel Aviv. So that's like a really short summary of kind of what happens. Everything I've discussed over these last two episodes also is part of why this revolt happens. Right. This increasing anger at the Mandate, this increasing anger at Zionism, all of the violence between these different communities that have occurred, all of that is a big part of what leads to this revolt

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

for 50 years at this point.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right? 50 years.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Basically nationalism being suppressed on one side.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right, right. And another cause also can't be divorced from is the coming of Nazism to Germany, which causes a massive surge in Jewish immigration into Palestine that makes them more than a quarter of the population by 1936. To quote from Ori Yehudai, again, the Zionists built their settlements on land purchased by from Arab owners living in Palestine or in neighboring Arab countries. The transactions had a devastating impact on Palestinian society as they often involved the removal of Palestinian peasants from the land. Land. The distress of thousands of uprooted peasant families, coupled with frustration over the failure of traditional leadership to halt Zionism, led to a grassroots uprising launched by younger nationalist activists on April 25, 1936. Palestinian political parties temporarily put aside their differences and created a coordinating body called the Arab Higher Committee, or ahc, headed by Haji Amin Al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And the first thing that happens in what's called now the Great Arab Republic bolt is a six month general strike that is peaceful. Right. This is an attempt by a large organized body of Palestinian Arabs to address their grievances with the British Mandate via a general strike. Which is what everyone says should be the right way to do something like this. Right. You peacefully but firmly state your demands and without using violence, create a way to disrupt Life so that the people who are running things, things. Make concessions to you, right? Like that's like how you're supposed to try to improve things like in the west. That's what we say, right. Rather than violence. Right. But nothing like the British not only ignore them, they outright refuse the demands of this committee. Right? Because the committee is demanding an end to Jewish immigration and land purchase and an independent national government. Now there's room, as there always has been, for a negotiation here. But the British refused. And after six months of peaceful striking, a rebellion breaks out and it turns into a general uprising against the British and the Zionists. And it gets very ugly. There's a number of different rebel groups. Some of them carry out attacks on Jewish civilians too. This is a really brutal time. But that's not the majority or even all of what's happening. Certainly the violence convinces the British that the mandate is untenable and that they're going to need to create a Jewish state immediately. And they drop plans to do this. The initial plans would transfer because of where they're. And I think that their initial idea for this Jewish state they want to make is about 17% of Palestine, right? And because of the way they draw it up, it's going to require the transfer, that's the term they use, of 200,000 Arab Palestinians out of this new Jewish territory. And about a thousand Jews are going to need to vice versa. So you see, I mean, that's a really good look right there at just the discrepancy between how the mandate treats these two sides is they think it's reasonable to ask 200,000 Arab Muslims to leave their homes in exchange for like a thousand Jews doing the same on the other side. Right. Which is like, I just think those numbers are kind of useful to look at next to each other. Right. So the Zionist leadership accepts everything the British offer except the size of their borders, which is worth noting. The Palestinian leadership, said, says, no, this isn't. This isn't really at all.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Why would we do that? Right.

[Brett Weinstein]

Why would we.

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

Like what.

[Brett Weinstein]

What on what. The rebellion goes on until fall of 1938, when the British send in a big old army to murder their way out of the problem. Ori summarizes. The British sent 20,000 troops to Palestine and used harsh measures against the rebels, including house demolitions and executions. They outlawed the ahc, arrested and expelled activists and disarmed the Palestinians. Their vote was suppressed by the summer of 1939, leaving a toll of approximately, approximately 5,000 Arab. 415 Jewish and 100 British deaths. And this is the most lopsided death toll we've seen. Obviously, the British are largely responsible for that. But you know what you've seen here? The British have sent a couple really important messages with how they've dealt with this. First, they've told the Palestinians that peaceful protest is not going to get you shit. And second, they've told the Zionists that your arms and militias are accepted and your years of militant organizing are working. These are not great messages to send. This is going to cause problems for everybody. Now, once World War II gets started, a great number of Jewish fighters in Palestine again sign up to fight with the British. And they do this for both the incredibly understandable reason of wanting to fight the Nazis and for the same reason. Yabotinsky had wanted a Jewish legion in World War I, so that they could get more arms and experience for their upcoming war of independence. But the conflict with the British doesn't end just because they're ostensibly on the same side of this growing war. In 1940, the Central Office for Jewish Immigration chartered three ships to take Jewish refugees from Romania to Palestine. Once these ships docked, the British refused to let the refugees off. They had enacted by this point, the White Paper policy to curb Jewish immigration. And they planned to deport these people and not, by the way, back to Romania. And to do so, transferred all of the Jewish refugees from these three ships to one boat called the Patriots, which was docked at Haifa and bound for Mauritius. That's where they were going to unload these people. So they weren't going to be in Palestine. Right, so you've got this boat full of. Have you heard of the Patria case, by the way?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

No, this is new to me.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, this is a really important point. It's kind of the point we're going to end on. I didn't really know about this either. So you've got this boat and it's got these refugees from the Holocaust, right, like, docked at Haifa, and the British are gonna send it off to Mauritius. And there's a massive debate within the Hawk over what to do here. Now, During World War II, the Haganahs unofficial motto was fight the White Paper like there is no world war and help the British like there is no White Paper. So they wanted to stop these people from being deported, right, For a lot of reasons. But when you get into the habit, as the Haganah has, by this point of stockpiling guns and explosives, every problem starts to look like maybe guns and explosives are the solution, right? Like, that's just a human universe. I want to quote now from an article in the Museum of the Jewish People. Amateurism, negligence and perhaps even an inherent subconscious disrespect for the refugees blinded their eyes. The Haganah commanders acted against experts advice and placed a bomb in the rickety side of the old ship rather than under the machines area where there would be no passengers. And their idea here at least the claim that the Haganah makes is that we wanted to set off a small explosion so that they would have to evacuate the ship. Ship. And once they've evacuated these refugees into Palestine, it'll be a lot easier to keep them here. Right. There's. You can certainly run into theories that they intended it to be as big as it was. But whatever the cause is, and the official stance is that they fucked up and were just really bad with their explosives. They completely screw up and they blow this boat to kingdom fucking calm and they kill 267 Jewish refugees.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Holy shit.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right? It is a horrible catastrophe. And it is still today known as the Patriot Disaster is seen as the largest catastrophe in which Jews caused death of other Jews. 267 total people die in the bombing. They're not actually all Jewish, but the vast majority of them are and another 172 are injured. Now the Haganah again says that we miscalculated. This was a horrible fuck up. On humanitarian grounds though the British respond to this by saying okay, all of the survivors get to stay. And so what message has the mandate sent the Haganah by bombing away? Yeah, exactly right. And this is where I'm going to end things. Again, it's an arbitrary point. Any point I would pick is. But I think by this point you see everything that's going to lead us in to the Nakba to 48, like everything has been established now. There's not really a turning back point. And a lot of it is because of the messages the British have sent both that they've cracked down and debilitated and killed so many of these Palestinian leaders. And they have just continued to yield and aid and abet the Hagen even while they're carrying out terrorist attacks that in a lot of cases kill British civilians and their own civilians. Right. The lesson they have sent is bombing and violence is the way to get what you want. And we will give you everything if you just do a little bit more of it. That's what the British are saying in 1940. Right. And everything that comes after that is I think pretty, I wouldn't say predictable, but you get, I think, kind of where everything else happens, happens at this point.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I think the discrepancy is also, like, really important to highlight here because when 1948 happens, I think a lot of maybe pro Israel readings of that event or propaganda around that event is that, oh, all of these Arab countries attacked Israel, but in fact, they were armed like three to one. Yeah. And it's because of this discrepancy that's like, continued through time that the British have allowed for them to, like, build up their material power. So even with those Arab countries coming in in 1948, when Israel declares itself after Palestinians are ethically cleansed, like, it's, it's nothing compared to what the Israeli gangs are able to do, which are not the IDF and all of that.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Which become the IDF in this period. And obviously there, there continue to be conflicts between, like, the Irgun and the Haganah because they're, they're not, not in agreement about, among other things, Irgun wants to be the military of Israel. Right. At a certain point. And, you know, there's. I did debate. Should I have talked. Ended this more at like, the, the bombing of the King David Hotel. But I don't, you know, which is something people should be aware of. You know, that's another. And that I think the. Was Irgun and Menachem Bagin was like a major figure in sort of helping to mastermind that terrorist attack. But I, you know, know, by this point in time, you've seen both, like, the community that had existed previously, you know, in the 1780s or in the 1880s that we started talking about has been forcibly broken down and also broken just because, like, the massive changes that have swept the culture have meant that, like, people don't feel the same about who they are anymore. In a lot of cases, it's very

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

difficult to say you're an Arab Jew when there's not really space for you in either nationalism, essentially.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

And then, of course, I mean, we're not even getting to the part of, like, all of the Arab Jewish migration that happens in the aftermath of Israel's creation and how the state treats them.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, today I think they're over 50% of the population of Jewish Israelis. But you wouldn't know that, like, there's so much similarity between them and their Palestinian enemies, essentially. But because of, like you said, the identity has been erased.

[Brett Weinstein]

Right. And that's why there aren't Arab Jewish communities and a lot of these different Middle Eastern North African countries that had existed up until the 40s is because after the establishment of the state of Israel, both. There's reprisals against them. They also feel safer moving to Israel. But yeah, as you said, there's like a. It causes. There are huge within Israel, like sectarian dividends divides between different points of origin. Right. And none of that goes away, you know, and the. It's all, it's all just. I keep thinking back. The thing I can't really get out of my head because I hadn't really known about this kind of relationship is the, the relationship between these Arab Muslims who were descended from the people who got kicked out of, you know, modern day Spain and Portugal, Liberia, and the Sephardic Jews who are the same. Right. And this, this, this beautiful awareness they have that like we're part of each other's past and you know, even though that they're not the same religion, they've preserved a lot of our past even better than we did. And so like we have this degree of love towards them that doesn't. I don't think that exists anymore that interrelate. Those communities interrelate like that I.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

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

[Brett Weinstein]

Right, Yeah.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

I mean, absurd, absurd.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah, absurd. And also like just one more piece of evidence that like, the long history of like, interrelationship and like community, like intercommunal existence is way older than sectarian hatred, you know, like. Yeah, it's just sad.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Maybe it's time to rethink nationalism. I don't know. We'll leave it at that.

[Brett Weinstein]

I don't know. Maybe it didn't work out great. Maybe, maybe it was mostly bad.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Yeah, maybe.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. I don't know. You know what's not mostly bad? The book you just helped put together.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Oh, that's right. The handbook on Authoritarianism in the Arab World is out now with Bloomsbury Politics. I'd also recommend my again my episode for It Could Happen Here about my, My great grandmother. And if people are interested in the Arab Jewish question, look up the Israeli Black Panthers. Yeah, very interesting little anecdote there.

[Brett Weinstein]

Yeah. Okay, well, that's gonna do it for us at behind the Bastards this week. And yeah, come back next week where we'll talk about, I don't know, probably a dictator or something. I'll give you guys. I'll give you guys a fun one. Well, not a fun one. None of them are fun ones. I'll give you guys a different one

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

sounds

[Brett Weinstein]

behind the Bastards is a production

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

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 Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel,

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

YouTube.com BehindTheBash we love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

[Brett Weinstein]

This is Matt Altmix from How to Money and we are all about comparing prices to save money on so many things in life. So why wouldn't you compare prices for your next ride share? Taking a few seconds to check Lyft can save you real money on your next ride. And I did this last time I caught a ride home from the airport after some travel. And guess who came came out on top?

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

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[Brett Weinstein]

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[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

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[Brett Weinstein]

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[Brett Weinstein]

The Odyssey and Spider Man, Brand New Day have taken over cinemas and Raiders of the Lost Podcast has all the coverage you need, including our interview with director Destin Daniel Cretton. What surprised you about Tom Holland? He shows up to every meeting early. He's the first one on set, aside from learning all of his lines, is also able to memorize everybody's name on set. Download the free iHeartRadio app, search Raiders of the Lost Podcast and listen now.

[Podcast Advertiser/Host]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Dr. Donna Al-Kurd]

Guaranteed Human.