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- [00:01]
William Durimpole
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com. well, I was down on my last.
- [00:23]
Eugene Rogan
Dollar Then I started saving because the bank said fiscal restraint is what you're.
- [00:26]
William Durimpole
Craving So I put my earnings in a high yield account, let the savings.
- [00:29]
Eugene Rogan
Compound and the interest.
- [00:32]
William Durimpole
I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check.
- [00:34]
Eugene Rogan
Now time is my friend and not.
- [00:36]
William Durimpole
A pain in the neck and we've got a little cash to rebuild the old deck.
- [00:40]
Eugene Rogan
Boring money moves make kinda lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet. Brilliantly boring since 1865.
- [00:59]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome to Empire with me.
- [01:02]
William Durimpole
Anita Anand and me, William Durimpole.
- [01:05]
Anita Anand
Now, in the last episode we left you or Caroline Elkins talked us through a Palestinian revolt, a report sent to the League of Nations. Yet all eyes are turned away as the world enters its next phase of tumult, and that is the Second World War.
- [01:22]
William Durimpole
And with the end of that war, the Mandate entered its last and most fateful phase. That led on one hand to the great triumph of the creation of the State of Israel and on the other to the great catastrophe, the expulsion of most of the Palestinians, known to them as the Nakba, meaning the catastrophe.
- [01:40]
Anita Anand
Well, here to guide us through what is, I think it's fair to say, one of the most contested territories of history is a rare figure who is respected by both sides of this conversation, Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of two seminal books that tell the story of this land, the Arabs A History and the Fall of the Ottomans. A friend of the show since our very inception. Eugene, welcome to you. Thanks very much for being with us.
- [02:09]
Eugene Rogan
It is a pleasure to be back with you. Thank you, Anita.
- [02:11]
William Durimpole
Eugene, we haven't mentioned there. You actually edited a book, didn't you, on exactly this topic, the War for.
- [02:17]
Eugene Rogan
Palestine, which I edited with Avi Schlaim and brought together a lot of the then new historians and other leading scholars on the Nakba itself in the 1948 war.
- [02:26]
William Durimpole
1948 war. And that's very much what we're going to be diving deep into here. As we've said, this is highly controversial territory, but we're going to go through it factually and calmly with the help of Eugene. Now, by 1948, Eugene, the Zionist leadership had split in two, hasn't it? Both sides wanted The British out. But while the mainstream Zionists under Ben Gurion were more cautious, especially about the use of violence, their right wing rivals, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, were ready to resort to what the British called terrorism. Tell us about that and tell us who the Stern Gang are. What did they do and what do they want?
- [03:03]
Eugene Rogan
Start by looking at Zionism. And Zionism is basically the national movement of the Jewish people seeking the revival of the Jewish people on the land of Palestine. And that mission had been led since Theodore Herzl's demise by the World Zionist Organization. And by the time we get to the interwar years, it's been Chaim Weizmann, who's been the leading shaper of the international effort, and David Ben Gurion, the leader of the Zionist movement in Palestine itself. But that movement does not hold together. And there is a challenge from what is called the revisionist Zionist movement led by Zev Jabotinsky. And Jabotinsky is far less accommodating in plans for cohabitation between Arabs and Jews. He believed that the only way the Jews had realized their goal of statehood in Palestine was by erecting an iron wall of pure force in and driving all Arab Palestinians out of the territory.
- [04:00]
William Durimpole
The iron wall is his phrase, isn't it?
- [04:01]
Eugene Rogan
It is his phrase. And this was a political platform that appealed to some of the more radical Zionists both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. And this is where you get the breakaway movements that were inspired by Jabotinsky, the Stern Gang or the Lehi and the irgunsveilmi or the Ezel. And these would be challenges to the position of Ben Gurion in holding the Zionist movement together.
- [04:28]
Anita Anand
We're going to cover both of those. And also you will have heard the term used Haganah. I think it would be really helpful to explain the origin stories of all three of these groups. Haganah, Irgun and the Stern Gang. Who are they? Who makes them up? What is their inception, if you will?
- [04:43]
Eugene Rogan
So the Haganah is basically the regular army of the Yishuv, or the Jewish community of Palestine. And it's governed by the Jewish Executive as part of the official Jewish state in the making that was going on under the British Mandate. Very different from the experience of Palestinians who really never had the capacity to build such institutions as an army. The Yishuv did, and that's the Haganah. And they're answerable to Ben Gurion and his officers.
- [05:11]
William Durimpole
Are they used by the British? What is the motivation of the British in allowing an armed force within their mandate?
- [05:18]
Eugene Rogan
The British did draw on Jewish volunteers during the Second World War. The British were themselves quite divided between those who were philosemitic and were sympathetic to Jewish settlement in Palestine and those who sided with the Arabs and were less supportive of the Balfour Declaration's promises. And among the philosemitic, you had people like Ord Wingate, who we talked about.
- [05:43]
William Durimpole
With Caroline Elkins, this, this extraordinary figure.
- [05:46]
Eugene Rogan
Yeah, your listeners are familiar with Wingate, but he represents one of those Brits who would be training up members of the Jewish community in Palestine for self defense and for military action. Some are drawn into military service with the British in patrolling the Eastern Mediterranean. Famously, this is when Moshe Dayan, famous general in Israel, famous for his eye patch, he lost his eye to a Senegalese rifleman serving for Vichy France off the coast of Lebanon when he was serving with the British in the Second World War.
- [06:20]
William Durimpole
As a regular British soldier.
- [06:22]
Eugene Rogan
As a regular British soldier.
- [06:23]
William Durimpole
And the British allow the Haganah arms. They're allowed to have guns and training and uniforms and that sort of thing, or what's the rules?
- [06:30]
Eugene Rogan
The Haganah was not reliant uniquely on British arms. And so while in the capacity that they were assisting and advancing British security interests, they were armed. There was at the same time an initiative by the Yishuv to acquire arms, particularly in the course of the Second World War, as the bid for statehood would lead the leaders of the issue to see the risk of war.
- [06:58]
William Durimpole
And just for clarity, there's no equivalent Palestinian group. There are Palestinians recruited into the regular army, but you don't have an equivalent of the Haganah, which is an armed group working with the British.
- [07:10]
Eugene Rogan
No, there's no equivalent. There were no Palestinian militiamen working with the British. The closest you get would be the Palestine Police, which recruited Arabs and Jews to the police force under British command. But as you will have covered in your last episode, you know, the Palestinians were more or less broken of all military capacities by the repression of the Palestine revolt of 1936-39. And they certainly had not recovered from that in the course of the Second World War.
- [07:36]
Anita Anand
So that's the Haganah who are working closely with the British. You have also mentioned two other groups, the Irgun and the Stern Gang. Let's start with the Stern Gang and their activities in the 1940s.
- [07:50]
Eugene Rogan
Well, the stern Gang's an offshoot of the Irgun, so it might actually make sense to begin with the Irgun. The Irgun are directly linked to Zev Jabotinsky, the revisionist Zionist, and they had their own youth movement. This was where Menachem Begin was drawn into revisionist Zionism. Already in the Russian Empire, he had joined Bethar and was an ardent supporter of revisionist Zionism. That is the beginning of the Irgun. From the Irgun, you'll have a breakaway movement in the 1940s led by Avraham Stern. Stern himself was born in Poland, came to Palestine as a young man in the 1920s at the age of 18. So he really is fully established in the Yeshuv by the time we get to this Second World War. And he is not persuaded of the more moderate position taken by Ben Gurion to fight Nazism with the British, while the British were now implementing measures that were limiting the scope for Jewish statehood. So Avraham Stern believed that you needed to treat the British like a colonial occupier. He took his inspiration from Irish resistance, the ira, and believed that by assassinating key figures, you could change the formula. And so the Stern Gang would emerge as a movement that was seeking to use terrorist tactics to change the reality in Palestine.
- [09:14]
Anita Anand
And in a very similar story to the Irish story that we've also covered here on Empire, they focus in on those very high up in the British chain of command in the territory. So In August of 1944, the Stern Gang attempt to assassinate the High Commissioner of Palestine, a man called Sir Harold McMichael. They don't manage to kill him, but in November they succeed in killing the British Minister of State in Cairo. Tell us a little bit about the killing of Lord Moyne.
- [09:42]
Eugene Rogan
Well, the assassination of Lord Moyne, Des Moines, really established the Stern Gang's notoriety. And for the British, this was Ireland coming to Palestine and they were determined to respond in force to crush this movement before it gained traction. And of course, Abraham Stern then became one of the most wanted men in Palestine and he was tracked down and ultimately was killed by the British authorities.
- [10:06]
Anita Anand
Churchill, who has been a supporter of Zionism up to this point, it gives him pause. I mean, he says, if our dreams of Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins, pistols and our labours for its future to produce a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself, will have to reconsider the position we've maintained so consistently and so long in the past. So, I mean, how much did that shake those involved in this, this idea that a state of Israel is within reach if one of your greater supporters is now being turned off? The whole idea?
- [10:38]
Eugene Rogan
Well, here we really come to the crux of the contradiction in Britain's position since the Balfour Declaration. There is a tendency to believe that since the Balfour Declaration, Britain had been working to give Palestine to the Zionist movement to make a Jewish state. And I would argue that was never their agenda. That the British had hoped to use the Jewish community in Palestine as partners to help govern Palestine against the expected resistance of its Arab majority, and that the compact minority of Jews in Palestine would be totally dependent on Britain and in that way totally dependable to work together with the British. But the British, I think all the evidence shows, intended to keep Palestine for their empire. They saw it still as essential for the security of the Suez Canal, and they were resisting the creation of a Jewish state. So, in a sense, the actions of the Stern Gang were bringing things to a head. The contradiction between Britain seeming to be favoring the creation of a Jewish state, but in action, doing everything it can to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine and to prevent the Jews from seizing statehood and creating Israel.
- [11:42]
William Durimpole
And just again, for clarity, the Haganah is legal and is working with the British and is armed partly by them. But the Stern Gang and the Irgun are both illegal and prescribed organizations, prescribed.
- [11:57]
Eugene Rogan
Organizations that are not acting like formal militaries, but rather like militias or even as terrorist groups. And I don't use the word terrorist unadvisedly. It's the word that Begin himself used for their methods. They saw themselves as deploying terror to change a political stalemate that they thought was to the disadvantage of Jewish national aspirations.
- [12:20]
William Durimpole
And what did figures like Weizmann and Ben Gurion make of these people?
- [12:25]
Eugene Rogan
Well, publicly they denounced the actions of the Irgun and of the Stern Gang. In a sense, they had to, because they continued to rely on the international community, and Britain in particular, to advance their goals in the course of the wartime of destroying Nazi Germany. And then they still hope to usher in a Jewish state in Palestine. But there are times in the Second World War where we can see that the Haganah was cooperating actively with both the Stern Gang and the Irgun. And in that sense, the period of collaboration was to leave all Jewish armed organizations suspect in the eyes of the British authorities. The British, in the course of the Second World War, no longer knew who to trust, as the Jewish community of Palestine was rising up in a Jewish revolt that was to prove far more devastating and effective than the earlier Palestine revolt of the 1930s.
- [13:24]
Anita Anand
Right, Eugene, do tell us about the most famous action of the Irgun, the attack on the King David Hotel. First of all, what was the importance of that as a landmark and what happened afterwards?
- [13:35]
Eugene Rogan
So the King David Hotel was Jerusalem's biggest, poshest hotel and in the course of the Second World War had come to house the administration of the British Mandate authorities in Palestine. In the immediate weeks before the attack on the King David Hotel, the British had conducted a series of operations to clamp down on the Irgun and the Stern Gang. And they had seized a group of documents as they made hundreds of arrests that incriminated the Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah as having collaborated. It became imperative to the Zionist Executive to eliminate the traces and the evidence of this because it would fundamentally compromise the Haganah's standing and that of the Yishuv. And so the people of action here were the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin himself, late arrival in Palestine from his native Russia.
- [14:32]
William Durimpole
And we should say again, for people that don't know this name, Menachem Begin goes on to become the Prime Minister of Israel.
- [14:37]
Eugene Rogan
Absolutely. But in the course of the Second World War would become one of the most wanted men in Palestine. So he was branded by the British as a terrorist. The most notorious of his actions was the bombing of the King David Hotel. The Irgun infiltrated the basement of the hotel dressed as milkmen, delivered a series of milk canisters into the basement, gave a warning, but too late to be actioned, and the bomb detonated, collapsed a full wing of the hotel. Over 90 people are killed, most of them Arab, no small number of them Jews, but a large number of British Mandate officials.
- [15:18]
William Durimpole
I've got the figures here. I think they're 41 Arabs, 28 Britons and 17 Jewish workers.
- [15:24]
Eugene Rogan
So you can see where this was. Indiscriminate violence targeting primarily the British presence, but also trying to SAP the morale of the British to continue to hold on to Palestine against such determined resistance.
- [15:38]
Anita Anand
So, I mean, we have an account of that. So we're talking about the 22nd of July 1946. And as you say, Eugene, this was sort of a housing point for journalists. And a British journalist called Barbara Board was there. She'd been reporting from Palestine for a decade, so she was very offic with the region. She was walking into the King David Hotel when the explosion went off. And this is how she described it. The boom of exploding admiral roared over the city like a giant thunderclap. The six stories of the southern wing bulge swayed and crashed in the ghastly mountain of crumbling cement, twisted girders and snapped off blocks of masonry out of which the screams of the dying rose in a piercing chorus of agony. A vast mushroom of Sepia smoke climbed up into the sunlit sky and rolled away in the awful silence that followed. Now, she survived, but there is something in, you know, that kind of testimony, first person testimony, that then gets published and republished and syndicated, that is very powerful when it comes to public opinion. And so was this attack on the King David Hotel scene changing in the minds of many countries around the world?
- [16:47]
Eugene Rogan
It was certainly sea changing in Britain. And I think the images of the bombing of the hotel, the reports of survivors, the. The death toll of those killed there were, you know, atrocious stories that circulated, and I think it generated tremendous outrage. You know, all this is happening in the aftermath of the Second World War when full knowledge of the Holocaust is already reaching public consciousness, and yet you could still have very strong anti Semitic responses to what groups were doing in Palestine when it caused British casualties. And it seemed to many in Britain that this was the ultimate betrayal, that the British, who had, through the Balfour Declaration, paved the way towards the Jewish presence in Palestine, should now be victims of a Jewish revolt like this provoked just fury in British public opinion.
- [17:41]
Anita Anand
Eugene, what happens to Jerusalem overnight then? How does it transform after an attack like this?
- [17:47]
Eugene Rogan
But Jerusalem became a security state and basically the deployment of police, the unrolling of barbed wire, the controls on the free movement of people, were all, as it turns out, vain efforts to try and establish Britain's control over a situation that was rapidly rolling beyond their reach. They were losing control of Palestine. And remember, this is after the end of the Second World War, where Britain had emerged victorious from that war, but at such a cost. And that cost meant that it had fewer and fewer means with which to respond to overseas challenges. It was still trying to rebuild London from the Blitz. It was dealing with, you know, the impending loss of India. They simply did not have the means or the will to be combating this kind of insurgency now in Palestine.
- [18:33]
William Durimpole
There is this feeling that you have in India at the time, which we just had in our Partition series, talking about the end of the Raj, when there's just this feeling of exhaustion. The soldiers want to go home. They fought a major war, or the ambition for empire, which has propelled the British for 300 years, is completely extinguished. They're exhausted, they want to go home, they're broke. And this is just a nightmare. This is a kicked hornet's nest for them.
- [18:58]
Anita Anand
So, as you say, you know, post war, exhaustion kicks in, but there's also sort of, you know, the moral difficulty of what do you do, especially if you've got an insurgency and things like the King David Hotel happening. At the same time, news of the Holocaust and the industrialized wiping out of a people because they are Jewish. So Britain then, what throws its hat up in the air and says, you know what? United nations, that's what you're for, Bye bye, and passes it all over? I mean, is that how it happens and is that why it happens?
- [19:26]
Eugene Rogan
Well, there's one other element, Anita, and you will have covered in your last episode, but in 1939, the British announced a new policy. It was to try and bring an end to the Arab revolt. And it was trying to put a cap on Jewish ambitions. And that policy basically said that the British would allow five years of reduced immigration, no more than 15,000 a year, a total of 75,000 more Zionist immigrants to be allowed into Palestine. And then no more Jewish immigration without the consent of the majority population, which would never, ever, ever happen. That was going to take the Jewish population of Palestine to 35%, compact minority, nothing bigger. This is what, if you like Ben Gurion as well as the radical factions like this Stern gang and the Irgun are fighting against. But Britain doesn't have another policy. And so it finds itself in this position of trying to reduce Jewish immigration to Palestine after the Second World War. This is where you get the Exodus and all the displaced person boats making their way across the Mediterranean to Palestine. And the British continuing to resist, to let them in, turning them back. And public opinion internationally is judging the British's actions very, very harshly.
- [20:41]
William Durimpole
Eugene, just for those that don't know the Exodus, don't know the novel that was inspired by Leon Uris or the movie which then followed, which was a major big Hollywood production. Just briefly tell us what the Exodus was.
- [20:53]
Eugene Rogan
The Exodus represents all those boats that the Jewish Agency hired, many of them broken down tramp steamers that were not seaworthy and just loaded them with Jews who survived the Holocaust. They were known as the displaced persons and they were kept in camps that were called DP camps, displaced person camps. And for the Zionist movement, the idea was overcome. British policy restricting Jewish immigration flood Palestine with the survivors of the Holocaust reach a critical mass to enable the bid to statehood. As long as the Jews would be a minority in Palestine, their chances of ever realizing their goal of statehood would be stymied. And the British continued to resist these tramp steamers filled to the decks with survivors, people in just deplorable state of health, filthy conditions. The misery of these boats was captured by Leon Uris in his novel Exodus, based on, you know, established facts. But the real story was being carried in the 1940s in the newspapers and the villain was Britain. The awareness of the Holocaust. It's very hard for us in 2025 to understand how slowly that is entering public consciousness, because after World War II and the millions who were killed on all sides, Jewish suffering had not yet been singled out as distinctive. The evil of the death camps was revealed by their liberation and the photographs that emerged of what was done there. But it was against the background of the millions of Russian victims and all those around the world who died and of nuclear war in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. You know, it just took time for the Shoah to become what it is to us now. And I think it was maybe more of a driver for the Jews of Palestine trying to harness the survivors and to more desperate than ever to create a Jewish state so that there'd be one place in the world where Jews would be safe against ever facing Holocaust again. So the Jews in Palestine knew what the Holocaust were. The rest of the world, they were waking up to it slowly. But it created a situation in which those displaced person boats were adding more and more pressure to the British, along with all the violence of the Jewish revolt and the terrorism that they couldn't contain and all the antagonism internationally. When you talk about what leads the British to hand the file onto the United nations, there was a lot of pressure that led to that decision.
- [23:21]
William Durimpole
We should also just mention the figures. Between 1945 and 1947, the number of British troops in Palestine doubles from 50,000 to 100,000. Now, this is the opposite of what the British want. They want everything to be winding down. They're just about to leave India and everyone wants to go home. Instead, they're forced to double. And then the price of this 1/10 of the armed forces of the British Empire now occupied a territory around the sides of Wales. Palestine was costing the British exchequer close to 40 million a year. This is more than post war Britain can afford. And so they hand the file on. But the horrors do not stop.
- [23:55]
Anita Anand
Well, I was just going to say, I mean, you've got that much expenditure, that much sort of troop investment. And yet. And yet in July 1947, there's another incident that takes place that inflames British public opinion and that is when the Irgun kidnapped and hanged two British sergeants in retaliation for the execution of three of its own members. Tell us a little bit more about that because it was one of those stories. Again, newspapers have a crucial role to play in this because the Daily Express leads on the Front page with a picture of these hanged men on its front page.
- [24:30]
Eugene Rogan
It would be hard to overstate the way that inflamed public opinion back home in Britain. The picture of young servicemen being hanged, their bodies actually have been booby trapped so that those who cut them down would also be maimed or killed. It just one generated tremendous anger against the Jewish community in Palestine. And, you know, it's shameful to recount, but this led to pogroms against Jewish shops and communities in Britain. In Liverpool, in London, in other cities, you actually had riots targeting the Jewish community of Britain in anger against the hanging of the sergeants in Palestine. But in terms of sapping imperial morale to keep up the fight, I mean, it was very effective. There just was consensus in Britain that there was no reason for young men to be dying in Palestine against such barbaric people. And I think it served the turns. If terrorism pays, I think it was an instance of terrorism paying, but terrible consequences.
- [25:32]
Anita Anand
Right, so that took place in July and it is in September that Bevan decides, or declares rather, that Britain's going to go the following year. So now you've got a clock ticking on all of this.
- [25:46]
Eugene Rogan
So from the moment you have a clock ticking, Britain is left in the position of impotence. And in my own work, I've had the privilege of interviewing a number of Britons who served in the Palestine Police at just this time. And they describe a time where increasingly the initiative slipped out of the hands of British forces and officials in Palestine. They were clearly no longer seen as relevant. And increasingly it will be the Jewish community, the Yishuva, that's going on a war footing with the Arab population. And they're just operating over the heads of the British without really any concern. It's clear that the British days are numbered. And with their announcement of ending the mandate and withdrawing, then everything was up for grabs. And it was a situation in which Palestinians and members of the Yishuv were both driven by a view that the winner would take all.
- [26:44]
Anita Anand
And in both of their minds, an existential crisis, I guess, you know. So for those who are seeking to create a safe place for a community that's gone through the Holocaust, this is existential. Either we have this or we could go through this again. And for the people who live there already, an existential crisis. This is where we live, this is who we are.
- [27:02]
Eugene Rogan
It's absolutely right, Anita. And again, to view things from the Zionist perspective, coming out of the experience of the Holocaust and 30 years of hostilities with Palestinian neighbors and with surrounding countries. There was no confidence that the compact Jewish community of the Yishuv would survive the hostility of its neighbors with the British gone. So their position was absolutely existential. And they have the Holocaust at the very forefront of their thinking as the risk that they face if they fail. And for the Palestinian Arabs, they have watched the population of Jews in their country go from under 10% to above 35% in the course of three decades. That means that the Yishuv was on the cusp of reaching that critical 51% point where they would be the majority population.
- [27:56]
Anita Anand
They could then say, you know, it's our decision to let as many people in as we want.
- [28:00]
Eugene Rogan
Exactly. So. And so I think for the Palestinian Arabs, it was the growth of the Jewish community that to them made them suddenly realize they were in risk of losing their country to this immigrant nation. And so, yes, both sides very intransigent because it was existential for both of them.
- [28:16]
William Durimpole
And it's such an extraordinary transformation. It's just 30 years since the battle of Gaza that you told us about in the last episode. Thirty years since the British come as conquerors to Palestine, full of confidence and imperial ambition. And now, 30 years later, with a completely transformed landscape, they are leaving with their tail between their legs.
- [28:39]
Anita Anand
So little wonder then that it is decided to pass this awful situation to an organization that at its inception was meant to deal with intractable problems after the war. The United Nations. Join us after the break when we find out what they did with their new responsibility.
- [29:01]
Eugene Rogan
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, There's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lindsay, Lynchburg, Tennessee. And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating.
- [29:39]
William Durimpole
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [29:43]
Eugene Rogan
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [29:46]
William Durimpole
They see us.
- [29:47]
Eugene Rogan
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty, Liberty Savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
- [29:57]
Anita Anand
At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way@newbalance.com running. Welcome back. So, you know, we talked about the United nations and its inception, even from the point when it was being discussed at Yalta, and this great vision that Roosevelt had that never again would we have major conflicts. The United nations will be the body that sorts it all out before it turns to bloodshed when this is passed on to them or the responsibility is going to be passed on to them. And as you said, you know, the clock is ticking. Finally, that clock, the alarm sounds. And it is now the United nations issue to deal with. Just talk through those early days, Eugene. And was there a sort of declaration of intent from the United nations of what they wanted to happen here?
- [31:09]
Eugene Rogan
Well, in the first instance, the United nations followed on good British precedent by convening a commission of inquiry. And the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine went round to meet with political leaders and members of communities on both sides of the dispute to try and work out what the issues were and what the solutions might be. And at the end of their investigations, the Commission came to two conclusions, a majority and a minority. The majority report called for a partition of Palestine. And this is not the first time the partition of Palestine has been suggested. The British thought of the idea back in 1937 with the peel Commission, and the United nations returned to that idea that where you had an irreconcilable conflict between two national movements, then just separate them into two separate states, the majority opinion believed that you could not come to a peaceful separation of the territory, that partition would lead to conflict. And so you had to find ways to resolve the respective aspirations of the Yishuv and of the Palestinian Arabs within the confines of one state. And the two positions were put to a vote of the General Assembly. Actually, the General assembly was asked to vote on the majority position. And initially it looked as though the majority of the countries in the General assembly, this was not put to the Security Council at this stage. It was a General assembly movement would not support partition. They were moved by the minority report calling for a unitary state. But it's at this point where I think the advocates of Jewish statehood really demonstrated their political acumen and gained support from actors in the United States. But they were able to successfully lobby the members of the General assembly one by one to overcome the resistance of the united bloc of Arab states who resisted partition of Palestine to secure a majority ruling in the UN General assembly in November of 1947. And at that point, partition became the policy of the United Nations. It became the future.
- [33:28]
William Durimpole
So, Eugene, when you say that the Arabs rejected the UN Partition plan, let's just have complete clarity on this because it's a crucial part of the story. The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine was a proposal by the United nations to partition mandatory Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. It's drafted by the UN Special Committee on Palestine on 3rd September 1947 and adopted by the UN General assembly on 29th November 1947 as Resolution 181. So the Arab state was to have a territory of 11,500 square kilometers, or 42% of Mandate territory, while the Jewish state has 15,200 square kilometers, or 56% of the Mandate territory. And the Arabs reject this. They think it's unfair that so much of their ancestral land be given away to what they regarded as new immigrants from Europe. But Ben Gurion crucially accepts it. And in that division lies the seeds of much future conflict.
- [34:35]
Anita Anand
For the first time, this is an international body that is rubber stamping the creation of a Jewish state. So I guess in the region itself you have different responses. You know, there were news reports at the time of Jews in Jerusalem pouring onto the streets in jubilation. But at the same time, what does the Arab community do when they hear that actually this is what the world has decided?
- [34:58]
Eugene Rogan
Well, the Arab community, rather like the United nations, was relatively new. You're dealing with countries that have only just come out of imperial rule. France and Lebanon only secured their independence in 1945. 46. Egypt is still very much under British domination. Iraq and Transjordan still out of Mandate, but not recognized as entirely independent states. So they were unprepared. They didn't have, as it were, the freedom to build armies of their own choosing. They were supplied and trained by the British. They were largely constrained. And so their first response when faced with the prospect of conflict in Palestine was to avoid sending in the national armies and to call instead for the creation of a volunteer force uniting all Arabs. This is at the height of the Arab nationalist movement where people across the Arab world believed they had a common Arab destiny. And so the idea was create an Arab Liberation army for Palestine and allow volunteers from across the Arab world, without the support of any given state, to join that force. It was headed by a veteran of many defeated attempts by the Arabs against their imperial rulers named Fawzi Al Kawkji. Immediately after the declaration of partition in November of 47, the Arab Liberation army began to recruit and to train soldiers to save Palestine from PARTITION so this.
- [36:32]
William Durimpole
Is the moment of crux, isn't it Eugene? A cycle of violence begins in January 48 and the Haganah, who are very much better organized than the Arabs, attack the Hotel Semiramis in the Catamon district of Jerusalem, mistakenly believing it's being used as headquarters of the local Arab forces. 26 people are killed, including the Spanish consul. Then the Palestine post office is bombed. Tell us about this unfolding violence.
- [36:59]
Eugene Rogan
From January onwards, Palestine will degenerate into what we tend to refer to as a civil war. This was now going to be increasingly tit for tat violence between Palestinian, Arab and Yishuv Jewish forces and the British are still trying to keep the peace or maintain order in an increasingly disorderly period. And the British police themselves become a target of attack. We have regular instances of Jewish forces barrel bombing. BRITISH POLICE STATION what does a barrel bomb mean? Well, it was a device which literally was putting explosives into an oil barrel. And then the insurgents would use dump trucks to tip them over the walls of police stations where they would detonate and send shrapnel flying whatever was inside the barrel along with the explosives. They inflicted very high casualties. One of the policemen that I interviewed who served in Palestine in 48 had a piece of his head shaved off and his life was saved by a Palestinian doctor who was able to insert a metal plate. But he had a very vivid story about being on the receiving end of a barrel bomb. But the British, as I said before, were increasingly irrelevant here. This was really a fight between Arab and Drew. This phase will see the better organization of the Haganah really begin to pay out against Palestinian Arabs who had not had the opportunity to organize militias since the breakup of the Arab revolt in 39, who had not really been able to acquire arms from anywhere. They were coming out with really outdated muskets and 19th century rifles against Jewish militiamen and Haganah soldiers who were armed with state of the art weapons.
- [38:43]
William Durimpole
They got a lot of weapons from Czechoslovakia, didn't they? There was a big shipment that arrived, absolutely.
- [38:48]
Eugene Rogan
So the check arm deal was huge for arming the Haganah to prepare for the battle. And this left the Palestinians desperately pleading with their Arab neighbour states to assist them with the supply of arms. And the person leading that was the leading militia leader of the Palestinian forces, Abdelkader Al Husseini.
- [39:07]
Anita Anand
Now he fought in the Arab revolt of 1936-1939. So how does he sort of rise up in the ranks to then become such a pivotal figure?
- [39:17]
William Durimpole
The Al Husseinis are one of the kind of grand families of Jerusalem, aren't they?
- [39:20]
Eugene Rogan
Well, that's it, Willi. The Al Husseinis are among the most influential notables of Jerusalem. His cousin was Hajameen Al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who had come to stand as a sort of civilian leader of the Palestinian community and was much maligned by the British and by the Yishuv. He's remembered today for his having defected to Nazi Germany in the Second World War, where he was received by Hitler. So there is this attempt to try and cast Haj Amin as part of an extension of Third Reich anti Semitism to the Palestinian movement. Abdelkader al Husseini had none of that baggage with him. He was just seen as someone who had fought the good fight against the British. In 36 to 39, he was able to mobilize resistance fighters. He was a very charismatic leader and he seemed to be a good strategist. But in his efforts to lobby the leadership of the Arab world to arm the Palestinians to defend their land, he was absolutely frustrated at every turn. And, you know, the documents we have of his negotiations suggest that he knew he was returning to a suicide mission in trying to defend Palestine without the arms and weapons. And the Arab Liberation army was failing in every way to assist the Palestinians to defend their land.
- [40:39]
William Durimpole
And why is there such a poor Arab response? Is it just the neighboring Arab countries can't be bothered or that they're not interested? What's the reason that there's such a. Because potentially you'd have thought there's all these different Arab countries, they've all got armies. It could have been game over in 10 minutes. And often you hear Israelis talk about the five Arab armies that descend on the state. Why did the Arabs fail to respond in a way that was effective?
- [41:05]
Eugene Rogan
Well, I hinted already at the fact that the Arab states were themselves only newly emerging to independence. And in a sense, this is the first trial they face. And it's huge. It's well beyond their means. Secondly, the Arab states were mutually suspicious. There were unresolved border issues. People had great mistrust for Amir Abdullah of Transjordan. They knew he had interests in Palestinian territory.
- [41:31]
William Durimpole
They.
- [41:31]
Eugene Rogan
He was popular with certain Syrian opposition groups. So the Syrians thought he might have AIDS on them. Tensions between the Saudis and the Transjordians, Hashemites and Saudis were very strong going back to the First World War.
- [41:43]
William Durimpole
The Saudis had kicked the Hashemites out of what's now Saudi Arabia.
- [41:47]
Eugene Rogan
Absolutely. And very strong tensions between the Jordanians and the Egyptians, you had all this sort of working against each other instead of working together. And lastly, they did not have independent means to arm their armed forces. The Egyptians, the Transjordanians and the Iraqis were all dependent on the British for their supply. They had no alternate source. And the British turned off the tap. They refused to provide any ammunition or any weaponry to the Arab states as a way of trying to stop the war from proceeding. But that immediately gave the advantage to the Haganah and the Yeshu fighters who were able to take advantage of the Jewish diaspora and its connections to different countries to open pathways for the supply of the Jewish armed forces to give them the edge in the war.
- [42:34]
William Durimpole
Eugene, so we've talked about Abdelkader. Tell us about his death in the battle of Castel. What goes on?
- [42:41]
Eugene Rogan
Well, Abdelkader leaves Damascus empty handed. The leaders of the Arab world refusing to provide arms and assistance to Palestinian militias, insisting they put their trust instead in the Arab Liberation Army. And so Abdelkader tells them that basically he was going home on a suicide mission to try and defend Palestine against this civil war in which Jewish forces were so much better armed. And what he first does is he tries to stop the Jewish forces from opening a road to Jerusalem to allow them to relieve the siege of Jerusalem that was trapping the Jewish community surrounded by Arab fighters. And the clutch point for that was a village on the road between Jaffa and Jerusalem, Al Kastal, which was where Abdelkader makes his last stand. And with Palestinian militiamen, they succeed in driving Jewish forces out of Al Kastal. But in the process, he himself is mortally wounded.
- [43:45]
William Durimpole
And we talked about disunity between different Arab states, but there's also disunity, isn't there, even within the Palestinians? Because one of the crucial moments is that the Haganah forces break through in Abu Ghosh, which is a village which doesn't fight, it allows them to come through. Abu Ghosh, to this day is regarded by other Palestinians as traitors to the Palestinian cause.
- [44:06]
Eugene Rogan
Yes, of course, but there were many villages who chose to take a non hostility position with Yeshu forces. Most notoriously Deir Yassin, just to be.
- [44:17]
Anita Anand
Clear, is a village, it's a hilltop village that had been, you know, sort of determined to stay out of it all.
- [44:23]
Eugene Rogan
That is correct. And so they had concluded a non hostility pact with Jewish forces, but were to become the target of a joint attack by the Irgun and the Stern gangs that led to a massacre that was to play a key role in provoking terror and flight, which I think was probably the intention of, of the authors of the massacre.
- [44:50]
William Durimpole
So what happens at Daisy? They have a non hostility fat, they don't fight. And so they're not armed, presumably, or are they armed?
- [44:56]
Eugene Rogan
They are not armed. There were a few villagers who had guns or whatnot tucked away in their mattresses, but there is no armed resistance. There is an attempt to try and get women and children away, but the village is overrun.
- [45:12]
William Durimpole
120 strong force invades the village and.
- [45:16]
Eugene Rogan
Over a hundred are killed. The figures originally given out by the Red Cross were more like 250, but Palestinian researchers have lowered the number to about 107 who were killed in the course of the massacre in Deir Essene. Survivors were rounded up and were paraded through Jewish quarters of Jerusalem as sort of war trophies as a way of trying to raise morale in the Jewish community and lower morale in the Arab community. And again, it worked. It just sowed terror in the hearts of Palestinian villagers who saw there was no armed force to protect them, but they had armed enemies who would massacre them and they ran from their homes to find safety in neighboring countries where they could be behind army lines like those of the Jordanian Arab Legion.
- [46:04]
Anita Anand
Is it true to say though that the Deir Yassin massacre infuriated David Ben Gurion? Completely, because he said, I didn't know about it, you didn't ask me.
- [46:13]
Eugene Rogan
Ben Gurion denounced the massacre in Deir Yassin. It was widely condemned by Jewish leaders around the world. So it was recognized as a stain on the reputation of the Yishuv.
- [46:23]
Anita Anand
But then how did it happen? I mean, you know, sort of. Who ordered it?
- [46:27]
Eugene Rogan
Well, it was definitely launched by Irguan fighters who were advancing the goals of the Haganah. But we're outside the ranks of the Haganah.
- [46:38]
Anita Anand
Therefore, you know, there are different groups doing what they want to do without a central command or there is a central command. I mean, they're loosely affiliated. They've got the same goal as you said before, but there isn't a command structure. Or is there?
- [46:50]
Eugene Rogan
It's really hard for us to be able to say what linkages might have gone on between the Haganah and the factions that split off from the Haganah. They were consistently denied recognition by the Jewish executive in the Yishuv. And then the tactics they pursued and the horror that produced was something that Ben Gurion and his fellows were quick to denounce. They did not wish to be associated with that.
- [47:20]
Anita Anand
Well, I mean, you have an event like that, then, you know, predictably, there's tit for tat violence. And we see that escalation very soon after Deir Yassine, can you just talk us through a little bit about what happened?
- [47:32]
Eugene Rogan
So the response immediately after Deir Yassim was an attack on a group of doctors in a medical convoy that led to scores of Jewish doctors and nurses being killed in the ambulances in which they were being transported. And the dead were photographed, and these photographs were published and sold commercially as sort of war trophies. So it's exactly the dehumanizing effect that such a deeply entrenched conflict generates, where tit for tat killings and a desire for revenge leads to the very lowest in human nature.
- [48:06]
William Durimpole
EUGENE the news of d' Essene now passes from village to village, and many begin to flee. There is like a domino effect. Tell us about this in the days that follow the massacre.
- [48:19]
Eugene Rogan
So by the time we get to April 1948, in advance of a British withdrawal on 14 May, the difference in military resources really begins to show. And Yeshua forces are increasingly mobilizing to take key cities in the territories allocated to the Jewish state by the partition plan and beyond. And is at this time where we'll see the fall of key cities like Safad, like Tiberias, like Haifa, like Jaffa, where, with Deir Yassin and similar violence in the background, the arrival of Haganah forces, their use of artillery, their assaults on cities, drove more and more civilians to flee their homes, they believed temporarily, hoping to return once peace had been restored, to reclaim their property, they took their keys, they took a suitcase with their clothes, then they went into exile, almost without exception, never to return. Those in the north of the territory tended to flee towards Lebanon. Those who fled from Jaffa and surrounding areas to the south made their way to Gaza. And it's at this point where the population of Gaza will go from a compact community of 20,000 people, 30,000 people, to witness the expansion of population beyond what anyone had ever conceived the small coastal strip, small coastal enclave of Gaza might encompass.
- [50:00]
William Durimpole
So April, you see the Haganah advancing and Palestinian villagers fleeing in all directions. And it's another 14 days into May, the British leave in defeat and ignominy. Alan Cunningham, the last British High Commissioner, leaves Jerusalem to board a waiting ship in Haifa. Later that day, in a museum in Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion proclaims the birth of the State of Israel. It was, wrote one historian, the Jewish triumph, an Arab tragedy and a British failure. Thirty years, five months and four days after General Allenby had entered Jerusalem in triumph, British rule ended in total disgrace. We will continue with the mixed triumph and tragedy of 1948, the triumph for the birth of Israel, the tragedy of the Palestinians in the next episode. So that's goodbye from me, William Durimple.
- [51:02]
Anita Anand
And goodbye from me, Anita Arnand.
- [51:09]
William Durimpole
Hi, it's Gary Lineker here and I.
- [51:11]
Eugene Rogan
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- [51:12]
William Durimpole
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- [51:18]
Eugene Rogan
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