Zionism and It's Discontents
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Hello, Eamon. Hello, hello. Hello from Greece, in fact. Here I am in sunny Greece, sunny springtime Greece, enjoying myself enormously. I hate you.

You'll like this though, Eamon. The other day I was at a dinner party in Athens and I was sitting next to a splendid old Greek gentleman who told me all about his ancestors in Alexandria. Do you remember last episode? We were talking in that last episode all about the Aswan Dam. Well, this guy's grandfather had been the Greek engineer who built the dam in Aswan that preceded Nasser's Dam. And he was still saying, he was saying,

And I don't know why Nasser needed to build a new dam. There was nothing wrong with my grandfather's dam, nothing at all. So the history that we talk about in Conflicted, it really is still alive in the memories of people in the Middle East. Not that I want to say Greeks are Middle Easterners. I wouldn't want to offend their sensibility. No, no, no, no. They are...

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The Greeks, they have to accept they are Middle Eastern because they, 2,300 years ago, they invaded the Middle East, Anatolia, Iraq, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt. So they have to bear the consequences and they should be lumped with us. Man, you Middle Easterners, no wonder the conflicts never end. Your memories are far too long. Indeed.

Today's episode, it's the big one. I mean, or is it the big one? Tell me, why do you think I've been so scared, really, now for three years, so scared to talk about Israel on this podcast? Because literally it is, you know, a minefield.

Wherever you step, it might blow in your face. So I always avoided this conversation with so many of my friends. And whenever people keep telling me, oh, you are not sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Have you ever been occupied? Or whatever, I say, well, yeah. My mother's village in South Lebanon, Sheba, was occupied by the Israelis from 1978, the year I was born, ironically, all the way until the year 2000.

- Wow, that's amazing. So growing up in Saudi Arabia, you knew the whole time your mom's village is being occupied by Israelis, by the enemy. - Yeah, that's what I was always told. Although my mom, funny enough, we're equally angry with the Palestinians as she was with the Israelis because she said they are the reason for the calamities of my home country, Lebanon, because their presence there provoked the Israelis to invade and provoke the civil war within Lebanon.

So she had no love lost for the Palestinians either. Now, Eamon, that's a sort of trailer for some episodes way down the line when you get to the Lebanese Civil War. Indeed. Today, we're talking about Israel, where it came from, how it was founded.

as a way of setting up those episodes that will, in a way, climax in the 1970s. So stick with us, listener. This time we're going back to the Bronze Age, going back to the Ottoman period, going back to the early 20th century, putting all of our pieces together on the chessboard.

I think we must have some sort of internal crystal ball, Eamon, because our plan for this series has overlapped quite eerily with current events. We record an episode about Russia and hey, presto, Russia invades Ukraine and now Israel. I mean, suddenly it's back on the front pages due to an extraordinary summit that recently took place

in Southern Israel, in the Negev Desert. On the 27th of March, the Negev Summit took place, where the foreign ministers of Israel, of course, but also the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, and the United States met to discuss a range of bilateral and regional issues. Eamon, what was the focus of the summit? If I had to guess, I'd say Iran.

Well, no one can escape the shadow of Iran in the region. Well, of course, because Iran operates many proxies across the region, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Syrian militias from Iraq and elsewhere. So, of course, for Israel, they are surrounded by these proxies and the UAE and Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. So the ramifications are very clear for everyone to see.

So the summit focused a lot on countermeasures against Iran's proxies and their expansion in the region, whether it is to establish a sort of a mini NATO, an air defense umbrella, you know, to help these countries counter the growing threat of

of precision weapons that Iran used, long-range precision weapons, offensive weapons, such as ballistic missiles and drones. Now, I can understand the desire for these countries to band together to resist Iranian encroachment, but what surprised me was that a pretty powerful player was missing. Saudi Arabia wasn't there. Why wasn't Saudi Arabia represented at the summit?

Actually, Saudi Arabia was represented, unofficially though, because the foreign minister of Bahrain was actually representing Saudi Arabia as well as Bahrain in the summit. His name is Abdel Latif Zayani. Oh, I see.

Abdel Latifa Zayani, the foreign minister of Bahrain. Saudi Arabia doesn't formally recognize Israel, so they can't really be there personally, but they send a Bahrain to speak on their behalf. And Abdel Latifa Zayani is a good spokesperson. I met him once. Well, I met him twice. I interviewed him once for a film. And he

He's a very sophisticated man, very civilized man, extremely articulate, tall, handsome. He's a good interlocutor for the Saudis with these other partners.

Absolutely. And he spent the majority of his career, actually, in Saudi Arabia because he was the secretary general of the GCC and it is based in Riyadh. So he is extremely familiar with the decision makers of the Saudi foreign policy. So Egypt was there in the Negev at the summit. Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty way back in 1979. And then in 2020, a couple of years ago, the UAE

Bahrain and Morocco also normalized relations with Israel. So the UAE's there, Bahrain's there. But Jordan signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994. Why wasn't Jordan at the Negev summit? Ah.

Well, Jordan is not happy at the moment with any of its neighbors, whether the Israelis or the Saudis, for a host of reasons. Oh, my goodness. Jordan's not happy. Jordan, you know, as we'll see later when we talk about the 1948 Israeli War of Independence or the first Arab-Israeli war, Jordan often has rather tricky relations with some of its neighbors. Absolutely. And so the Jordanians were invited. You know, they just decided not to come.

So let's get back to the summit in Negev. You mentioned it addressed the problem of Iranian proxies in the region, but what about its nuclear ambitions? Did the summit address Iran's nuclear ambitions? The summit did discuss indeed the Iranian nuclear ambitions and the fact that they are not far away from achieving the breakaway point of having enough fuel for a nuclear device or even two.

The other things also they discussed is the fact that with this alliance or semi-alliance between Iran and Russia and the fact that the Russians are very nervous about what's happening in the region with Iran, this could impact the food security of the region. And with food security, there could be unrest, especially in places like Egypt, which is exactly why after the summit, the Saudi government deposited

$5 billion in the Egyptian central bank to help Egypt deal with the rising food prices and fuel prices they have to import, not to mention favorable terms in terms of oil and all of that. So actually, the summit is looking at

Iran, looking at its proxies and looking at the ramifications of the Ukrainian war on the region. Yes, and those ramifications are massive, especially in food security. But the summit was not only interested in food, it was also interested in water. And in fact, they've decided to make the Negev summit an annual thing to be held in a different desert city every year. They've chosen a desert city to shine a spotlight on this main issue, water.

- The Israelis are one of the most advanced nations on earth when it comes to water treatment, water management, and water efficiency. - The Saudis' water insecurity was recently highlighted when the Houthis attacked a desalination plant on the west coast of Saudi Arabia.

It's funny, Eamon, you warned us three years ago that the Yemen war and the Houthi threat from the Saudi point of view was all about water, all about those desalination plants, and still, boom, it's happening.

Well, of course, because that is exactly the juggler that the Houthis want to go after, because the past several months, from June last year onward, I mean, the Houthis have been sustaining significant human casualties inflicted upon them by the Saudi Air Force. And that is why they are lashing out, not only at the Saudis, but the Emiratis as well. I mean, Abu Dhabi was attacked. So this is what worried the decision makers, even in Israel, because of the long range

of these weapons, the ability to fly low over the terrain or over water, over the sea, and make them difficult to detect. So this is why the summit addressed, you know, this technological advance that a non-state actor, a third party here, the Houthis, possess. They attacked

oil and petroleum storage facilities for the Saudis, which of course affected the oil prices. Already the world is suffering from it. And the Saudi response was totally unforgiving. I mean, they pounded Yemen. They pounded especially the port of al-Hodeidah.

Oh yeah, the port of Hodeidah, the airport in Sana'a, the port of Salif. So of course they attacked without mercy, and that actually led to the Houthis to say, wait, wait, wait, wait, three days' cessation of hostilities from our side, now meet us halfway. So this is now we have some glimmer of hope finally.

with the Houthis deciding, of course, with some instigation from Iran to deescalate with the Saudis and have a two months ceasefire. I don't think it will last two months, but at least it might. - How many ceasefires have there been? And they don't, the ceasefires mean nothing as we're finding out in Ukraine as much as we've been finding out in Yemen for years. - Exactly, exactly. - Well, Saudi is not the only country that was attacked

During the summit and over the days following, a number of terrorist attacks were carried out inside Israel itself. The first wave of attacks like this for some time, on the 22nd of March, a few days before the summit, a Bedouin in the Negev stabbed and ran over people in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba. The perpetrator, the guy who carried it out, he had actually been in prison.

for supporting ISIS and was released in 2018. On the 27th of March, the day of the summit, ISIS gunmen attacked a bus stop

killing two people and injuring 12. And then two days later, a couple of drive-by shootings carried out by a Palestinian militant killed five people. So, you know, Israel is still not going to be feeling secure. The Palestinian issue is still capable of redounding into violence upon them. Well, there is no question this issue has been exploited again and again by a multitude of

Islamist groups whether Shia or Sunni as well as or jihadist groups as well as you know by other dictatorial regimes in the region So Israel is just a flavor of the month what I found quite interesting and even moving was that among the dead in those attacks were two Arab Israelis I mean that means Palestinian Arabs who live inside Israel proper Yeah, this community is often forgotten by people so two of the dead were Arab Israelis both were police officers and

which is rather interesting and telling. Even more interestingly, one of the Arab-Israeli victims was a Christian and the other was a Druze. A reminder, if you need one, that the patchwork of ethnicities, religions, and cultures goes far beyond any one binary, if you like. I mean, certainly it's not just Jews on the one hand and Muslims on the other. It's way more complex than that. Definitely. Way more complex.

So, Eamon, what does all this mean? Do you think things are really changing in Arab-Israeli relations? Is the Arab world growing more comfortable with Israel's existence for real? Or are the Abraham Accords and all of this recent peacemaking between Arabs and Israelis, is it all just a temporary marriage of convenience? And do you think the future will be just like the past, marred by terrorism, injustice, and intractable conflict?

I've spoken to a senior policymaker in the GCC, in one of the GCC countries, which signed a peace deal with the Israelis.

And what he said was illuminating. He said, look, Israel is a country of six million inhabitants. Yes, it is military advanced, very powerful, but they cannot even invade Jordan. They could invade Jordan, but they cannot keep it. They could invade Sinai, but they can't keep it. They can invade Syria, but they can't keep it.

They are no threat to the region because they couldn't even control Gaza. So why would they invade Saudi Arabia? Why would they invade the Gulf? Why would they invade all the way there? They don't even have the manpower to do it. However, we have on the other side of the Middle East a regional power with 87 million inhabitants.

with armies upon armies of people who have been brainwashed religiously to believe that we are the enemies, we are the mortal enemies, and that they want to go all the way to the Hejaz and to Medina to liberate it from us. He was talking about Iran, of course. So he was saying,

We can't take our eye off the real enemy and focus instead on an imaginary enemy because that imaginary enemy is, which is, you know, he meant the Israelis, suits the narrative of a bygone era of the time when Arab nationalism was reigning supreme.

I think what you've just expressed, the shift that this policymaker at least has felt is going on, I think that it really has massive implications and it's very interesting. So let's get back to it. And instead, instead of talking about the future, we're going to do what we always do on Conflicted and talk about the past. The past is complicated, nowhere more so than in what I'm going to try to call the Holy Land in this episode. Okay? So at least when discussing the

ancient and medieval history, I'm going to use the term the Holy Land as much as possible, because the words Israel and Palestine are both very loaded, as we'll see, for interesting historical reasons. Stay with me, dear listener. There's going to be some history now, but I promise it's going to be as brief as possible, and I hope very interesting. To get started, we've got to go way

Way back in time. Back to our favorite age, Eamon, the Bronze Age. Sometimes I feel like I am, you know, how can I say, like I am Sherman, you are Mr. Peabody, when you say the way back.

Now listen, obviously everything that follows is a gross oversimplification. The Holy Land is basically a highway connecting Egypt with Mesopotamia via the Levant. So over the centuries, it witnessed a huge amount of migration and conquest. Ethnically, culturally, linguistically, it was a much more complex patchwork than any simple historical narrative can do justice to. With that said...

We've been talking about some really old places this season. Persia, pretty old. Arabia, really old. Egypt, effing old. But the Holy Land?

In some ways, it takes the cake. The city of Jericho, in what's today called the West Bank, meaning the western bank of the River Jordan, which flows north-south from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, the city of Jericho is often called the oldest city in the world. Archaeologists have traced a continuous pattern of settlement there for centuries.

11,000 years. Wow. That means when the first pyramid of Egypt was built 4,600 years ago, Jericho was already over 6,000 years old. Wow.

Wow. By 3000 BC, what would become the Holy Land was known as Canaan. This is what it's called in the Old Testament, and it's to Canaan that God tells Abraham to go. We touched on this history in episode three of this season. In the book of Genesis, God promises the Holy Land to Abraham and his descendants, and that promise is repeated to Abraham's son Isaac, and then to Isaac's son Jacob.

Jacob would later on wrestle with an angel and be given a new name, Israel. The sons of Israel, or so the story goes, are promised the land of Canaan for their eternal inheritance.

Ayman, does the Quran echo this story? What does the Quran have to say about the Jews being promised the Holy Land? Anything? Well, yeah, I mean, when Moses was trying to persuade his people who escaped from Egypt, he said, "Ya qawmi, dkhulu al-ar'dha almuqaddasa allati kataballahu lakum" "You are my people."

Go storm that land, the holy land which God promised you. So it is actually enshrined in the Quran that that land was promised to Bani Israel, to the children of Israel. Although all Muslim scholars will say that promise had an expiry date. - Well Christians throughout the ages have argued about this too. Are the Jews still the chosen people? Is the holy land of Israel still theirs for eternity? Christians don't always say yes to that.

Yeah, so from a Muslim point of view, yes, it was promised. This is why even Muslims to this day, they celebrate the Passover from Egypt, the exodus from Egypt. The holiness of that land

And the holiness of that promise stems from the holiness of those generations, the generations of Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, and David, Solomon, all of these people. This is where the holiness of those generations come from. The religious idea that Jews are still the sons of Israel and therefore still the rightful inhabitants of the Holy Land informed some of the claims made for a modern Jewish nation state there.

But there's a secular version of this claim, which is that the forefathers of modern Jews lived in the Holy Land for 2,000 years or so before being brutally expelled by the Romans.

Following which, exiled from their native land and always on the move, they suffered statelessness, marginalization, persecution, and attempted genocide. And therefore, it is only right and natural that they should return to the Holy Land and build a nation-state there all of their own.

The political side of that argument has obviously been hotly contested, but the basic claim that Jews are descended from the Bronze Age inhabitants of the Holy Land is basically true. However—

The same is also basically true of the Palestinians. Indeed. DNA studies have shown that Israelis and Palestinians are both fairly equally descended from those Bronze Age Holy Landers, i.e., the Canaanites and their neighbors. Eamon, you're a fan of DNA, fact and fiction. What do you make of what I've just said?

Well, I mean, it is true. I mean, the land of Canaan, as you know, it is known in Arabic and Aramaic, Canaan, it's called Canaan in Arabic.

in English, you know, was always inhabited by, you know, people who were always there. Even when the Jews conquered the Holy Land, they just went into the periphery. I mean, the east bank of the River Jordan became the land of Canaan there for a very long time. And some of the coastal areas, especially from, you know, Acre, you know, in the north of

modern-day Israel, you know, all the way to Ashkelon. Many of the coastal areas were still controlled by the Philistines, you know, Phoenicians and Canaanites. You know, it is the heartland, what is known today as Judea and Samaria, which was mainly the

domain of the Jewish people for a very long time. So what I guess we're saying is that despite their different historical trajectories over the millennia, and despite the incredibly fraught political conflict that has swallowed them up, Israelis and Palestinians have a lot in common genetically, ethnically, and culturally.

Right. Okay. Let's move on with our historical summary. I can't tell the whole story of the Bible. God knows I wish I could, but I can't. So let's just start the story from where the 12 tribes of Israel, in one way or another, have subjugated the Holy Land to their domination. There are still Canaanites, as you said, Eamon. Other peoples are there too. But the Hebrew-speaking 12 tribes are dominant.

This is about 1000 BC. They are eventually politically united by King David with his capital at Jerusalem. But that union doesn't last long. And after the death of David's son, King Solomon, the Davidic kingdom is split into two. The kingdom of Israel in the north in Samaria and the Galilee, and the kingdom of Judah in the south.

centered on Jerusalem. Now, the Northern Kingdom is destroyed by the Assyrian Empire in 720 BC. The Southern Kingdom is destroyed by the Babylonian Empire in 586 BC.

In Jerusalem, its beautiful temple built by King Solomon is completely destroyed by order of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, and all of the royal and priestly elites are forcibly removed to Mesopotamia until...

50 years later, when our friends from episode four, the Persians, overthrew the Babylonians and the Persian Shah Cyrus the Great allowed the Jews to return. And they were now Jews, properly so-called. Jews, i.e. people from the southern kingdom, the kingdom of Judah. These returnees from Babylonian exile re-established political rule and rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem. This is the so-called Second Temple.

Persian overlordship was followed by Greek overlordship, then a brief return to self-rule under the Maccabees before returning to imperial subjugation again, this time to the Romans. Roman client kings, such as King Herod, worked alongside the priestly hierarchy in Jerusalem and the Roman political governor to keep the Roman province of Judea in line.

It was during this period that Jesus was born and Christianity began to flourish. You still with me, Eamon? Oh, absolutely. You know what happened next, right? Oh yeah, I know what happened next. Nothing but rebellions and rebellions and rebellions, and that caused the whole city to be destroyed, including the Temple of Herod. The Jews were frequently rebelling against Roman rule, climaxing in the horrific Jewish-Roman wars.

In 70 AD, the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the second temple.

Then 60 years later, they finished the job, slaughtering an unholy number of Jews and expelling most of the rest. Jews were forbidden from entering Jerusalem, which had been basically destroyed and rebuilt from scratch along Roman lines and given a new name, Aelia Capitolina. A massive temple to the Roman god Jupiter was built on the site of the old Jewish temple.

it had been an unimaginable tragedy for the Jews. The Jewish diaspora, which was already long established and extremely strong across the inhabited world, became the bedrock of Jewish life. A number of Jews settled in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee, where they remained until the modern period. But Jerusalem was a Roman city, and to stress the fact, the emperor changed the name of the province from Judea to... wait for it...

Palestine. Named after a people, you mentioned them before, called the Philistines, who had been arch enemies of the Jews a thousand years before.

I think Emperor Hadrian more or less wanted to humiliate the Jews as much as possible by naming the province of Palestina after the Philistines, who were the enemies of the Jews, especially with the story in the Bible about the Temple of Gaza and Samson. And this is why the Jews to this day, whenever they mention the name Hadrian, they say, may his bones be crushed. Well,

What was a tragedy for the Jews, though, became a triumph for the Christians. In fact, at the time, the distinction between Jews and Christians wasn't nearly as large as it would become. One of the effects of the Roman turn against the Jews was that it stimulated conversion to Christianity. Christians did, after all, worship the same God. So over the next couple of centuries, the Holy Land became significantly Christianized.

And many, many people who today call themselves Palestinians were in fact native Holy Landers who converted to Christianity and would later on convert to Islam. In the fourth century, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great himself converted, and in time he converted the whole empire to Christianity.

He and his mother Helena began a huge building works program in Jerusalem, erecting enormous lavishly endowed churches across the city at sites associated with the life of Christ. And the temple to Jupiter, up where the Jewish temple had been, was re-consecrated as a church.

Now, I'll hand it over to you now, Ayman, and thank you, listener, for your patience. I hope that was a useful prece of historical events, but I'm going to hand it over to you now, Ayman, because 300 or so years later, religious newcomers rocked up to the gates of Jerusalem. Oh, absolutely. The armies of Islam, the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate,

- The Ishmaelites, the Ishmaelites, the Hagarites, as the Christian inhabitants of the Holy Land call them. - Exactly, yeah. - Of course, yes, the Arab Muslims. - One of the things that the Caliph Omar, the successor of the Prophet Muhammad and his companion Abu Bakr,

When he went to Jerusalem, and of course, basically, when the Muslim army surrounded Jerusalem, the patriarch of Jerusalem demanded that, I'm not going to give the keys of the city to just a mere general. Let your own top leader come. So this caliph in Medina, he must come and take the city. So of course, he made the journey.

And he said, when he entered Jerusalem, that God's promise that Jerusalem and the surrounding areas, the blessed land, the holy land, would remain within the realm of the descendants of Abraham is still being fulfilled because we are too the descendants of Abraham, just from his elder son Ishmael. So when he entered there, he was accompanied by

by a Jewish rabbi who converted to Islam, known in Islamic history as Ka'b al-Ahbar. And he guided Umar, the caliph, to where the dome, well, the rock in which right now stands the dome of the rock, where Muhammad, it was told that he was

he ascended to heaven from that rock. - Yeah, so there's a story in Islam, it's called the Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammad. He woke in the night to be greeted by a mystical flying horse who transported him from Mecca to Jerusalem, and getting off the horse at the spot of the rock where the Dome of the Rock is, he ascended into heaven to the throne room of God. - Yeah, and this is where the Jewish rabbi showed him where that rock is, and then he took him to where

The remains of the Temple of Solomon were, and so Umar decided to establish a mosque there, and he called it Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa. The Al-Aqsa Mosque, as it's known in English, yeah. Exactly. So, and this is how the transformation of what we now know as the Temple Mount, you know, where the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque stand, you know, came into completion from the Islamic point of view.

They have taken over, you know, this four acres of land, except for the Western Wall, which is known also as the Wailing Wall, which is the last remaining part of the Temple of Herod. You know, he left it there based on the advice of Kabbalah, as it is still a sanctified place for Jews, even though Jews were forbidden from visiting the city or coming for many, many, many years.

In fact, Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, when he gave the city to the Muslims, he asked for terms like freedom of worship, freedom of religion for the Christians, certain other terms. But one term in particular, the Muslims rejected immediately. Sophronius asked for the Muslims to bar the Jews from entering the city or living in it or dwelling in it. And Omar ibn Khattab said no.

Jews will have as much rights as Christians and Muslims in the city. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Whether you're selling a little or a lot.

Shopify helps you do your thing, however you cha-ching. From the launch your online shop stage, all the way to the we just hit a million orders stage. No matter what stage you're in, Shopify's there to help you grow. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash special offer, all lowercase. That's shopify.com slash special offer. In the West, I think we often look at

pictures today of the Temple Mount with the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque there. And we sort of don't know how to interpret what we're seeing. I think even well-educated, well-informed Westerners will often see those Islamic monuments there and sort of

think of them as outside invaders. They don't really see them as situated naturally in that space, because we imagine that's where a temple should be. We imagine this is where Jesus lived. What does this have to do with Islam? Muhammad was living far away. Why are these, beautiful though they are, why are these Islamic buildings on the Temple Mount? But you were telling me the other day that in the 1400 years or so since

Jerusalem became an Islamic city. It has really featured heavily in the Islamic imagination, Islamic theology, especially in terms of the end of time.

Yes. I mean, for Muslims, Jerusalem is the place where the souls near the end of time, or basically when the Day of Judgment happened, the souls of people who are there here on earth will ascend to heaven. From where? From Jerusalem. Not only from Jerusalem, from actually a cave beneath the rock where the dome is.

So I visited there in 2018. It was a deeply spiritual experience. And I was so happy to be there, to be honest. And I remember when I went there, it was such an overwhelming feeling of spirituality. And below the rock was...

the dome stand, there is that rock in which many Christians believe that it's a rock in which Jesus was sentenced by Pontius Pilate and his footprint is supposed to be there. But if you go under the rock, there is a cave. And that cave is called Kahf al-Arwah in Arabic, which means the cave of the souls.

This place is where the souls will be gathered before they are ascended to heaven. It's incredible because I remember when I was reading some Muslim scholars, it's like, why Muhammad never ascended from Mecca? Why does he have to go all the way to Jerusalem on a winged horse all the way there and then ascend from

from Jerusalem to heaven is because Jerusalem is so special because there is that portal there which enables people or souls, whether physical or metaphysical beings to actually ascend to heaven because that is the place.

So that is the, I think this is, you know, in the Bible, the, you know, the vision of Jacob where he, you know, was in that land, you know, somewhere near Jerusalem, I think. And he saw a vision of angels ascending and descending upon a ladder.

Yeah. I mean, there are lots of hilltops in the Holy Land from which people ascended and descended. It's a kind of, it's a land of magical elevators, really. Exactly. It could be. Why not? But this is the holiness of Jerusalem in terms of the imagination of Muslims. And that is why it is actually...

so intertwined into the prophetic, messianic, and eschatological texts of Islam, as well as that of Christianity and Judaism? - Well, I mean, this is Jerusalem. In a way, it's like the linchpin of the whole universe.

Indeed. Anyway, we've got to move onward now towards something nearer to the present day. And it's a shame because, you know, Eamon, think of what we're jumping over. The Crusades, Saladin, the Mamluks, they all left their mark. And in the end, like the rest of the Middle East outside Iran, the Holy Land was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire.

Century after century, the Holy Land, which was part of the Ottoman province of Syria, lived its life. The Holy Land lived its life. Its inhabitants were mainly Arabic-speaking, mainly Muslim, but also Christian. And yes, there were a fair number of Jews too, but they were very much a minority.

until in the 1880s when Jewish migration to the Holy Land began in earnest, mainly from Europe, among Jews who would become known as Zionists. So Eamon, when you hear that word, Zionists, what does it make you think of? Because, you know, it's sort of a bad word in Arab circles, isn't it?

Growing up as a child in Saudi Arabia, in that tumultuous Arab world, yes, the word Zionism invoked at that time the enemy, the other, the people who want to suck our blood out

The vampires who are raping the lands of the Palestinians, the poor Palestinians who are so suffering and they need our help. So Zionism, it was equal to colonialism. It was equal to fascism. It was that menace that is...

out there planning more than anything else to ruin our lives and to keep us subjugated to the West. And it is behind every conspiracy theory, every calamity, every problem that we have. If I lift a rock, I will find a Zionist under there. So that is how...

Zionism was, you know, envisioned in our minds when we were young. Jewish migration continued throughout the late 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, causing more and more consternation among the Arab inhabitants of Palestine. This reached

ahead during the First World War when the British arrived and wrested control of the area from the collapsing Ottoman Empire. It was at this time that the infamous 1917 Balfour Declaration was made, where the British guaranteed a national homeland in Palestine to the Jewish people.

Don't forget Sykes-Picot. Sykes-Picot, the famous agreement between the French and the British to divide what is left over of the Ottoman Empire. They took the Levant, really they split it in half. The northern side, which is Syria and Lebanon, was a French zone, and the southern side, the Holy Land as well as Jordan, or they called it Transjordan.

was a British mandate. So it was a British zone. And this is where the British started, you know, a festival to allow Jewish migration to happen all the way until 1929 when they started to see that there is a problem. It's causing more trouble than it is worth. And this is when they reneged on their Balfour Clause.

That's right. The mandate, the British mandate in Palestine was explicitly charged with facilitating Jewish migration to Palestine. This was obviously provocative to the Arabs of Palestine and in fact was generating, was leading to, for the first time, a Palestinian national feeling.

Well, until then, there were no Palestinians because the province of Palestine wasn't named after a certain ethnicity or a tribe or a culture or anything. It's just an old Roman name. You know, it's like calling, like in a well, Libyan Cyrenaicans. I mean, really?

I mean, the Libyans will never be accepted like in the word Syriza as a formal identity. So for the Arabs of Palestine, they were always called the Arabs until really, you know,

Later, they were called always the Arabs of Palestine, the Arabs of Palestine until after 1948. Then you started to see the formation of, well, I'm a Palestinian. It means I am an inhabitant of the land that once was called Palestine. - One of the problems that the Arabs of Palestine, later known as the Palestinians, had in resisting Jewish national ambitions over the same land was their lack of a profound and deeply rooted national consciousness.

They were regionally based, they associated with their families, with their clans, and with their villages or their towns, but they didn't have to the same degree a sense of unity. And this played out down the line during the Israeli War of Independence, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when the Jews were able to take advantage of Arab disunity and really

win the field. I understand, Thomas, that the Jewish migration caused a lot of provocation among the Arab inhabitants. But the question here is, and this question is really valid, even many Arab quarters always voice this, who sold the lands of

Who sold their homes, farms, and lands to the newcomers, to those who came from Europe, who are washed with cash and gold, and they sold the lands and they moved to Syria, to Lebanon, and to Jordan, and to Egypt? My guess is, first, wealthy Ottoman landowners, and then wealthy Arab landowners in the area. Exactly. Many, many, many Arabs sold land.

hundreds of thousands of acres of land and houses and farms and dwellings to Jewish migrants. - And a lot of that land was in areas that were under inhabited, they were swampy or they were very arid.

They weren't overly inhabited because they were very difficult to live in. And the new immigrants, they did an amazing job actually transforming that land into productive land that was amenable to habitation. Exactly. And this is where we have the character of...

of al-Hajj Amin al-Husseini enters the picture here. - Hajj Amin al-Husseini, this was a man who would eventually become the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, placed in that role by the British, and was really the founding father of Palestinian nationalism, and an infamous character because he would spend the years of the Second World War in the Axis countries working as a propagandist for Hitler. - Yeah, in Berlin. I mean, he was in Berlin.

And he escaped Berlin just before the Russian army invaded Berlin. But the reality is that Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, he issued a fatwa in the 1930s saying any Palestinian who sells any of his properties, any of his real estate, to any Jewish migrant is a kafir. I mean, he excommunicated...

for a legitimate transaction. This is a pure political fatwa. I mean, the idea that I'm free to sell to whoever I want. I mean, there is nothing in Islam that says I can't sell to whoever I want. The right of property is very much enshrined there. I can sell to whoever I want. And so,

You know, Haj Amin al-Husseini resorted to twisting Islamic theology to say anyone who sells any piece of land or a house, you know, or a square inch to the Jews who are coming from Europe is a non-Muslim, is a kafir. He excommunicated them.

So during the 1920s and the 1930s, the phenomenon of terrorist violence arose in the Holy Land. This is something that is now sadly associated with Israel and Palestine and their conflict. On the Jewish side, paramilitary groups were founded to defend themselves from attacks by Arabs, also to facilitate the smuggling of Jewish migrants once the British opposed migration. And these paramilitary groups eventually coalesced

into three groups: the Haganah, Irgun, and Lehi, of varying degrees of radicalism, more or less corresponding with the three types of Zionism that were prevalent among Jews. I mean, it's very interesting and it's important to remember that Jews

hardly agree about anything. You get a group of Jews together and they're all gonna fight. And there's not just one form of Zionism. And Zionists themselves never really agreed on their goals. So there was one form of Zionism, which was known as practical Zionism, and its paramilitary group was the Haganah. It supported immigration and settlement

as a precursor to a state. So it's called practical Zionism 'cause it's like, we want a state, we gotta move people there 'cause once we have a lot of people there, they'll have to give us a state. Very practical. Then there was something called revisionist Zionism and its military group was called the Irgun. This form of Zionism supported a Jewish state which was supposed to be coterminous with the whole of ancient Israel.

which in their view included what is now Jordan and even parts of Syria. So this was a much more radical form of Zionism. They wanted a state to correspond with the ancient borders of Israel.

Finally, a third kind of Zionism, revolutionary Zionism. This is the most radical of them all, and its paramilitary group, which was the most brutal, was known as the Lehi. Like revisionists, they also sought to bring back the whole of ancient Israel, but in addition to the state itself, they wanted to bring back the kingdom. They didn't want a secular state. They wanted all Jews everywhere to migrate to this new kingdom with a new king of

the Jews. This was very radical. And so these three forms of Zionism each had their own kind of paramilitary network which began more and more to work together as the Zionist project emerged. Now while all this is growing, the Arabs have paramilitary networks of their own. Indeed, the Black Hand, you know, and Azad al-Qassam in particular, a Syrian cleric,

who dabbled in international jihad, actually, in 1916, 1917, when he started recruiting people from Syria, from Egypt, and raising funds to help the Libyan jihadists, the Libyan mujahideen, under the leadership of Omar al-Muqtar, to fight against the Italians. So he was based in Alexandria, in Egypt, in order to support the

the Libyan Jihad, the Libyan campaign against the Italians. He then left Alexandria to go back to the Levant and go to the West Bank in order to fight against not only the Jewish paramilitary groups we're talking about, but also to fight against the British mandate.

And he fought and fought until 1935 where he was killed. And then after that, it was Haj Amin al-Husseini who took over. This history reveals again that the struggle of the Arabs in Palestine at the time was really part of a larger pan-Arab struggle, a kind of the struggle of a growing Arab nationalism. And so that's why a Syrian like Izzedine al-Qassam is fighting for Arabs in Palestine. There wasn't

to the same extent as there is now, an idea of Syrian-ness, of Palestinian-ness, etc. Exactly. And the fact that he was actually busy before the British mandate over Transjordan, he was busy supporting the Libyans fighting against the Italians by recruiting Syrians and Egyptians. So...

You know, and to this day, actually, you know, his memory still lives in because Azzedine al-Qassam is the name of the military wing of Hamas. Yes, indeed. The Palestine question was beginning to grow very tense and the British wanted peace.

to get shot of it. They were sick of it. They drew up several plans to solve the problem, but none of these plans got anywhere, and the situation between Jews and Arabs worsened. It was a chaotic, very violent period. For example, between 1936 and 1939, there was something called the Arab Revolt in Palestine, where the Black Hand and other Arab paramilitary groups

revolted against the British mandate, attacked Jews and Jewish settlers. The British succeeded in putting it down. The Palestinian leadership was expelled. This forced the Palestinian nationalist politics, such as they were, underground and would hobble Palestinian politics and statecraft for years. So in the 1930s, the Arabs rose up trying to solve the problem themselves, and they were smacked down by the British. And then

beginning in 1944, as the Second World War was nearing its end, and the Zionists who were, of course, experiencing the Holocaust in Europe thought, it's now or never. We need to get our own state to protect ourselves from genocidal maniacs. The Jewish groups in Palestine in 1944 started to

to rise up against the mandate as well, which forced British policing to grow extremely brutal in cases. The British needed to adopt even more brutal methods, which only alienated people more. The climax of this, in a way, were the horrific King David Hotel bombings in 1946. On the 22nd of July, 1946, bombings carried out by Jewish political terrorists, really, in which 91 people were killed.

Indeed, and that is exactly which finally led to the British to say, let's wash our hands of all this mess and do what we do best, partition the country.

Yeah, fed up, Britain essentially dumped the problem in the UN's lap. So as the Second World War was ending, America got involved because the American public's sympathy, you know, largely pious, Bible-believing Protestants, their sympathy for Jewish people in general following the horrific revelations of the Holocaust was

caused the US to put pressure on the UK to sort out Palestine for good. So as I say, Britain turned to the UN, which drew up a plan to partition Palestine more or less 50/50,

though the Israeli half was slightly larger, which was provocative given that there were fewer of them than the Arabs, but it was more or less 50-50 between the two groups in terms of land. Opening it up into the sort of growing Cold War zone, the Soviet Union supported the UN's partition plan because it thought...

the plan would piss off the Arabs, who would then revolt against Britain. So Stalin wanted to hurt Britain, so he supported the plan and compelled his communist satellites to support it in the UN. The US government lobbied heavily for the plan too. Several countries, in fact, agreed to support it after Washington gave them financial incentives to do so. President Truman himself was only so-so on the plan, but he certainly supported a Jewish state and was facing an election. There were

big groups in the U.S. lobbying in favor of Zionism for different reasons, this political player, which would go on to be called the Israeli lobby, would certainly grow over time. So on the 29th of November 1947, the U.N. votes on the partition plan. It's very interesting, Eamon. Basically, all non-Muslim countries supported it and all Muslim countries didn't.

Surely we see a clash of civilizations component here. - There is no question in my mind that if the Muslim and Arab countries acted pragmatically at that time and decided, well, we're gonna lose, we're gonna lose anyway, let's cut the losses and let's vote in favor of this,

things would have been very different by today. - Well, as it happened, Arab antipathy to a Jewish state in the Holy Land is what led the Arabs to reject the UN partition plan and immediately oppose it on the ground with force. This doubled down several months later when on the 14th of May, 1948, the British finally withdrew from Palestine

The mandate ended and Zionist leaders in Israel voted to establish an independent nation state. The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, announced that for the first time in 2000 years, a Jewish state had been founded in the Holy Land. And on the very same day, a coalition of Arab states invaded this new state of Israel. The 1948 war

is a war in which several Arab countries, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, even Saudi Arabia, Syria, all of these countries decided that, no, no, no, no, no, we're not going to have a Jewish state on our border. And they invaded immediately. And of course,

I think, armies, you know, invaded and no coordination between them whatsoever. Actually, forget coordination. They were actually fighting against each other at some point because King Farouk of Egypt wanted Jerusalem so he can gain more legitimacy, you know, because he was always, you know,

insecure about being an Albanian ruling Egypt and he's not Arab even and wanted to show, hey, I'm controlling a holy city and I have a legitimacy. And then you have the king of Jordan who is Abdullah ibn Hussein. He, you know, his ancestors lost

just recently, just 25 years earlier, lost the kingdom of Hejaz, Mecca and Medina to the house of Saud. And so he wanted to gain Jerusalem, so to gain legitimacy. And the two were racing towards Jerusalem rather than racing towards, you know, the Jewish units of the state of Israel. And the outcome?

Well, apart from the incompetence, the lack of coordination, they were buying weapons from Italy and other European countries in the post-World War II, and most of these weapons were past their expiration date. So they were soundly beaten, all of these countries, by the new...

but newly founded Israeli state. Whereas the Jews had prepared for the war, they were much better organized. They were really fighting for their lives, at least that's what they thought. Having recently experienced the Holocaust, they thought, oh my God, here's another consortium of people who hate us for being Jews and want to destroy us. We're going to fight them off this time. We're not going to allow it to happen again. So they were very, very...

motivated to win. They had negotiated an arms sale from the Soviets via Czechoslovakia. If you remember, dear listener, in the previous episode on Egypt, that's exactly what Nasser did seven years later when the West wouldn't sell him any weapons. So the Jews had more modern weaponry, they were better organized, and

And though they were the underdogs in the fight, they trounced the Arabs and punched them in the eye, really. And, you know, it was a huge knock to Arab pride.

Absolutely. And of course, that defeat led to many outcomes in the Arab world. King Farouk lost his popularity and, of course, lost his throne just four years later. I won't say the name of the operation that overthrew King Farouk because, no, we're not going to say any swear words in this episode. Indeed, indeed. Of course, there's the other big, big lasting problem of the 1948 war, which is?

the existence of Palestinian refugees. Exactly. I mean, we have 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled

or left, depending on where they come from. And... Yeah, that's a contested thing. Were they expelled? Did they leave their homes hoping to return later? Were they enticed to leave their homes by Arab politicians and commanders? It's a swirling kind of vortex of chaos there. Exactly. But of course, there was also the element of fear. There were several massacres, you know, from Dari Asin and Qibya and others, you know, which...

you know, served as a catalyst for the politics of fear, that the fear that they could be next, that they left in massive numbers towards Jordan, towards Syria, towards Lebanon, and towards Egypt. However, whenever basically people always talk about the Palestinian exodus from the Holy Land,

they always forget that the Arab countries retaliated in kind and started to expel Jewish population, Jewish people who lived there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. They were expelled from Iraq, from Syria, from Jordan, from Egypt, from Yemen, from Libya, from Algeria. You know, the expulsion was so big that the numbers are anywhere between 425,000 up to 550,000. And many of them

were kicked out without any compensation for the homes they lost, for the businesses they lost, and for the money and jewelry and work of art they left behind. And they were just sent to the state of Israel with only the clothes on their back. So 750,000 Palestinians ended up being refugees due to the 1948 war. But also on the other side,

And between 450,000 to 550,000 Jewish people were expelled from the Arab world and were made refugees and they were sent to the new established state of Israel. So it is difficult to say that there was only one victim here.

And again, we come back to always saying here on Conflicted, we don't always talk about good guys and bad guys. You know, there are no good guys in the story again, you know, because nations are not founded, you know, unfortunately, like, especially in the Middle East, uh, through, you know, uh,

happy circumstances. And when there are no happy circumstances, there are no good guys. One further thing about the refugee issue, which is important to keep in mind, is that the Jewish refugees from Arab states following the 1948 war, when they went to Israel, resettled there, they were granted citizenship and started new lives as fully paid up members of the State of Israel.

One of the tragedies of the Palestinian refugee phenomenon is that the countries that they went to as refugees did not grant them citizenship, did not allow them to integrate properly into the new Arab nation states that were growing in the region. Quite the contrary, often it suited the leaders of those states to prevent Palestinians from assimilating, to maintain a network of Palestinian refugee camps to keep the

Israel-Palestinian problem alive because it suited their political interests as Arab leaders. Absolutely. This is why I always say that, you know, no nation or a cause in modern history was used and abused like the Palestinian cause. Yet it is very interesting that more than 74 years later, three generations later, the grandsons

of those who fought the Israelis in 1948 were so comfortable to go to the same battlefields of the Negev, to go and have a summit with the Israelis to discuss common, mutual, you know, peace, defense shield, and cooperation.

If the 1948 war was to some extent informed by a clash of civilizations, one Arab, Islamic, Middle Eastern, the other Jewish, Zionist, European to some extent, then that clash of civilizations seems to be easing. I mean, the 1948 war from the Arabs' perspective was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way,

Back in 1948, for the Arabs, territory was sacred and its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war. And its conquest or reconquest was a divinely ordained necessity. This is how the Arabs, the Muslims at the time, were thinking about the Palestinian issue. They were thinking like traditional Muslims. That's no longer the case.

Arab leaders now, they meet with their Israeli counterparts in Israel, and they speak of secular statecraft like any other leaders anywhere in the world. So it kind of brings back what I was talking about a couple of episodes ago about this sort of tension in the heart of the modern Muslim, the modern Arab person. I mean, Islam is still there.

Islamic ideals are still there, Islamic history full of glory and an Islamic future full of glory is still there, but it's coexisting more easily with a less Islamic, more secular way of thinking. - I think because we have grown up

Thomas, I think in my personal life, you know, I was a jihadist. I mean, I grew up as an Islamist, as an imam, you know, I became a jihadist. And you were animated at the time, I suppose, by a certain desire that Israel be destroyed. Absolutely. I was cheering on Hamas suicide bombers. You know, I was trained in the camps in Al-Qaeda there in Afghanistan with some of Hamas members coming to train with us. So,

There was no question that I, at the time, supported the Palestinian cause based on the Palestinian narrative from an Islamic point of view, the Hamas narrative, the Muslim Brotherhood narrative. However, what happened to me? I grew up. I mean, this is exactly what happened mentally as well as intellectually. I decided that where we are heading is the path of blood.

is the path of destruction, is a path that will lead no one to win but to lose. We'll all be losers. And so I ended up actually being a personification of the clash of civilizations, from a jihadist to a Western spy. And I ended up actually

You know, in later years, traveling to the state of Israel in 2018, visiting the holy sites, but also speaking in Herzliya at an Israeli security and counterterrorism summit. People were asking me, have you ever thought you will be here? You know, 20 years ago, I said, if you told me 20 years ago, I will be here. I will say, whatever you're smoking, get a refund. It's really not good. Yeah.

Well, dear listener, there you have it. We've done our best in this episode to talk about the Israeli-Palestine issue, to establish its historical context, the ideological clashes that underlie it, as a way of moving forward toward our ultimate goal of narrating the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, climax points of the Cold War in the Middle East. We could have talked for hours and hours and hours on...

on the Holy Land, on the theological and mythological dimension of the Arab-Israeli crisis, on the plight of the Christians of the area. I mean, everyone forgets that there were and are a lot of Christians there. But anyway, Christians are nice and humble. We'll just be overlooked. Oh, yes, indeed.

Indeed, Thomas. I feel for you, bro. I feel for you. Next time, you know, having talked about Israel this time, next time we're talking about Arabs. We've got Lebanon. We've got Syria. We've got Jordan. We've got Iraq. We're going to talk about their perspective, their historical experience in the 1950s and the 60s where they play a role in the Cold War as they're all inclining towards reinvading Israel and getting their revenge.

This is your biweekly reminder that if you're not doing so already, you can follow the show at MHConflicted on Twitter and Facebook. You can find that by searching Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group over on Facebook. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Sandra Ferrari. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley. ♪