#6 - Fear & Loathing in the New Jerusalem - Never Again

Hey everybody, this is Daryl Cooper, and you're listening to the Martyr Maid Podcast. You're about to hear the final episode of Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, a six-part series on... the early history of Zionism in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you enjoyed this series, please do consider subscribing to my Substack page where...

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I hope you guys enjoy the show. Here we go. I'm content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head. And make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No. God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere. Hell does exist. But its reference is to something that transcends all things. Why, we must tear ourselves apart for this small question of religion.

The godfather of political Zionism in its modern form, Theodor Herzl, he once wrote in his diary that if the Jews ever returned home one day, and he's talking about palestine and i'm quoting him here if the jews ever returned home one day they would discover on the next that they do not belong together for centuries he said they have been rooted in diverse nationalisms

and they differ from each other group by group the only thing they have in common is the pressure holding them together see there's nothing like a threatening other, to force together people who are relatively closer to one another. Relatively closer to one another and have more in common with one another. and more shared interests with one another than they do with whatever this other is absent an outside threat societies very often tend to lose a sense of themselves

The boundaries start to become a little bit muddy. If you've got a foreign army bearing down on your town, they're going to impose on you an understanding of... the interest you share with your neighbor, right? You both have an interest in not getting killed or losing your political sovereignty or whatever. It becomes pretty obvious at that point. And you remove that outside pressure

And what you start to focus on about your neighbor is not what you have in common, but what you don't. And not reasons that you should ignore the things that you don't like about them because you have more important things to worry about right now. And you start to wonder why you should put up with this guy at all. That's what tends to happen.

You hear old timers a lot. Everybody's grandfather who was in World War II or Korea or Vietnam or something. You hear them all the time saying, what America needs is a good war. This is what they're talking about. They're not just saying that people need to... go off and get killed, or that, you know, they don't even mean it in the old Prussian sense, right, of the German Empire and so forth, where, you know, they're saying that war sort of...

firms up a nation and the hardship and the challenge of it it's not it's not even really that it goes deeper than that there's a social psychological aspect to it right which is that without an other societies especially ones that are held together more loosely by a set of ideas or something other than say a shared biology which you can't get away from

people start to question it and the boundaries start to shift and get a little bit more porous when you don't have something out there to sort of provide that pressure that Herzl's talking about.

in the seventeenth eighteenth and early twentieth centuries when the christian aristocratic social order of europe began to collapse and gave way to popular nationalism new others had to be found to define the boundaries of these new social identities and how severe and virulent the thinking toward the other was was often determined in part at least by the relative security

of the identity that was in the process of being born and the precariousness of the social order that was being defended okay when the united states still had settlements in the west that were being attacked by native tribes it was just kill kill kill and almost as soon as that threat was neutralized and it was clear that the united states was not going anywhere people began to look back and think

you know, we might have been able to handle that a little bit differently. Germany only became a country as we know it in 1871. You know, it's really easy for non-history nerds to forget that. That the country that went off to war in 1914 had only been around for about four decades.

I don't place the responsibility for the First World War primarily on the Germans. That's my personal thing. But there's no doubt that they often spoke and acted in a more overtly... uh belligerent manner than say france and britain who had been around for a long time and so they didn't have to worry about their publics not buying into their national idea there's very little danger of that in britain right

When Bismarck took the German principalities and hammered them together into a state, into a nation state under Prussian leadership, you know, he didn't wake up the next day and find that everyone in the German Empire was a German patriot. That's not how it works.

to this day there are still people that you can find in germany who feel more bavarian than they do german another example the u s civil war had proximate causes having to do with slavery and economics and and some of these other things that served as a sort of catalyst for it but those causes are they were only proximate they were surface level okay no matter how you sliced it

Slavery or no slavery, whatever. A country basically bound together with chewing gum and silly putty in 1776 when you had a Puritan English elite in the Northeast. and a bunch of second son cavaliers and territorial Scots-Irish who identified more with their state than they did with the country, the overall country itself, down in the south, eventually there was going to be a reckoning.

In antebellum writings, you'll often see the writers talk about, they would often say, these United States are, right? Plural. These United States are this, or that, whatever.

and after the civil war you always see the united states is singular the precariousness of the identity of a nation that was settled by waves of immigrants from its founding has led the united states to go almost our entire history without having a single gap of time where we weren't chasing down one boogeyman or another just to keep us focusing on our collective differences with that boogeyman

or whatever it is at the moment, communists or Islamic terrorists or whatever it was, and to keep us distracted from the differences we had with one another. But some nations don't have to manufacture or exaggerate their threats. Sometimes the threat is as real as you can possibly imagine and as serious as it can possibly be.

And right now I have in mind a place like Poland between the world wars. And that's where I want to go to start this off. So let's go back to Poland. You're in Warsaw. It's 1935. You're on one of the main boulevards in the city and they're shouting. And the road is full of soldiers and military equipment. And the air is thick with smoke from guns and fireworks. But relax. This is just a parade. It's not a battle.

the national hero of the polish war against the soviet union in the early twenties josef piłsudski is dead and the whole country is in mourning so here's warsaw this massive parade is passing by in remembrance and honor of their great man and in his spirit military and local militia units in sharp formation squared away uniforms and everything are passing proudly in tight formation saluting the crowd saluting their officers

floats are passing by commemorating the great military victories in polish history lines of artillery and tanks and cavalry officers in their dress uniforms on their horses and saluting with their cutlasses the whole thing josef piłsudski had been a hard right hard right wing nationalist who had helped save poland from being swallowed up by the bolshevik barbarians in the early twenties and had sort of served as their national symbol

leadership rock since then but now he's gone gone just at the time when national socialist germany is rising in the west and stalin was consolidating total power and the soviet juggernaut to the east this militant parade was a message to the polish people that piłsudski might be gone but you are safe your men are trained armed and prepared to fight and die on your behalf so the parade continues you're there you can hear the cheering you can feel what they feel

in that situation and the parade continues and there's not just soldiers and militias and military equipment suddenly you see passing by you've got artisans and trade unions and youth organizations and women's groups and churches More and more of these kinds of institutions rolling through with their heads high to give confidence to the onlookers that the home front, and not just the military, but the home front is committed to doing its part for the country and her people.

and then at a certain point during the passing of the military portion of the parade but separate from the polish officers and men comes a contingent of squared away uniformed soldiers marching in perfect formation down the thoroughfare they strode proudly and took in the cheers of the parade goers who were cheering them on just like they're cheering on everybody else

and flanking their formation were uniformed members of their group on motor cycles riding along with them each of those motor cycles with two staffs posted on the backs of their bikes one flying the polish flag and the other the white banner with the blue six-sided star of zionism hundreds of smartly uniformed polish jews members of the right-wing betar paramilitary organization

were saluting the polish crowd and signaling to them their commitment to fighting for poland if the day ever came over loudspeakers you can hear the polish national anthem whose first lines poland has not yet perished so long as we live what foreign violence has taken from us we will reclaim sabre in hand Those first few lines of the Polish national anthem, any revisionist and Beitar Zionist would have no trouble identifying with.

I've said it many times throughout this story, but this is a good place to repeat it, because I'm going to get a little bit into the internal Zionist politics of this period, just to start us off. And it's going to become clear, but I want to point it out to begin with. Despite all of the fevered dreams of conspiracy theorists who love this kind of stuff, in these earlier years especially, there was never really any such thing as world Jewry.

In the sense that Jews the world over were ever working together towards some common goal. That just didn't exist. There were worldwide networks of Jewish activists and revolutionaries who were working together with one another.

over here on Zionism, over there on Bun Socialism, over there on the Bolshevik movement or whatever, but they were never united in any way. In fact, Jews from different regions and different countries... very often did not get along with one another very well chaim weitzman the zionist elder statesman that we've talked a lot about who rose to leadership of the world zionist movement after he got the balfour declaration out of the british empire

he infamously told arthur balfour he of the balfour declaration in nineteen o six that when it came to german jews weitzman himself he's the one speaking and telling this to balfour that weitzman himself who was a polish jewish transplant to britain he might as well be considered an anti-semite when it comes to german jews he despised them when after eighteen eighty one millions of jews from the russian empire began flooding into america and western europe

Many of the Jews that were already in those countries who were very well assimilated, very plugged in, they dressed like everybody else, they spoke the language, they knew how to navigate the institutions and all that kind of stuff. A lot of these Jews who were already in these countries started to become very worried. about what was going to happen with these new unassimilated immigrants who were coming from, you know, a part of the world where...

they were going to be very strange in their behavior and their looks to the new host. They very often didn't speak a language that was familiar to anybody. And since they were... in a part of the world where jews were used to being sort of shut off within their own traditional jewish communities and didn't have the same kind of regular day-to-day interaction with the people round about

They were often very direct and open with their hostility to Christianity or in their commitment to communism and other subversive movements, anarchism or whatever. And so the Jews who were already in these places... you know they started to become worried that these new arrivals were going to bring down the wrath of the local populations upon all of them when this influx of russian jews into the u s began

the mostly German Jews who were already here in the U.S. actually set up these intake centers. They were sort of like training and indoctrination centers almost. to teach the new people how to behave in their new country and to set them up with a trade or a job because they didn't want these new arrivals many of whom had been steeped in radical politics in the russian empire to come over here and start acting up in their new home

This was, you know, somewhat successful in some countries, not very successful in others. And so from Berlin to New York City. as these immigrants start coming in, it became impossible for people to ignore the fact that when trade unions were being radicalized, terrorism was starting to occur in countries that had never experienced really anything like that before. All these things began to occur.

and it just became impossible for people not to notice that more often than not there seemed to be a disproportionate number of these eastern jews crowded around the warm center of these disruptive movements so you've got these unassimilated, often radicalized Eastern Jews, these Jews from the Russian Empire who have come into these other countries. You've got well-assimilated German Jews.

You've got Jews in the U.S., Britain, France, the Netherlands, some of those other countries who are very prosperous and very well built into their countries. And then you've still got... Sephardic Jews and Middle Eastern Jews spread out from Portugal to Iran, from there all over the world. So this is a very diverse community, and it remains so today. And these various groups, especially back then,

very often did not have a lot in common. They didn't communicate very much, and very often when they did communicate, they didn't much like each other. We've already talked... a bit in this story about the friction that immediately started affecting relations between the conservative indigenous traditional Middle Eastern Jews that were in Palestine before Zionism and

the libertine, revolutionary European Zionists who were coming into the country, that was pretty normal. That wasn't the only place where that kind of thing happened. You know, you're talking about people who had lived in different parts of the world for... hundreds or even thousands of years and when you drill down even more you find jews within countries and within communities split along generational lines or ideological lines in fact

Yeah, this is what I'm going to do. So it might be useful to map out a few of these fissures within the Jewish community by referring to a few of the Zionists we've mentioned in the story. That'll give me a chance to sort of catch up with where we're at. give you a refresher since i took so long to get this episode out but also set us up for the rest of the episode it'll be a good pivot point for bringing us back to that polish parade in nineteen thirty five and from there

to launch us into the last chapter of this part of the Zionist and Israeli-Palestinian story. So give me a few minutes to talk about some of the internal Zionist politics that I've kind of been skimming over up until now. And hopefully you'll just trust me when I...

say that it's going to illuminate everything else that happens from here on out. So let's start at the beginning with Theodor Herzl. Herzl, again, the founder of modern political Zionism, whom we met in the first episode. He was raised in a very assimilated, secular, very comfortable, some would say spoiled Austrian Jewish home. He didn't speak Yiddish. He didn't speak Hebrew. He had almost no exposure to Judaism.

and he would never be interested in any of that stuff he didn't care he was a very well assimilated viennese jew who for the first part of his life basically just wanted jews like himself to be accepted as members of their respective societies just be an austrian be a german be an american be a frenchman whatever and if you want to be a religious jew that's fine whatever but just be a member of your society a normal member of your society

He longed his whole life for that sort of full, seamless acceptance into Austria's Gentile culture. To just be a normal person in his society. And he's trying to get away from that. sense of alienation that another Austrian Jew was sort of the prophet of Franz Kafka. That's what he's trying to escape.

and this was basically his orientation up until the french dreyfus affair which you also remember from episode one but a quick refresher alfred dreyfus was the french jewish army captain who was accused of providing French military secrets to the Germans, and then in his subsequent railroading and show trials, you know, it sort of brought to the surface this sleeping anti-Semitism in the supposedly enlightened Republic of France.

well herzl he was still a citizen of the austro-hungarian empire but he was a journalist working in paris at the time and so that experience seeing that happen it made a zionist out of herzl but then even his zionism was not particularly jewish and you wouldn't expect it to be given his background in his pamphlet der judenstadt the jewish state that set everything off herzl practically i don't want to say he attacks them but he indicts his fellow jews

laying out their faults as a people, as a sort of incomplete and half-formed people, interfering in the affairs of other nations. Just as he had hoped for individual acceptance his own individual acceptance into viennese society as an individual non-zionist now as a zionist what he really just basically wanted was the jewish people to become a proper nation, to be accepted in the international community as a normal people.

and that all tied back to his original desire for individual acceptance you know if he if he was no longer an austrian jew from the diaspora living in somebody else's country and interacting with austrians say on that basis but instead was a jewish visitor from a jewish state just like an austrian from austria then he thought he would finally be able to meet the people from the nations of the world on equal terms

And so after Herzl, the next great leader of Zionism, chronologically at least, is Chaim Weizmann. He's been a big player in the story so far, and he's going to stay that way. Now, unlike Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann was born into a large, traditional Jewish home in Poland. I think he was the fourth or fifth of 15 kids. Very traditional.

And he leaves home as soon as he can and goes to Germany to attend university. And while he's there, he grows to hate the assimilated German Jews. He kind of sees them as Uncle Toms or... I don't know, Uncle Benny's, I guess, maybe. And he resented the way that these, you know, again, well-plugged in, assimilated, sophisticated German Jews tended to look down on Eastern Jews like him.

And there was some of that. There was quite a bit of that. He also developed this abiding hatred for ordinary Germans of which he'd never let go. Now he rebelled somewhat against his traditional upbringing. When he became a Zionist, he wanted to keep Judaism out of the Jewish state.

as far as he didn't want to turn it into some kind of a theocracy or light theocracy where the rabbis and the religious ideas were somehow involved with the government or that the government was going to be structured that way. But he did have this very deep awareness. of difference and it led him to expect, unlike Herzl, it led him to expect the eternal exclusion of the Jews by the rest of the world.

not only as a diaspora population living in other people's countries but even as a jewish state on the international stage herzl had grown up in vienna during a sort of jewish renaissance This was the period of Freud and Kafka and many other intellectuals and the Vienna cafe scene and all that was going on. Viennese Jews during the time were prosperous. They were part of the intellectual culture of the country.

and so hertzel didn't mind gentiles weitzman saw jews and gentiles as eternal foreigners and he had no hope and he really had no desire that that was ever going to change David Ben-Gurion comes next, of course, and he takes over the movement within Palestine in the 1920s, and he's still in control when the Second World War opens up.

David Ben-Gurion grew up in Poland as well, not too far away from Weizmann. They were separated by a decade or so. I think Weizmann was 11 years older, but whereas Weizmann... sought to escape the traditional life of a Polish Jew by heading west, first to Germany and then to Britain, where he eventually made his home. Ben-Gurion instead dug in his heels. He grew up a street fighter.

And instead of picking up and moving to Britain or the United States, he was busy fighting in the 1905 Russian Revolution as a Jewish socialist before eventually catching the Zionist bug and heading to Palestine. And once he was there... he employs the tactics of the revolutionary that he had learned in russia to consolidate his own power and the power of his side of the movement

fighting both the communists and the right-wing Zionists, organizing the labor movement into a big, single, powerful union called the Histodrut, even threatening and shaking down

Jews who were not ideological and who were just trying to do business and thought that they could maybe skate by without getting too involved in politics, things like that. Typical revolutionary tactics. Well, Herzl's approach... to zionism was shaped by the traditional diasporate jewish community formation strategies that they had used in europe throughout history you know herzl wanted to ask the ottoman turks for a community charter

in exchange for the Zionists rendering traditional Jewish services to the Ottoman Empire. Let us have this little patch of land down here, and the Zionists will help the Ottoman Empire run its finances, for example. And while Chaim Weizmann, the British subject, he did become a committed British subject, he was thinking in terms of great power colonial politics. He had kind of imbibed and taken in that British view of the world.

And so he was hoping to convince Britain to take Palestine as a colony that the Jews would administer locally. And maybe eventually, down the road, they could have...

their own allied sovereignty, but that's the way he was thinking. David Ben-Gurion, while he had come from this radical background, he focused on the practical politics of interpersonal and community relations among the zionists in palestine he focused on building institutions and establishing meaningful effective power on the ground a recent book by

a great author named Milton Viorst called Zionism, the birth and transformation of an ideal. He describes David Ben-Gurion at this point in his life, in the 1930s, as he's really coming into his own and becoming comfortable with his power. He says, Ben-Gurion won respect for being clear-sighted and shrewd. Meticulous in observing democratic procedures, he was also creative in crafting organizational structures.

he had little time for attending social or cultural events he was indifferent to personal wealth though an addict in the collection of books his basic love was the exercise of leadership which was synonymous with power as the dominant force in both mappai and histadrut he achieved his ambition of becoming the yesh's pre-eminent public figure before he reached forty and now yours is quoting from a jewish newspaper at the time

his posture on the speaker's rostrum hands in pockets exudes awareness of his power wrote haretz an independent paper in nineteen twenty six he always looks as though a great party stands behind him and quite often he proves to be right at the sight of his serious face silence prevails in the auditorium his strong and moderate voice begins to rise more and more his words are weighty he does not use a fiery style or big words

he associates the present with the past there is history and continuity he judaizes his socialism wrapping it in human morality and international justice

Now at this time in the 1930s, it's often said that there are three centers of Zionist power. You've got Tel Aviv under David Ben-Gurion. You've got London under Chaim Weizmann. and the British, and then you've got Warsaw, Poland, which is where we started out. New York is getting there, but it's not there yet, and we'll talk about the Americans later.

so if london is associated with that sort of colonialist minded liberal capitalist chaim weitzman and tel aviv is associated with the ornery socialist labor zionist david ben-gurion warsaw zionism

was this hard right-wing nationalist flavor organized by the revisionists and the Baytar paramilitary movement under the revisionist leader Zayev Jabotinsky. Now keep this in mind as we go on, because... when we left off the last episode with the outbreak of the second world war the eventual establishment of a jewish state was starting to look like a certainty at least eventually and these three men

are already competing with one another in the late thirties to see who's going to rule it tensions had existed between those three poles for a long time but they intensified throughout the nineteen twenties and they were coming to a head in the nineteen thirties Ben-Gurion was the man on the ground in Palestine, organizing the bulk of the Yeshuv, the Zionist community in Palestine. It's called the Yeshuv.

And by the 1930s, he's done a pretty decent job of consolidating power and marginalizing Jabotinsky and Weizmann within Palestine itself. Weizmann's... promise to the zionists that the british were going to come through and forcibly establish a jewish state in palestine hadn't panned out at least not yet and so he was being accused by ben-gurion loyalists of being too cozy with the british

jabotinsky's betar followers were being blamed by ben gurion and the labor zionists of provoking those awful 1929 riots and massacres over the wailing wall and then the subsequent british reaction which was the issuance of a white paper limiting Jewish immigration into Palestine. The British had banned Jabotinsky from the country altogether while he was in Europe in 1931.

and despite his appeals he would never set eyes on the place again so he spent his time traveling around the world trying to rally revisionists and other zionists giving speeches and trying to organize people but he wasn't allowed back in the country he still did command tens of thousands of revisionists around the world and he still had the sympathy of right-leaning jews wherever they were and his troops are starting to get a little bit restless

with jabotinsky barred from palestine ben-gurion was working on turning the future jewish home into a socialist home in which the labor zionists under his leadership were going to be in total control and the zionist right wing would be completely excluded By 1935, the revisionists had already officially seceded from the official Zionist movement. And from then on, we're going to work on taking Palestine their own way, whatever Weizmann or Ben-Gurion or the British thought about it.

Jabotinsky was actually disappointed in the need to break with the official Zionist organization, but many of the more radical younger revisionists who served under him were glad to have been unshackled from it.

one of his followers the young very dynamic menachem begin we introduced him briefly toward the end of the last episode he was one of these types begin was He's built for Zionism practically from birth, especially for the particular role that he's going to play. In the mid-30s, Begin's a young man. He was born in the Polish town of Brest-Litovsk in 1913.

It's an interesting time to be born in that town, right? He was born on the last Sabbath before the fast day mourning the loss of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple by the Romans. Begin's birthday Sabbath is known as Shabbat Fahamu. I'm sure I butchered that, as I've butchered so many other non-English phrases and names and everything in this, so you just have to forgive me. But it's called the Sabbath of Comfort, and so he was named Menachem, which means comforter.

But little Menachem would get very little comfort in his life, especially as a child, and he was going to provide no comfort to those people who stood in his way as a man. Begin once said that he was born into war.

pinned between the armies of the kaiser and the czar a year before they stormed in a battle against each other in the first world war menachembegin's sister said that he had never really gotten a childhood as she and her other brother had his whole early childhood was that of a refugee put to flight his hometown fell to the germans in nineteen fifteen it was briefly part of the belarusian democratic republic in nineteen eighteen

It was incorporated by Poland in 1919, and then it changed hands twice more during the Polish-Soviet War over the next few years. Menachem Begin never knew his grandparents, never really knew any of the things of childhood. But he did come of age with a very acute sense of the perils of statelessness and physical insecurity. When he was 16 years old, Begin returned to Breslatovsk in 1929.

He joins up with Beitar. In 1935, he sees Jabotinsky speak and immediately becomes a disciple of the revisionist leader. Worships him. begin had inherited from his father a tendency that was amplified by jabotinsky he had sort of internalized this sort of aristocratic idea of how a zionist should conduct himself

A principle that was called Hadar, that the Zionist right wing seemed to think of almost like a samurai thought of Bushido or something. Not that extreme, but something like that. Maybe the...

Something like the manner of conduct of a British gentleman in the 19th century. Not a defined code, but just a way of carrying oneself. That term Hadar doesn't... translate very well into english but you'll see it translated as dignity or honor or majesty jabotinsky constantly reminded his fellow jews that they were descended from the kings of a great civilization

and that their mission required that they conduct themselves with the gravity demanded by that heritage in a nineteen thirty four essay to the youth of bitar he reminded them that behind every one of us stand seventy generations of ancestors who could read and write and who spoke about and inquired into god and history peoples and kingdoms ideas of justice and integrity humanity and its future

Every Jew is in this sense a prince, end quote. And see, the revisionist, you know, I shouldn't even say that because many on the Zionist left as well. maybe in a slightly different way, but they believe that living in exile for so long had sort of crippled the Jews as individuals and as a community. You know, for example,

If you have too acute of a sense of honor, just as one example, a too acute sense of honor can be a severe liability when you're living in somebody else's country, right? We talked about that in an earlier episode. If you're a diaspora Jew living in... Ukraine in the 17th century and you're walking down your village road and some local Ukrainian guy comes up and spits in your face, it might feel great in the moment to just beat his ass right there in front of everybody.

But when him and all of his friends come and burn down your entire village that night, you know, you got to learn to kind of roll with some of those punches when you're a minority in somebody else's country. And so over time, over centuries, this sort of becomes a part of your culture. The idea that honor is maybe a little bit of a liability.

Jabotinsky, and also the revisionists, and I shouldn't just give them, I guess, the credit for this, because the Zionist left... had this idea as well, but it was just stronger and more militant with the revisionists. This was something to them that had to be rehabilitated. part of the reason that they needed zionism needed their own country was so that they would have a place to go through this process of rehabilitation jewish culture had also been exclusively urban

for most of the last 2,000 years. And while there's nothing particularly wrong with urban culture, just like any culture or subculture, there are good things that it lacks and bad things that it has in excess, right? And when it isn't moderated by, it's not balanced out by a more traditional rural component that's sort of in dialogue with the urban side, the type of people produced by that culture are going to be similarly imbalanced.

This was something that Jabotinsky and his followers wanted to rectify, beginning with their own conduct, and so Menachem Begin was always known from an early age, especially once Jabotinsky got a hold of him. to conduct himself with that same kind of dignified almost military bearing that jabotinsky was so well known for and he was known as he became a leader as he came up through the revisionist ranks to demand the same

from other Bittaris and revisionists that he came into contact with. By the mid-1930s, Begin is already traveling around Eastern Europe. I mean, he's in his early 20s at this point. He's traveling around Eastern Europe giving talks to any Jew who would listen to his message. He's literally sleeping on park benches when he rolls into a town because he refuses to accept quarters in a stranger's house without paying.

he's skipping meals in order to pay for the printing costs of betar posters and pamphlets that's where he's at in the mid-thirties and that's who this guy is becoming completely committed Somebody who was born for this in a way that very few people could have been. The Zionists are looking for a home for the Jewish people. He was born as this refugee in the First World War, being bounced back and forth in all these different places.

And so in 1936, at just 23 years old, Begin is already sharing the dais with his idol, Jabotinsky, at the Betar World Conference in Krakow. There are private writings from revisionists in 1937 talking about Begin's rhetorical prowess already starting to rival, or some people even thought, surpassing that of Jabotinsky.

Meanwhile, Jabotinsky's now years-long exile from Palestine and the constant travel and the rise of... nazism in europe and the stress that that obviously was causing for somebody like him had begun to take a physical and emotional toll and he was beginning to slow down and so menachem begin like many young bataris and other revisionists

they took personal offense at many of the insults that ben-gurion and the laborites would constantly throw at jabotinsky especially since jabotinsky's commitment to the principle of hadar prevented him from ever responding in kind. I mean, they would just say vile things about him, and he refused to ever respond with that same kind of vitriol. And so as you can imagine,

These young soldiers who worshipped Jabotinsky did not take kindly to seeing him slandered by Ben-Gurion as Vladimir Hitler. And even when... ben-urion and jabotinsky met and agreed to bury their differences for the good of zionism began and other revisionists were far less willing to forgive or forget that's how it works very often right so it's not too surprising

If you've got somebody that you admire and somebody else is constantly slandering them and insulting them and all that, the other person... The person you admire, they might get over it, they might advise you to get over it, but very often it's the acolytes or the students or whoever that stays angrier longer than the target themselves, and that was the case here.

In fact, Begin, when Jabotinsky and Van Gurion had gotten together and sort of come to that mutual agreement to kind of back off and set certain limits on their competition, Begin openly denounced that agreement. And to really kind of grasp what that would mean, I mean, this is not the United States in 2016. This is a different time and a different culture, openly defying your leader.

like that was a big deal in an interwar right-wing movement that placed very high value on obedience to leadership.

This is the time of the rise of fascism, which revisionism was influenced by to a great degree, Italian fascism anyway. And this idea that you sort of, to a certain degree, submit your will to a leader. Because that's how your group can best coordinate its actions and so forth. I mean, the idea of openly denouncing an agreement made by your leader is a big deal. Jabotinsky was fighting...

in the Jewish Legion in the First World War while a young Menachem Begin was being carried as a refugee infant in his mother's arms. But Menachem Begin had found his identity in that Beitar uniform. And so he didn't hesitate to say that, unlike my teacher, I have not forgotten that Ben-Gurion called him Vladimir Hitler. And then Jabotinsky...

You know, he's trying to smooth out the differences between the various Zionist groups. And so he fires back, he publicly reprimands, begging for this outburst. saying i will never forget that the people like ben-gurion wore the uniform of the battalions fought together with me and i am sure that if zionism will require it they will not hesitate to wear those uniforms again and fight

Power works in mysterious ways, right? And so the mere fact that even though Begin was denounced by Jabotinsky, not personally, but what he said was denounced, The mere fact that the great Jabotinsky was forced to respond to Begin's challenge elevated the younger man's profile. Up until 1931, the revisionists had just been something like an opposition political party.

within the zionist movement but after the zionist congress that year voted to censor chaim weizmann for subservience to the british officially voted to censure him and after that same year Right after that same conference, Jabotinsky was banned from Palestine altogether. The possibility of Ben-Gurion and his faction gaining complete control over the new Zionist state, over the Yeshuv, was...

was very real. And so the revisionists formed up a new militia separate from the Haganah, which was the main Zionist military organization. in nineteen thirty seven a few years later when the second stage the more serious stage of the arab revolt was getting under way a number of baitaris and haganah commanders who wanted to take a harder line against the arabs joined up with this new organization

which was called Irguns Vi Liumi, or by its Hebrew acronym ETZEL, but usually just Irgun or ETZEL for short. I'll call him Irgun as we go through here.

pledging allegiance to jabotinsky the urgon was nominally under his command but his exile from palestine meant that the local commanders there on the ground had a lot of free reign from nineteen thirty seven on and over those next few years this would manifest in many reprisal attacks including dozens of terrorist attacks against arab civilians jabotinsky and many were ambivalent about these proactive measures, especially against women and children, but as the pressure mounted...

in hitler's europe and as atrocities began to pile up on both sides in palestine more and more zionists were starting to become accustomed to the idea of using terror as a weapon jabotinsky continued to insist that the at least issue warnings to civilians before launching attacks. Now, Menachem Begin agreed with that part, but he didn't share any of Jabotinsky's ambivalence about preemptive offensive strikes against the Arabs.

For a time, the clash between Jabotinsky and Begin over this issue led Begin to request a leave of absence from his Beytar duties. He actually left Poland altogether, ostensibly for a legal apprenticeship. understood by everybody as a decision basically to take time away from Jabotinsky to cool off. But why, you might be asking, I certainly asked this when I first arrived at this point in the story back in the day, why didn't Begin just go to Palestine?

Why did he have to come up with this idea that he's going to go off to Galicia for legal apprenticeship? Why doesn't he just go to Palestine? Well, the answer to that question contains the key to the...

that's going to develop between the Zionist left and right wings in the coming years. Put simply, the British were only allowing a certain number of Jewish migrants into Palestine, and in accordance with the terms of the mandate, the league of nations mandate they worked with the jewish agency to determine who was going to receive that limited number of immigration passes and that meant that any jew that wanted to get into palestine had to be approved by david ben gurion and his circle

who ran the jewish agency and those people were partly selecting for political loyalty david ben-gurion was not interested in bringing in reinforcements for the political opposition as he already had his eye on the leadership of a future jewish state which here in the late thirties as the british are systematically destroying palestinian arab society in the second half of the arab revolt was becoming an increasingly likely eventuality

And this wasn't just petty practical politics on the part of Ben-Gurion. And it wasn't just personal ambition. You know, here is a man who thought only in grand historical terms. And who had surrendered himself and his personal feelings almost entirely to his historical mission. I mean, this is a guy, you heard the quote earlier from Vjors. I mean, this is a guy who was indifferent to personal wealth.

After he's prime minister of the future state of Israel, spoiler alert, years from now, after he's prime minister, he lives in a tent for a while in the Negev desert with his wife because he has this whole thing about how he wants...

to make the Negev desert bloom and all that. And so he lives in a tent with his wife after he's been prime minister of a UN member state, right? So this is somebody who's not thinking in terms of what he can get out of this. This is somebody who has surrendered himself and is... personal feelings to this mission. And although Ben Gurion did have a monstrous ego, for him, this was about the shape that his future nation was going to take. The way he looked at it, you only get one crack at this.

Now remember what's happening in 1937 in Europe, right? Around those years. European Jews looking to escape this rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe are facing... A world where immigration to almost every other country on the planet is closed to them. The U.S. isn't taking anybody. There's nowhere to go. The Israeli author Tom Segev, who we've...

quoted a couple times in earlier episodes, he discusses some positions that Ben-Gurion held that can come across as very severe today. And indeed, they're used against... Ben-Gurion and Zionism in general by many people who were critics of both. But I guess I would ask everybody out there to consider which nations in the world were carved out by softer men than this. And again, consider what...

the climate in Europe is like as I read this. Tom Segev writes, quote, when in nineteen thirty seven ben-garion spoke of bringing a million and a half jews to palestine over fifteen years he was thinking predominantly of the necessity to create a jewish majority

ben-gurion also began to view the rise of the nazis in germany as a means to advance zionism consequently the zionists took action to ensure that europe's jewish refugees would come to palestine rather than go elsewhere He also saw other endeavors to help European Jews as harmful competition.

ben-gurion's sense of competition explains his reaction to the international conference that convened in evion france in nineteen thirty eight to discuss the problem of the jewish refugees he warned that opening other countries to jewish immigrants was liable to weaken the zionist demand that they be evacuated to palestine

the yeshuv depended on jewish immigration he wrote expressing his fear that the persecution in europe would adversely affect the zionist movement's ability to raise development funds while myriads of jewish refugees are languishing and suffering in concentration camps even zionists will not respond to the needs in palestine he complained

in december nineteen thirty eight a month after kristallnacht ben-gurion had made the following statement about the rescue of german jewish children if i knew that it was possible to save all the children in germany by transporting them to england but only half of them by transporting them to palestine i would choose the second because we face not only the reckoning of those children but the historical reckoning of the jewish people the tendency to see the jews of europe as

human material necessary to establish the state rather than seeing the state as a means to save the jews guided the zionist leadership in setting its immigration policy given the choice ben-gurion said he would opt for young immigrants and not old ones and not children children could be born in palestine he preferred workers indeed most immigration permits issued in the nineteen thirties were assigned to unmarried male pioneers in their twenties only twenty per cent were assigned to young women

while a small number of permits were allocated to children the jewish agency stipulated that no retarded children should be permitted to come three years after the nazis came to power in germany with world war two on its way a special fund was established in palestine to finance the return of incurably ill jews to europe the justification was that these migrants had become a burden on the community and on its social institutions

while local leaders tried to pick and choose potential immigrants they were upset that europe's jews seemed to be in no hurry to come to palestine moshe shurtock this is ben gurion's second command at the time moshe shertok complained that polish jews were not rushing to take advantage of the immigration permits the jewish agency had sent them he estimated that thousands had permits but kept putting off their departure now quoting

the jews of poland apparently do not know that a sword is hanging over our necks he said referring not to the danger of the nazis to the polish jews but to the dangers faced by zionists in palestine he suggested creating a panic in poland to encourage the jews to leave and so ben-gurion is looking at everything in terms of building the state period

and in terms of determining what kind of state it's going to be. If you're going to get in line and help with that, great. If you're not, tough. You're out of luck.

and so with the gestapo and the ss looming over europe the jewish agency was banning mentally handicapped jewish children from entering palestine they were sending jews who became incurably ill away from palestine back to live under the shadow of hitler who actually would have approved of the jewish agency's justification that such people were a burden on the community and its social institutions and nazis would have understood that just fine

No old people, very few women and children. If you were a Jew married to a non-Jew, you could absolutely forget about it because they took racial purity as seriously as their blood enemies that were running Germany at the time.

And so when you take all that into account, it's no stretch really to understand why, even with the thousands of immigration permits that were going unused by some of the European Jews that the Jewish agency had selected, that ben-gurion would nevertheless bar many motivated healthy young jews who were ready to get to work building the homeland but who had a very different version of how that homeland should end up looking it's not hard to understand from a historical perspective i mean

But to the revisionists and the young Bataris who were living on the edge of the Nazi and Soviet volcanoes, as you can imagine, this was an unforgivable betrayal.

At least one young Batari committed suicide after his immigration certificate was pulled by the Jewish Agency after they learned about his political leanings. You know, that's the kind of thing that goes viral overnight today. Back then, they didn't have... twitter and facebook for that to happen but you know these stories had a similar galvanizing effect on the revisionists back in the thirties as tensions between the revisionists and the labor zionists continue to escalate

bagin returns from his hiatus comes back to warsaw and almost immediately clashes with jabotinsky again this time at the third international betar conference this is in september nineteen thirty eight just two months before the infamous kristallnacht pogrom in germany

At the conference, Jabotinsky, of course, is given the honor to speak first, deliver the opening remarks, and after he does, Begin takes the floor and declares bluntly to everybody that political Zionism has failed. and that the time for dependency upon a great power has passed.

you know, a little bit in this episode and a couple times in earlier episodes, but I just want to be clear. Political Zionism, when I say it here, means political Zionism is just the approach that was inaugurated by Theodor Herzl's original vision. of working with one of the great powers to secure palestine for the jews hertzel at the time that he wrote his pamphlet

the Jewish state, it was 1896. And when he wrote that, he spoke of offering to help make Jewish capital and financial acumen and other expertise available to the Ottoman Empire in exchange for the concession of Palestine. When the First World War blew up, Jews in various countries, thinking along these same lines, sought to make themselves useful in one way or another to the great powers that they had access to.

and so chaim weizmann you remember from episode one contributed a process to help the british synthesize a critical war material and when david lloyd george the british prime minister asked what the empire might be able to do to repay him for that he requested that palestine be given as a home for the zionists that right there is the essence of political zionism in a nutshell it draws on the method diaspora jews had long used over the centuries to settle their communities

Over all those years, European Jews had been chased out of over a hundred countries. Very often it was due to superstitious anti-Semitic paranoia or some other such thing among the local population. I'm sure sometimes the reasons were a little bit more complicated, right? I mean, it would be weird if something was all the other side's fault 100 times out of 100.

they're always moving around. They're always having to pack up. A Jewish community is being forced to pack up and move on all the time. And you have to think back to when this is taking place. Think back to the Middle Ages. This is a time when foreign hordes... like the Huns or the Mongols, still randomly showed up on the horizon to rape all your women, take all your stuff, and kill all your men.

And so people were very wary of outsiders, especially outsiders of another religion, when the political order of Europe was explicitly based on Christianity.

especially outsiders of another religion who were supposed to have rejected and killed the founder of your own religion and especially outsiders from another religion who more than occasionally were not that shy with their hostility toward christianity and who had even collaborated with and even fought for muslim armies that occupied spain and that were taking christian slaves in europe to sell to the ottoman empire when you spell it out

You know, when you consider the times we're talking about, it's amazing that these Jewish communities were ever allowed to settle anywhere in any of the lands that were controlled by Christian rulers. But they were. And the reason that they were is that they were able to make themselves very, very useful.

that was the only way they could survive you know again jews had been living almost exclusively in urban cosmopolitan environments since before the destruction of judea by the romans in the second century when the romans did that back in the second century already at that point three-quarters of the world's jewish population lived outside of judea in cities around the roman empire in the middle east in asia minor and so living in these

big cities and sort of having to engage in the trades and activities that that type of a lifestyle requires for so long meant that they could simply do things that European realms that were just... emerging out of the dark ages simply could not do for themselves well political Zionists took that same idea if we make ourselves useful maybe you guys can let us kick it

OK, only instead of asking for a bit of land in the country of the people that they'd be helping out, they wanted one of these great powers to help them get their hands on an Arab country whose inhabitants were never really consulted about it.

But that's political Zionism. It's the same principle. You know, and again, like that last sentence I said, remember, it's 1896, right? So when Herzl wrote the pamphlet, colonial empires are the norm so it's not a particularly odd request you know for britain or the ottoman empire whoever it is to help you take possession of some piece of territory that happens to have some native population it's it's not

It's not strange in 1896. Now, Jabotinsky and the revisionists were mostly political Zionists. That was their approach. But as early as the First World War, you can already start to see how they approached the idea a little bit differently than Herzl had in mind.

They believed, I guess, in what you might call the legion principle, the principle of the legion. Roman legions would fight for the republic or for the Roman Empire and then be compensated with land grants and settlement in conquered lands.

soldiers zionist soldiers like joseph trumpildore and zeb jabotinsky had this kind of thing in mind when they formed the jewish legion to fight for the british in the first world war this is the kind of idea they had in mind in the view of many revisionists they had done their part but the british had reneged on their end first by separating the land east of the jordan river from the territory that the zionists expected to get

and secondly by turning on jabotinsky the man who had founded and then fought with the jewish legion in the service of the british empire during that war after jabotinsky was exiled from palestine he'd sort of broken with the british but he hadn't given up on the approach of political zionism in general and he hadn't given up on the idea of the legion instead he just began to shift his focus from the british to the poles

in poland you know they already had numbers that could make up a legion consisting of several divisions for the polish jabotinsky hoped that his revisionists might be able to cut a deal with the polish government to get their help in securing a Jewish homeland, and this was something the Polish government was very receptive to. There were several reasons, but for one thing, the nationalistic Polish government had some natural sympathy for the outlook of the revisionists.

Not necessarily for the Zionists themselves, but for the revisionists. You've got to have an idea of what the feeling of Polish nationalism was like at this time. when the great hero josef pelsutski died polish spies were sent into the soviet union at the risk of their lives and at the risk of polish soviet relations just to gather and bring back some earth

from the sites of historical Polish battlefield victories to fill his grave up with. This almost mystical kind of nationalism was the same political language that men like Jabotinsky and Begin spoke. And so they had kind of a direct... a direct line to the Polish aristocracy in the 30s. On the other hand, the Polish government saw Palestine as an opportunity to finally answer its own Jewish question.

The three million strong Jewish community in Poland was unassimilated, very, very different and set apart from the rest of the Polish population, but it was very organized and very politically active. You had Zionists, you had communists loyal to the USSR, which again, the USSR had only just recently invaded Poland. You had socialist organizations like the Jewish Bund.

most of these jews felt very little attachment or loyalty to polish nationalism and to the polish nationalists that was fine for the most part why would they feel that way the poles had been forced to live under foreign suzerainty for years And now, since they'd been freed after World War I and given their own national independence, you know, as they saw it, the Jews were living under Polish foreign rule, essentially. It was natural that they would want a home of their own.

And it was pretty normal for the time that the Poles would want to eliminate this politically disruptive community that they had internal to their own society by helping them find their own home.

it was certainly a more moderate solution to the problem than the soviet union to the east and the germans to the west would settle on as far as how to deal with their national minorities now don't get me wrong poles and polish jews have a long history of mutual hostility and polish anti-semitism was as real and as common as the bigansky stereotype that the jews often applied to the poles there was a lot of

inter-community hostility here, anti-Semitism and the reverse. But to the Polish ruling class, their anti-Semitism was mostly political. It was what to do about this group of politically organized people.

in our society jews weren't a racial problem as they would become in germany they were just a foreign political formation within the body politic of poland and so they were looking at this organized community that was not small, that made up 10% of the total population of Poland in trying to figure out how to manage a group of people who didn't identify with the Polish national project.

You know, you couldn't just kind of put them aside and treat them like we treat the Amish in America. To do that, you'd have to imagine that there were 30 million Amish in the United States, that they were very politically active. that they owned a decent amount of the economy and that many of them were either sympathetic to or working directly on behalf of a much larger hostile foreign state on the border

which had as a large chunk of its government and secret police a bunch of crazy Amish. Okay, that sounds kind of crazy, but that's more or less the situation Poland was dealing with at the time with its Jewish population in the Soviet Union. In the early 1920s, they've been able to fight off the Red Army, very possibly saving a good chunk of Europe from living under the Red Terror and communism in general.

but ukraine had not been able to fight off the red army and so in the early nineteen thirties poland got to look across the border to ukraine and watch the communist secret police which was seventy five per cent jewish in the ukrainian capital of kiev murder by intentional starvation somewhere between six and ten million ukrainian peasants we tend to think of foreign affairs today as some kind of a game

You have a little conflict and you send a spec ops team and a few drones to take care of it with our high-tech, hyper-specialized boutique volunteer militaries and the overwhelming global superiority of NATO. But this shit was not a game back then. Okay, real things could happen to you. And Poland was going to find that out soon enough. And so the Poles were trying to figure out what to do with these people. And here come the revisionists.

they come along and they say, look, we actually agree with you. This is your country. This is your country. But we don't have a country and everybody deserves a home. And look, we hate communists as much as you do. So what do you say? We take these 90,000 Polish Betar fighters that we have here in the country and help you guys out. Then at some point down the road, maybe you can help us out. And so that became the plan.

instead of a legion serving the brits betar would work with poland if poland was invaded they could count on the support of a number of zionists that made up no less than ten percent of the total fighting power of the polish army

So that's a very important boost. If Jewish communists were organizing strikes or other disruptions, instead of risking the internal and international backlash themselves, you know, by sending Polish police or military after these people the polish government instead could call on betar jews and send them in to break up the strike or break up whatever's going on and then just call that a squabble internal to you know the jewish political community

and then eventually at some point down the road the polish state can help the revisionists lead poland's jews off to their own country and so this is how we got to that parade in nineteen thirty five in warsaw for josef piłsudski's funeral

with the jewish legions marching in tight formations flying polish and zionist flags the polish army began training and equipping thousands of bettar fighters as well as irgun men who were going to serve as their officers Since the British and the Jewish agency were keeping them out of Palestine, revisionists began working with national governments, especially the Polish, but even with the National Socialist state in Germany, to facilitate their illegal migration into Palestine.

but as the pressure continued to ratchet up in europe and things started to become increasingly more alarming the labor zionists under ben-gurion were making things even more difficult for the revisionists in palestine having Betar and revisionist leaders followed and harassed by the Haganah, excluding them from important decisions, and things like that. And so, again, by the late 30s, Menachem Begin and other young revisionists like him are seriously losing their patience.

And so now let's circle back to that clash between Zaev Jabotinsky and the maturing Menachem Begin at that third Betar conference in Warsaw, September 1938, two months before Kristallnacht. Jabotinsky gives the opening remarks, Begin takes the floor, openly calls, openly repudiates Jabotinsky's approach, essentially, and calls for an end to the failed approach of political Zionism.

britain was never going to deliver a jewish state to the zionists or if they did it's going to be a socialist state in which the jewish right wing is going to have no role in which shorn of transjordan was never going to be able to contain all the world's jews anyway What are we waiting for? Begin demanded. We've got tens of thousands of fighters. We've got weapons and training from Poland. Why are we waiting to inherit our own land? Or to receive it as a gift from the Arabs or from the British?

Why are we waiting as Ben-Gurion consolidates control over the whole country? It's time for us to take it. To take the fight to the Arabs, and even to the British if necessary.

the arabs are a simple enough problem it's the british and the jewish agency that are standing between us and our homeland jabotinsky is in no mood for this he had no desire to pick a fight with the british empire let alone with other zionists whatever disagreements he may have had with them but the changing conditions had begun to win many revisionists especially those of the younger generation over to began's point of view

jabotinsky denounced bagan's call to arms as the mere creaking of a door but by the end of the conference bagan had successfully won a vote to change a very critical line in the bettar pledge taken by new recruits the original pledge that was written by jabotinsky said only in defense will i raise my arm but began's new version that became standard after this nineteen thirty eight conference said

I will prepare my arm for the defense of my people and the conquest of my homeland. So it went from only in defense will I raise my arm to I will prepare my arm for the defense of my people and the conquest of my homeland. the change was passed over jabotinsky's objections i mean he openly argued against it the fact that it was passed over his objections that was unthinkable just a few years before there was nobody with the

personality or nobody who could challenge him, and he was unchallengeable himself. But now Begin was really starting to get his feet under him, and Jabotinsky was beginning to fade. But I don't want to give the wrong impression. I mean, Begin still looked up to Jabotinsky. He always would look up to Jabotinsky. I mean, despite their differences of opinion, Begin's talent and his growing power...

were undeniable, and Jabotinsky trusted him. He placed him in command of Poland's tens of thousands of Beitar personnel in early 1939, after that conference. And so he still trusted him, and these two men are very close. and bagin once he took command of polish beytar immediately expanded the training camps and he began to oversee and monitor all of them closely in anticipation of the coming war for palestine but of course in september nineteen thirty nine

Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland from east and west and put an end to all that and put an end to everything. Okay, so... I'm looking at my pile of notes in this outline that I've got posted up here, and this was supposed to keep me on track, and I'm realizing that I've completely failed to follow any of it.

This was supposed to be a short introduction, but I've gone off on so many tangents that, well, okay, I've got to get past this meandering introduction. So I am sorry if you've waited for me to, you're waiting for me to catch up. to where we left off the last episode. But this whole time, up through this series, I've really kind of been putting off discussing the Zionist right wing.

And I couldn't put it off anymore, given everything that's going to happen in this episode. So I just kind of dumped it all on you at once to kind of get you caught up a little bit. Hopefully... I've earned enough leeway with those of you who have already sat through 20 hours or so of this podcast that you'll trust me when I say that nothing from here on is going to make sense unless I've laid this groundwork. So just give me a little bit more time.

But still, I'm going to try to wrap this up and get into the red meat here. So, okay, so the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany invade Poland. France and Britain have a defensive pact with Poland, so they declare war on Germany. Although not on the Soviet Union. And after the war, they allow the Soviet Union to seize Poland, commit mass murder against non-communists, and turn it into a Soviet police state. But whatever. It's another podcast.

Get me started about communism. So now World War II is on. Okay. Shit is on. whatever the revisionists had been planning with help from the poles was done that was over the polish state was destroyed completely within a few weeks and the polish army along with Thousands of faithful Beitar Zionists who were going to stick to their commitments were pushed underground to carry on their fight as guerrillas and partisans.

Jabotinsky was out of the country at the outbreak of the war. He was in New York, but Begin was not. He was in Poland when it happened. He was over in the east, in the Molotov part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop. pact that split up Poland between Hitler and Stalin. So he was under the power of the Soviet Union. The Soviets in Poland often did this thing when they started to become suspicious of somebody where

Instead of just showing up and seizing them on the street, they would first invite them. They would invite somebody that they were targeting to report to the secret police for a conversation. And so Begin very soon got his invitation. When he gets it... He calmly packs a bag.

sacrificing a quarter of it. Okay, let me lay this out first. Most people who go in to get interviewed by the Soviet secret police don't come back, and a whole lot of them are never seen again, whether they're sent off to a gulag for years or just put on their knees, held by two arms.

receiving a .22 shot in the back of the head before they're put in a mass grave that's where somebody like Begin who's a nationalist activist has to at least have somewhere in his mind might be the fate that is awaiting him when he shows up And so he packs his bag and he still sacrifices a quarter of the bag space for a stack of books that he wanted to take with him into prison. I always loved that part of his story. And so he shows up to the police station.

Now Begin is one of those unique characters that any movement like this is going to need if it's going to really have any kind of impact on the world. He was a guy, Menachem Begin was a Zionist, period. And he did not really care about much else. Like I said, from his very birth, you know, born between the Tsar and the Kaiser's armies in 1913, I mean, this was just something that he was made for.

his psychology was built for it his whole life history had brought him up to be the thing that he is he just was a zionist and that was it he wasn't really an anti-communist or anti anything he was just a zionist but the soviet secret police distrusted nationalists of all kinds including zionists and he arrived to the police station knowing that chances were very high that he was never going to be heard from again

And so he gets in there and they soften him up with 60 hours of sleep deprivation. 60 hours, they forced him to sit in this uncomfortable position in a chair with his legs pressed really painfully against a wall for 60 hours. They don't feed him. They rough him up a bit. And then after that, they're just questioning him around the clock, those marathon interrogation sessions that they would do. But none of this was really necessary because there's no guile in Menachem Begin.

He's a very upfront guy. They didn't need to extract Menachem Begin's political views. All they really had to do was ask. Whatever you might come to think of...

begging over the course of this episode, the guy is the real deal. I mean, he's ready to die on the spot rather than dishonor himself. His interrogators that he started out with at this police station included at least one jew who was very well versed in judaism and in zionism and so they start in on him and they begin by asking how long he's been involved with zionism

And this would normally be the part where somebody with a healthy instinct for self-preservation would try to lie or obfuscate. You know, like Zionism? What Zionism? I never heard of it. But that's not who this guy is.

Since my childhood, he answered, and from 15 onward in Beitar. The Jewish-American writer that I... mentioned earlier milton viorst in his book on zionism the birth and transformation of an ideal he picks up this part of the story he handles it well quoting from the book now the interrogator then volunteered that baggan had long been engaged in criminal activities

Why criminal? Begin asked. I think my activities were right and proper. You're a big political criminal, the interrogator answered, because all your activities were anti-Soviet.

by offering zionism to working-class youths as an alternative to bolshevism he declared bagin was worse than a man who has murdered ten people he called zionism an artifice devised by british imperialism to entrap europe's jews who the interrogator asked had sponsored his membership in betar nobody bagin replied i went to a jewish school they knew me in my town and they accepted me without any difficulty but why did you choose

I liked its program, Begin answered. I had read and observed Zayev Jabotinsky. only when the interrogator described jabotinsky as the leader of jewish fascism and a colonel in british intelligence did he upset began's equanimity striking a chord of deep indignation i should have mentioned that jabotinsky had died

shortly before Begin's arrest while he was on a visit to New York. Jabotinsky had been warning that Poland's Jews were living on the edge of a volcano, and now that volcano had exploded and engulfed them all. it took its toll. Jabotinsky was already beginning to struggle in the late part of the 30s. This kind of broke him down.

he tried to fight off despair and he continued in his duties traveling and trying to rally revisionists around the world but his strength was just sapped after reviewing a formation of american baitaris he retired for the evening and the last person to seem alive reported that he said i'm tired i'm so tired before closing his eyes for that last time

having been kept by the British for the last decade of his life from seeing the land to which he had devoted that life. Getting back to Vior's book, quote, Jabotinsky was... the greatest jewish political leader of modern times after hertzel begin told his interrogator he went on to say if i filled whole pages i could not explain what his death meant to me

a stranger will not understand and in this special instance stranger also includes some of my own people and so all i will say is this the bearer of hope was gone never to return and with him perhaps never to return hope itself baggan's obvious sorrow seemed only to incite his interrogator further how well did you know jabotinsky he demanded i think i knew him well baggan replied in the years before the war

i met him personally i came when he summoned me i reckon that in all i spoke to him a few dozen times the two discussed the future of hebrew youth politics in palestine british policy palestine immigration Began wrote in his memoir. The interrogator insisted that Jabotinsky consistently lied, which Began vigorously denied. Jabotinsky was my teacher, he declared. He gave me my faith. End quote.

Through friends, Begin learned eventually that his wife had actually escaped Palestine, a young wife. He had recently been married. And once he received that news, he knew that one way or another he had to survive this ordeal.

and get down get down there to reacher after his interrogation he was given a communist show trial and sentenced to eight years of hard correctional labor in the soviet gulag system but even then begging he kept his bearing he remained defiant when he was presented with a confession to sign regarding his zionist activities he agreed at once to sign he said i don't mind signing that at all but he demanded that the papers be

drawn up again to replace the word confess with the word admit since confession implies an acceptance of guilt for doing something wrong he was fully ready to admit everything he had done but he refused to confess to anything it's a testament to Begin's personal charisma and power that his communists and prisoners, who could have had him killed and buried in one of the mass graves they were filling up all over the territories that they occupied during the war, that they actually did it.

and then with many others he was packed up into a cattle car and shipped off to a distant slave camp in the gulag system in prison menachembegin maintained that same defiant bearing with which he had met his interrogators

During his time there, he drew on his deep knowledge of the Hebrew Bible to frame his experiences. One time when he and the other prisoners were given these filthy... tobacco spittoons in place of dishes for eating out of he thought of ecclesiastes a man hath no preeminence above a beast and he would constantly draw on that to frame his experiences over and over

And Begin continued to debate Zionism and Jewish politics with anybody that would engage him. Other prisoners, guards, new interrogators, anybody that would listen. He wanted to talk about it. And it's all he wanted to talk about. Pain, lice, sores, starvation, back-breaking labor, and very likely death with a lot of Soviet gulag slaves. But Begin stayed focused on Zionism the entire time.

and on somehow making his way to Palestine. I mean, here's another example. Despite starvation conditions that drove prisoners to steal from one another, and in which one missed meal could mean the difference between making it through the next day's labor and just falling dead on the side of the road begin surprised his two cellmates on one occasion when he refused his portion of soup

voluntarily and gave it to the other two men because it was yom kippur and he said he was fasting i mean it's important to point out also menachem bagan although he was knowledgeable about judaism he had never been religiously punctilious but instead of abandoning his faith he clung to it even tighter even when it imposed hardship upon him when the going got tough

this wasn't something hanging around his neck in other words his judaism wasn't something hanging around his neck it was a well of strength that he drew on in the spring of nineteen forty one

he made a makeshift passover seder for himself and another jewish inmate they were anticipated they knew that the holiday was coming up and so baggan had been trading some of his very meager food supplies and putting aside his small rations of coffee for several weeks ahead of time so that they could each drink four cups of coffee in place of the customary cups of wine

during that during that meal he and his friend lifted up a prayer over it intoning this year we are slaves next year we may be free men this year we are here may we next year be in jerusalem which is he's a year in and so that's a pretty optimistic hope for a prisoner with seven years of hard labor left in the soviet slave camps but everything was about to change

Everything was about to change for Begin himself, for the Jewish people, and for the world. A few months later, in June 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union.

And so let's leave Begin up in the Soviet Union for a little bit. Let's catch you up on what's been going on in Palestine. Let's talk about that. After the Arab Rebellion was suppressed in 1939, many British officials... were finally coming around to the opinion that there was really nothing left for them to do in palestine not all of them winston churchill and many many others were still all but taking orders from the jewish agency

Two decades of trying to put the place in order and find some kind of compromise with the various groups there. The idea that Palestine was more trouble than it was worth was gaining, well, it had gained at least equal footing with the allies of the Zionists. within the British government. The General Bernard Montgomery, who was probably the guy most responsible for putting down the Arab revolt, said that, quote, the Jew murders the Arab and the Arabs murder the Jew.

This is what is going on in Palestine now, and it will go on for the next 50 years in all probability. The colonial secretary at the same time, William Ormsby Gore, had written, quote, the Arabs are treacherous and untrustworthy, the Jews greedy, and when free from persecution, aggressive. I'm convinced that the Arabs cannot be trusted to govern the Jews any more than the Jews can be trusted to govern the Arabs, end quote.

and the high commissioner at the time speculated that not even a million soldiers would be enough to stop the murders and the terrorism and the reprisals in the country another british official wrote that even had there been no zionist policy we should eventually have got up against the arabs if we had attempted to govern them the new generation would demand the right to rule themselves and we should have to have given in and as far as the jews

another official from the colonial office wrote that the zionists hate all the gentiles the british as much as the arabs maybe more the israeli author tom segev that we quoted earlier wrote that the arabs great achievement then he's talking about during the revolt the arabs great achievement then greater even than the white paper was to have made the british sick of palestine only a catastrophe the high commissioner wrote might change anything in the country

a plague or a great war james pollock who had come to palestine a few days after its conquest wrote to his father everything seems to be just as bad as it can be That same day World War II began, end quote. And so that's not good, right? But of course this is Palestine, and just about everything in Palestine is upside down. And when the war came along, it was no different.

and so despite the complaints of those british officials despite the outbreak of the most destructive conflict in human history naturally in palestine violence actually dropped off and things began to look up It actually wasn't so bad in the early years of the war. Most of the non-compliant Arab leadership was dead, imprisoned, or exiled.

the majority of the arab elites who didn't suffer one of those fates had voluntarily left the country to go to syria or lebanon or egypt to get away from everything the grand mufti the arab leader haj amin al husseini he remained the symbolic and to a degree the operational leader of the palestinian arab resistance but he had been banned from the country by the british and so he was stuck across the border in beirut

those prominent arabs who remained in palestine were mostly clients of the jordanians who were allied to the british clients of the british really or else they were just openly collaborating with the zionists and with the british to keep to peace or for their own personal ambition after an initial dip in the economy due to the arab revolt kind of shutting things down and then

due to the shutting down of trade to the Mediterranean, after that brief dip, the economy in Palestine actually began to stabilize and then really pick up, because the British turned the whole country into this major supply depot for the war.

a supply depot that really they used as a base for the whole middle east so dozens of factories went up very quickly to provide the allies with munitions gasoline tires you know spare parts for their machines clothing boots foodstuffs and you need people to actually work in those factories it served as a primary destination for soldiers who were on leave from that part of the front and so many of the

unemployed jews that did exist and many of these destitute arabs who had been pushed off their farms and were living in squalor outside the cities suddenly had jobs the zionists were fiercely opposed to the white paper that the british issued in nineteen thirty nine to limit jewish immigration but with the coming of the war they had reached a sort of internal compromise on how to deal with it

ben-gurion laid it down that they were going to oppose the white paper as if there were no war meaning that they would do everything they could to facilitate immigration against the orders of the british but that they would support the british war effort as if there were no white paper And Zaev Jabotinsky, before he died in 1940, he approved of that formulation, and he pledged the support of the revisionist movement to the British war against Hitler.

Even the more radical Irgun militants had agreed to avoid attacks against the British as long as the British were fighting the Nazis. It wasn't peaceful in Palestine, and there were still... back and forth murders and fights and other disturbances and things like that but compared to the years of the arab revolt and to the years that are coming just over the horizon it was a relatively stable period

It's hard for us to imagine today, but in 1941 and even into 1942, it was far from clear that the Nazis were not going to achieve total victory.

most of europe and a good part of the populated soviet union was under their control and they were driving through north africa from west to east toward egypt if the nazis took egypt palestine would be next on the menu And people were absolutely panicking over that possibility, as you can imagine. Many Jews were trying to arrange refuge deals.

refuges and monasteries and other hideouts others were literally carrying around cyanide capsules with them the british army had offered to allow the jewish soldiers who had enlisted in its ranks to leave the country But there was a heated debate internal to the Zionist community in Palestine whether they ought to surrender when the Nazis arrived, which most people expected at that point, or whether they should just stand and fight with honor to the last man.

In the fall of 1942, of course, General Bernard Montgomery stopped Field Marshal Rommel's advance through Africa at the Battle of El Alamein, ending the immediate danger to Palestine. But it gives you an idea of... the mentality that's going on i mean the nazis really did look absolutely unstoppable throughout this early period of the war david ben-urion spent most of his time

outside of palestine he moved first to london in september nineteen forty because he wanted to be close to the centre of british power in decision-making during the war but when he gets to britain he finds that he really doesn't have a whole lot to do in a place where Chaim Weizmann is already the man. Chaim Weizmann knows everybody. He's got these relationships. He just looms large in London. And Ben-Gurion is kind of a third wheel there.

and so to get out of weitzman's shadow in london he moves to new york and then after the attack on pearl harbor in december nineteen forty one he moves to washington d c with jabotinsky dead Weizmann and Ben-Gurion are the two men left standing in the competition for Zionist leadership at this point.

Begin and other young revisionist leaders haven't really emerged yet as clear successors to Jabotinsky, and in any case Begin's out of the picture in the Soviet Union when the Nazis invade. Until now... weizmann and ben-gurion had been able to divide their labors and avoid direct conflict by letting weizmann represent the movement in britain europe and the u s while ben-gurion managed the yeshuv in palestine

But Ben-Gurion now disrupted that balance by leaving Palestine to invade Weizmann's territory, sort of. The decision to leave probably seemed like a tactical mistake at first. he didn't accomplish very much ben-gurion didn't accomplish very much and it allowed his opponents in palestine room to breathe if the revisionists hadn't been in such disarray in the period just after jabotinsky's death in nineteen forty

Ben-Gurion might have returned to find a very different Palestine than the one he had left. But his stay in America did leave him. It did yield one insight that was going to prove absolutely critical.

later in this story into the whole history of zionism and israel the insight that zionism does not need britain any more the future of the jewish state could be secured much better and much easier through the power of the united states and there were political motivations at play here as well weizmann heim weizmann had secured his position as representatives of the zionists to the british government he had deep relationships long-standing relationships and that was not going to change

And so Ben-Gurion hoped that by pivoting the movement toward the United States while he was in Washington, that he could marginalize Weizmann's influence and consolidate his own. With the war on in Europe... there was no chance of convening a zionist congress on the continent as was customary every year so instead they decided to hold a conference of american zionists at new york city's biltmore hotel in may nineteen forty two up to that point

american jews and american zionists the majority of whom again were assimilated german jews or else hard left jews from the former russian empire had kind of vacillated in their commitment to zionism and especially over the acceptable means of achieving zionism's goals but in what should probably go down as one of if not the most important political achievement in the history of the movement

to whom weitzman deferred to deliver the headline address to the conference managed to secure the committed co-operation of all the most important american jewish leaders and organizations in lobbying the american government to throw its weight behind the Zionist Project, which the Zionist Project was now agreed by all within the movement.

to be the eventual establishment of a sovereign Jewish state. There was no longer any question about that. Something that the Americans had been kind of ambivalent about before. Despite the success of the Biltmore Conference, Ben-Gurion was clearly uncomfortable playing second fiddle to Weizmann, as he was forced to do outside of Palestine.

Ben-Gurion, he was used to being the man in Palestine. Everybody looked to him for authority. The gruff, kind of ornery Ben-Gurion had put aside the daily struggle in the dirt.

in the meeting halls of palestine to enter the world of cocktail parties and entertaining dignitaries and that's weitzman's home field he's not going to do any better than weitzman there and it's starting to frustrate him even though the practical political success of the conference had been ben-gurion's weitzman was the better known figure outside of palestine and so he still received much of the adulation

Weizmann was going around, and he was getting standing ovations when he entered a room, and he was lauded as the heir to Theodor Herzl, and Bryn-Gurion was just getting... this was driving him insane he would get frustrated and blurt out some charge that weitzman was just playing to the crowds and then weitzman would just deftly parry that attack with a charming rebuttal and that just pissed off ben-gurion even more

After the conference, Chaim Weizmann summoned to the White House for a meeting with President Roosevelt. That drives Ben-Gurion even crazier. He wasn't invited. Again, this is somebody who's used to being in charge. and as far as he was concerned he had been doing the more important work for zionism this frustration led him during the conference to attack the british very strongly

Because the British were standing in kind of as a proxy for his rival. He didn't want to attack Weizmann directly because he didn't want to open up a rift in the movement between followers of the two men. But he could attack... the british who chaim weizmann was understood as being loyal to and that kind of stood in as a proxy and so he attacked the british very strongly rather more harshly than was probably appropriate and he took a lot of criticism from weizmann's allies for it

But his criticism of the British, while politically inadvisable probably, was not completely driven by politics or frustration. The British were continuing to enforce the 1939 White Paper limiting Jewish immigration.

while the war was going on you know the way the british saw it they were just fulfilling their obligations to the arabs but what this meant on the ground was interdicting Jewish immigrants that were trying to make their way into the country. You know, British ships were intercepting boats and chartered ships that were trying to smuggle Jews into Palestine, frequently Jews who had just managed to escape the grip of the Nazis in Europe.

And so the British are at this point of trying to balance two principles that both have validity, but they're really stuck between a rock and a hard place at this point. On some occasions the British actually sent the ships back to where they came from, literally returning those Jews into German hands. The British...

And they were taking a lot of heat for that. And so instead, when they would capture these illegal Jewish immigrants, they would set up internment camps, which is what we call concentration camps when they're set up by people we like.

You know, they set up these internment camps on islands in the Indian Ocean, and they would imprison these Jewish refugees there until they could figure out what to do with them, which, you know, the British are trying to solve a... a problem here and trying to deal with a very difficult situation but you can imagine the effect this had on many of the zionists and on people around the world and not just on militant revisionist zionists

both the irgun and the hagana were working non-stop to facilitate the smuggling of jews into the country against british orders and a lot went into it tom segev talks about this as well he says most of the illegal immigrant ships operated by the labor movement sailed from the port of constanza in roumania some sixty journeys were made altogether each one was a great human and operational drama a saga of bravery and passion for life

ships and crews had to be found and readied for sailing and equipped with food water and medical supplies passenger documents and a national flag had to be obtained the passengers had to be collected and transported to the point of departure they were frequently smuggled across borders in truck convoys or through mountain paths and thick forests even as the war raged the nazis did their best to intercept them

the immigrant operations demanded faith courage organizational talent contacts and money to bribe police and secret service chiefs government ministers and foreign consuls the mediterranean sea was a battlefield and dangerous for civilian ships all the more so for the shoddy vessels the zionists used conditions on board were abominable the ships were overcrowded and there were insufficient provisions water and sanitary facilities So inevitably, under circumstances like that,

some of the attempts by the Zionists to break the British blockades were going to go terribly wrong. The Zionists had commissioned three ships in November 1940 to bring... a few thousand Jewish refugees, into Palestine, but the British had interdicted those ships and escorted them to the port at Haifa. British authorities

had decided to send these passengers, these refugees, to the internment camp down at Mauritius, an island off the east coast of Africa. And so the Haganah is scrambling to find some way to rescue their comrades from that fate. While the British are making plans for the transfer, they take all the refugees, or most of them, about 1,800 people.

over to a converted French ocean liner, the SS Patriot, to wait for the logistics of the transfer to be sorted out. And then the ship was going to take them down the coast of Africa to the island. So the Haganah, operating under orders from a future Israeli Prime Minister, Moshe Sharet, determines that their only option, or their best option at least, is to try to set off a minor explosion and to disable the patria.

to try to make it impossible for it to make the trip to Mauritius, betting that the British would have no choice but to either put the passengers ashore... and and release them as the british would sometimes do when they would catch attempted illegal immigrants they would just release them into palestine and then just count them against the immigration quota or at least to put them ashore to hold them

temporarily giving the hagenau an opportunity to break them out and free them now the patria the s s patria is an old world war one era passenger ship that the british had re-outfitted as a troop transport for the war as a civilian ocean liner she had been authorized for 805 passengers but the british had determined that the patria could safely hold 1800 passengers plus the crew unfortunately

Even though the British had reauthorized it for those 1,800 passengers, the Patria only had enough lifeboats for the original 805, with a few inflatable life rafts to supplement. And so I'm sure you can see where this is going. At 9 o'clock in the morning... On November 25th, 1940, the Haganaz bomb set off an explosion that ended up being much larger and more violent than they intended, blew a hole about 6 feet by 10 feet in the hull.

a yiddish newspaper from the time the daily journal described the decision and then the scene of the explosion as follows after the british deportation order the hagana general staff took a decision at which their leaders shuddered the decision was not to permit the patria to leave the english must be given to understand that jews could not be driven away from their own country the patria must be blown up

the decision was conveyed to huggenau members on the patria and in the hush of night preparations had begun for the execution of the tragic act on sunday november twenty fifth nineteen forty the passengers were informed by the english that they were being returned to sea the jews remained silent save for a whisper from man to man to go up the deck all up the deck apparently the signal did not reach everybody for many hundreds remained below

never to see the light again suddenly an explosion was heard and panic ensued it was a hellish scene people jumped into the water children were tossed into the waves agonizing cries tore into the heavens as soon as the bombs went off british and arab ships rushed into the scene and began rescuing survivors as quickly as possible the air was filled with smoke and the water was slick with oil and small oil fires burning here and there all over the surface

the rescuers did a pretty good job considering the constraints and the time constraints they were working under because it only took sixteen minutes for the patria to go to the bottom she took two hundred sixty seven people with her mostly jewish refugees with about fifty british soldiers The exact number varies a bit depending on who you read, but it's right around there. At first, it wasn't apparent what had happened.

stories began to circulate that the passengers had committed suicide out of despair or in protest of their treatment by the british the british suspected that it was the urgun who had blown up the patria and it wasn't actually until 1957 17 years after it happened that a former jewish dock worker who was sort of guilt-ridden over what had happened wrote about

what happened that day and the Haganah and his role in the disaster. And so that same year, in 1940, a group of Irgun militants decided that they had seen enough and... they refused any longer to go along with the policy of avoiding conflict with the british calling themselves the fighters for the freedom of israel or more commonly by the acronym lehi it's avowed aim

And its only focus, really, was to drive the British out of Palestine by force. Their leader was a very interesting guy that I wish we had time to really get into, named Avraham Stern. but we don't really have time for it. But the group is very often just called the Stern Gang. That's how I'll refer to them here. And so at this point, you've got three major militias or military organizations.

among the Zionist community in Palestine. You've got the main one, the Haganah under David Ben-Gurion. You've got the Irgun. which is sort of the, you could say, the mainstream revisionist militia, which is smaller than the Irgun, but very effective. And then you've got the Stern Gang, which is broken away from the Irgun because they decided that the Irgun weren't extreme enough.

right so and that's an even smaller and more extreme group the stern gang did not care that there was a war on with germany their priority was driving occupiers out of their land to form what they called a new totalitarian hebrew republic based on the principles of national bolshevism they openly called themselves terrorists and they defended terrorism as a tactic

the founder regarding that idea the founder avraham stern wrote neither jewish ethics nor jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat we are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes we have before us the command of the torah whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world

ye shall blot them out to the last man but first and foremost terrorism is for us part of the political battle being conducted under the present circumstances and it has a great part to play speaking in a clear voice to the whole world as well as to our wretched brethren outside this land it proclaims our war against the occupier we are particularly far from this sort of hesitation The Stern gang actually reached out on two occasions and tried to make an alliance with the Nazis.

offering a pledge to help undermine the british in the middle east if the germans would guarantee them an opportunity after the war to set up a jewish state in palestine along similar lines to the nazi state in germany They actually met at least once with Nazi officials, but the Germans demurred. The Grand Mufti also, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian movement, he did end up working with the Germans.

driven by the same impetus that led many Eastern European states and countries like Finland to throw in with them. You know, for the Eastern Europeans and the Finns... if you've just been invaded and slaughtered by the soviet union and now the germans are fighting the soviet union and driving them out of your country you ally with the germans at least for today similarly the arabs were not particularly concerned with whatever was going on in europe

they just wanted the french and the british out of their countries and apparently some german with a military uniform and a silly mustache was fighting the french and the british and so great he's okay with them the alliance between the mufti and other arabs

with the Nazis is hammered on endlessly by many pro-Israel activists today, but it really doesn't go beyond what I just said. Taking sides with the distant Germans because they were fighting the British Empire that had been facilitating the occupation of your country by... these hostile outsiders, the Zionists, in the early war, again, the Nazis looked unstoppable. And however things looked to us in hindsight, the people at the time had to deal with reality as they found it.

so all this had been going on between the time that david ben-garion had left the country in nineteen forty and the time of the biltmore conference in may nineteen forty two and when ben-garion returns to palestine he finds that tensions between the british and the zionists and between the hagana and the irgun within the zionist movement are still rising and getting to a critical point and so he struggles to take back control of the situation but world events were conspiring

to ratchet up tensions between the groups even more in late nineteen forty two the yeshuv began to get its first really reliable evidence that something terrible was happening to the jews in poland

I've had to make a lot of hard choices throughout this series about what to cover and how much. Or really the hard choices generally come down to what not to cover. There have been... very important events and individuals that I've had to give very short shrift and I'm about to do it again here in a spot where

Well, part of the reason that I've been delayed getting this episode out was that I kept struggling over how to deal with the Holocaust. Should I walk it back and try to provide a bit of historical context for it? That's what I thought I was going to do for a while. For a while, I was rereading books on the Russian conquest of Lithuania and everything else you could think of. At one point, I had mapped out a brief...

with air quotes around it. I had mapped out a brief history of the Jews in Europe to provide some background and capped that with a section about interwar Germany and the Soviet Union, everything that was going on there. You know, because here is what most people know about Jewish history. Bible stuff, Bible stuff, you know, Cain and Abel, King David, more Bible stuff, then Jesus, then almost nothing for 2,000 years, and then bam, the Holocaust. That's it.

And why did the Holocaust happen? Because a guy with a funny mustache was crazy. You know, when you lay it out like that, it's such a ridiculous and impoverished understanding of the situation that I... that I couldn't just leave it there. But every time I tried to deal with it with any kind of thoroughness, it ended up being not just a whole episode, but a whole new series. And so I tried and I reformulated it and I tried again.

what i eventually decided to do was to just put that larger story off for a future series which fortunately now much of the research is already done for and the theme of which is going to be roughly described by a halfway decent book in that topic's orbit called Why the Germans? Why the Jews? And so we'll address the deep history of all that and that interwar period another time.

But that still left me with the question of how to handle it right here, how to handle it here and now. I mean, to give you anything like a proper context was going to take a whole series.

to spend too little time on it risks underplaying the absolutely central role that the holocaust plays in the zionist story and in jewish self understanding today and so in the interests of I guess, let's just be honest, in the interest of shifting responsibility, but also just to help me break past this dilemma so I can finally release this episode so that Jocko doesn't choke me out.

i'm just going to call in some heavy artillery and bring in a few others a few other people with infinitely more sensitivity or talent or both at their disposal to bail me out in doing so My goal is not, when I talk about this, I go through this section, I want to make it clear that my goal here is not simply to emphasize the horror, the horror of the Holocaust, because we know it was horrible, okay?

so was the rape of two million german women by soviet soldiers so was the starvation of three million soviet soldiers by the germans so was the rape of nanking and the indiscriminate annihilation of german and japanese cities from the air by allied heavy bombers we know it was horrible i want to emphasize something else something that actually has a lot more to do with the story we're telling here

I'm going to let three people tell more personal stories, and I hope that my intentions here will become clear as we go through them. This first passage that I'm going to read to you is from Timothy Snyder's shattering 2010 book bloodlands europe between hitler and stalin it's 1941 and you're in ukraine

Ukraine, the same land that less than a decade before this had seen 6 to 10 million peasants murdered in Stalin's Holodomor. And so Snyder begins, quote, in kiev in september nineteen forty one a further confrontation with the remnants of soviet power provided the pretext for the next escalation the first attempt to murder all of the native jews present in a large city

on nineteenth september nineteen forty one the vermont's army group south took kiev several weeks behind schedule and with the help of army group center on twenty fourth september a series of car bombs and mines exploded destroying the buildings in central kiev where the germans had established offices of the occupation regime some of these explosives were set on timers

before the soviet forces withdrew from the city but some seemed to have been detonated by n k v d men who remained in kiev as the germans pulled their dead and wounded from the rubble the city suddenly seemed unsafe as a local remembered the germans stopped smiling they had to try to govern this metropolis with a very small number of people dozens of whom had just been killed even as they prepared a continued eastward march

at a meeting on twenty sixth september military authorities agreed with the representatives of the police and ss that the mass murder of kiev jews would be the appropriate response for the bombing although most of the jews of kiev had fled before the germans took the city tens of thousands remained they were all to be killed a wehrmacht propaganda crew printed broadsheet notices that ordered the jews of kiev to appear

on pain of death at a street corner in a westerly neighborhood of the city in what would become the standard lie of such mass shooting actions the jews were told that they were being resettled they should thus bring along their documents money and valuables on twenty ninth september nineteen forty one most of the remaining jewish community of kiev did indeed appear at the appointed location some jews told themselves that since yom kippur the highest jewish holiday was the following day

they could not possibly be hurt many arrived before dawn in the hopes of getting good seats on the resettlement train which did not exist people packed for a long journey old women wearing strings of onions around their necks for food having been assembled the more than thirty thousand people walked as instructed along melnick street in the direction of the jewish cemetery

observers from nearby apartments recalled an endless row that was overflowing the entire street and the sidewalks the germans had erected a roadblock near the gates of the jewish cemetery where documents were verified and non-jews told to return home from this point forward the jews were escorted by germans with automatic weapons and dogs at the checkpoint if no earlier

many of the jews must have wondered what their true fate would be dina prnecheva a woman of thirty walked ahead of her family to a point where she could hear gunshots immediately all was clear to her but she chose not to tell her parents so as not to worry them instead she walked along with her mother and father until she reached the tables where the germans demanded valuables and clothes

a german had already taken her mother's wedding ring when prniceva realized that her mother no less than she understood what was happening yet only when her mother whispered sharply to her you don't look like a jew did she try to escape such plain communication is rare in such situations when the human mind labors to deny what is actually happening and the human spirit strives toward imitation subordination and thus extinction

who had a russian husband and thus a russian surname told a german at a near-by table that she was not jewish he told her to wait at one side until the work of the day was complete thus dina prnecheva saw what became of her parents her sister and the jews of kiev having surrendered their valuables and documents people were forced to strip naked

then they were driven by threats or shots fired overhead in groups of about ten to the edge of a ravine known as babi yar many of them were beaten panicheva remembered that people were already bloody as they went to be shot they had to lie down on their stomachs on the corpses already beneath them and wait for the shots to come from above and behind then would come the next group jews came and died for thirty-six hours

people were perhaps alike in dying and in death but each of them was different until that final moment each had different preoccupations and presentiments until all was clear and then all was black some people died thinking about others rather than themselves such as the mother of the beautiful fifteen-year-old girl sara who begged to be killed at the same time as her daughter here there was even at the end a thought and a care

that if she saw her daughter shot she would not see her raped one naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby when the baby was thrown alive into the ravine she jumped in after it and in that way found her death only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing or to their number which was thirty three thousand seven hundred sixty one

since the bodies were later exhumed and burned on pyres and the bones that did not burn crushed and mixed with sand the count is what remains at the end of the day the germans decided to kill dina whether or not she was jewish was moot she had seen too much in the darkness she was led to the edge of the ravine along with a few other people she was not forced to undress she survived in the only way possible in that situation

just as the shots began she threw herself into the gorge and then feigned death and now i'm going to leave

professor snyder behind and let dina prnecheva tell the rest of her story as she related it to the russian writer anatoly kuznetsov all around and beneath her she could hear strange submerged sounds groaning choking and sobbing many of the people were not dead yet the whole mass of bodies kept moving slightly as they settled down and were pressed tighter by the movements of the ones who were still living

some soldiers came out on to the ledge and flashed their torches down on the bodies firing bullets from their revolvers into any which appeared to be still living but some one not far from dina went on groaning as loud as before then she heard people walking near her actually on the bodies they were germans who had climbed down and were bending over and taking things from the dead and occasionally firing on those which showed signs of life

among them was the policeman who had examined her papers and taken her bag she recognized him by his voice one s s man caught his foot against dina and her appearance aroused his suspicions he shone his torch on her picked her up and struck her with his fist but she hung limp and gave no sign of life he kicked her in the breast with his heavy boot and trod on her right hand so that the bones cracked but he didn't use his gun and went off picking his way across the corpses

a few minutes later she heard a voice calling from above demidenko come on start shovelling there was a clatter of spades and then heavy thuds as the earth and sand landed on the bodies coming closer and closer until it started falling on dina herself her whole body was buried under the sand but she did not move until it began to cover her mouth she was lying face upwards

breathed in some sand and started to choke and then scarcely realizing what she was doing she started to struggle in a state of uncontrollable panic quite prepared now to be shot rather than to be buried alive with her left hand she started scraping the sand off herself scarcely daring to breathe lest she should start coughing she used what strength she had left to hold the cough back she began to feel a little easier

finally she got herself out from under the earth dina's eyes were full of sand it was pitch dark and there was the heavy smell of flesh from the mass of fresh corpses dina could just make out the nearest side of the sand pit and started slowly and carefully making her way across to it then she stood up and started making little footholds in it with her left hand in that way she pressed close to the side of the pit

she made steps and so raised herself an inch at a time likely at any moment to fall back into the pit there was a little bush at the top which she managed to get hold of with a last desperate effort she pulled herself up and she scrambled over the edge and as she did she heard a whisper which nearly made her jump back don't be scared lady i'm alive too it was a small boy in vest and pants who had crawled out as she had done he was trembling and shivering all over

quiet she hissed at him crawl along behind me and they crawled away silently without a sound dina prnecheva survived the horrors of babi yar the young boy who had escaped from the ravine with her called out to her as they sought to leave the area he warned her that danger was near motin the young boy's name called out to her don't move lady there's germans here the germans killed him on the spot But not understanding what he said, she made good her escape." Now I'm going to play...

for you a recording of an interview that I found. This is something that the BBC did a while back. This is an interview with a man who was... He's an elderly Jewish man who was interned in several concentration camps as a boy. His name was Jakob Bresler of Poland. This 16-year-old boy has been in the ghetto at Lodz. and five concentration camps. He's lost trace of all his family. I am the lost Jacob Bressler. I am 86 years old right now and going on 87.

I grew up in a place called Unyev, and that's in Poland, not far from the German border. I came from a large family, four sisters, one brother. my parents, and we were 65 first cousins, and I'm the only one who is alive. My father was a very intelligent man, very loving, but yet strict. In 1939, when the war broke out, I became the sole supporter of my family. My father was taken away right away. They kept him in jail, and they took him away.

to Poznan. And I was separated from my mother and the rest of the family in 1942. My mother and two sisters were taken to Chelmno. which was an extermination camp. They were the first ones to be gassed in trucks. And two of my sisters were taken to a camp in Poznan. I was sent with my brother. to get a lodge. And I worked in a factory for two years there. My father was in Poznan.

And I've heard that there is a transport coming with prisoners from Poznan. And I had a premonition that somehow my father will be among them. And sure enough, after a while... I have seen columns of wrecks coming towards me, and I ran into them and I asked them, do you know Chaim Bresla, who is my father? He said no.

Then I went on the lines until somebody said, yes, there is a Chaim Bressler here with us. And they pointed me to the direction where he was. And I hardly recognized him because he was... He didn't look like a person anymore. He was a skeleton. They took him to a prison called Charnitzkego. And I asked...

My boss who had great connections to everybody, I said, I would like to take my father out. And he said, how are you going to feed him? You can't get a Russian for him. Well, I managed to get him out. He was with us for about four days or so. And then one day I came home from work and there was a note on the table, I have returned. to prison because i cannot take away your piece of bread that you're sharing with me i was very angry and i ran to

prison and I scolded him and I says, Papa, why did you do that? And he said to me, I don't live anymore. If this is life, he says, I don't want it. But you are young. See that you survive. Those words ring in my ears throughout. concentration camps and that's why I survived. I wouldn't give up. I didn't want to...

I didn't want to tarnish that story with my own voice. I wanted you to hear an 86-year-old man describing his murdered father 70 years after the fact to hear his voice at the end of the war yakov was the only member of his entire extended family still alive experiences like this do not leave you they impose themselves on a life in such a way that they they set personalities in stone stuck and

reliving that painful moment again and again and again. And when enough people share experiences like this, the character of whole peoples... crystallize around them with a new self-understanding and with a new relationship to each other and to the rest of the world.

Finally, I want to read you a few diary entries from the diary of an unknown woman, unknown Jewish woman, from the Tarnapal ghetto, where many of Galicia's 500,000 Jews Quote. 7 April 1943. That interview gets me. Excuse me. 7 April 1943. Before I leave this world, I want to leave behind a few lines to you, my loved ones.

when this letter reaches you one day i myself will no longer be there nor will any of us our end is drawing near one feels it one knows it just like the innocent defenseless jews already executed we are all condemned to death in the very near future it will be our turn as the small remainder left over from the mass murders There is no way for us to escape this horrible, ghastly death. At the very beginning, in June 1941, some 5,000 men were killed, among them my husband.

after six weeks following a five-day search between the corpses i found his body since that day life has ceased for me not even in my girlish dreams could i once have wished for a better and more faithful companion i was only granted two years and two months of happiness and now

tired from so much searching among the bodies one was glad to have found his as well are there words in which to express these torments It can be easy for 33,761 corpses to become numbing, especially when it happens over and over and over. But there's something about reading the diary of a young wife searching among corpses for days, hoping, if you can call it that, hoping to find her beloved husband. Something about that that brings you back down into the mud.

This was real. Oh, yeah, yeah, I know it was real. I read about it in school, or I have a Jewish friend with a grandparent, or maybe you're Jewish and you had a grandparent. No, no, no. This was real. Okay? Close your eyes and look around you at the field of bodies stacked. Smell them.

and look at the distraught young wife flipping over rotting bodies hoping not hoping what do you feel in this kind of a situation see the distraught young wife flipping over rotting bodies in this field of corpses one by one hoping to find her faithful husband that she had married only four months before the german invasion this was real the diary continues twenty sixth april nineteen forty three i am still alive and i want to describe to you what happened from the seventh to this day now then

it is told that everyone's turn comes up next galicia should be totally rid of jews after all the ghetto is to be liquidated by the first of may during the last days thousands have been shot meeting point was in our camp here the human victims are selected in petrakov it looks like this before the grave one is stripped naked then forced to kneel down and wait for the shot

the victims stand in line and await their turn moreover they have to sort the first the executed in their graves so that the space is used well and order prevails the entire procedure does not take long in half an hour the clothes of the executed returned to the camp after the actions the jewish council received a bill for thirty thousand zloty to pay for used bullets why can we not cry

Why can we not defend ourselves? How can one see so much innocent blood flow and say nothing, do nothing, and await the same death oneself? we are compelled to go under so miserably so pitilessly do you think we want to end this way die this way no no despite all these experiences the urge for self-preservation has now often become greater the will to live stronger the closer death is it is beyond comprehension

It was beyond comprehension. It was, and it remains beyond comprehension today, despite the millions and millions of words that have been written about the Holocaust. You can tell that by the almost religious significance that this event has taken on throughout Western civilization. Or not even almost. It has become a religious symbol. And what I mean by that is that...

it's looked upon as something without precedent, without cause. And to even inquire too deeply into precedents or causes will sort of draw suspicion, you know, to look into the details of the symbol. in a way that doesn't have official sanction. You know, this can result in predictable social rituals of denunciation and purgation, or if you're in many European countries, you can actually be jailed under anti-heresy and blasphemy laws.

We don't call them that, but that's what they are. The point I'm trying to make is that if you're a Gentile out there listening and... a western country you know the power of this symbol the holocaust the power that it has over your own culture and society and how large it looms over your own culture's self understanding and so try to imagine

And we can't really, but try to imagine the space that it occupies in the minds and the cultural identities of Jews. And we're going to come back to this later, but I want to leave you with that for now.

if you're one of my jewish listeners i don't have to tell you but i have found that even many of my jewish friends have to really stretch their minds to try to understand how this would have been situated in just where this would have been situated in the psychology of the Zionists in Palestine once it became clear exactly what was going on. So let's return to Palestine.

it's tel aviv in december 1942 the news was coming in now that something was happening to the jews in eastern europe and the soviet union and so a group of young men young jews gathered to meet in a meeting hall in tel aviv to discuss what they might be able to do to help as the men argued

About halfway through the meeting, a small, thin man in his late 20s, wearing the short pants uniform of the Free Polish Army and wearing these kind of little small, round, thick spectacles on his nose, enters the room.

quietly and sits down in the back the men were at a loss some of them are offering you know trying to be helpful but offering suggestions like taking up offerings to send to polish jews others of them are wondering whether the british or soviet governments could be lobbied to focus their efforts more on poland and finally this thin man

who had arrived late the man in the polish uniform decided he'd heard enough and he interrupted another speaker mid-sentence he stands up and he announces to the room that there's only one thing that any of them can do to help the jews in poland they must attack the british in palestine until they either lifted the immigration embargo or else left the country because as long as polish jews know that they have nowhere to go

there's no reason for them to attempt to flee poland romanian hungarian and many jews in other countries had hardly yet been affected by the third reich and so they might still be saved in their entirety and at least a portion of polish jewry would manage to escape if only they were given hope that they would have a home waiting for them somewhere when the meeting broke up

one of the attendees a young jew who was serving the british army at the time asked another who the stranger was who had spoken up he was the head of beytar in poland the other man told him He was imprisoned by the Soviets and eventually made his way here. His name is Begin. Menachem Begin had arrived in Palestine. Begin had taken a very... long and circuitous route to finally join his wife and his people in country.

when the germans invaded the soviet union the soviets made common cause with the polish government in exile and one of the stipulations of their agreement was that polish nationals would receive a general amnesty from the soviets and be released from soviet prisons and so this is how bagin was turned out seven years early from his sentence of hard labor

after that for several months he wanders around southern russia finally making his way to the home of his sister's family near the afghan border and while he's there somebody suggests to him that he join this new military regiment which was forming up and heading south toward the middle east

The Free Polish Army under General Wladyslaw Anders was made up of these Polish nationals like Begin who had recently been freed from Soviet captivity. The General Anders himself had spent two years at the nightmarish... god-awful lubyanka prison in moscow they had uniforms and and gear supplied by the british and the americans but upon forming up there were about forty thousand of them upon forming up it became

quickly clear that the Soviets were either unable or unwilling to feed and supply them. And so Anders had a meeting with Stalin and prevailed upon him to allow this new army of his to make its way south. through Persia to link up with the British in either Iraq or Palestine. And so Begin jumped at the chance and enlisted in Andrew's army.

marching south and finally arriving in jerusalem in may nineteen forty two the same month that weitzman and ben-gurion are holding the biltmore conference in new york and it didn't take long for beggin starr to rise once he got to palestine he was quickly nominated to lead the rudderless irgun begin refused he said that he wasn't yet free from his duties to andr's army which had actually carried him home and he wasn't going to betray that

i always found that kind of remarkable because it would have been very easy for him to desert and just melt into the zionist community there but he said that a deserter from whatever army is still a deserter and any man who deserted an army that was fighting hitler could under no circumstances stand at the head of a national militia and so he continued to serve anders's army dutifully

and he used his time off to make connections and network and start to prepare for the coming conflict within a few months of his arrival the haganaugh considered him sufficiently dangerous to have him tailed and they opened up a secret file to track his activities so he's being noticed right away while bagun was limited by his duties and responsibilities to andr's army he sat back and observed as ben gurion returned to palestine and began reasserting himself and seizing control of events again

after the warsaw ghetto uprising in april of nineteen forty three the jewish agency and other official zionist institutions went to work on the narrative surrounding the uprising suppressing the critical role that revisionist fighters had played in the battle and making it seem like it was just a purely an uprising purely by zionist socialists that they had orchestrated it and fought this doomed war against the germans without anybody's help in october that same year two haganass soldiers were

parachuted into romania from a british plain with the mission to spread propaganda among the jews there that the labor zionists had actually gone to rescue the jews in poland while the revisionists were standing by and doing nothing A few months after that, near the end of 1943, another mission was launched behind enemy lines to do something very similar.

so this is kind of what's going on begin knows that he's got to do something and so toward the end of nineteen forty three he requests a temporary leave of absence from his position with the free polish army finally begin receives an official letter granting him a twelve-month temporary discharge beginning on january twenty sixth nineteen forty four he accepts command of the air gun the very same day and just five days after that he takes the air gun to war with the british empire

we are nearing the final stage of the war baggan announced we are facing a decision that will change the fates of generations to come the cease-fire announced at the beginning of world war two has been broken by the british the rulers of our land did not take loyalty concessions or sacrifices into account they have fulfilled and are still moving forward with their plan the elimination of national zionism we shall draw our conclusions fearlessly

no more cease-fire in the land of israel between the people and the hebrew youth and the british administration which hands our brothers over to hitler their gun began with attacks against british office buildings they set small explosives around sabotaged infrastructure engaged in some arson

menachem baggan who was already being watched was immediately declared an outlaw and was forced underground from that point in early nineteen forty four just to avoid arrest and the ten thousand pound bounty that the british had offered for his capture 1944, 10,000 British pounds is... It's not a tiny amount of money today. It's a lot of money back then. So it gives you an idea of how much of a threat they saw Baggin as.

underground he took on a series of successive disguises first as a law student and then as a rabbi and then as a doctor moving around from safe house to safe house with his wife and their young son that they now had directing the activities of the irgun from these safe houses once the irgun resumed hostilities against the british a familiar pattern that very often happens in these kind of asymmetric insurgencies emerges where

the various resistance groups will kind of get locked into this cycle of one-upsmanship in an effort to maintain their credibility and relevance among the supporters for whom they're really all competing We've seen this to a degree in the war in Iraq and Syria right now. It's toward the end of 2016 as I record this. We've seen this to a degree in the war in Iraq and Syria with ISIS and other al-Qaeda-affiliated groups.

where they kind of get into this cycle of one-upsmanship. They're both competing for followers and supporters, and so they both have to show that they're the ones who can hurt the enemy. They're the ones who... have the most guts whatever it is and so in nineteen forty four the ergun and the stern gang find themselves in one of these spirals and then in november of that year nineteen forty four

the stern gang takes the game to a level that almost nobody's prepared for the gang sends two young men to cairo egypt to follow and learn the routine of lord

the British foreign minister in the region, the highest British official resident in the Middle East, responsible for administering all British holdings in that part of the world. In the early afternoon of November 6, 1944, they stood watch outside his residence and when moyn arrived home the two zionists drew their pistols and fired murdering both moyn and the driver in his car

There was no plan for getting these two young men out of Cairo, so it was essentially a suicide operation. While the Stern gang, including its leader, Begin's old friend Yitzhak Shamir, somebody he had known back in Poland, celebrated the assassination. Most of the issue, including Begin, were outraged, or at least considered it a huge strategic mistake. They knew that this had taken things way too far. Just earlier that year, earlier in 1944,

Ben-Gurion had finally, after a couple years of trying, had finally convinced the British to arm and train specifically Jewish military units. Up until this point, they were taking... Zionists and other Jews into the British Army if they wanted to join. Ben-Gurion and Weizmann had been trying to get them to set up specifically Zionist Jewish military units.

ben-garion had finally gotten that through ostensibly to aid in the war effort but there wasn't that much to do in palestine and so these were weapons and supplies that were being put aside for the war that ben-garion anticipated was going to come with the arabs eventually they had just achieved this and now lord moyne's murder had put all that at risk lord moyne was a very close personal friend of the prime minister of great britain winston churchill who took the murder very hard

Churchill, I mean, in addition to losing a close friend, Churchill felt profoundly betrayed because more than almost anybody else, he had been an almost subservient ally to the Zionists for two decades, really.

and after this happened churchill warned if our dreams for zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins pistols and our labors for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of nazi germany many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently in the past even begin knew that this was a mistake that it had set the movement back and so

he refrained from doing something he would consistently do in future years he didn't honor the killers as jewish soldiers or anything like that he didn't call for revenge or reprisals after they were eventually executed by hanging several months later He knew it was a mistake, but Ben-Gurion sees an opportunity here to crush the Urgun and the Stern gang and to strangle Begin in the cradle once and for all, and he's not going to let it pass.

And so working with the British, Ben-Gurion unleashes the Haganah against the Urgun and the Stern gang, raiding their hideouts, arresting their members, handing them over to the British authorities, sabotaging their operations.

confiscating their weapons and their materials. This period between November 1944 and March 1945 became known as the season. as in the hunting season. And throughout that period, Jews were informing on and turning in other Jews to the British, something that Begin found revolting and shameful.

but despite the damage that was done to the air gun and the stern gang and they were damaged they were not crushed and bagin refused to either call off the attacks on the british or to initiate retaliatory strikes against the hagana it was something he wouldn't do some people were calling on him to do it and the stern gang did engage in some of it but he held the eargun back from it later he wrote about this he said quote we examine the situation from the viewpoint of the whole of jewry

the extermination of jews in europe was in full swing the gates of the holy land were barred to any who sought sanctuary where then was the political change that could justify the cessation of our struggle we decided not to suspend nor to promise to suspend our struggle against british rule yet at the same time we decline to retaliate for the kidnappings the denunciations and the handing over of our men

we said there would be no civil war but in fact throughout the country a one-sided civil war raged the hunting season came to an end in March 1945. And in the end, it wasn't anything internal design as politics, but external political events that brought an end to the conflict between Ben-Gurion's faction, Begin Zirgun, and Yitzhak Samir's stern gang.

april nineteen forty five of course marked the germans final collapse and the war in europe was over ben-gurion's order had been to fight the white paper as if there were no war and to help the british fight the war as if there were no white paper well now there was no war but there was still a white paper and that hard limit of seventy five thousand total jewish immigrants that the british were going to allow had been all but exhausted

in july clement atley's labor government won a landslide victory over winston churchill and took power atley quickly appoints the-the gruff trade union leader ernest who had very little patience for the zionist machinations as his foreign secretary in an interview later on clement attley the prime minister explained that he didn't see much more that the british could really accomplish in palestine the interests of arab and jew in palestine were really quite irreconcilable

it's true the arabs had a lot of land and not much development and you might think that an arab struggling to keep alive on a bare strip of land would jump at the chance of going to iraq or somewhere else where there was more opportunity for a better life but oh no

one patch of desert doesn't look very different from another patch of desert but that was the one they wanted their own traditional piece even the bedouins circle in the same area they have this attachment to one place and nothing else will do contrary to the zionist demands at least foreign secretary ernest bevan favored the establishment of a single

bi-national state that should be governed jointly by both jews and arabs together something that the british had pushed for for a long time until really until the mid-thirties when they started talking about partition and breaking it up bevan sympathized with the arabs plight he was not inclined to once again betray british promises to the palestinians by raising the immigration quotas

especially as attempts to defy those quotas continued and even picked up pace after the war menachembegin's contention that the british were the real obstacle blocking the zionist goal of a jewish ethnostate was becoming more difficult for ben-urion to deny and when the war ended europe is a shambles it's absolutely destroyed people have been

deported from one side of europe to the other to work in camps and this it's just absolute nightmare cities are destroyed and europe is pockmarked with these camps for people who had been displaced or made homeless by the war millions and millions and millions of people germany had been divided up into american british soviet and french zones of occupation

Each of those managed the displaced persons camps that were under their control, but the United Nations, which had been formed in October of 1945, sent the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, the UNRRA, I'll call them UNRWA, I don't know if anybody else has called them that, but I'm going to do it. Sent UNRWA to coordinate the efforts at repatriation and resettlement of these refugees, these displaced persons.

and very quickly the question of what to do with the jews was raised a british lieutenant-general sir frederick morgan was pulled off of active military duty to lead the unra the u n relief and rehabilitation agency and he wrote about his time there and this first difficulty of answering the question about what to do with the jews he wrote it was logical that the camp should be set up on a racial basis poles here balts there ukrainians elsewhere and so on

was one therefore to conclude that jews were to be regarded as a separate racial group in my innocence i asked my chief the question that was continually being put to me what is unruh's attitude or policy in relation to jewish problems there was none such no politics i was left therefore to sort out as best i could the enigma presented by the evolution of a system of welfare that should appeal equally to jewish americans british jews palestinians israelis

he's reading this a few years later after israel was founded as suitable to jews who up until now had been russians poles balts or citizens of other european countries there was not there never could be there were those who intended that there never should be any solution the whole business of illegally transferring jews through europe to palestine was represented as being the spontaneous surge of a tortured and persecuted people toward their long-lost homeland

i fancy that in reality there were few among the travelers who of their own free will would have gone anywhere else than to the u s a to the world at large the whole operation was presented as a spontaneous surge of the survivors of hideous oppression towards the peace and safety of the homeland so long and so wickedly denied to them seen from among the participants it did not quite look like that

except for a few ardent devotees with the light of fanaticism in their eye i was never able to discover any great enthusiasm for the cause among the many to whom i spoke in the camps all jews were subjected to ingenious and ceaseless zionist propaganda the jewish agency under david ben-gurion is acting under that same impulse that ben-gurion exhibited

in the passages earlier, in the 1930s, when he saw any possible alternative other than Palestine for Jews who were trying to flee Germany as a threat to the Zionist program. And so now for these displaced persons who were... rotting in these camps, waiting for somewhere to go, the Jewish agency rejected all other possible solutions. Anything other than Palestine was rejected, and anybody who suggested anything other than Palestine was attacked by their allies in the press.

From his vantage point, Lieutenant General Morgan got a privileged view of how determined and dynamic and sometimes ruthless the Zionists could be during this period. They had two related angles of attack. First, they used their powerful and extensive network of allies around the world to push propaganda, especially in the United States.

insisting that the British were no longer fit to manage their situation or to find a solution in Palestine. And second, that the only possible answer regarding what to do with Europe's Jews was to send them to Palestine.

Like many people over the years who would be perceived as being in the Zionist way, Lieutenant General Morgan was chewed up and spit out during his brief time as the head of UNRWA. He continues, i was i suppose i should say unlucky in that i had as it were grown up over the past few years in the general international situation that now in nineteen forty five existed throughout europe i was moreover

by virtue of my cloth and calling in touch with the elaborate information gathering network that had been built up through the war so recently ended which enabled me to build up in my mind's eye a picture of events taking place around me that had very little appeal

all who have experienced it know the loneliness of high command even when as in the orthodox case one is surrounded by a trusting and trusty staff here and now there was nothing of the sort hardly an individual with whom one could trust information on the contrary there were many in my immediate entourage who could not fail to be actively implicated in what was nothing short of a skillful campaign of anti-british aggression on the part of zion

there were several unra camps exclusively for jewish dps displaced persons and refugees of which it was never possible to get any accurate census their populations fluctuated by no perceptible system these jewish camps were with one notable exception in the u s zone of occupation but the one camp in the british zone was near the site of the notorious nazi horror camp at this latter had been bulldozed out of existence as soon as its rescued survivors had been removed

the accommodation given to jewish dps and refugees consisted of first-class german army barracks as good as any in europe but of course the name belson had tremendous propaganda value when bogus complaints making play with the name became too insistent the offer was made by general templar on behalf of the british commander-in-chief of any alternative housing the inmates might care to select in all the british zone the offer was at once refused

was moreover distorted into an attempt to inflict further hardship on these unlucky people so belson remained for years as a staging post on the zionist migration route and further was built up as the most efficient center of every other form of illegal traffic with ramifications throughout europe and many other parts of the world the camp at near Frankfurt, was used skillfully.

to reinforce points of zionist propaganda of which the general object seemed to be to indicate to the world that those jews who had just survived the nazi terror were now being treated little if any better by the western conquerors who were now doing their utmost best for all including jews

if the propaganda at the moment alleged that jewish dps were being overcrowded in their camps then the inspection at zeilsheim would be invited and it would be found to be full to the rooftops if the cry was one of starvation the cookhouses at zeilsheim would be found empty if clothing were said to be short then the zalsheim population would be found in shivering rags and so forth with consummate skill end quote

And General Morgan, as you read through all of his writings, you can tell he resents all this since he's the one that's having to deal with it. But there's also some begrudging respect for the fact that the Zionists are very, very good at this stuff. Very early in his tenure. and he was only there in 1945 and 1946, but early in his tenure he was obliged to give a press conference, and he had no idea what he was walking into, even though he was in charge of many millions of displaced persons.

jews and non jews and the majority were not jews he wrote quote the very skillful questioning concerned itself solely with the zionist problem and i found myself giving the result of my several weeks of investigation of the business summing it up by saying that in my view we were witnessing an admirably organized second exodus this time from europe as i afterwards discovered this phrase had been used earlier

american papers by various of their correspondents it was later used again as a result of official inquiries by the british foreign office and others but its use by me here and now apparently was the stuff of which journalistic scoops are made

there was an ugly rush from the room to get the red-hot words on the way to the presses whereafter two or three of the correspondents came back to assure me that if as a result of what they had done i found myself in any trouble they would be only too delighted to help me all of which i must confess puzzled me considerably if in any doubt the principle was one should tell the truth i had told the truth as i saw it the devil had surely been shamed but that was not how others saw it at all

toward evening the london headquarters of unruh came on the telephone in a mixed atmosphere of sorrow anger and panic to ask me just what i had been at i did my best to administer calm when there was read out to me a selection of the headlines in the london evening papers i must admit that there did seem grounds for a certain unquiet

and when in a few hours the new york headlines appeared it was obvious that my childlike endeavor to set the record straight had been used as the detonator to set off an explosion of some magnitude that must have been carefully prepared the mildest of my detractors labelled me as simply brazenly anti-semitic there was no upper limit to the villainy of which i was accused to the extent that the great comedian

who entertained us in our cinemas for so many years under the name of eddie kantor gave me his biggest laugh ever by announcing in a full-page spread in the new york times that in his opinion i was no less than a reincarnation of adolf hitler

david ben-gurion later wrote that he was convinced that the main arena for our efforts outside palestine was not britain but america aside from the yeshuv itself we had no more effective tool at our disposal than the american jewish community see america was not touched by the war while europe including britain were either in ruins or bankrupt or both either way

The United States was able to exercise a great deal of influence over Britain and the continent by providing or withholding relief and rebuilding funds. The Zionists had realized that America was much easier to manipulate than Great Britain when it came to foreign policy.

Britain had been on the world stage for centuries and had been exercising complicated high foreign policy since long before they had anything truly resembling electoral politics. As a result, the british foreign policy establishment was much freer to make decisions and act than its u s counterpart the u s had been an isolationist republic until very recently at this time and domestic politics

it was much easier to use U.S. domestic politics to dominate questions of foreign policy. And so the Zionists mobilized the Jewish American community to act politically on their behalf with tremendous energy and zeal.

As in Britain previously... allies of the zionists used their wealth and influence to woo american politicians and also as in britain there opened up this gulf of resentment between the american deep state and the american politicians who held final authority over those people You know, the deep state, those persistent networks and bureaucrats that work at the State Department and the Defense Department, the intelligence agencies, people who don't have to worry about elections.

who hang around from administration to administration for 30 years or whatever. These are people who had to keep working on the same problems over the years as politicians and their promises come and go. This deep state...

was then and would remain for decades at odds with the politicians who could actually be threatened or bought off. This was the same situation that they had had in Britain where You've had the military and many of these cabinet offices dealing with foreign policy who always advocated for a more balanced approach toward the claims of the Jews and the Arabs. but they had to deal with the politicians who had never met an arab and definitely didn't have to worry about losing any of their votes

while they were meanwhile being beset in their offices and on their telephone lines and in the newspapers and everywhere else they looked by Jewish advocates offering or threatening to withdraw political support. The difference, again...

between the two countries is that american foreign policy uh the american foreign policy establishment has much less independence the idea that i mean britain is very similar to us today but back then it was a little bit different the idea that the whims of the british public

should be dictating how many jews the british should be letting into palestine rather than the decision being made by the leaders and generals and commissions that had actually been working on the issue that was not a huge part of british thinking until very recently in the united states on the other hand domestic and foreign politics have always been enmeshed i mean think of today we've been doing business with brutal dictators all over the world for years and years and years

And yet we maintained our embargo against Cuba for decades after the Soviet Union collapsed. We didn't do that for some reason related to grand strategy. We did that because 7% of Florida's population is Cuban. many of those cubans came here as refugees and hate the castro regime down to their bone marrow and would vote against any president who tried to ease relations between the two countries and florida has been one of the most important swing states in presidential elections for years

That's all there is to it. There's nothing special, no grand strategy involved. It's that simple. And you can do that in the U.S. If all those Cubans had, for one reason or another, settled in California or Tennessee, instead of Florida or some other state that was either always red or always blue and never played an important role in deciding elections, we'd have been vacationing in Havana in the 1990s.

But what are you going to do? I mean, we've got a system of government that was designed for a geographically isolated, sparsely populated, mostly agrarian society, and we're trying to... run a global empire with it now so there's bound to be some glitches i guess and and this is one of them and the zionists are ready at this point to really take advantage of that glitch

the british prime minister again clement datley in that same interview taken a little bit later that i quoted before he was asked how difficult it was at the time to get the americans under president truman to see the british point of view attley replied to the question very difficult there's no arab vote in america but there's a very heavy jewish vote and the americans are always having elections

there was naturally a great deal of sentiment and very powerful lobbies and of course immense sympathy which we shared for the jews who had been ousted from europe the americans thought we should introduce a hundred thousand jews into palestine right away without the slightest consideration for the effect on the arabs they had no obligations there we had

the president went completely against the advice of his own state department and his own military people the state department would tell us one thing and then the president would come back with the exact opposite the state department's view was very close to ours they had to think internationally but most of the politicians were influenced by voting considerations thus according to the published diaries of mr james forestall

u s secretary of defense he and other u s officials met to discuss the situation arising from the fact that jews are injecting vigorous and active propaganda to force the president's hand with reference to the immediate immigration of jews into palestine

five weeks after he recorded that the postmaster-general and one of the chief organizers of the democratic party machine had raised at a cabinet lunch the question of the president making an early statement demanding the entrance of a hundred fifty thousand jews into palestine

this he said would have a very great influence and great effect on the raising of funds for the democratic national committee he added that very large sums were obtained a year ago from jewish contributors and they would be influenced in either giving or withholding by what the president did on palestine despite the growing pressure from the united states

And from their own press and voting base, because things are starting to change politically in Britain as well, Prime Minister Attlee and the Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, they held their line for now. And so the Zionists in Palestine...

took their game to the next level. Putting their differences aside, in October 1945, the Haganah, the Urgun, and the Stern Gang came together and signed an agreement to coordinate offensive operations against the british with the irgun and the stern gang operating under the overall command of the hagana which would have veto authority over all operations

So this is no longer something I should make clear here because things have kind of been evolving and I haven't taken a lot of periods to just sort of stop and take stock of the situation. This is no longer just a ragtag group.

of settlement watchmen with old rifles and rusty revolvers ben-gurion has organized the yeshuv into a society with military power and institutions a committee of inquiry that was sent by the british and the americans to look into the situation right around this time opened the report that it eventually produced by stating palestine is an armed camp

we saw signs of this almost as soon as we crossed the frontier and we became more and more aware of the tense atmosphere each day many buildings have barbed wire and other defenses we ourselves were closely guarded by armed police and often escorted by armored cars it is obvious that very considerable military forces and large number of police are kept in palestine the police are armed they are conspicuous everywhere and throughout the country they are substantially built

police barracks why are they so concerned it was not because the arabs the arabs had been obliterated by the british from thirty six to thirty nine and had not been really all that much trouble ever since in the next paragraph the report says we do not think that the conditions in palestine since the mandate have been fully appreciated throughout the world it will be seen that up to the year nineteen thirty nine the jews exercised very great restraint

It is in recent years that the threat to law and order has come from them. Yeah, okay, but how much of a threat are we talking about? How much of a threat can they really be? Well, the report goes on to list examples of heavy weapons and explosives and landmines and personal firearms and ammunition found in the various raids.

the committee found military training camps around palestine with jews who had come from all over the country for specialized training it talks about the various military organizations and mentions that the at this time, had a static militia of 40,000 personnel, another field army trained in mobile operations of another 16,000, and a full-time mobile force of crack troops called the Pamak, which was another...

three to six thousand men depending on what was going on in addition to that the strength of the Urgun was estimated at between three and five thousand small much smaller than the Haganah but very effective and the Stern gang again was two to three hundred, but the power of these groups was amplified by the fanaticism of their members and their willingness to do almost anything to do what the Haganah often balked at.

Starting in the autumn of 1945, these groups combined their forces and went to work to drive the British the hell out of their country. Rather than targeting specific

British officials or personnel now, in the early stages of their cooperation, the three groups were going after critical infrastructure and control points. In one single operation, to give you an idea of of how competent and scaled they are at this point in one operation carried out in a single night in november 1945 about a thousand jewish terrorists launched attacks on railroad infrastructure all over the country they blew up

over 150 critical nodes in the railway system. That same night, they blew up three British guard boats. blew up the very heavily trafficked litter railway station blew up several offices and train cars and engines all over the country a few months later in june 1946 the hagana launches attacks on

all 11 of the major bridges connecting Palestine to neighboring states, completely destroying 10 and severely damaging the 11th. The British, you know, the British are in a very tough spot here. The Zionists...

are now in open war against them. But in the shadow of the Second World War, and with the whole world's eyes on Palestine and its Jews, and with the Zionists controlling this extremely effective propaganda network around the world the british were very limited in what they could do to retaliate and the zionists knew that the british had been here dealing with this situation for decades

So they knew the history of it, they knew what had been going on, but it had only come to the attention of most of the world recently, and only as a possible solution for the Jewish refugees of Europe.

that's the only reason people around the world are even paying attention to Palestine right now they woke up to it in 1945 officially the zionist leadership of course denounced the terror campaign as the actions of a few rogue elements but the british knew better see the british i mean the second world war may have been won on the strength of british code breaking

as much as Soviet manpower American industry. So you might have thought that the Zionists would have been a little more careful with their communications protocols, but British cryptographers had hacked, or rather had cracked the code that the Jewish agency...

was using for its secure communications. And so the Brits knew that the terrorism was being ordered and directed from the highest levels of Zionist leadership. The British wanted to present that evidence to the americans and other allies to demonstrate that the problems in palestine were a little bit more complicated than everybody realized but they didn't want to give away the fact that they had cracked the codes by bringing the intelligence directly to them

The executive branch of the American government was crawling with both Zionist and Jewish communist spies at this time, so the British were certain that the information would eventually get back to the Zionists if they shared it with the Americans. And so the British needed hard evidence. And they needed to send a message. And so on Saturday, June 29th, 1946, the British launched Operation Agatha. A massive...

sweep and raid of Zionist offices and hideouts and settlements throughout Palestine. Operation Agatha, which was called... The Black Sabbath by the Zionists, it was on a Saturday, involves somewhere in the neighborhood of 17,000 British personnel. Sometimes you see as much as 25,000. 17 is the most common I've seen.

and nearly three thousand zionists were arrested and held crate after crate and box after box of documents were seized from their various hideouts and offices including the actual co-operation agreement that had been signed by the leaders of the zionist militias

The goal of the British here was twofold. First, to change the political landscape by catching the mainstream Zionist leadership red-handed, endorsing and directing these acts of terror. Hopefully, then forcing a negotiated political settlement with some of the more moderate zionist leaders like haim weizmann and then second to get the more militant zionist leaders out of action and off the street long enough for that to actually happen

Now, fortunately for the British plans, the most important leaders, including Ben-Gurion, Begin, and the leader of the stern gang, Yitzhak Shamir, they all slipped the dragnet. But the revisionist and labor leadership were in a panic.

the british were already beginning to go through the mountains of documents that they had seized and the zionists believed that there was enough evidence for the british to arrest and imprison most of the high leadership of the yeshuv and even to execute several of them including of future Prime Minister Golda Meir. And so Ben-Gurion and the mainstream Yeshuv leadership are scrambling for some kind of a solution.

Some people were suggesting, maybe asking highly placed Jews in the American government to lobby the president, President Truman at this point, to intercede on their behalf. New York, back then, was an important swing state in the 1948 election.

Hard to imagine that today, but it was an important swing state in an upcoming 1948 election. And Jewish votes and Jewish money was thought to be critical for re-electing President Truman. But there were doubts whether this would actually have the intended effect, because... you know i mentioned a little bit earlier american jews had been more inclined toward achieving the zionist goal through more peaceful means and they were kind of in denial about

you should have leadership having anything to do with what was going on. And many of them had only relatively recently, with the advent of Hitler, who is now out of the picture, kind of come over to the understanding outlined in the Biltmore program. that palestine should be the exclusive home of the jews alone and so if they were confronted with evidence that they had been financing and supporting terrorists against america's second world war ally britain

the Yeshiv leadership might lose the confidence of the American Zionists, never mind the American government. And then finally, just cutting through that Gordian knot, Menachem Begin spoke up again. Why don't we just attack the British where they live?

the documents are being kept at the british headquarters in the king david hotel in jerusalem why not just attack the hotel and destroy the documents or else just blow the place up it was a sign of how desperate the zionists were at this point that the hagana quickly agreed to work jointly with the urgun and the stern gang on such a brazen act of war against the british government who you know i mean whatever else they had or had not done

was the only reason that the zionist project was remotely within reach despite having their high officials targeted for assassination despite expensive critical infrastructure being sabotaged even during the war against the Nazis, despite the Zionist actions bringing down upon Britain the hatred of the Arab states with whom Britain had worked for so long to try to cultivate positive relationships, despite all this,

The British were still protecting Jewish settlements, and they had still crushed the Arab revolt to make Palestine safe for Zionist settlement. But at this point, the Zionists are desperate, and so all of that is out the window.

if the british brought forth the evidence that they would inevitably find in those seized documents jewish money and influence in britain and the united states might be enough to salvage the zionist movement but it was not going to be enough to save the current crop of leaders If they were going to be the ones to lead this future Jewish state, they had to act now. On July 1st, 1946, the head of the Haganah sent Menachembeg in a secret note authorizing the bombing of the King David Hotel.

The operation itself was to be carried out by the Irgun, with diversionary and supporting actions being taken by the Stern gang. Begin immediately sent his men into action. At first they sent in... undercover teams to case the building and learn its vulnerabilities and when they did they learned that the entire south wing part of which contained the offices out of which the british were operating was supported by four large concrete pillars in a basement nightclub

Security was tight for obvious reasons relative to other locations.

but they learned that the hotel received milk deliveries from jewish and arab suppliers and so they decided that a team of ergun men would enter the building disguised as milk deliverers and plant five hundred pounds of high explosives in milk canisters to take out the pillars and destroy the entire south wing the operation was supposed to go down on july nineteenth but on july seventeenth the haganaz leader at the time moshe sneh who had planned the attack

requested a delay and didn't provide a reason to Begin. What he didn't tell him was that Chaim Weizmann was threatening to resign publicly as the president of the World Zionist Organization if the Haganah didn't cease its terror campaign against the British.

two days later moshe sneh requested of begging another delay hoping this time to fly to paris to meet with ben-gurion and to convince him to speak with weizmann and either get him to change his mind or else just throw his public weight behind the attack and kind of overrule weizmann begin didn't know anything about any of this he wasn't given a reason again but he agreed one more time to a delay

fearing that every day that passed was going to give the british informants time to catch on putting his men and the operation in danger and so he told him he wasn't going to delay it again and he gave moshe sneh and the haganath three days to get ready As the July 22nd deadline approached, Moshi Snay asked for another delay, but this time Began didn't even respond. He was tired of what he saw as...

the labor Zionist political maneuvering and just kvetching, and he was tired of their cowardice, frankly. So he and the Stern gang were going to go forward with the operation themselves.

his men bombing the hotel and the stern gang blowing up the nearby david brothers building a few minutes later july 22nd 1946 comes along seven large milk jugs filled with explosives were set with a thirty five minute timer in that basement at the very last moment the stern gang was caught out of position and so it aborted its own operation

and now menachembegin is out there on the corner completely on his own his co-conspirators having gotten cold feet and abandoned him for what would in just a few minutes become A little after 12 noon, the bombs exploded creating a blast equivalent to a direct hit by a five hundred kilogram bomb dropped from the air the entire south wing of the building was destroyed and ninety-one people were killed including forty-one arabs

28 British citizens, 17 Jews, and four others. Through Jewish agency propaganda organs, david ben-gurion insisted that his people had no knowledge of the attacks they knew nothing about it they denounced it as a dastardly crime committed by a gang of desperados very convenient menachem bagan was on the hook as being fully responsible for blowing up the british headquarters but despite his own anger and frustration over ben-gurion's mendacity

he understand the damage that would be done to the zionist movement if the official zionist institutions were fingered for the attack so instead of denouncing ben-garion as a liar and going public with the fact that the attack had been planned by the leader of the Haganah himself, Begin claimed full responsibility for everything that had happened, and the Jewish agency was happy to let him do it. And the British, I mean...

You can imagine the British. They practically had blood running from their eyes, especially the military men on the ground in the country. I mean, you know, this is a British empire that...

If this were anywhere else, just ask the people of India, ask the Boers, ask people in British colonies all over the world. I mean, whole cities would have been destroyed over this. But this is a unique situation. They've got a lot of eyes on them, and they can't do that. But they are very pissed. The commanding general of...

The British forces in Palestine said that he was, quote, determined that the Jews should be punished and made aware of our feelings of contempt and disgust at their behavior.

and he dismissed the hypocritical sympathy expressed by their leaders and representative bodies and their protestations that they were not responsible he even commented that if he ever found himself single again and so free of responsibility to return to his wife in Britain, that he would return to Palestine himself to personally help the Arabs fight to free themselves from their Zionist scourge, as he put it.

and many other British soldiers and high officials felt the same way. Over the next several months, the British made several arrests and tried to reassert their authority in Palestine, but they were kept on a very tight leash by a political leadership that was acutely aware of how it was going to look to have British soldiers arresting and sentencing and fighting Jews.

just a year after hitler had been defeated in europe prime minister clement attley wrote to the u s president harry truman in the weeks after the bombing saying i am sure you will agree that the inhuman crime committed in jerusalem on twenty two july calls for the strongest action against terrorism but having regard to the sufferings of the innocent jewish victims of nazism this should not deter us

from introducing a policy designed to bring peace in palestine with the least possible delay you can note a little tone in there because more than ever the british at this point are starting to just look for a way to wash their hands of this nightmare and so after this although the official cooperation between the irgun and the stern gang and the hagana had temporarily ended none of the three groups let up on the british

A few months after the bombing, Urgun men attacked a Jerusalem police station, mining nearby city streets to kill and maim any first responders who showed up. The Stern gang attempted to kill the British commanding general near his house, leaving a baby carriage concealing a bomb for him to find. That attempt failed, but...

The British were losing about two soldiers every single day on average, while being forbidden by a sensitive civilian government from retaliating in the way that they would in any other colonial territory. These were the people who had just taken out 10% of the military-aged male Arabs in the country for far, far, far less than what they were suffering right now at the hands of the Zionists.

in fact an arab leader at the time pointed out that if the british had followed the same policy they had followed toward the arabs during the revolt for the king david hotel bombing it would have been followed by the total destruction of the nearby jewish neighborhood

Instead, the British just sort of hunkered down in their bases and tried to avoid confrontation, but it was not going to be that simple for them. Oh no. three months after the king david bombing in october nineteen forty six an ergun cell based in italy blew up the british embassy in rome destroying half the building an article a few years ago in foreign policy magazine

talks about this period quote in the wake of the bombing king david bombing in the wake of the bombing the ergun and stern gang launched a series of operations outside palestine including a series of sabotage attacks on british military transportation routes in occupied germany in march nineteen forty seven an ergon operative left a bomb at the colonial club near st martin's lane in the heart of london

which blew out the club's windows and doors injuring several servicemen the following month a female air-gun agent left an enormous bomb consisting of twenty-four sticks of explosives at the colonial office in london the bomb failed to detonate because its timber broke the head of metropolitan police special branch leonard burt estimated that if it had gone off it would have caused fatalities on a comparable scale to the king david hotel bombing but this time in the heart of whitehall

at about the same time several prominent british politicians and public figures connected with palestine received death threats from the stern gang at their homes and offices finally from late nineteen forty six and into nineteen forty seven the stern gang launched a letter bomb campaign in britain consisting of twenty-one bombs in total which targeted every prominent member of the cabinet some of those in the first wave reached their targets but they did not result in any casualties

Sir Stafford Cripps was only saved by the quick thinking of his secretary, who became suspicious of a package whose contents seemed to fizz and placed it in a bucket of water.

the deputy leader of the conservative party sir anthony eden carried a letter bomb around with him for an entire day in his briefcase thinking it was a whitehall circular that could wait until the evening to be read and only realized what it was when he was warned by the police of the planned attack so now while the americans are still shaking off the post-world war celebration hangover the british are getting whacked all over the world by zionist terrorists

The Arabs, again, the Arabs are largely pacified, as David Ben-Gurion later on wrote, said that from 1946 to 1947, there were scarcely any Arab attacks on the Yeshuv.

And so the Arabs are largely pacified, which means that the hatred of the British, especially the British officials and soldiers on the ground, is being pulled purely in the direction of the Zionists now. But... the people who are attacking the british are not worried about british hatred any more they are at war as benachan baggan said when he declared it a war to the end the british are not at war

Okay, the British are trying to figure out what's going on. The British are trying to avoid the perception that they're at war with the Zionists or with the Jews. You know, try to remember for context here, it's something that I always have to remind myself of. British voters have been focused on the war in Europe for the last, say, seven, eight years at this point.

They were focused on the Great Depression and the rise of fascism and communism the decade before that. So the last 16, 17 years or so, they've not been paying attention to this. You've got an entirely new generation. of british voters who don't really remember how they got to palestine or what they're doing there remember the balfour declaration was thirty years ago palestine's a minor issue to most british citizens who weren't jewish

And what people did hear about it was mostly sanitized propaganda from Zionist-friendly news outlets like The Guardian. But now... with the war in Europe over and hundreds of thousands of Jews languishing in these displaced persons camps.

The British people are opening up their newspapers every day to learn about another dead soldier or another terror attack carried out against them by Jews who say they're just fighting to free their homeland from occupation, from British occupation.

the british had to try to fight back against this propaganda and so to do that they needed to demonstrate that they're not fighting against the jewish people and they're not even fighting against a rogue jewish militia but that they're just fighting against common criminals

You know, this is a propaganda war we fight to this day with all the effort we put in to emphasize that the war on terror is not a war on Islam. In fact, it has nothing to do with Islam. What Islam? What's Islam? I never heard of it, but it sure sounds peaceful.

This is something we deal with today. As silly as it gets, you know, it's one of those things that people see through and people kind of know the truth of what's happening. But as silly as that seems, it's really the ritual effort that matters.

And that's the reason we do it. It gives the people on the other side who are not inclined to fight a reason not to fight. You know, an excuse not to fight. And I think of something like... the cuban missile crisis although obviously that's a much larger scale but you've got two leaders kennedy and khrushchev where both of them are looking for a way out that does not involve a nuclear war but both had internal political reasons that made it

practically impossible for them to back down without saving face to a degree i'm not sure how perfect this metaphor is to be honest with you but this analogy is but to a degree That was the position of the mainstream yeshuv leadership under Ben-Gurion and the British government. Ben-Gurion didn't want to completely alienate the British government, let alone provoke a real response militarily. He definitely didn't want that.

But the British government knew that coming into a real conflict against the Zionist mainstream leadership would have them very quickly denounced in the press and by the Americans as making war on the people who just went through the Holocaust. And in 1947, you don't want to be that guy, right?

And so both of them, they're in this position where they don't want to back down, but neither of them really, the mainstream issue of leadership, doesn't want an open confrontation with the British, and the British don't want that either. But that is not going to work. for Menachem Begin. You do not, you do not wait for an occupier to leave your country.

not if sovereignty means anything not if legitimacy means anything you do not wait for an occupier to leave your country you drive him out if he's still busy trying to decide what to do

You make the decision for him. If he's already walking out, then you make him fucking run. And so Baggin and the Ergun, as well as the Stern gang, and even elements of the hagana who now feel pressured by the pace that's going to be set by these other two groups they stepped up their attacks when the british caught zionist terrorists red-handed they would punish them but those who were in prison

would become political prisoners objects of propaganda those who were hanged became martyrs during this period over these couple of years the british hanged twelve jewish terrorists and most of them went to the gallows singing the bettar and zionist anthems in one operation menachembegin took three dozen fighters and raided the largest british military base in the country in fact it was the

british military headquarters in the middle east and gaza they overwhelmed the base defenses and raided the armory for weapons and ammunition but two of baggan's air-gun fighters were captured and sentenced to death now The two men said that they didn't recognize the jurisdiction of British courts or British law in their country, and so they refused to petition for clemency. You see that at this point...

The labor Zionists, the Jewish agency, Ben-Gurion and Weitzman and the rest, they could keep negotiating. That's fine. Great, guys. We're with you. Keep negotiating. Just knock yourselves out. We hope it goes well. but the revisionists are not negotiating anymore they are not negotiating you don't negotiate with someone whose soldiers are on your soil okay your presence here is not under negotiation

Just get out. It's not your country. It's our country. Get out. That's where Begin's at. This is a question of sovereignty. If it means anything. And that meant that he is not about to let two of his soldiers and two of his countrymen be hanged by a foreign power in his country. And so Menachem Begin took to the airwaves on the designated Irgun radio station and told the British in very plain terms, Do not hang the captured soldiers. If you do, we shall answer gallows with gallows.

A few days later, they kidnapped five British military officers. And after a few more days of intense negotiations, the British Empire backed down. They commuted the sentences of the two men. Now, this might have seemed like an unfortunate but necessary political maneuver.

by people high enough up the totem pole in the british government but it is exactly the kind of thing that drives soldiers and security forces and police officers and the people on the ground expected to deal with a situation like this absolutely insane and so a little bit later when these british security forces captured a young air gun fighter who was robbing a bank to help finance the movement's operations

they wanted to send their own message and so in addition to his prison sentence they ordered him publicly whipped for eighteen lashes now this was a punishment that was reserved for common criminals in the colonies that's it

It had even been banned as a punishment in the British Army for over 60 years. They wanted to send the message that well they wanted to send the message to the zionists and to the world at large that the people that they are fighting right now are just criminals their militias are gangs their soldiers are thugs

It's the message to the world that we are not at war with the Jews, the message to the Jewish terrorists that they don't even deserve to be treated as a sovereign people. They are nothing more than common criminals. but unfortunately for the british they are not dealing with common criminals when the sentence was announced the irgun put up posters all over the place warning the british not to carry out the flogging

which was, they said, contrary to a soldier's honor. Menachem Begin declared that if the punishment were carried out, then every British occupier in Palestine would be liable to the same punishment. The British ignored the warnings this time. I mean, what else could they do? And the robber got his 18 lashes. The very next night, men from the Irgun kidnapped a British major.

who had been eating dinner with his wife in a restaurant whipped him eighteen times beat his ass and then returned him to the place that they had kidnapped him in just his underwear in tel aviv more irgun men kidnapped two more british officers tied them to a tree in a public park where they whipped them eighteen times this happened in several other locations over the next several days every time the men were whipped

18 times. As you can imagine, the British officers in Palestine are... They're going bananas. I mean... They tried imposing curfews, setting up checkpoints, conducting random stops, and before long, they arrest three young Zionists carrying weapons and rope, meant for whipping. after they captured them the very next day menachembegin issues another warning if the oppressors now dare to injure the body or the personal or national honor of young hebrews we will not respond with the whip

we will respond with fire. Games are over, folks. Okay? Games are over. This dude is not playing around. These people are not playing games. You don't get to whip our people anymore. Okay? You don't get to whip an American. You don't get to whip a French or a Soviet citizen. And you don't get to whip us. Not anymore. We are warning you. But even more than warning the British, Begin is sending a message to his fellow Zionists.

And to Jews around the world. This isn't just a message to the British that you better not do this. He's talking to Jews all over the world. We don't let people whip us anymore. Not after what just happened. Never again. And guess what? The British backed down again. The three Zionists.

despite their sentences already having been passed and confirmed were not flogged and the british never whipped another zionist again but still the zionists didn't slow down attacks on trains and buses cafes and a british officer club killed dozens of people on a weekly basis

When two airgun terrorists were captured and sentenced to hang by the British after a bombing which killed several people, the Zionist allies of theirs smuggled the materials to build an improvised explosive device to them in the prison. They wanted to blow themselves up as suicide bombers in a crowd of British people before they could be hanged.

Fortunately, they received word that a friendly rabbi was going to be in the group that was going to be escorting them to the gallows, and so they triggered the explosives before they could get close enough to hurt anybody else. These people are committed, okay? This is what commitment looks like. You look around whatever country you think you're in today. If you're in the West, I don't want to say it about other countries. And you look at the people that call themselves nationalists.

You look at the movements that think they're subversive and think that they're edgy. Give me a break. This is what commitment looks like. It means dying in a cell. and 70 years later when somebody does a podcast about it, he doesn't even mention your name because you don't matter. Okay, the goal matters. That's what it means.

in one week in november nineteen forty six nineteen people were killed by zionist bombs a few months later zionists engaged in an organized attack against five arab cities using bombs machine guns and flame throwers

The Haganah gloated that 200,000 more Jews had infiltrated Palestine in the last year. In 1947, attacks on infrastructure on british soldiers and arab civilians got to the point where people were dying by the dozen on a weekly basis january twelfth nineteen forty seven four british soldiers were killed in a bombing of their headquarters a month later seventeen more were killed in another raid in a bombing a week later another

A few weeks later, a coordinated attack targeting four areas in the densely populated city of Haifa. Now, although the Zionist left is kind of fretting over how the British are going to respond to all this, they're kind of worried that the British are going to just say screw it and just jump on them the truth was that bagin's declaration that the only way to help the world's jews was to go after the british was actually beginning to work

The British were hearing calls from their own people and their own press and from the press around the world and from other countries around the world to just get the hell out of here, to just withdraw from Palestine. The Zionists are trying to establish their national honor. The declining British Empire is trying to hold on to theirs. And so again, another air gunman is captured during a weapon-stealing raid on a British police station. In early 1947, he's sentenced to death.

begging goes back to what had worked before and he threatened death for death if his man were hanged but this time the british did not back down and the prisoner was hanged going to the gallows once again singing hatikva the zionist anthem Before he was hanged, he had composed a final letter addressed to Menachem Begin, which reads as follows, quote,

you may rest assured that whatever happens i will not forget the teachings on which i was weaned the teachings to be proud and generous and strong and i shall know how to stand up for my honor the honor of a fighting hebrew soldier the right way to my mind is the way of the irgun which does not reject political effort but will not give up a yard of our country because it is ours

and if the political effort does not have the desired result it is prepared to fight for our country and our freedom which alone ensures the existence of our people by all means and all ways that should be the way of the jewish people in these days to stand up for what is ours and to be ready for battle even if in some instances it leads to the gallows

for the world knows that a land is redeemed by blood i write these lines forty-eight hours before the time fixed by our oppressors to carry out their murder and at such moments one does not lie I swear that if I had the choice of starting again, I would choose the same road, regardless of the possible consequences to me."

that letter was read and broadcast over the irgun radio station menaken baggan immediately ordered every irgun unit to be prepared to execute a field court-martial on the spot and to immediately try and sentence and execute any british citizens they were able to capture in early may nineteen forty seven menachembegin ordered the irgun to execute a prison break to free irgun and stern gang men from the jail in the town of accra daniel gordas's

very good biography of menachembegin describes this attack he says like the bastille the prison in accra was a symbol of imperial power its freedom to arrest suspects at will hold them indefinitely convict them and when it saw fit execute them akra prison housed in a crusader era fortress held many of the etzel's men captured in previous operations bagin was determined to get them out

forty-one prisoners were selected for liberation thirty were etzel members etzel remembers just the irgun it's the acronym for the hebrew name of the group and eleven were stern gang men at a prearranged signal etzel fighters outside detonated the explosives creating a breach in the wall the prisoners inside blew up internal heavy iron bars using explosives that had been smuggled in earlier

A battle erupted in the prison courtyard, but the prisoners marked for escape made it out. They boarded, prepared trucks, and sped off.

the british police followed in hot pursuit but was impeded by the mines the etzel had placed along the road in anticipation of the chase the etzel did not anticipate however that british soldiers would be bathing south of acre hearing the commotion the soldiers dressed quickly gathered their arms and set up a roadblock a skirmish ensued and nine jewish fighters were killed in the end the etzel had freed twenty-seven of the original forty-one prisoners it had

originally designated for liberation. Six prisoners died in the battle, and eight others were captured by the British. In the confusion, more than 200 Arab prisoners, the majority of the Arab prisoners in the jail, also escaped.

three of the irgun men who had been involved in the prison break had missed the signal to board the trucks and they were eventually captured by the british at the prison after a long gun battle they had killed and wounded some british soldiers and so they were tried and sentenced to death by hanging menachembegin ordered his men again to find and kidnap british personnel to hold his ransom

on july twelfth nineteen forty seven his men captured two british soldiers clifford martin and mervyn pace in the coastal town of netanya these two men these two men weren't even officers they were just everyday grunts sitting in a cafe out of uniform in fact pace mervyn pace was known to be sympathetic to the zionists and clifford martin's mother was jewish the british

absolutely locked the city of natanya down for twelve days they went house to house searching for their captured men but the men were being held in a tiny underground cell beneath a factory it was covered with like a foot of sand so that sound couldn't get out the british didn't find them finally on the morning of july thirty first a police patrol found them in a small grove they had been tortured and then they had been hanged with wire around their throats

from the police report at the time they were hanging from two eucalyptus trees five yards apart their faces were heavily bandaged so it was impossible to distinguish their features their bodies were a dull black color and blood had run down their chests which made it appear at first that they had been shot the royal engineer's captain and color sergeant-major loft branches off the tree which held the right-hand body

and started to cut the hang rope with a saw as the body fell there was a large explosion two trees had been completely blown up and there were very large craters where the roots had been one body was found horribly mangled about twenty yards away the other body had disintegrated and small pieces were picked up as much as two hundred yards away the bodies had been booby-trapped with explosives that night

groups of british policemen and soldiers went without orders tearing through tel aviv smashing up shop windows and jewish buses destroying cars and if any young jewish men were cut out by themselves they paid for it but the zionists are not allowing people to whip them anymore and so in retaliation groups of jews jewish men came out in force and began throwing stones and attacking the british police who were then ordered to withdraw from the city

and then again without orders more police commandeered several armored vehicles and headed back into tel aviv opening fire on two buses and killing four jews by the time the night was over five jews had been killed and fifteen were injured at that point zionists around the world kicked into high gear their contacts in the press and the governments in britain and america denouncing the british administration and calling for their immediate evacuation

and finally i know i've said it a couple times they've been working toward it but the british have had enough of palestine winston churchill who was now the political opposition to prime minister clement He had been denouncing Atlee's handling of the Palestine problem and calling on the United Nations to take the situation over since the previous fall, fall of 46.

by january of forty seven the violence against the british had gotten so bad that all families and non-essential british personnel were ordered out of palestine altogether february a month later the british foreign secretary ernest bevan told the house of commons that the palestine question was going to be transitioned over to the united nations for resolution see a primary driver for the british determination to maintain control over this area especially over egypt and palestine

was to protect that carotid artery of its empire, the Suez Canal, that had connected the two halves of the British Empire, the British Isles and the British Raj in India. But by 1947, it was becoming... very clear that British rule in India was about to be over anyway. The Indians ended up achieving their independence in August of 47, but it was already pretty obvious early on. And so the British are just about out of reasons to keep putting up with Palestine.

In April of 1947, the British reported that they had 100,000 soldiers stationed in little old Palestine at the cost of over 40 million pounds a year. And this is at a time that Britain itself is suffering through a post-war recession bad enough to... make power cuts and goods rationing back in Britain itself necessary. So enough was enough. The great British Empire was collapsing. And Palestine was one of the first ceiling tiles to hit the floor.

In May of 1947, the UN Special Committee on Palestine was convened to study the problem and make recommendations. UN Special Committee on Palestine, better known as UNSCOP. This is a committee that's made up of representatives from 11 countries.

Australia, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Guatemala. Let me look at my notes here. Guatemala, India, Iran, the Netherlands, Peru, Sweden, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia. You notice there are no Arab representatives.

on that committee, and Iran is the only country having anything at all to do with regional politics. The Arabs who did choose to participate many... did not want to participate at all, and maybe that was stupid at the time, but they didn't want their participation with all this to bestow any legitimacy on the idea that this newly formed international body, the UN had only been around for a couple years at this point.

that it had any right or legitimacy to set itself up and allow Guatemala and Sweden and some of these countries to decide whether piece of palestinian arab land and these muslim holy sites should be taken away from them and given to these recent european immigrants so many of them chose not to participate at all because they didn't want to give the impression that they considered any of this legitimate

People love to repeat this quote that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. And it's a clever quote. The implication is that they could have made things easier on themselves if only they knew better how to play the game. but this is not a game to them and they're not treating it like one you know their view is and has remained for many of them that the question about whether the land on which they have lived for centuries

That's not a question that is open for negotiation between Swedish and Guatemalan diplomats. And I get that, I do. It's hard to say what the right thing, the right way to handle that is, but I do understand the impulse. So as the Arabs tried to make their case and the Western powers negotiated what was going to happen, the Zionists begin to work behind the scenes, influencing the international decision as best they can, while the Yeshuv in Palestine continues to prepare for war.

They knew that a partition of Palestine into two countries was going to be the most likely outcome that was the one they were pushing for. And regardless of the size of the partition that they eventually got, as a sovereign state the zionists would have the authority to just lift all limits on immigration allow all the holding centers filled with jewish refugees and any jew around the world no matter how many it was

to just flood into Palestine. They could worry about where to put them later. And so the Zionists are going into these refugee centers and these displaced person camps, and they're training these future immigrants. for the war that they're going to be conscripted into the moment they step off the boat in Palestine. They're bringing in fake weapons carved out of wood and teaching them fighting tactics and things like that in the actual refugee camps.

the special committee on palestine unskap had been split up into two units one to study the possibility of jews and arabs living together in a united or a federated country somehow and the other one to study the possibility of breaking up Palestine into a Jewish and Arab country and how that would work. The report that favored binational unity was very scathing, and it was almost outraged at what...

The authors of that report considered very clear bias toward the Zionist claims in the other report, the partition report. Nevertheless, eventually the recommendation for partition won out, and that was the recommendation that was sent to the UN General Assembly for a vote. So after some redrawing in General Assembly committees,

The final partition to be voted on by the General Assembly was settled. The lines were drawn. But it was very problematic. Even after all the arguing and debating, negotiating the final partition plan was understood by most people to be unworkable if it passed there was supposed to be a jewish area in which jews were going to rule over

An Arab population that still made up about 50% of the people in that territory. Meanwhile, the Arab partition, the Arab territory, would cover a zone with very few Jews at all. there would be about seven hundred twenty five thousand arabs compared to about ten thousand jews the zionists owned about six percent of the land in palestine and comprised about thirty three percent of the population and yet the partition that was settled on granted them 56.4% of the territory.

the zionists felt that they were as prepared as they were ever going to be and that this was probably the best offer they were going to get so they accepted the partition and the arabs rejected it of course it was determined that the vote was going to go forward And this was going to provide this two-year-old institution, the United Nations, really with its first big decision to make that was going to involve parties from all over the world. This was going to be its big coming out party.

the united states and the soviet union each for their own reasons favored the zionist position and so they were directing their allies and their dependent states to side with partition with the help of some other muslim countries palestinians did what they could And it turned out that, I guess unsurprisingly, they had quite a bit of built-in support from some smaller countries who knew a little something about colonization. The General Assembly began debating the issue on November 26, 1947.

And it was determined that a vote was going to be taken by midnight that night in order to wrap it all up for American Thanksgiving, which was the next day. So both sides mobilized. what forces they had at their disposal. The Arabs trying to push this message of basic unfairness and international ethics to Western and non-Western countries alike.

meanwhile the zionists are deploying this powerful and sophisticated realpolitik propaganda machine to sway delegates to their side the representative from the philippines general carlos romulo he had closed himself off

For the previous three or four days, with orders that nobody should have access to him because he was just trying to avoid all this extreme pressure that started being brought on him and the other delegates. After the pressure started hitting him, he called up the president of the Philippines.

And he read the speech that he was going to deliver to him because he just wanted to get the president's approval for everything he was going to say. And he got that approval. The president said, fine, signed off on it. General Romulo had that. He just stopped talking to anybody else. And so when the day of the General Assembly debate arrives and the various delegates are getting ready to give their speeches, General Romulo was the second to the many speakers scheduled throughout the day.

He took the floor and he gives this fiery, passionate speech condemning the partition of Palestine. And then, you know, he's a general. He doesn't want to sit all day through speeches for the next 12 hours. He leaves written instructions for his alternate. to vote in his place against the partition. And in all, there are 56 national delegates present.

The UN only had 57 members at the time, and Thailand was going to be absent from the vote. So you have 56 delegates present. And the UN rules required a two-third majority for this kind of General Assembly resolution. With Great Britain and Argentina and some other Latin American countries not wanting to put their stamp on the resolution, but not wanting to go directly against the United States either. Ten states planned.

to abstain from it, leaving 46 total voting delegates. And that meant that the Zionists needed at least 31 votes to pass the partition, and that the Arabs needed 16 to block it. having already secured thirteen votes against the partition in some of the committee sessions the commitment of the philippines to block the resolution gave the arabs fourteen they needed two more a few speakers later the greek delegate comes to the rostrum

and it turned out that the zionists had been trying to bribe the greek delegation and rather than having the effect that they hoped had actually turned the greeks against them and so they condemned the plan and pledged to vote against it giving the arabs fifteen just one vote shy of blocking the break-up of their country And then Haiti, a country that knows very well the downside of colonialism and minority rule, gave a speech and came out against it.

putting the Arabs over the top. And after that, Liberia came out and promised to vote against it as well, giving the Arabs a little bit of a cushion. Now, I know I keep saying the Arabs or the Palestinian Arabs. I'm just doing that to make things simple here. But it's important to know that the effort supporting their position was mostly being led by other sympathetic states. The Palestinians still had no real or effective...

leadership class in their country. They didn't have a country that had a delegation at the UN, and so they were relying a lot on support from the outside. Their society of displaced peasants and unemployed townspeople was still being led mostly by collaborators who weren't dangerous enough to either be killed or run off during the arab revolt by the british and so these aren't people willing to push that hard

the more hard-line arab leaders either refused to recognize the legitimacy of the negotiations and didn't show up or else they were just banned from the deliberations altogether some arab representatives did testify Even after all these years, it's weird because after everything that's happened, they still really just don't seem to understand what is happening to them.

They're going before the committee and before the General Assembly making these big moral appeals, not realizing that they are now in the world of cutthroat international politics. One delegate from Beirut, in an address to the general assembly said the arabs of palestine are not responsible in any way for the persecution of the jews in europe that persecution is condemned by the whole civilized world and the arabs are among those who sympathize with the persecuted jews however

the solution to the problem cannot be said to be a responsibility of palestine which is a tiny country and which had taken enough of those refugees and other peoples since nineteen twenty any delegation which wishes to express its sympathy has more room in its country than has palestine and has better means of taking in these refugees and helping them one of the people who helped lead the effort to block the partition was the Pakistani representative Mohammed Zafrul Khan and

In a Pakistani international affairs journal a few months after all this happened, he wrote a report of what had transpired. And he said that by 1 or 2 p.m. on that Wednesday, earlier than anybody expected, the pro-partition Zionist faction had... basically no path forward quote in order to win the other side had to get thirty two votes and there was no means by which they could get that number he said

32 at this point because one of the abstentions hadn't been announced yet it became 31 after that so by early afternoon the other side found that they had lost and were quite convinced in their minds that we had won and that partition was blocked

but they apparently had some other dodges up their sleeve the zionists ordered the delegates that were supporting their position to begin filibustering to buy time stretch things out as the afternoon dragged on a rumor began to circulate that the vote was going to be postponed no longer to take place at midnight that night or even the next day but on friday two days later the man presiding over the special session of the u n

was an open and ardent pro-Zionist from Brazil. And so Khan and the Iraqi foreign minister went up to him to see what exactly was going on.

he confirmed that he intended to fix the time for friday instead saying that there were still eight speakers left this is about three thirty in the afternoon he said that there are eight speakers left and that they couldn't possibly all be fit in before midnight and so khan he gives an account of his response i told him there are eight speakers and out of them the iraqi foreign minister and myself were going to make long speeches but we shall not speak

The Indian delegate also intended to make a speech, but we will persuade him not to make a speech at all. India under Gandhi was firmly against partition as well.

russia is speaking and you may have one or two more speakers that leaves you three speakers and you can easily take the vote he said what is your trouble i said the real trouble as you are doubtless aware that the delegations are under great pressure and we do not know which of them might fail us because efforts are being made with their governments to get their instructions countermanded he said the delegations which were in doubt have declared themselves clearly

for instance haiti greece and the philippines have expressed their case clearly and you are now quite certain that nothing will happen to their votes right around that time some representative khan wasn't sure who moved for an early adjournment of the assembly that day and it was passed before he knew what was going on he continues the press gave publication to very significant news

we had it in the new york press and no doubt other newspapers must have carried the story that during the interval jewish leaders saw mr truman in washington and said what is this those delegations that had never voted against you were going to vote against you now the state department has not done its proper canvassing they further said if partition fails the european recovery program bill is off this last was of course not in the papers during the interval

we talked to the delegates that had promised us their votes for instance i went to the liberian delegate he said we as the delegation are still determined to vote against partition but last night when i came back from the assembly our ambassador rang me up from washington and tried to persuade me to vote in favor i declined As it turned out,

the zionists through their allies in the u s government had deputized the president of firestone rubber company the maker of firestone tires and by far far far the largest employer and investor in liberia they've got a hundred and sixty thousand acre in the country that they would begin to divest themselves and leave liberia altogether unless liberia agreed to change its vote in favor of breaking up palestine

The Liberian president might have had his personal feelings about what was going on there, but Palestine was a long ways away, and this was a threat that would very simply destroy his country if it was carried out. You take an economic hit like that in a country with weak institutions and a weak government, well, we know what happened to Liberia a few decades later. Mohammed Khan continued his account of the conversation. He said, quote, I said...

if a telegram comes you could just put it in your pocket and forget all about it he replied how long could i withhold it the delegate of haiti met us in the morning in the delegates lounge and came up to me there were actually tears in his eyes and he said what am i to do I said, we realize your position and are grateful to you. End quote.

during the committee stage before the general assembly debate haiti could not have been clearer in their opposition to partition but in this interval created by the postponement of the vote it turned out that haiti's government had been promised large loan on generous terms through the U.S. government. And so they reversed their position. That Filipino General Romulo wrote about his experiences over these days in his memoirs.

although he had received approval for his speech condemning the partition directly from the president he received an urgent message from his president telling him to reverse his position he said i have no idea what happened President Roxas said that for the sake of our higher national interests, he was giving instructions to our Philippine delegate, the one with whom Romulo had left his instructions, to vote in favor of the partitioning.

roxas hoped that i would understand the situation and realize that his reversal of policy was dictated only by his desire to serve our people best i felt this public reversal of a stand i had taken was a slight my pride was stung i wired roxas my resignation from the united nations this particular chapter in history has been exceedingly unpleasant to me romulo later withdrew his resignation after it became clear to him that

pressure had been brought to bear against the filipino president from the united states that could not be resisted if it was not going to not do harm to the people of the philippines nehru the prime minister of india denounced the whole process and said that the zionist had tried to bribe the indian delegation with millions of dollars and that his own sister had been receiving daily threats from the zionist warning that her life would be in danger if she didn't manage to change the indian vote

The very powerful Jewish American financier, big player in the Democratic Party, and a major supporter of the Irgun, Bernard Baruch, visited the French delegation and warned the French delegation that if they abstained from the vote as they had been planning to, unless they came out in favor of the partition, that he would ensure that American financial aid to France would be withheld.

This is 1947. France is devastated from the war, and like much of Europe, they needed American capital to rebuild. And so, after some consideration, France came off the fence in favor of the partition. France's neighbors, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg also came out for partition. Zionists went to work using their money and influence around Europe to ensure in every way possible that the vote went their way.

With a 1948 U.S. presidential election approaching, allies of the Zionists were able to prevail upon President Truman to apply pressure to all of these UN member states that were vulnerable to the pressure.

to try to get them to swing over the u s is now the dominant power in western europe and one on whom many of these war ravaged countries not just france are counting on for money and material to rebuild and so they could swing a big stick president truman wrote later i do not think i ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the white house as i had in this instance the persistence of a few of the extreme zionist leaders

actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats disturbed and annoyed me end quote so news of this effort to influence the vote starts to go around you know they're all staying in the same hotels and stuff and so it starts to get out what's happening and the lebanese delegate gets up in front of the general assembly and begs them to think about what they're doing to consider the effect this is going to have on the integrity and the credibility

of this new international institution the u n he pleaded my friends think of these democratic methods of the freedom in voting which is sacred to each of our delegations if we were to abandon this for the tyrannical system of tackling each delegation in hotel rooms in bed in corridors in ante-rooms to threaten them with economic sanctions or to bribe them with promises in order to compel them to vote one way or the other

Think of what our organization would become in the future. Should we be a democratic institution? Should we be an organization worthy of the respect of the world? at this supreme junction i beg you to think for a moment of the far-reaching consequences which might result from such maneuvers especially if we yielded to them that was all for nothing no the final count was

33 in favor, 13 against, with 10 abstentions. And the count has become important to the narrative over the years because it was only two votes more than was necessary for the two-thirds majority. And we know today... through historical records and testimonies we know today beyond doubt that at the very least the philippines haiti and liberia were swayed by threats every single country

within 2,000 miles had voted against it. I think Ukraine was the country closest to Palestine that voted in favor, and it was acting under direct orders from the Soviet Union. You've got to go pretty far from the region to find anybody that voted for it.

the powerful nations of the world had just decided to ease their collective guilt over the jewish holocaust not by welcoming jews into their own countries that was not on the table but by taking palestine from the arabs and handing it over to the zionists in the hebrew bible the psalmist lamented the destruction of the kingdom of judah and the exile of the jewish people by the babylonians

centuries after the romans destroyed the jewish homeland and pulled down their temple the scattered rabbinic jews would conclude their yom kippur services and their passover seder with the hopeful words next year in jerusalem With a stroke of a pen now, the Zionists had gotten the wish for which they had prayed and fought and bled and killed for 50 years. They had their Jewish homeland.

britain determined to end the mandate and be completely evacuated from palestine by may fifteenth nineteen forty eight the zionists very quickly got over their victory celebration Because they knew that the real work had just begun. If this was the end of the story, we might not have, even today, a situation which is one of the most terrible and bitter and intractable conflicts in the world. If it had ended here, the new state of Israel, it's not quite there yet, but it's coming.

although it was created under bitter circumstances might have eventually found a way to exist peacefully in the middle east with its arab neighbors instead of becoming a permanently militarized garrison state as it has and if it had ended here the situation wouldn't be known to palestinians today as al nakba the catastrophe but of course it didn't end here the british had not volunteered for this but

They were expected by the world to keep the peace in Palestine until they left, and there were still about five months before that happened. Zionists knew now that they had a unique opportunity to act with freedom. while they were still being protected from surrounding Arab countries by British forces, who would still be constrained by world opinion as far as what they could do to the Zionists. So whereas the

Earlier cycles of violence mostly took the form of reprisals and attacks driven by general animosity and group friction. The Zionists now began a strategically directed campaign of terror.

with the specific goal of cowing the arab civilians in the jewish zone or of frightening them into fleeing jewish controlled areas altogether a few days after the vote six arabs and eight jews were killed in street clashes about a week after that the air gun killed sixteen arabs and injured dozens more in a series of bombings of residential neighborhoods in jerusalem and jaffa the palestinians have very few weapons

the british had done a pretty good job disarming them from thirty six to thirty nine and they hadn't been armed like the jews had over the course of the war the palestinians were completely disorganized leaderless They had no structure, no command structure, nothing like that. These are just a bunch of disorganized peasant rebels, things like that. The British, meanwhile...

are hiding in their secure areas and just running out the clock. And the Zionists are completely off the leash. And the movement has come a long way since Theodor Herzl was circulating his pamphlet, The Jewish State, to a few Jewish bankers in 1896. The Jewish homeland has been achieved, but the Zionist ideal, the thing that people talked about, that was debated and fantasized over by starry-eyed idealists like Ahad Ham in the early years, that ideal had been transformed.

it was transformed once it left the minds of its founders and ran into the dust and mud of the real world ahad ham himself had died in nineteen twenty nine a sad lonely old man who had seen his dreams of establishing a new kind of nation that was going to exemplify those specific values that the jewish people had spent several thousand years preserving against all odds

with a distant hope that a day was going to come when their specific world outlook could be reconstituted into a national home that would express the soul of the Jewish people. And now he's... Watching his dreams succumb to the easy temptations of deceitful politics and terrorism. Reflecting on the path traveled over the years by that ideal, that Zionist ideal.

The Jewish American historian Hans Kohn wrote an essay not too long after this. In the essay, he mentions a study that came out in the journal Jewish Social Studies in 1951. In that journal article...

The author Robert Welsh tracks the arc of this transformation through a profile of Chaim Weizmann. And so now I'm quoting from Cohen's essay, talking about Welsh's paper. Quote, weitzman had to mediate between liberal world opinion and the often disparate wishes of his followers officially the zionist emphasized that the jews did not come to palestine in order to dominate the arabs he's quoting weitzman here

and they also declared most solemnly on many occasions that no arab shall be expelled from the country at the meeting of the zionist general council in berlin in august nineteen thirty five declared that a transformation of palestine into a jewish state was impossible

because we could not and would not expel the arabs moreover the arabs he said were as good zionists as we were they also loved their country and they could not be persuaded to hand it over to some one else their national awakening had made considerable progress these were facts which zionism couldn't afford to ignore to speak of a jewish state would make people believe the calumnies that were steadily being spread that zionism aimed at the expulsion of the arab population

on the eve of the seventeenth zionist congress which met in basle in nineteen thirty one vice opposed proclaiming a jewish state as the aim of zionism the world will construe this demand only in one sense that we want to acquire a majority in order to drive out the arabs in a speech before the congress weitzman rejected this interpretation as unfounded we zionists know that this is not our aim and we have always emphasized it

a numerical majority alone would not be a sufficient guarantee of the security of our national home the security has to be created by reliable political guarantees and by friendly relations to the non-jewish world surrounding us in palestine robert welsh calls weitzman one of the last representatives of humanist zionism a zionism based on the assumption that the reborn jewish nation would avoid all those national excesses from which jews had so much to suffer among the other nations intolerant

brutal egotistical nationalism would be unacceptable to jews who had learned to know what it means in his autobiography written just a few years after all this takes place chaim weizmann himself had reflected on this transformation with a sophisticated understatement. He reflected on the distress that he experienced over the changed country and people he'd found when he visited Palestine in 1944. He said, quote,

here and there a relaxation of the old traditional zionist puritan ethics a touch of militarization and a weakness for its trappings here and there something worse the tragic feudal un jewish resort to terrorism and worst of all in certain circles a readiness to compound with the evil to play politics with it to condemn and not to condemn it to treat it not as the thing it was namely an unmitigated curse to the national home but as a phenomenon which might have its advantages

hans kohn commenting on that quote from weitzman added the evil was not only here and there it was rapidly taking root and growing the militarization of life and mind represented not only a break with humanist zionism but with a long history of judaism the zeitgeist or at least the zeitgeist of twentieth century central and eastern europe had won out over the jewish tradition

now this wasn't quite clear to weitzman yet or at least that old follower and loyalist of ahad ham was not ready to give up on the dream that he had been working for longer than anybody living

It was in the lead-up, remember, to the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946 that Weizmann was threatening to resign from the World Zionist Organization if the Haganah didn't cease its terrorist activities. And so at the 22nd Zionist Congress, seventy-two years old the aging slowing down chaim weitzman gets ready to do battle with david ben-gurion one last time for the soul of the zionist movement

and he feels in his bones at this point what is at stake and so he marshals his faculties and he pulls himself up to the speaker's podium and he pleads with his fellow zionists to turn away from this path that they are starting to wander down Ben-Gurion supporters are yelling at him from the crowd. They're crying out that he's a demagogue and they're accusing him of favoring Britain and being disloyal to Zionism. Can you just imagine how that must have felt?

and he had devoted the last fifty years of his life to the zionist cause and as he stands up to make a plea to prevent terrorism from putting a stain on the birth of his nation He's listening to these younger people in the crowd shout out and disrespect him. People who were in diapers when Weizmann was giving everything to this cause are now out there accusing him of all people of having confused loyalties.

But the old man's having none of that. I mean, he's on his game now. He's up there. He's in his element. He's got all his strength, all his faculties working. So he just roars back at the people in the crowd. He says, If you think of bringing the redemption nearer by un-Jewish methods, if you lose faith in hard work and better days, you commit idolatry and endanger everything we've built.

he concludes his speech still with that same energy crying out would that i had a tongue of flame the strength of prophets to warn you against the paths of babylon and egypt zion shall be redeemed in judgment and not by any other means Babylon and Egypt, of course, were two empires which had, in the Bible at various times, violently dispossessed the Jews of their land and confined them against their will. And that's the path that

Chaim Weizmann now fears that his own people are about to follow. See, only Weizmann carried enough weight to challenge Ben-Gurion like this at this time. Only Weizmann could have delivered this message. And so it got people's attention. People started talking. His plea to turn away from all this, to avoid something that could corrupt the birth of the Jewish homeland.

It sparked a debate among the delegates about what exactly they were doing and what they should be doing. And so Weizmann starts to settle down.

breathe a little sigh of relief but ben-gurion is pissed ben-gurion's already up in his hotel room before weitzman finishes speaking packing his bags he's up there shouting and screaming and raving about how he's going to start a whole new zionist movement and then a few of his colleagues come in and try to settle him down he said the old men were all cowards weitz men in his whole generation they're incapable of doing what is necessary

And the only people who can do it are the revolutionary Zionist youth around the world. They're the only ones that had what it took to do the hard things that were called for in an hour like this. his friends sort of calmed him down eventually and they convinced him to go back down and make one final appeal to the zionist congress and if the appeal failed they would leave with him and go start a whole new movement a movement that was more comfortable with what needed to be done

And so he starts to prepare to do that, thinking about what he's going to say, and word starts to spread that Ben-Gurion's coming back. He's going to come respond in direct opposition to Weizmann. He comes down and speaks and... Debates rage all night long as Ben-Gurion's out there making angry emotional pleas and denouncing his moderate rivals as people living in a pre-Holocaust world.

weitzman's allies and weitzman himself are doing their best to defend their position against this onslaught they're arguing that things are already going their way and that coming out and announcing

Their goal of statehood openly or of going out and using terror to achieve it was just going to force a hasty decision by any of the big powers that are watching over what's happening. In the end... the zionist congress decided to stick with david ben-gurion thiam weitzman who had really been the unchallenged godfather even through the ups and downs of the zionist movement for most of forty years

was shoved aside. His lofty ideals were not going to organize the yeshuv or prepare for its defense in Palestine. Ben-Gurion's sweat and the blood of Zionist military organizations was going to do that. weitzman had put all of his credibility on the line put himself out there and his fellow zionists had voted against him finally publicly and never again would he challenge ben-gurion's power

The plans of the Zionists for dealing with the Arab question, now that they had a partition plan in place, had gone through various iterations since the war had ended. shaped in every instance by external events and their own changing expectations. The Haganah High Command had first devised Plan A. That's what they called it. That's not me giving it a...

giving it a name. They called it Plan A in February 1945, when the Zionists still hoped that the British were going to respond to the Holocaust by throwing out all their promises to the Arabs and just opening Palestine to unlimited Jewish immigration.

plan a included operations that were designed to suppress any palestinian arab resistance but since it assumed total british cooperation and support plan a didn't mention anything about the surrounding countries Plans B and Plan C eventually replaced Plan A as circumstances changed, and then in March 1948, two months before the British Union Jack was to be folded up and sent back to Britain with the last British official,

The Haganah prepared plan D. The British evacuation had been proceeding slowly up to this point, but it was about to pick up speed. They were going to leave very quickly. And plan D... was to come into force once the Zionists determined that there were too few British forces left in the country to stop them from carrying it out.

Under Plan D, the Haganah would act quickly and decisively and independently to secure not only the territory that had been designated as the Jewish partition by the UN, but that they would strike out into arab territory anywhere that a few jews lived or to seize any land that they determined was necessary to secure and defend what they already held now

had been talking about since at least the mid-1930s in letters to his son and other insiders. He'd been talking about his plans to use whatever partition the Zionists could get out of the UN or... the british when they were in charge and just use that as only a jumping off point that was just a beginning something they would use to marshal their resources and their forces and then to acquire any other land they could get their hands on and he also

did not believe that it was possible for the jews to sustainably rule over such a large arab population remember in the jewish partition arabs are still about forty nine point five percent of the population ben-gurion does not think that's sustainable And today, thanks to this new breed of Israeli historians, they call themselves and others call them the new historians,

These are Israelis who have gone into the Israeli archives, declassified Israeli archives, and pulled out information that we never had access to before. We've got a lot more insight now than any time in the past into what happened. during what would be called by the Zionists the War of Independence, and by the Arabs, the Catastrophe. One of the most prominent of these new historians has been Benny Morris of Ben-Gurion University in Israel.

So Benny Morris, he's got several thick books, details, countless examples from this period of Arabs being expelled from their homes by force, of Zionists using the opportunity then to... destroy the houses and burn down the villages to make sure they don't come back in january nineteen forty eight the hagana launches an attack on the village of mansurat under orders to kill anybody who offers resistance

they burn the village kill the farm animals burn the crops and trees after they're gone the olive trees that take twenty to thirty years to mature and bear fruit arab resistance meanwhile remains disorganized and ineffective mostly limited to You know, snipers taking potshots with old rifles and raids on traffic convoys and street violence, things like that. After one Arab attack on a supply train in northern Palestine,

The village of Al Husania was completely devastated by a reprisal attack by the Zionists. Several dozen Arab men, women, and children are killed.

there are stories of zionist death squads clearing out villages and then blowing up homes and then leaving land mines in the rubble of the homes to catch people who came back to pick through the remains of their belongings in at least one place an attack on the water supply seems to have been confirmed in at least one place but the israeli historian yuri millstein tells us that in many conquered arab villages the water supply was poisoned to prevent the inhabitants from coming back

I almost didn't bring that up. I cringe bringing that up. But, you know, these are confirmed incidents and you've got to talk about them.

uri milstein the historian also tells us that the preceding typhoid epidemic in that same village was caused by a zionist biological attack in may nineteen forty eight a group of zionists that were disguised as arabs were arrested attempting to infect protected artesian wells in gaza with a vial of liquid containing typhoid and dysentery one of the men captured david horn admitted to having been given that infected canteen and the mission by his commander in the hagana

You kind of, I don't know about you, but I have to wonder what's going on in the minds of the people involved in something like that. You know, it's hard for me to believe that it was nothing more than just a simple military tactic or an act of political terrorism. Many of you probably heard some of the accusations that had been levied against the Jews over the years in Europe, known as blood libels. You know, there were times when

We're talking in the Middle Ages and so forth. There'd be times when a Christian child would go missing and someone would accuse the local Jewish community of having kidnapped and murdered the child in some anti-Christian ritual. And that would lead to a big pogrom and violence and death and so forth against the Jews. One of the more popular of these blood libels that would pop up again and again, and certainly one of the ones that's best known today, it would pop up during plague years.

When nervous Christians, who didn't have the benefit of germ theory back then, didn't know what was happening to them, often accused the Jews of poisoning wells to spread the disease. This blood libel has come down through the centuries and is very well known. It's often used as the very first example of what a blood libel is. And it's impossible for me to believe that a Jew, especially a committed Zionist in the 1940s, had never heard of that.

And so you have to wonder if that's going through his head as he's pouring a vial of typhoid and dysentery down a well used by an Arab peasant village as its main water supply. Did he just shut out the cognitive dissonance or was there no inner conflict? Maybe there wasn't. Maybe the Zionists are just tired of being slandered and harassed and chased around.

Maybe they are tired of being afraid of monsters. Maybe it's time to become the monsters. And maybe it's time for other people to be afraid of them. And so from here on... Terror and depraved violence become general everyday occurrences. Young Arab men begin attacking Jews wherever they can find them, while Jewish groups continue their... focused and strategic reign of terror. There are confirmed accounts of Zionists throwing grenades into crowds, of a sniper taking out a pregnant Arab woman.

of packed theaters being set on fire while jewish gunmen waited the exits for people trying to escape zionist militias firing indiscriminately into crowds and launching mortars into residential neighborhoods the irgun was known for killing british soldiers or arab civilians and then booby trapping their bodies to kill anybody who tried to recover or bury them like they did to the two british sergeants that they had strung up

arab and jewish snipers both of them were firing at anybody who was not on their team including the few remaining british if they were caught out you could just walk around in the street and that could be it people are just looking at you if you're an arab shooter You're looking to check if somebody's an Arab, and if they're not, you're shooting at them. The Jews are doing the same thing. You know, sad irony.

of all this is that the vast majority of the evil tactics that we hear about today being used by groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad with the exception of suicide bombing were pioneered by the irgun and the stern gang in palestine in the 1940s attacks were launched against infrastructure and water supplies in arab towns and villages

with the goal of trying to make that land unlivable, because they knew that it would force the Arabs to leave, since they didn't have the material or the capital or the expertise to rebuild anything. Whereas the Zionists could always rebuild that stuff later on, with money from rich zionists and supportive nations like the united states the middle east correspondent for the london daily herald someone who is a future citizen and diplomat of israel

Harry Levin was in Palestine reporting on Zionist activities during this period, and after a while of asking to do it, he was finally allowed to go along on a typical operation carried out by the Palmach. The Palmach is the Haganah's kind of shock troops. And so he accompanies this squad of Jewish fighters that he surprised are much younger than he thought they were going to be. They claim they were 17, 18 years old, but he said a lot of them were more like 15, 16 years old.

and he follows them through the hills toward the village of colonia around midnight they get in range of the village and without warning they begin launching mortars into it The village starts returning ineffectual fire, mostly shooting over the heads and just missing everything, as Arabs tend to do when they fire at people, I don't know why. And more Zionists crawl closer to the village.

get within range and start opening up on it with their machine guns the arab resistance begins to wane and then melt away and so the zionists moved into the village and when they found arabs still occupying a house or a structure they'd surround it and start lighting it up with machine gun fire and then throwing grenades into the windows until everything stopped the arabs who hadn't been able to escape were killed

Harry Levin said that he counted 14 himself, but there were a bunch more. And then as his escort was taking him away from the scene back to town in a car, he started hearing the Zionist sappers blowing up every house and structure in the village. one after another. And this is how it worked. In just six weeks, 769 Jews had been killed. 1,069 Arabs were dead. And also 123 British.

who, for the most part, were just staying behind their fences and waiting to get the hell out of here, but 123 British were killed as well. That's in six weeks. By springtime, the Arabs had been almost entirely driven out of West Jerusalem.

it was almost entirely clear of them and a refugee problem was starting to become a refugee crisis very quickly After Arabs were driven out of neighborhoods and villages, Zionists would immediately follow up their operations by moving Jews into those homes that had been abandoned by these fleeing Arab families. They would divide up the Arabs' former belongings, and they'd be eating food that was still left on the shelves. That's how quickly and efficiently this was going on.

to one group who had moved into what had formerly been an arab section of jerusalem ben-gurion went down there to speak to them and he gloated there are no strangers left one hundred per cent jews since jerusalem's destruction in the days of the romans it hasn't been so jewish as it is now in many arab districts in the west one sees not one arab i do not assume this will change

he added that what had happened in jerusalem could well happen in great parts of the country if we hold on and that there would be great changes in the composition of the population of the country only one village remained on the outskirts of jerusalem whose citizens had not fled and so on april ninth nineteen forty eight about a hundred and thirty fighters from yitzhak shamir's stern gang and menachem baggins ergun with approval

and mortar support from the Haganah approached that village called Der Yassin, off the main road near Jerusalem.

der yassin was uninvolved with any of the fighting it had non-aggression agreements with nearby jewish settlements very good relations with them and it had even recently had all of its live stock slaughtered by fellow arabs because it had refused to allow them to operate, to use their village as a base of operations.

the zionist fighters entered der yassin as the village leaders were trying to explain to them that they were not partisans in the fighting but the irgun and the stern gang had not come to der yassin because der yassin was a threat they had come to compose a message In blood. The Zionists launched a wild attack. Indiscriminately killing everybody that they could find. Umm Muhammad. And that's probably the only...

Arab name I'm going to get right as I go through this part. I've been butchering Hebrew names the entire time so now I'm about to pay back the Arabs for that.

umm mohammed was fifteen years old he's a fifteen-year-old boy that day at dariassin and he remembered it i saw how hilwe zaidan was killed along with her husband her son her brothers and kumaez hilwe zaidan went out to collect the body of her husband they shot her and she fell over his body i also saw hayat bilbesi a nurse from jerusalem who was serving in the village as she was shot before the door to musa hassan's house the daughter of abu el abed

was shot dead as she held her baby niece the baby was shot too whoever tried to run away was shot dead as one jewish observer later wrote the conquest of the village was carried out with great cruelty whole families women old people children were killed lahey members lahey's the stern gang lahey members tell of the barbaric behavior of their gun toward the prisoners and the dead

they also relate that the irgun men raped a number of arab girls and then murdered them afterwards mahmoud kasem al yassini was also fifteen years old in nineteen forty eight and he was there he reported what he witnessed everything seemed strange there was blood everywhere a dead woman holding her baby reminded me of my mother so i dashed to our house i found my mother hiding in fear in the basement and when she saw me she cried and started screaming

she told me to go to my uncle's house next door through a hole in the wall to make sure that the rest of his family was still alive when i peered through the hole i saw horror i could see traces of blood all over the place all that i could see was blood i knew that they had all been massacred i had lost my uncles yusuf and mohammed hamidah fahimi zaydan was

twelve years old that day and she remembered the jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us i was hit in the side but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents the bullets hit my sister kadri four in the head and my sister same eight in the cheek and my brother mohammed seven in the chest but all the others with us against the wall were killed my father my mother

my grandfather and my grandmother my uncles and aunts and some of their children abu yusuf was twenty-one years old at the time of the massacre and he said the jews took elderly men and women and youths including four of my cousins and a nephew they took them all women who had on them gold and money were stripped of their gold they took the men to the quarry and sprayed them all with bullets

one woman saw her son taken some forty to sixty meters away from where she and the rest of the women stood and shot dead then they brought jewish kids to throw stones at his body then They poured kerosene over his body and set it ablaze while the women watched from a distance, end quote. Another female who was there, a Ms. Halim Ayd, who was 30 at the time.

she remembered a man shot a bullet into the neck of my sister salier who was nine months pregnant then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife and then mrs reported that she was being raped at gunpoint and i screamed but other women around me were being raped too some of the men were so anxious to get our earrings that they ripped our ears to pull them off faster after a sustained period of house to house murder and rape and torture and mutilation

several of the military age arab men were put in chains and brought back to the jewish quarter of jerusalem to be paraded through the streets as trophies in front of a jeering crowd and then they were brought back to dariossin executed and thrown into the quarry pit The villagers of Deir Yassin, some 245 men, women, and children were murdered that day. There are reports that many women...

Many, many women were raped, and that the meager belongings of the villagers were looted after they were dead, and the bodies were mutilated and placed in humiliating positions, castrated, things like that.

one hagana intelligence officer who was there reported in the quarry i saw the five arabs they had paraded in the streets of the city they had been murdered and were lying one on top of the other i saw with my own eyes several families that had been murdered with their women children and old people their corpses were lying on top of each other the dissidents were going about the village robbing and stealing everything chickens

radio sets sugar money gold and more each dissident walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he had killed one jewish eyewitness who was there guess that's what an eye-witness is one jewish eye-witness remembered hearing one of the zionist fighters walking through the town counting bodies and relaying back through a radio to headquarters minus fifteen arabs

Minus 60 Arabs. And after a while, his message on the radio to headquarters became, it's too difficult to count. Word of what had happened at Dariassin spread very quickly all over the country.

and one of the reasons that it got around so fast was that the killers themselves the actual ones who had carried this out they were the ones spreading these stories around they wanted people to know one of the men who was there who actually drew pictures of the incident that were intended for publication he wrote quote i drew a jewish soldier pointing a bayoneted rifle at an arab woman

i sent the drawing to the newspapers through the arab headquarters in jerusalem with the additional information that six hundred women five hundred men and four hundred children were slaughtered at their yassin i exaggerated on purpose to frighten the arabs Here's a very common misconception that a lot of people have about how this kind of thing works, whether it's a genocide or an ethnic cleansing operation or something like you have here. When you hear that...

A couple million people have been killed or driven into refugee status in Darfur or some other African war, for example. Don't imagine to yourself that the enemy is going village to village shooting millions of people in the head. That's not what happens. What happens is you go out and you choose a few examples to make. You roll into a village one day. You start shooting until it surrenders. And then you rape the women.

and when you get bored you mutilate their faces or you cut off their breasts you make sons murder their fathers and their older brothers you take the old women and cut off their lips and then you rape them and then you murder them And then you let a few people go to spread the word and you sit back and families and villages and towns all around you flee into the bush to avoid having any of this happen to them and their children.

And then you just enjoy the view because out in the bush, young children die immediately. Old folks die immediately. Pregnant women die immediately. Almost everybody dies right away. And those who don't, at least flee the land that you're after across some border or into some UN refugee center that's been set up. That's how these things work. And so the Zionists were playing up.

They weren't denying, they weren't trying to get away from or avoid responsibility for what had happened there, Yassin. They're playing it up. And so now when they're preparing to attack other villages and towns, they're actually threatening the civilians there. They would set up trucks with big speaker systems, and they would go around these villages and towns, threatening the civilians with another Deir Yassin to get them to run away.

menachembeg and commander of the attack publicized his group's role in the slaughter and began circulating reports that the urgun now had twenty thousand soldiers in palestine which shocked everybody and especially the arabs What did it mean for them if in addition to the normal Zionist forces, the Haganah, which were tough enough, there were 20,000 of the people who had just done this out there running around?

British intelligence indicated that the Irgun may have had as many fighters in the country as the Haganah, and the London Times reported that, quote, by April, it had become clear that the Irgun virtually controlled the all-Jewish city and Zionist headquarters of Tel Aviv. End quote.

Now, a lot of that is exaggeration and propaganda spread by the Urgun. They most likely at this point did not have 20,000 regular full-time soldiers in the country, and they controlled territory in Tel Aviv and had a lot of support there.

but the Times of London statement kind of implies that they controlled the government there, that they were kind of in charge of the yeshiva, and that was not true. But it didn't matter, because this is aimed at the Arabs, and the Arabs really have no way of knowing any of that.

the goal of this is to put the arabs to flight make them so afraid of what was about to happen to them that they would just flee in terror for the lives of their families and themselves and it worked john kimchi he's a british zionist publicist and editor at the time wrote at this moment the irgun launched an attack on jaffa accompanied by a flourish of ostentatious publicity irgun police took over the streets of tel aviv leading to jaffa

jaffa and tel aviv are kind of attached to each other ergun police took over the streets of tel aviv leading to jaffa and ergun lorries with singing boys and girls careened around tel aviv the great bombardment of jaffa was started with three-inch mortars this bombardment started a panic among the jaffa arabs the remaining twenty thousand started to leave the city by boat and by road the jewish and foreign press was invited to visit and to inspect the arab prisoners

a few blindfolded prisoners were paraded through tel aviv the irgun activities in jaffa also extended to yet another field for the first time in the still undeclared war a jewish force commenced to loot in wholesale fashion at first the young irgunnus pillaged only dresses blouses and ornaments for their girl friends but this discrimination was soon abandoned everything that was movable was carried from jaffa furniture carpets pictures crockery and pottery jewelry and cutlery

the occupied parts of joffa were stripped what could not be taken away was smashed windows pianos fittings and lamps went in an orgy of destruction the un general assembly had

approved their resolution to break Palestine into a Jewish and Arab partition. But that was all it did. There were no provisions for enforcing any of this. There were no provisions for what to do if the Zionists began striking out into Arab territories and driving the Palestinians who lived there out into the desert.

on 15 may 1948 the last british high commissioner of mandatory palestine left the country and so now you've just got the organized well-armed militias of the zionists and the scattered and broken population of the palestinian arabs in this country together john kimchi also wrote that with the help of some british officials who were still outraged at everything the zionists had done and what this whole situation had become

with their help pushing it a little bit the zionist propaganda about their strength about the ergun's strength and about the zionist intentions of what they intended to do it had created these unintended side effects besides just scaring the palestinians out of their homes he wrote this information had been passed on by the foreign office to the british envoys in the arab countries who in turn informed the arab governments to which they were accredited it had the desired effect among the arabs

it swayed many who had been hesitating on the brink of the decision whether to go to war against the palestine zionists or not for though it has become a habit among pro zionists to assume that there was nothing but evil hatred behind the arab decision to go to war

and that the arab explanation that they came to save their brethren from the attack by terrorists was just a cheap excuse for the benefit of those who dared to believe it it must be stressed that there was a great and very real arab concern for the fate of palestine arabs

the concern reached fever heat when the british information was passed on that the terrorists were becoming the decisive factor in the zionist armed forces the issue of leadership voted to declare national independence for the state of israel as the last british ships were leaving haifa and as palestinian civilians are fleeing villages and towns across the country david ben-gurion was named head of the provisional government and the very next day

Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan invaded Palestine. This whole time, Arab people and Arab militaries across these borders have been getting edgy watching this happen. you know they've got refugees streaming across their borders with stories of murdered sons and raped daughters and destroyed villages and the people and the militaries in these nations are calling on their leaders to set them loose let them do something

But the leaders, for the most part, are not enthusiastic about intervening. Most of these states still had ties to the British or the French, who were whispering in their ear and letting them know what the situation is, and they understood it.

the situation was that it did not matter what any of them thought about it it didn't matter if it was right or wrong this was happening it had been i mean the british didn't want it to happen and it still happened this is something that had been bought and paid for in the halls of American power, and in the Kremlin, and nobody was going to do anything to stop this. King Abdullah of Jordan.

commanded the most significant arab force in the region by far the british trained and british advised arab legion but he was hesitant to get involved at all in fact before everything happened before the conflict kicked off, he had cut a deal with the Zionists to stay out of any fight that might happen. It was only after everything was so horrifying and they started seeing everything that was happening that he eventually agreed to intervene just to...

save a little bit of face. But he didn't want to get in there to try to stop something that the UN, the West, and the Soviets all seemed to have blessed. Now the Zionists, meanwhile, the Zionists, they don't have an enthusiasm problem. They don't have a commitment problem.

They certainly don't have an organization problem or anything like that, but they're in it to win it. They've got the same attitude, only turned up to 11, that they've always had. One Zionist who was there for all this, right in the middle of it, Chaim Herzog, he tells this story that, you know, I always love this story. It's so short and simple, and it's just a single scene, but I think it just gives you an idea of the commitment level of these people and how focused they are.

and then think of the difference in commitment between the zionists and the arab states that are supposed to be supporting the palestinians so one time after a car bomb is detonated at the jewish agency headquarters in jerusalem in march haim herzog whose wife was injured in the explosion rushes away from the area to a nearby office of a norwegian staffer for the u n commission that's overseeing the partition he rushes over there grabs this guy and rushes back herzog writes

only then did i realize that i was covered in dust and my shirt was soaked with blood i took rocher lund the un representative to the agency and showed him the ruins already workers were laying bricks and repairing internal damage to the building As secretaries cleaned up and workers moved silently carrying bricks, his eyes filled with tears. Such a nation will never be defeated, he said. Now, you know...

I don't know if tears are really necessary there. The Norwegians' reaction might have been a little bit melodramatic, but think about that. Think about an explosion going off, killing 13 people, injuring dozens more, blood everywhere, body parts everywhere, people everywhere. And within a few minutes, Jewish civilians, okay, these are not, this isn't a police troop. These are the secretaries and the workers who were there. Within minutes,

Jewish civilians are already working feverishly, cleaning debris and stacking bricks and going off and getting new bricks and making repairs to these buildings. You know, good luck. Good luck, guys. You're not...

You're not beating that. It's not going to happen. Not until you somehow find a way to get them to lose a little bit of that enthusiasm. It's not happening. And compare this to the aimless resistance of the... palestinian arab civilians and the half-hearted and reluctant intervention of the arab states the popular narrative that a lot of people at least in the united states kind of buy into

is that several powerful well-equipped arab nations enraged at the prospect of having dirty jews in their midst immediately threw their full military weight at tiny little israel as soon as the u n voted for partition that's not what happened in reality the arab states had to stand by for months after that and they only intervened after months of seeing bloody palestinian refugee families flooding across their borders with story after terrible story

of burned communities and murdered parents and children and even then the response of these arab states was obligatory and underwhelming in the event as things start kicking off Israeli fighters actually outnumbered the Arab soldiers, and the operations of the Arab militaries were almost completely restricted to operations within the portion of Palestine that had been partitioned by the UN to the Arab population.

they avoided mounting operations within the jewish zones almost completely so the israeli war of independence in other words was not really a defensive war fought on israeli soil against an invading enemy. It was fought, the actual combat was fought almost entirely on territory allotted by the UN to the Palestinian Arabs. So as the Arab forces move into the Palestinian territories.

The Arab state forces, they begin to engage with the Israeli defense forces. I'll call them the Israelis now because that's what they are. On June 1st, the Irgun had signed an agreement with the government, the Israeli provisional government, to have its whole organization and all its men absorbed into the command structure of the new Israeli Defense Forces.

On May 29th, the UN had ordered a ceasefire, which was put into effect on June 11th. And so the Israelis were using that time to try to... get through that absorption and work in the Irgun, but also to bring in more reinforcements. Immigrants are streaming into the country at this point, and also to fortify their positions and consolidate the control that they had over territories that they had taken away from the Arabs.

Fighters and weapons were brought up to the new front and Israeli fighting strength was increased to about 65,000 men from about 35,000 when they started. The agreement between the Irgun and the IDF The absorption agreement stipulated that as part of the IDF that your gun was going to have to stop any independent procurement of weapons and supplies, and that it was going to have to work through, you know, the standard IDF chain of command if it needed anything.

just like any other military unit but prior to the agreement a ship called the altalena had already been chartered by the irgun with nine hundred and forty more fighters and a very large cache of weapons and ammunition coming from france it was on its way to palestine and set to arrive during the cease-fire so menachem begin goes to david ben-gurion to the provisional government and demands that some of those weapons

at least, go to his men out in the field because the unification of the air gun with the new IDF has not all been worked out yet. It's only been a short period of time, and so it's not like it's all complete. And he's still got fighters and units out there operating independently.

who need supplies initially ben gurian agreed that twenty per cent of the weapons and ammunition would go to the irgun units out there but then begin requested that since the irgun had actually worked out the procurement and the delivery of all these weapons they had done all of it

that these weapons should go to equip the IDF units that were made up of Irgun men. Because the guys who were in the Irgun, once they moved into the IDF, they didn't just get worked into other units, they had their own units. And Begin wanted the rest of the weapons to go to them. Now Ben-Gurion, his spidey sense went off here. He was afraid that Bagan was still thinking of the Irgun, even the ones that had been rolled into the IDF.

as his own private army rather than as just a part of the military bureaucracy of their new state and he was afraid that menachembegin planned to use these loyalists at some point to challenge ben garion's power so the government refused that request in fact he demanded that begin surrender the ship and all of its cargo immediately when it got there he said at a government meeting we must decide whether to hand over power to begin or to order him to cease his separate activities

if he does not do so we will open fire otherwise we must decide to disperse our own army and so a letter was delivered to begin informing him that the area in which the ship intended to land was going to be covered by troops and artillery and armored cars and he was ordered to give up and report to israeli headquarters baggan ignored that summons and he was conferring with his officers on a beach near

the place where the Altalena was waiting at the time. And while they were deciding what to do, IDF units roll up and a firefight breaks out between the Urgun and the IDF. Eventually, the IDF brings in heavy weapons and a lot of reinforcements, and they overrun the Irgun's positions. Menachem Begin and a few others manage to get into a rowboat and make their way out to the Altalena while they're being fired on from Israeli small boats.

began orders the altalena to make its way down to tel aviv where the ergun would be able to muster a lot more shore-side support for the landing and word starts to get around about what's happening and a bunch of ergun members including ones who had been brought into the idf already leave their posts and start making their way to meet the ship at tel aviv rumors begin circulating all over the country that the argonne was going to launch a military coup against ben gurion's government

shlomo knocked him on a jewish author in his book on the alt elena incident he wrote that ben-gurion instructed the israeli air force which was only a few planes at this point but sufficient for this task, that Ben-Gurion ordered the Israeli Air Force to sink the Altalena at sea with Ben-Gurion on it before it made its way down to Tel Aviv. Gordon Levitt was a pilot who was flying for Israel during the 1948 war in his book Under Two Flags.

wrote that the deputy commander of the israeli air force delivered that order to him and several other non-jewish volunteer pilots when jewish pilots refused to carry out that mission but none of them were willing to sink the altelena They were all of the opinion that they had not come to Israel to kill Jews. That's not why they were there, and they weren't going to start now. So the Altalena, with Begin and his thousand or so people on board, is being chased by Israeli Corvettes.

during its voyage down to Tel Aviv, and eventually runs aground on the busiest stretch of Tel Aviv Beach, in a full view of beachgoers and hotel guests, including all the reporters and UN observers who are about to watch everything that's going to happen. from their hotel balconies. Now, Begin claimed that he had not directed the ship to Tel Aviv for a coup. Remember, that's where the seat of the Israeli government is at this point. He claimed that that's not why he was there.

he had gone there because he hoped that we could extricate ourselves from these siege conditions and then i would be able to communicate directly with the government and put an end to what i still hoped was a perilous misunderstanding well ben-gurion was waiting with large concentrated forces on the beach heavy guns were brought in and assembled and baggan was urging the men ashore not to fight he's calling out to them saying don't do this

he starts unloading the weapons calling out to these idf soldiers that the weapons were for ourselves and you we've come to fight together and he shouted at them we shall not fire we shall not fight our brothers And so all this is kind of going on and people are kind of hesitating as Baggin's doing this. And the IDF commanders are worried that their men, some of whom literally had relatives on the ship, at least one I'm sure had a brother there,

on the Altalena, that they were going to lose their nerve and refuse to fire on other Jews. And so to get out in front of that, they order the government forces to start shelling the Altalena. The first gunner that they gave the order to refused, he said he would be executed for insubordination before he opened up with artillery on other Jews.

the second gunner was a recent arrival from south africa and he refused at first but then they threatened him with a court-martial and so he complied the heavy guns opened up on the ship that was laden with explosives and ammunition and israeli troops on the shore started opening up with heavy machine-gun fire soon the ship began to burn after a direct hit

and that fire spread to the ammunition holds and got out of control very quickly and very soon the altelena was ordered abandoned ergon men were jumping into the water to avoid being burned while their comrades ashore were going out to try to meet them with rafts and all the while these swimming men and their rescuers are being fired on with automatic weapons by israeli forces begin refused

to leave the ship until the last of his wounded men had been evacuated eventually he too jumped into the water and he managed to make it ashore to escape and just as during the hunting season back in nineteen forty four and forty five bagan was not prepared to be the cause of a jewish civil war whatever the other side had done and so he negotiated with the israeli provisional government and secured a deal that

freed the two hundred or so air-gun men a couple weeks later after they had been captured and eventually worked most of those men back into the idf the alt elena incident made a huge impression on everyone i mean you can imagine you're sitting on a beach and a ship runs aground and then a bunch of soldiers show up and a battle breaks out

And this is in front of UN representatives during a ceasefire when they have the official mediator there in front of reporters from all over the world. This is happening. Many Jews watching this from Tel Aviv were disgusted. with the savagery with which ben-gurion had ordered his men to attack begin's men after all they were jews and they were zionists and they were popular too they were playing Begin was playing Zionist anthems from the loudspeakers of the ship while the fighting was going on.

think about how that looks people are watching and you've got a bunch of ben-gurion's forces arrayed out firing artillery and automatic weapons at a ship that is blasting zionist anthems the entire time the un mediator who had been sent

to observe and manage the arab israeli ceasefire count folk bernadat he was particularly disturbed by the demonstration that the zionists still seemed to have rogue independent militias out there running around the country and procuring weapons through unofficial channels he didn't like that at all count bernadotte was this widely admired humanitarian and a hero of the second world war not a combat hero he was he was a citizen of neutral sweden during the war but he had negotiated the release

of some thirty-one thousand jewish and other prisoners from nazi concentration camps as vice president of the swedish red cross he had actually gone in and led several rescue missions behind enemy lines in germany So he's a revered figure in Sweden and a hero to many Jews. Miriam Macavia, she was a Polish-born Israeli writer and diplomat.

she had been a prisoner at bergen belsen the concentration camp and and she expresses a pretty common perspective about bernadine toward the end of the war the nazis are in full retreat and bernadotte's swedish red cross is sending in its iconic white buses into the continent to rescue concentration camp survivors and when akavia was found she was nearly dead

She weighed less than 60 pounds. Reduced by misery and deprivation, she describes the day of her sad liberation. This is from a later article on Bernadotte and the UK Independent.

i myself was lying on a heap of dead bodies and beside me was my sister lucia our mother was there with us but she was no longer alive for her the war ended too late sweden chose the weakest and sickest nothing was demanded of us they sanitized us dressed us checked us fed us vitamins and cod-liver oil and sent us to pretty localities most of us to hospitals hanan akavia her husband

He was also a Holocaust survivor. He describes Count Bernadotte as his savior and says that when he was found, he was so thin and ill that if he had not been saved by Sweden, I cannot imagine how I would have survived.

it meant recovery and a new life well bernadad is shocked by what he is seeing in palestine and he opened up negotiations between the two parties by demanding that this swelling mass of arab refugees to start with they've got to be allowed to go back to their homes this is not how the laws of war work and then he said that the lines of the u n partition are not going to work they've got to be redrawn in a manner that's more equitable for the arabs

And before he could make much headway on that, this was just a starting point, before he could make much headway, the limited-time ceasefire expired, and the Arab and Israeli forces started engaging each other again on July 8, 1948. With the expiration of the ceasefire, Zionist commanders, they'd already been preparing. So they're already in place to advance now on the cities of Lydda and Ramle.

There was going to be another truce in 10 days that was already scheduled, and so the Israeli Defense Force needed to act quickly. It amassed its largest force up until this time and moved very quickly into Palestinian territories.

the idf arrived at lydda and it began softening up the civilian population and the small militia that was there with artillery and mortar bombardment after a very brief battle with the city's few defenders israeli forces which are backed up by armored vehicles and mounted weapons with artillery and mortar support very quickly they had taken strategic points around the city these demoralized and untrained

arab resistance fighters are easily overrun and the population just huddles in their homes and in a few mosques treating the wounded and trying to bury the dead men women and children that are scattered around no one's permitted to leave any of their buildings and the israeli soldiers are marauding through the streets and homes while the leadership tries to decide what to do with so many civilians the terrified population of

had heard of the massacres and so they're in a complete panic as you can imagine several thousand of lidda's citizens had been confined to the grand mosque near the center of town about three thousand or so It was said to be so full that you couldn't actually sit down. Everybody had to stand up. There was no room for anybody to sit down.

This is on a July day in the Middle East when a British commander who was present said that it was over 100 degrees in the shade. And so things are starting to get difficult and tensions are starting to get, you know, things...

tempers and tensions are starting to flare. People who are left to marinate in their own filth and waste, you know, like the Louisiana Superdome during... hurricane katrina with no food no water no toilets sweating in the july heat and the stink of this unwashed humanity and screaming infants as they wondered if they were about to become the next

So put yourself in that place for a minute. Imagine that you're there with your child or your wife. Maybe give yourself a scorching headache from... the dehydration and lack of sleep and stress from worrying about whether the next soldier that comes through that door is going to start shooting after some time goes by a few israeli fighters killed some arabs

And when they were questioned about why they'd done it, they said that they had been shot at. Not sure if that actually happened or not, but that was the excuse that they gave to their commanders. And so once news spread that they had been shot at, the IDF forces just went on a rampage. They went berserk.

They smashed through the town, firing into crowds, shelling buildings that they knew were full of people, and throwing hand grenades into the windows of homes that are full of people. In 30 minutes, 250 Arab civilians were dead. all the able-bodied arab men were rounded up leaving nothing but the old people the very young and the women any arab regardless of age or sex that was found outside after sunset was to be shot on sight many were

And so with all the able-bodied men rounded up and confined, most of them were shipped off out of the town, you've got nothing but the old people, the women, and the children basically left in this city. This is a big city. 40, 50,000 people. And so you've got nothing but the helpless remaining citizens huddling in terror.

with most of the able-bodied men gone and they're just hoping that the armed men who are now prowling the streets these bands of men are not going to choose their door to kick in in order to loot or assault or rape or kill soon news of the situation reaches israeli headquarters and the leaders are trying to discuss what to do with this mass of people the future israeli prime minister and nobel peace prize recipient yitzhak rabin was there that day

he recorded what happened in his diary as they were trying to figure out what to do with all these civilians. Rabin writes, quote, later called log ben-gurion would repeat the question what is to be done with the population waving his hand in a gesture which said drive them out driving out is a term with a harsh ring

Psychologically, this was one of the most difficult actions we undertook. End quote. Well, if he thought that this was tough on him and his men, it was going to be much harder on the people that they were about to drive out.

the order was given to use any necessary means to quickly expel the residents and cleanse the area of the people that ben-gurion referred to as strangers the following day thirty-five thousand arab civilians virtually all women children and the elderly were rounded up and marched out of their homes as refugees driven into the desert with only what they could carry

the israeli soldiers looted the city with abandon and they were stopping the fleeing residents to search them for valuables as they were going out the israeli commander in charge of the city informs us that the arabs were grateful to be allowed to leave thankful that they were not just massacred now while this is going on a parallel operation is being carried out in the nearby city of ramleh

leaflets and loudspeakers and radio broadcasts threatened the residents with extermination and bombings and bombardments and sniper fire got the population moving many of the current inhabitants of both cities were refugees from earlier raids they had been either in jaffa or some of the other villages and they had fled to these cities and so they needed very little convincing about what the israelis were capable of

So in one stroke, between 50,000 and 70,000 Arabs were purged. Some bussed off to concentration camps, but the majority just sent out into the desert. In just the month of July,

nineteen forty eight over a hundred thousand arab civilians would be driven into homelessness thousands of women and children trod out into the july heat the few remaining people were elderly and disabled folks having gathered what they could carry trying to pull it on little makeshift sleds they took doors off their hinges and tried to put their valuables in their

belongings on that to carry with them wherever they were going. They didn't know where they were going. The road very quickly became littered with all their belongings because they were just forced to let go of them eventually. They couldn't carry them. It was the Muslim month of and so they were fasting during the day and the vast majority of these fleeing palestinian muslims refused to break their fast taking no food and no water even as they were collapsing under the burning sun

the heat began to take the old and the sick first and the road became choked with bodies of dying men and women children began to fall from heat stroke And women tried to carry them while Israeli soldiers fired shots over their heads and at their feet to frighten them and to keep them moving. Some Israeli soldiers followed the train of refugees into the desert.

waiting to scoop up dropped valuables and taking interesting things that weren't dropped off of people one israeli soldier later said to begin with they jettisoned utensils and furniture and in the end bodies of men women and children scattered along the way some of the israeli soldiers were traumatized by what they witnessed hour after hour in the lidda death march

eyewitnesses reported seeing babies trying to nurse for mothers who had died already in the heat the road was narrow and congested and it was choked with dust and thirsty people there were children screaming through dry throats and adults were weeping and occasional gunshots were fired into the crowd every so often we're told a family would pull out of the column to the side of the road

to bury a baby who had succumbed to dehydration or heat stroke, or to say goodbye to a grandmother who could go no further and that nobody could carry.

as the day dragged on and the stress piled up things degenerated and people just began to go crazy there were delirious mothers abandoning their screaming babies unable to bear their screams for hunger and in screams of thirst a british commander who was outraged by the scene but who was under orders not to intervene reported that the side of the road was littered with the bodies of the young and the old

and that the number of dead children would never be known, many of them buried anonymously in shallow desert graves. Again, far from running away from incidents like this, from incidents like Deir Yassin and Lidda and Ramleh, the Israeli commanders considered them strategically valuable. And so they actually sent out agents to spread exaggerated versions of all this into Arab communities.

in order to make the cleansing of strangers called for and planned eat more easily accomplished the israelis spread it by word of mouth leaflets radio broadcasts and again they would circle villages and towns that that they were filled with Arabs and announced with loudspeakers what was going to happen to them. They tell them that they would be infected with typhus and cholera and other diseases, that they would be massacred.

They were even going out and spreading rumors that the Israelis had possession of atomic bombs and were going to use it to eradicate cities. And once again, this campaign of terror had its intended effect.

Arabs fled in fear of genocide by a group of fanatical terrorists and assassins who seemed to have the blessing of the entire international community behind them. Without knowing where they were going, the people who had lived in and worked the land of palestine for thirteen centuries fled into the desert by the hundreds of thousands by the time the next cease-fire had kicked in

the israelis had driven the majority of the arab population under their control out of their homes in certain places like in the city of haifa up on the northern coast the arabs who didn't flee were caged in their neighborhoods with fences and barbed wire and kept under military supervision and all about somewhere between seven hundred and eight hundred thousand arabs were ethnically cleansed from palestine driven into the unoccupied west bank or into gaza or across the borders

into quickly thrown together refugee camps in lebanon and syria and jordan count bernadotte's view of the zionist case as he's watching all this go on is beginning to darken

He reported back to the UN that the Arab states were reluctant to restart the fighting. They were looking for a way out. And he said that what violence was being initiated by the Arab states... or mere incidents, he called them, committed by overzealous commanders or freelancing troops, usually acting without orders, and the Arab states were just looking for a way to get out of this.

and so as bernadotte and his staff are beginning to understand what is going on and as he tours the country and just sees hundreds of thousands of destitute and homeless arab refugees all over the place this you know renowned humanitarian count bernadotte who was chosen for his role specifically because his humanity and credibility could not be questioned by anybody by either party

he insisted that his proposal his demand that the displaced civilians these refugees be permitted to return to their homes when the fighting was done as required by settled international law he also recommended that jerusalem be placed under an international protectorate some kind of an international body set up by the u n that would look after jerusalem to ensure that jews and moslems and christians all had equal rights and that no conflicts erupted over

you know, restrictions in Jerusalem. Now, the Arabs were actually, they expressed some amount of interest in this proposal, but the world was not going to have to wait very long to find out the Israeli response.

when count bernadotte's swedish red cross had been conducting rescue missions in nazi europe bernadotte would often insist on personally accompanying convoys of refugees he would ride with them on the red cross buses more than once he was mistakenly strafed by allied aircraft and almost killed now in jerusalem he had been warned to stay away from exposing himself to the chaos but same thing again he refused to send out his

observers to expose themselves to dangers that he wasn't going to face himself on september seventeenth nineteen forty eight as bernadotte's car convoy is traveling through jewish west jerusalem

His set of cars is stopped by a Jewish army jeep. General Agee Lundstrom, who was in the vehicle with Bernadotte, describes what happens. Quote, in the katamon quarter we were held up by a jewish army type jeep placed in a roadblock and filled with men in jewish army uniforms at the same moment i saw an armed man coming from the jeep i took little notice of this because i merely thought it was just another checkpoint

however he put a tommy gun through the open window on my side of the car and fired point blank at count bernadotte and colonel sorot colonel sorot was a french human observer who was in the vehicle i also heard shots fired from other points and there was considerable confusion colonel surreau fell in the back seat in front of me and i saw at once that he was dead count bernadotte bent forward and i thought at the time that he was trying to get cover i asked him

are you wounded he nodded and fell back when we arrived at the hadassah hospital i carried the count inside and laid him on the bed i took off the count's jacket and tore away his shirt and under vest i saw that he was wounded around the heart and that there was also a considerable quantity of blood on his clothes about it when the doctor arrived i asked if anything could be done but he replied that it was too late

The other victim, Colonel André Serreau, was a U.N. observer, a French U.N. observer, and he wasn't supposed to be in the car with Bernadotte the day he got killed. he had actually swapped places from the first car in the convoy in order to personally thank bernadotte for saving his wife from a nazi concentration camp three years earlier he was shot eighteen times and died

on the spot. And so the ceasefire expires and the Arab states and the Zionists engage with each other again and the fighting drags on for some months more after this but with new reinforcements and more supplies being provided to the zionists now the rest of it is mostly a mop-up operation by the israelis

When it's all over, they have control not only of the territory partitioned to them by the United Nations, but they had also seized and cleaned out 60% of the territory provided to the Palestinians. The UN and the... Neighboring Arab states are trying to manage this three quarters of a million refugees now living in squalor in these hastily built camps. Today there are millions of stateless Palestinians still living in these dilapidated refugee camps.

I was thinking about tacking on a brief summary of the major events that have happened in the time since the founding of the State of Israel and today. But I think we're going to handle that another time. Maybe I'll do it in a blog post or... a supplementary podcast. But in 1967, in a 1967 war against the Arab states, Israel seized the rest of the original Palestinian territory.

controlling the entire thing and they placed any arabs who were still in that territory and not in one of the refugee camps across one of the borders under very severe military occupation a condition in which those people remained this very day

fifty years later and everything that the british taught the zionists during the arab revolt from from checkpoints to random searches to blowing up the homes of suspected rebels to punish their families and random arrests and jailing people without trial or explanation it's all there All the old colonial native control methods are all there. Over the years...

Israel has expanded even into the meager occupied reservations under which the Arabs have been forced, and this has been probably the major obstacle to any peace process going forward. After the Altalena incident, David Ben-Gurion had secured control over the early state of Israel. He served as both the first... After the Yalta-Lena incident, David Ben-Gurion had secured control over the early state of Israel. He served as both the first and the third prime ministers of the country.

but that spirit that it animated the irgun and the stern gang that spirit remained strong in the country and the subsequent conflicts that continued between the israelis and the palestinian population that it now ruled and also with the surrounding arab states has continued to bring israel more and more in bagan's direction over the years after everything that had happened

Jabotinsky and Begin and their revisionists were going to get the last laugh after all. Because in 1977, Menachem Begin was elected Prime Minister of Israel.

after he had served two terms he was succeeded by yitzhak shamir the terrorist leader of the stern gang who had personally ordered countless murders including the assassinations of the british official lord and count bernadotte the bodies of the two murderers who had assassinated lord moyne and cairo were eventually brought back from egypt and buried in israel with full military honors

Since Menachem Begin took power as prime minister in 1977, his Likud party that he founded has held power consistently for 27 out of the last 39 years and for 15 of the last 20 years. in two thousand five the lakud prime minister ariel sharon ordered the evacuation of jewish settlements from gaza and placed that city in the south and the whole area under siege now over sixty percent

of gaza city's population is fourteen years old or younger and the israelis literally have it surrounded by a wall with remote control machine guns dotting the top of the wall facing inward toward the inmates the palestinians for their part have lived under siege and occupation now for so long that

i find myself wondering if their individual and social psychology hasn't been twisted up so much that it makes this whole problem practically insoluble hamas the terrorist resistance group based out of gaza is basically a death cult celebrate suicide bombers as martyrs of war. You know, when you can't win a fight, you start to celebrate losing. And so they celebrate suicide bombers as martyrs.

in a war where they have to make their own weapons in basements and when your enemy has state-of-the-art attack jets and tanks and satellite surveillance and cruise missiles and helicopters and nuclear weapons Every so often the Palestinians will lash out and the Israelis will attack. They did that recently in 2014 when they threw their forces at Gaza. When it was all over, 66 Israeli soldiers and 6 civilians were dead.

sixty-six soldiers six civilians twenty three hundred palestinians were killed and almost eleven thousand were wounded at least seventy per cent of those casualties were civilians in a city that is sixty percent children fourteen and under you know the level of insane hatred on both sides of this conflict has gotten so bad that you'll find videos of arabs celebrating suicide bombers every time they take out an israeli school bus and you'll find videos of israelis

outside southern towns like staroh during the twenty fourteen gaza war bringing food and drinks and having parties and picnics up on the hills overlooking gaza city cheering every time an israeli jet fires a missile into an apartment building or a power plant or a water treatment facility this is where we're at today the long serving current prime minister benjamin netanyahu he said that israel will never ever allow the palestinians to have a real

sovereign state of their own that it's too dangerous and they will never let that happen meanwhile after years of persecution and hopelessness and increasingly severe Islamist indoctrination the palestinians have led to this mutated monstrous culture among the palestinian arabs as i speak right now we're still going through this period that has lasted over a year

where Palestinian Arabs, very often children and women, are just randomly pulling out kitchen knives or screwdrivers and other things and just stabbing random Jews on the street. There have been cases where it doesn't even seem like it was planned at all. There was this one case where an Arab teenager seemed to be on her way to school. She had a packed school bag and everything to indicate that she was actually planning to go to school that day.

but then who randomly pulled out a knife and began stabbing a random Israeli until she was shot and killed. And just the year between... October 2015 and October 2016, there were hundreds of stabbings and attempted stabbings and shootings and vehicle attacks. That one year, just from these, 38 Israelis have been killed, almost 600 wounded.

During the same period, 235 Palestinians have been killed and almost 4,000 wounded. But neither the Palestinians nor their allies in the region seem any closer to giving up today than they've ever been.

the long-time popular mayor of jerusalem teddy culloch he was once asked what ought to be done about the arab problem and culloch looked at the interviewer and he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he said, the Arab problem, we don't have a problem. Problems have solutions. We have a condition.

in conditions you just learn to deal with the zionists are never going to give up israel and the palestinians are never going to give up their fight to return in gaza writes back wrote sometimes a homeland becomes a tale we love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland because of the story There are more stories in this country than anywhere else in the world. In the end, our stories are all any of us have.

if this conflict is going to end with any result other than the total destruction of one of the two sides it'll be when somebody figures out how to tell this story in a way that allows both sides to feel that they're suffering has been acknowledged I've brought this up to Jewish friends before and they usually just think I'm being silly but

An apology might go a lot further than anybody imagines. I heard an interview a while back with some U.S. Army officers who had served in Iraq for a while. These officers, their job was to go out. into the country go find the families of people who were killed by mistake by u s forces and to try to work out some kind of compensation for their loss

When you hear about a drone taking out a wedding party or something like that, these are the people who go out and find the victims' families and go talk to them on behalf of the U.S. government. This is something we started doing all the way back in World War II.

You know, one of our Jeeps would run over some French farmer's kid or something as we made our way toward Germany. And so I'm listening to this, and it's interesting. And then they start talking about the compensation that they would provide to these people. And sometimes...

you know we had killed a goat or we had destroyed a piece of farm equipment or something and the value of those things is pretty easy to work out but other times they were talking to somebody who had lost a wife or a child because of a mistake we made because of something we did

And so the interview asked this officer what kind of compensation that we would typically provide for something like that. And the officer said something, I don't remember. It was like $5,000 on average, something like that. And so the interviewer said the same thing that everybody listening was probably thinking, which is what I was thinking, which is that offering somebody $5,000 to make up for killing their family member is not compensation. That's an insult.

That was the first thing I thought, but the officer who had done this many, many, many times over a few years, unfortunately, he said that it typically did not work like that.

he said the program was actually incredibly successful and that the people were almost always grateful but he said they weren't grateful for the sum of money which by itself would be insulting he said what made the difference was just the fact that the suffering and the loss experienced by these people was being recognized that we took the initiative that we came to them and took responsibility and told them that we were wrong

and we were sorry, and we wanted to make it right. The officer said that, you know, he said, look, everyone everywhere in the world knows that there are such things as wars. Whether or not they agree with the reasons behind this one or that one, people know that they happen. And everyone knows that in wars, sometimes things happen that shouldn't happen. However much it hurts, people generally get that.

what people want is recognition and he said you wouldn't believe the miracles that can happen when you actually try it for any solution to the israeli palestinian conflict or the arab israeli conflict or I guess now the Jewish-Muslim conflict. It's expanded to that. For any solution to even get off the ground, if there's going to be a solution, it's going to have to begin. With the Israelis recognizing what they have done to the Palestinian people. With them saying, look, it was crazy back then.

okay we didn't know what else to do we didn't have a home and it was pogroms and then the holocaust and everything else that was going on and we were desperate and we just didn't know what else to do But none of that was your fault, and it shouldn't have landed on you, and we are sorry. We are sorry. And then by the time any of us, your people or my people were born,

this stuff was already happening. It had been happening. And then we were caught up in it. You were taught to hate us. We were taught to hate you. And then by the time we're teenagers, I'm being conscripted into the IDF and you're being taught how to make a Molotov cocktail to throw at me. So can we work this out or what? All my Jewish and Israeli friends laugh when I bring that up. But I'm going to keep waiting around for somebody else to come up with a better idea. I my

I find it kind of sad. The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had. Find it hard to tell you. I find it hard to take. When people run in circles, it's a very, very See that. Which I'm dying are the best I-