What ah ship boy. Now, any introduction I could make like that for this episode is just going to be in poor taste. This is Behind the Bastards, UM, a podcast that is never introduced well and wasn't introduced well this time. But at least I stopped myself from getting into major trouble. Are you proud? So Ki proud? The training has worked? So today we have a special motherfucker of a tale for for everyone. UM. Obviously, if you've been like even paying the least bit of attention to the news, UM, you will notice that a lot of terrible ethnic cleansing or ethnic cleansing adjacent stuff has been going on in Palestine, or has been done in Palestine recently by the Israeli government. UM. We have not really delved into any of that conflict or it's bastards. And today we're going to talk about the Net and Yahoo family. UM. And because this is well outside of my wheelhouse, our guest today is doctor Donna el kerd um, an Assistant professor, PhD in political science and author of Polarized and Demobilized Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. Uh, Danna, how are you doing today? I'm okay. The time difference is gonna make me perhaps not the most lucid, but it'll be fine. Yeah you are. It's like late at night for you, it's unspeakably early in the morning for me. So, um, that's like a normal human six am for Robert. I was gonna sympathize, but I no longer a sympathize. You should not. Um, Dana, could you want to give a little bit of your background here, just kind of before we get we get started on the episode today, Yeah, like like personal professional background. Yeah. So so, Um, I'm from Jerusalem, Uh, born there, and I lived there for some time and then I Um, I had kind of a weird topsy turvity tale. But I went to Japan and then I went to the United States. UM and I received a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in putical science in government. UM and I specialize in compared to politics and international relations, with a focused on Palestine. UM And well generally yeah, yeah, and I'm happy to have you one. I'm happy to be talking about this because, like I think, there's there's a couple of reasons people don't talk about what's happening in Palestine enough. One of them is kind of the almost insurmountable, well, it seems less insurmountable now than it ever has, but like almost insurmountable level of kind of thoughtless, inherent sympathy to Israel that is built into the US education system and to our media system, to the way that stories are framed. There was a great New York not a great New York Times article, but a New York Times article that was a great example of this recently where they they talked about the number of Israelis killed by Hamas rockets and the number of Palestinians who died and that were killed by like just died like okay dead out of yeah sympathy, And it's um so I so, I think that's one reason why this doesn't get enough coverage. But I think a reason why people like myself who are inherently sympathetic to the Palestinian um cause maybe don't cover this enough is um the historical complexity. And when I say complexity, I'm not talking about the complexity of the morality of the situation, because I don't think it's particularly complex. I think it's an ethnic cleansing, but the history is and I think when you like one of the things that has stopped me for maybe covering this as much as I would have wanted is um, I get so nervous when I try to figure out how to talk about the history, because there's a lot that goes on, not just with the history UH since n in Palestine, but with the history of the Zionist movement there. Like it's just a shipload of stuff has gone on. So today we're gonna be talking about the net and Yahoo family and their role in Zionism, and we're also going to be kind of giving an overview of how that kind of played into two more broadly, the ongoing UM I mean ethnic cleansing and Palistina. I can't really use that phrase enough, I don't think so. UM I mean kudos for using it, I'd say that's not the common one that's used. If the if the UH series of government actions taken to remove a religious and ethnic group from its homeland fits uh. I know that's where we were going on that one. So UM Yeah, I kind of thought a lot about how to actually cover this, and I feel like, because this is behind the bastards, UM are strong point is covering individuals and people who are particularly shitty, and I think kind of the Net and Yahoo family is a good way to ground this because of how central they've been to a lot of everything that's happened there over the last I don't know, eighty some years, seventy some years, how many years has been since night like, yeah, seventy one. Um. So there are a lot of sources for this episode. A key one was the book b b by Ansel Feffer Um. And I think there's some folks who are better versed in the history of the region that could bring some criticisms of this book, But to me, it seemed like a really fair and very critical look at both Net and Yahoo bab Net and Yahoo and the Net and Yahoo family, um. And it gives a lot of detail about kind of the the early Zionist movement. So we're gonna start by talking about Babie's grandpa, whose name was Nathan Milikowski, and he was born in eighteen seventy nine in the village of Kreva in modern Belarus. Now. At that time the area was part of the Russian Empire, and as the documentary Fiddler on the Roof shows, it was not a great time and a place to be Jewish the Russian Empire the eighteen seventies, a lot of real bad things happening there. Um, roughly five million Jewish people lived in what was called the Pale of Settlement. Now, this was a clearly defined area of territory within the Russian Empire where Jewish people were legally allowed to reside, and it was illegal to be a Jewish person living outside of the Pale of Settlement, which is not a situation that I think would seem familiar to any people living at Balastine today. Now, um, if Jewish people left or traded in other parts of Russia, they could be arrested. And it is worth noting that when these laws were first laid down in the fifteen hundreds or so, everybody in Russia who wasn't a noble had this kind of limited freedom of movement. Right, Most people were serfs, they were slaves bound to the land. So in the fifteen hundreds, when the Pale of Settlement is established, the Jewish Jewish people in Russia are not the only people who were restricted from moving this way. Right, Russia's a horrific autocracy. I mean, it's still kind of is, but it was an even worse one back then um when serfdom ended, though and freedom of movement was extended to the mass of citizens, Russian Jews remained restricted. And that's kind of like the eighteen hundreds now. The Czars in this period were absolute monarchs, and the reasons for restricting their reasons for restricting Jewish businesses from operating in parts of the Empire were generally as petty as believing there were too many Jewish innkeepers in a specific like part of the Empire, like Poland, and wanting to put a stop to that. The Czars also opened parts of the Russian frontier up to Jewish habitation when they wanted to colonize those areas, though so they both restricted them and used them as colonizing agents in areas like Ukraine. By the end of the eighteen hundreds, things had started to open up a little, but it was not an even process, as this quote from the Jewish Virtual Library makes clear. Quote. The Jews hoped that these regulations would prove to be the first steps towards the complete abolition of the pale of settlement. However, they were disappointed when these alleviations came to a complete halt after eighteen eighty one, as part of the general reaction in Russia at this period. The Temporary Laws of eighteen eighty one prohibited any new settlement by Jews outside towns and townlets. In the pale of settlement, Jews who had been living in villages before the publication of the decree were authorized to reside in those same villages. Only the peasants were granted the right of demanding the expulsion of the Jews who lived among them. The decrees were bound up with intensified administrative pressure, brutality by local authorities, and the systematic acceptance of bribery on the part of the lower administrative ranks. So that's kind of the situation in Russia in this period. When Nathan Milikowski grows up and that's Babie's grandpa again. Um, Now, his family is dirt poor, Probably not a big surprise given everything we've talked about. His dad is basically a subsistence farmer. But Nathan is gifted and is immediately kind of noted as being very intelligent and marked to go to a yeshiva, which is a religious school. Uh. Now, his family was so poor that the entire village had to take up a collection to fund his education. Education. At that time, rabbinical students and Nathan is a rabbinical student, were forbidden from studying anything but religion, so it was like illegal for kids in the ashiva to study math, science, foreign languages. Part of this was because Russia had a jew quota in university, so you couldn't have more than a certain number of Jewish people out of college. UM. And another part of it was there there's a lot of weird Russian laws bound up in this, but the gist of it is that a lot of kids in the Yeshiva are like illegally studying not just ath but socialism and communism at nighttime, which is why so many socialist revolutionaries in the late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds in Russia were Jewish. UM. By the time that Nathan was starting his education of the eighteen nineties, UM anarchism and communism had gotten to be like increasingly popular underground topics in the Yeshiva, and a lot of kids, like Yeshiva students on the left, were leaving school to take part in growing movements against the czar. Nathan was not one of these. He was taken by a very different strain of radicalism what was known as Hovevi Zion or the Lovers of Zion, and these are one of the first European Zionist movements. Uh. In short, the members of Hovevi Zion believed that the Jews of Europe needed to immigrate to what had historically been, you know, the biblical land of Israel, which at that point was controlled by the Ottoman Empire. Nathan fell in love with this idea, which was at the time widely panned by the most influential Russian rabbis of the day, who felt like, no, we we've gained a lot in the way of rights, unless we need to like stay here and continue to be you know, part of the Russian state. Um. Now, among the most influential Hovevi Zion advocates was a French Jewish journalist named Theodore herzel Um. And herzel was again French, so he covered the dry Fust affair in Paris in eighteen ninety four, which we've talked about before in this show. And he was so horrified by the rise of the anti Semitic French right and the dry Fist affair. Is this Jewish French officer gets accused of passing secrets to the Russian He was innocent, but it became this whole culture war issue. Um and Herzel is so horrified by this that he decided, you know, basically the only option a Zionism because there's so much anti Semitism. Theodore was a secular Zionist. Um. He was not particularly religious. His advocacy for Zionism had really nothing to do with the religion itself. It had to do with more with kind of the anti Semitism that Jewish people faced, and it was very much you know Earlier's the kind of the modern manifestation of these ideas is very much like, uh, a product of their time, given kind of rising nationalist sentiment um in certain parts of Europe and certain even certain parts of the real least um under the Ottoman Empire. So it's it's kind of like they're expressing their need for you know, self determination and dignity through these this lens of like nationalism. Yeah, and it's it's it is very time, Yeah, I mean, because that you're you're right, it is important to note this is a global movement that's a big part of like at the end of World War One. There's this understanding of like the right of national self determination, which is never evenly applied or even particularly honestly applied, but that idea becomes increasingly common UM, and it is like these these Jews in different European countries are seeing other groups UM kind of establish a national identity and they start to feel and it is very much motivated by horrific repression because there's a lot of programs in this period of time, right, there's a lot of murders, so it is there's a there's a a strong kind of defensive element to this. You can understand like why this would be so appealing to people dealing with the kind of ship that they're dealing in this period of time. UM. And Nathan Milikowski was kind of on the more religious side of the Zionist things, so Herzel is a more influential figure in this time UM, but he's secular. Milikowski is kind of influenced directly by radical Zionist rabbis UM. But he still winds up because this is just kind of the thing that is easiest to do at the time, was preaching on the more secular end of Zionism. He never served as a rabbi despite being ordained. Basically, as soon as he gets out of the Yeshiva, he starts traveling around the Russian Empire giving speeches to drum up interest in the Zionist project. In nineteen o three, British Zionists, supported by Herzel backed the Uganda Plan, which would have established a new Jewish homeland in East Africa, presumably without asking to people who already lived there. And again, you know, this is a Jewish Zionist movement, but it's also British, which is why they're saying, like, well, why couldn't we just take a bunch of lantin Africa? Africa seems fine, there's anybody they're um now that said, like, so you've got this mix of really privileged, wealthy imperialists but also a lot of desperate Russians who are like, yeah, Uganda sounds a hell of a lot better than Russia right now? Why not? Um? And this is uh kind of mixed in with like. Part of why the Uganda Plan seems like a good idea to a lot of people at the time is that the the Ottoman Empire is pretty strictly refusing to allow their Jewish population any kind of autonomy. Um, of course, they're the Ottoman Empire. They're not really big on autonomy, being an empire. Um, it's kind of any yeah, for any minority group. Yeah, it's not like they're not they're not even particularly um oppressing the Jews if you want to, like, look at what they did to the Armenians is much worse. So it's certainly like they're not picking on Jewish people purely here. Um. So the Uganda plan is really popular among Zionists for a while, but it's not popular with Nathan Milikowski. He rejects the plan specifically because he was afraid it might work and that would stop Zionists from trying to retake the Holy Land. Now, the Uganda Plan obviously fell apart before too long, and after that happened, European Zionism split into two groups. There were the political Zionists, who sought to convince one of the great powers generally Great Britain to give them a charter for a Jewish commonwealth and Palestine. And then there were the practical Zionists, who thought that Jews should raise money to immigrate to Zion and build a legal settlements there and that that was the way to establish. One side is like, if we convince a great power to give us a state, that's the best option. The other side is, well, we should just raise money, move their start communities and then eventually have enough power to fight for our independence. There. So those are kind of the two chunks of the Zionist movement after the Uganda Plan um in nineteen o seven at the eighth Zionist Congress, these are like, you know, big yearly events where everybody talks about how you're gonna how you're gonna do with zionis um um. At the eighth point of these, Nathan accuses delegates in favor of the Uganda Plan of quote betraying all the generations um, which is there's this idea um within we'll talk about this a couple of times in the episode that Jewish people cannot cannot fight each other for political reasons, but there's also this idea, and Nathan is when he when he accuses the Uganda Plan supporters betraying the generations, there's this idea that if you take certain actions that are anti Zionist, you're not Jewish anymore. Really, like that's that's a big part of this, and it's gonna play a role in the assassination of an Israeli Prime minister Um later on in this episode, Um and Benjamin Netanya, who's very proud of his grandfather for this. He keeps a picture of his grandpa at this conference in his office. That's going to make a lot of sense later on. So uh, Nathan, and you know, it continues to be a kind of fringe Zionist figure during this period. In nineteen ten, his wife gives birth to a son, ben Zion net and Yahoo, Bibi's father um And ben Zion is raised and kind of at this point the most extreme wing of the Zionist movement. Nathan supported the family in part by writing articles, which he wrote under the pseudonym net and Yahoo, which is a name from the Bible that means given by God. In nineteen seventeen, the British government issued a public statement known as the Balfour Declaration. This is because World War One is going on the British, you're fighting. The British have actually just gotten their asses kicked in a horrific battle against the Ottomans in Gallipoli, and the Balfour Declaration basically is Great Britain giving its support for the establishment of a quote national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. There were a number of reasons for this. One of them was a hope that it would increase Jewish support for the Allies in neutral countries because Britain's trying to get everybody is possible in on their side of this war. Um, and other of it is just kind of a you know, there's they're fighting the Ottoman, so they're sticking a thumb in the Ottoman saying like, this is what we're gonna do when we beat you. The third reason is Balfour was an anti semit Yeah, he really want to choose out of Europe. Yes, And that is a that's a big part of this, and it's I mean that goes deep within kind of the anti Semitic movement, down to the fact that before World War Two, among the Nazis, there was the Madagascar Plan, which you can see is kind of descended from the Uganda Plan, which is like what if we move all the Jews to Madagascar, another place where no one else lives, you know, but yeah, always like the answer to the white supremacy is let's push it on Africa. It will be fine. It's empty. That is. That is the overwhelming attitude during this period. UM. And there is there's a lot of people within the British government who have resistance to the Balfour Declaration. UM. A decent number of them recognize that there's no way to push for the establishment of a Jewish state. UM in Palace dined without a lot of bloodshed. UM. And much of the anti Zionist resistance in Britain actually came from British Jews. And I'm gonna quote from history dot com here, led by Edwin Montebu, Secretary of State for India and one of the first Jews to serve in the cabinet. The anti Zionists feared that British sponsored Zionism would threaten the status of Jews who had settled in various European and American cities, and also encourage anti Semitic violence in the country's battling Britain in the war, especially within the Ottoman Empire. Pretty reasonable set of concerns, and they would prove right, yeah, I mean yeah. If you saw the Newsmax thing that came out today, No I didn't. It was like a clip on Newsmax, where the broadcaster is basically saying, like, you know, if you're a Jew and you support Biden, like he is like, you know, targeting your homeland if you're an American Jew, Yes, no Americans. I mean it's it trickles down this this thought process, like if you know, they're not fully citizens of wherever there um because of this alien thing that's being formed outside. Yeah. Yeah, and you're right. That is incredibly toxic because it plays directly into this idea that's critical to the Nazis that Jews are not part of whatever community, They're a part of their own separate thing. Yeah, it's it again, there's a lot of there's it's it's interesting the Balfour Declaration, which is so critical for the establishment of Zionism, is invented by any come up with, announced by an anti Semite, and opposed by a lot of Jewish people within Great Britain. Um. Yeah, but obviously, um, you know a lot of people, particularly guys like Nathan Milikowski, see the Balfour Declaration as a huge shot in the arm, right, like now we have a great power has finally backed us having our own state in Palestine. Now in nineteen eighteen, World War One ended, the Ottoman Empire gets broken up, and the League of Nations, dominated by Britain and France, UH, splits up all of these territories. You know, the Psykes, Pico agree it is, you know all that stuff. Um, and Britain gets a mandate over Palestine. UM. And this convinces Nathan to immigrate to Palestine with his family. UM. And he's a number of a lot of European Jewish people immigrate to Palestine during this time because the British takeover and it's seen as like they've just made the Balfour declaration, We're about to get our own state. Uh. They didn't stay long though, UM, because Nathan was soon sent by a figure in the Zionist movement to the United States, where he was asked to use his charismatic speaking skills to drum up funds from wealthy American Jews. And this will be like the major role the net and Yahoo's play in UH, in Israeli politics and whatever up until bb becomes Prime Minister. They spend the whole net Yahoo family spends more time in the United States than they spend in Israel. UM. It's just the way it goes um because they're good at like talking and drumming up money um. Now, while his wife joined him for part of the trip, ben Zion and the other Net Yahoo kids, while they're not netya who's yea grow up in boarding schools. Nathan was unhappy in the United States, which he considered decadent and impure, and he moved back to Palestine, but quickly isolated himself from the Zionist movement, which had grown really secular and socialist during this period. Again, it's not a religious movement and it's very much a left wing movement UM in this period, and kind of religious right wingers like Nathan are not particularly popular. Nathan identified with the Missrahi movement, which is kind of a religious fundamentalist Zionist movement UM, and as a result he kind of gets ostracized from the mainstream of of Zionism and he dies angry in February of nineteen thirty five at age fifty five. Now ben Zion was twenty five years old when his father died, and he very quickly abandoned the name Milikowski for the name his dad had used as a pseudonym Net and Yahoo, so that's Babie's dad, ben Zion Net and Yahoo. In the summer of nineteen twenty nine, when ben Zion was nineteen, a dispute over prayer organizations at the Whaling Wall turned violent. A hundred and thirty three Jews and a hundred and six teen Arabs died in a wave of mass like rioting violence. People are just murdering each other. Hundreds more are injured. And as far as I can tell, the crux of this, the Whaling Wall is sacred to both faiths. It's the last remnant of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem by Muslim traditions, the spot where Mohammed tight his steed after his night flight from Mecca. I think I'm getting yeah, yeah, yeah, it's ascendenced to Heaven. Yeah, yes, yeah, so it's it's it's super sacred to both sides. The violence, though, was about more like that's kind of and this is what you see over and over again. There's a spark that gets justified in history books, is this is why the violence happened. But it's really a bunch of stuff building up. Yeah, it's it's anger over um, the buffer declaration, it's anger over um. What Arabs in pastin pastin and Arabs saw as UM like economic market marginalization UM at the hands not necessarily of you know, the religious Jewish communities that have been in in you know, the old city of Jerusalem for for hundreds of years, but more of these kind of newcomers that are UM kind of setting up shop and only hiring amongst themselves and like being already quite discriminatory. And so there were these like marches during the UM There's like the Nabisad March and things like that. And like you said, it would be the spark for UM for for kind of like intercommunal violence. Yeah, yeah, And I I can't say again, this seems like a fairly fair reading of it to me. I'm interested in your thoughts on this UM in terms of talking about kind of the influence of this surge of violence the book, BB writes, quote, uh, prior to this, very few Jews had fully realized how They're growing presence impacted the local Arabs. August drove home the reality that two nations were competing for the same piece of land. Before then, the Arabs living there had not factored into Zionists thinking. The main question had been how to convince the great powers carving up the Middle East to grant the Jews sovereignty. The realization the Abs were going to fight, and that the British, despite Lord Balfour's grant promises, weren't going to automatically fulfill the Balfour Declaration towards the Zionist movement apart once again, and it tears them into these two sides. One who thinks we need to reach an agreement with Great Britain and also reach an agreement with the Arabs who already lived in Palestine and had been for generations, and one which says, funck that let's get a bunch of guns. Basically, Yeah, I mean I think that's pretty I think that's pretty accurate. Um. You know, both the left wing what you characterize as kind of left wing secular Zionism and the religious Sionism kind of saw, like the secular ones saw are the Pastinian Arabs is like this backwards, you know, again from like a white lens, like these are black words people like they don't factor. Um. Hurtzel had like written a novel like kind of encompassing his like Zionist ideas, where like he wrote, like you know, they could be servers, they can you know, they could like be part of society, like in this kind of fringe way, they can be our workers. Um. And then the religious you know side of designers, which again, like you said, I don't think was that will Um represented not in this period. Yeah. Yeah, I mean like religious Jews had existed in Palestine, that Palestinian Jews had been in Palestine that they didn't really identify with like a Zionist movement. Um. But yeah, those guys also don't see, you know, necessarily the humanity of other things. Um. So so yeah, I mean I think that characterization what you just said is seems seems correct. Yeah, they realize, oh, these people exist here, these people exist, and they're not just gonna let us take everything, and you get Yeah, I think as you characterize, you get the side that's like, well, we can live with these people as long as they're like second class citizens, and the side that's like, well, we'll just shoot anybody who disagrees with us, um. And critically, the we can shoot anyone who disagrees with a side is also willing to shoot the British, which is a huge part of like what is going to come next is this kind of um insurgent anger at the British for not immediately fulfilling what the Balfour Declaration, what these people assumed it had promised. Um. So yeah, that's kind of like the next couple of decades of of of the movement here um at age nineteen and and obviously Ben zion is on the we don't need to ask for anything side. We should take what we want, or we should take like we have a right to take this and we're gonna we can take it by violence. Like That's that's the angle of this that he's on. And at age nineteen he joins a group called Hat Zohar, which is the World Union of Zionist Revisionists. Uh. And this is the one. This is not the one, but this is a political faction of the Zionist movement who had basically decided number one, we're going to ignore the fact that Palestinian Arabs already owned this land. We're also going to say fuck you to the British. These are like the most extreme and most aggressive chunk of the Zionist movement. They were founded on the teachings of one influential Zionist, zeev Jabotinsky. Um, a secular Zionist who found inspiration in European nationalist movements um and including a number of like fascist movements. Um. Like he was, really, he was, he was, And that's a big part of revisionist Zionism prior to World War Two. Is a lot of sympathy before, but for at least kind of the way fascists are doing things because it's an ethno nationalist movement, and ethno nationalists stick together um, well to an extent with an external enemy. Yeah, yeah, with an external enemy. Um yeah, you know who, what's not an ethno nationalist movement. I certainly hope the products that support this podcast. It's like, yeah, thank you, thank you. That's that's that's what we strive for here. Um, all right, we're back. Um. So yeah, you've got this. You've got this guy, Jebatinsky um and who is who is a hardcore secular zionist nationalist who is like, will fight the Arabs, will fight the British, will fight anybody. Um Like that's that's the only way to get what we want. And he gets kicked out of the British mandate in Palestine very quickly because he's urging that it be overthrown violently. Um now. Jebatinsky is the early Zionist thinker who probably influenced modern bbing net and Yahoo the most. He believed that for a nation to survive, it must quote keep apart, untrusting, perpetually on guard a club at all times is the only way to survive in this wolves fight, which is basically Israelis domestic policy and torn policy today. A really big fans of the lean yeah, um now. He believed that uh. He rejected mysticism again, not a religious guy, an excessive religia city, and insisted that strength and violence is what would gain the Zionist movement the respect of other nations. This could be done by taking the land occupied by Arabs and defending it with a quote iron wall of Jewish bayonets. Now. In that same essay, he acknowledged that the forced settlement of Jews in Palestine would be resisted quote any indigenous people will fight the settlers as long as there is a spark of hope to be rid of the foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs of the Land of Israel are doing and will continue to do as long as a spark of hope lingers in their heart that they can prevent Palestine from becoming the land of Israel. So a lot of discussion about Israel is a settler state and whatnot. It's important to note that one of the founders of Israel, one of the most important Zionists in the history of the movement, explicitly described what they were doing as a settler attempt to displace an indigenous indigenous people. He did was not at all hiding that or trying to dress it up like we are ming in from elsewhere and we are forcing the indigenous people out and that is the goal. Yeah, a lot of them were quite clear. Yeah, was real clear. And Ben Ben Gurion was actually Jevitnski's main political enemy. Which again, when we talk about the left wing and the right wing of the Zionists and like the different they all still are basically agreed on we're going to come here and we're going to take what what we what we want, what we need by force if necessary, you know. Like that. There's not a lot of debate on that. There's a lot of debate about how there's a lot of debate about how to justify it. There's a lot of debate about how the state that they want to set up should look. They're basically they're agreed on the basics. Um and Ben Gurion ran an organization called Mapai, which was a kind of socialist e Zionist party. UM and I don't know from from where what I'm reading, these guys were bitter rivals. They didn't see them all that different, though. When it came to what to do with the people who'd been living in Palestine for generations, Ben Gurion was an advocate of multiplying the settlements there and old there were enough Jews in the area to force his state. He wanted Jewish settlers to see themselves as pioneers. Jebatinski wanted them to see themselves as soldiers, and Ben Gurion called Jebatinski a fascist. Um like a bunch of times, and that's not an unfair characterization. UM. Now, ben zion Net and Yahoo was pretty marginalized in these discussions. His most meaningful addition to the debate came during his early years at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, when he orchestrated the stink bombing of a British Zionist professor. Now, this guy Norman Bentwich was controversial because he had been the Mandate government's attorney general during the nineteen riots, and Zionists saw him as being too neutral in this job. Basically he was too fair to Arabs. Um. I don't know that he was fair to them. I'm not saying he was. That's how the zion can smell it. We can smell it, yea. So they stink bomb this guy and it's like it's a big deal um within the movement, and that's kind of ben Zion's he helps orchestrate that whole plan. No, what's funny about Hebrew University. Sorry this is a random interjection, but it was founded with the explicit support and approval and land from a prominent Postinian family that Hassan's Um, who later become this like trope amongst the Israeli propagandists that they're like, you know, all anti Semites and all these things, but um, you know the oh for a lot of Palestinians at the time, they they're like, yeah, it's another group. There's lots of groups coming in like we can we can help, we can help work with them. Um. I think that where the convergence, like you were saying between like somebody like mccarrey and somebody like Jermatinski. It came after the air of revolt in the nineteen thirties, UM, and they were like, oh, okay, they they're yeah like you said, but they're not they're not going to go quietly. Um. And then people like the Hassans and stuff, they're like, oh, this is actually like a settler colonial movement. Um, we should maybe we shouldn't be hoping. Yeah, maybe, and that I mean that's heartbreaking too, because it suggests that there was a way that you could have had a Jewish community in Palestine without having a horrific settler apartheid state and violence. You could have just had people living in Palestine that that that weren't at each other's throats. It wasn't ever been a safe haven. It could have been a national state that could have it could Yeah, there was actually that. I think it was. The president of Hebrew Hebrew University was like on record UM in the lead up to the ninety eight saying like he disapproved of the plans to expel arrows and like his his Zionism was are more of a cultural Zionism. I don't necessarily know all the variances of Zionism, but but there there were other possibilities. Definitely. Yeah, there's a decent number of people on both sides who do not want violence or the forced displacement of people. But they lose, you know, they that's the end, the end of the the end result here um as everyone knows if you've been watching hundreds of bombs fall on Gaza Um. Yeah. In ninety four, Hitler seized total power in Germany and that ended the dalliance some Zionists on the revisionist side of things had with fascism. Uh. In fact, when one official with the Jewish Agency, which was the organization that handled the immigration of Jews into Palestine, negotiated a deal with the Nazis that allowed German goods to be sold to Palestine, and the reason he did this was to allow sixty Germans Jews to immigrate before the Holocaust. This guy was declared a traitor to his people by the revisionists. They argued that he was not really Jewish and he was murdered. Um. Suspicion immediately fell upon it. And again this is this is going to be when we talk about ye Zak Rabine, this is going to be like, this is a through line here. Jewish people cannot kill each other for political reasons, as the attitude the Zionists have. But if you do things that certain Zionists don't like, you're not really Jewish anymore and you can be murdered. Um. And this guy gets This guy gets murdered, And I'm not gonna like, making a deal with the Nazis is not something I ever feel too fond about. But it's hard to see, like what options this guy had. He's trying to get people out of this state before the fucking Holocaust happens. I don't know, Like I've never had to make a call that tough, so I'm not gonna judge the dude. But he gets murdered, and he probably gets murdered by a group of extreme revisionist Zionists whose name in Hebrew literally literally translated to gang of thugs. Um. That's what they called themselves. Um. Now, Ben Zion and his father believed these guys were innocent because they didn't think Jewish people could murder each other for political motives. And while the Gang of Thugs were eventually acquitted, they almost certainly did it. Ben Zion, though, came to believe that the allegations against them had been a blood libel against the revisionist cause by leftist Zionists. And the blood libel we've talked about this in our episodes on the anti Semitism. Is this old Christian idea about like Jewish rabbi sacrificing Christian babies for anyway, the fact that he's using this term against the left is really extreme. I mean like father, like son, right, Yeah, his son later later does similar things. Yes, yes, absolutely, Angel Peiffer writes, quote. The episode left ben Zion convinced that there was nothing the left wing would not do to cast the Revisionists out of the Zionist camp. Now, ben Zion saw his role within the Zionist movement as that of a propagandist. He started in journalism, and he lectured his colleagues that quote, the first condition for our total victory is a combination of three factors propaganda, propaganda, and propaganda. He became the editor for a series of revisionist Zionist newspapers and spent most of his time attacking other Zionists for quote warping Zionism by seeking any kind of accommodation with Arabs. And when I say accommodation, I'm not saying that it is something we would regard as fair, but it's something he regarded as as yielding too much. Yeah, which is at all um. Any democracy that was multi ethnic he derided as a quote leftist dictate leadership. Um yeah um. And none of his papers were very successful. He is not popular at this moment. It does not really catch on other than among a small fringe. He was not even very popular among other revisionist Zionists. They saw him as a milktoast academic them what you'd call the realist, real ass motherfucker's within the revisionist Zionist movement had actually formed a militia we might call them, a death squad called the I c L, who trained and actually carried out attacks on both British and Arab interests in Palestine. These guys were terrorists. Um. I mean yeah, that's the only way to look at it. Uh. They received some of their training and weaponry from the Polish government, which was outrageously anti Semitic and basically saw the I c L as a way to get rid of Polish Jews by encouraging them to conquer Palestine. Poland is trying to train Polish Jews as an army to conquer Palestine. Like, that's the thing the Polish government does prior to the outbreak of World War Two. Now, a big part of the I c L S Deal was to carry out reprisal attacks for real and for sometimes imagined attacks on Jewish people in Palestine. Obviously there are actual attacks too. I don't mean to say like that that doesn't happen, um, But the i c L just spends a lot of time killing Arab civilians. Um. Some of these murders were in response to other murders. Some of them were just murders in nineteen thirties. I mean, they're all just murders. But some of them were just like this guy said a thing we don't like, let's fucking shoot him on the street. Uh. In nineteen thirty six, a concerted series of Arab protests broke out, an uprising really against Jewish immigrants moving into the region, against the stated Zionist goals to dominate the area, and against violence from groups like the I c L, and also against the British mandate, which both the Zionists and the Palestinians spend a lot of time fighting UM because it's a foreign power imposing its will on the people there. Nobody really likes the Mandate UM. The goal of these protests was to get the British government to a shually rescind the Balfour Declaration and to stop letting Jewish Europeans immigrate to Palestine. Obviously, the revolt did not succeed, and part of why was the fact that the British Army collaborated with the Haganah, which was a more moderate paramilitary unit operated by the Zionists alongside like Ben Gurian Zionists. You've got the I c L which are the revisionist Zionists under Jabotinsky, and you've got the Haganah, which is the more moderate Zionists under Ben Gurion. But they both have their militias. The Haganah is larger and better organized and it works with the British Mandate to put down this Palestinian revolt, which is really the birth of the I d F. In a lot of ways, the current Israeli military because it does come directly out of the Haganah. And during this period, the British because that and this is something the British do everywhere, right, They do it in Kenya, they do it all over Africa, they do it all over Southeast Asia. Wherever they colonize, they find local groups to organize an arm to put down other local groups. UM. And I think that's just how they see what they're doing with the Haganah. I was like, these people are more willing to work with us, will give them guns and training to put down these other people, will keep everybody split up so nobody can overthrow us in in the mandate, you know. And then there's more affinity obviously that they with Europeans than absolution. A lot of these a lot of the Hagana guys are Europeans, so they guess some of them are even British, so it's easier for them to interface. But the training and the arms that the hagan are received during this time are a big part of why in nineteen forty eight things work out for them, um, because they have this huge head start, they have this UM and that's the thing. I think there's a lot of focus when people talk about like why Israel has been so military lee successful on on just the weaponry they receive. It's not just the weaponry, it's also training, an organization and military doctrine that they receive from the European powers prior to the outbreak of fighting, especially in the Very in nineteen forty eight. That's almost a bigger part than any specific arms, although the arms that they get, like particularly the Soviets, are a big part of it too. I don't want to like say that it's not, but it's a lot of things. Um Now. The years of violence that followed would establish what came to be a pattern in Palestine. Jewish militias, benefiting from foreign arms, training and joint force operations, operated at a level of proficiency not matched by their indigenous opponents. And the fighting that followed the revolt, two hundred and sixty two British soldiers died, three hundred Jewish soldiers died, and more than five thousand Arabs died. Um Now. Many of the Arabs killed were reprisal murders carried out by the I c L. In the early nineteen thirties. This was not super popular among Zionists. It was a controversial issue. Even Jabotinsky, who was technically on paper the leader of the i c L, but he had been exiled opposed a lot of these revenged killings, but that did not stop them from happening, and the idea about whether or not it was acceptable to carry out reprisal killings changed very rapidly. By nineteen thirty nine, the idea of organized reprisal murders against Palestinian Arabs was common enough that David Gurion, who again is the moderate here, authorized the formation of a special Operations Unit to carry out reprisal murders against Palestinians, essentially a death squad. So the I c L's attitudes kind of become mainstreamed after the Arab revolt um and by the time the revolt died down, the British had revised their official stance on Zionism. They were released a white paper that made everybody angry, which is generally what the British do in this period. Instead of supporting Jewish autonomy and Palestine, they now backed a bi national state in which Jews would make a permanent minority. Uh To further this, they capped Jewish immigration into Palestine. This angered Zionists for obvious reasons, but it also piste off everybody else, because the Palestinian Arabs were being told by a foreign power, you're going to have to give these people some of the land you inhabitant, and inhabitants were still going to keep letting them in to take more stuff. And it's begin It's worth noting that at every stage of this, the messiness of what was always going to be a complex situation is continue really escalated because you've got this foreign power who is the ultimate power in the region, but they don't really understand or give a ship they keep. They may They'll make one decision one day, another decision the next, um, and it's kind of based on whatever people who are sitting back in London, uh get convinced of on that day. Like it's that's a huge reason why this is so messy. Now. The revisionist i L responded to this declaration by the British with a series of terror attacks on British military basis and more murders of Arab civilians. The Haganah, for their part, launched an illegal immigration operation. So the i c L starts killing people, the Haganah starts like illegally like coyote ing people into Palestine. UM. Now, while this is happening. Those Polish I. C. L. Guys over in Europe are preparing themselves to invade. They're getting armed, they're getting trained, and right as that was about to maybe happen, World War two kicks off and things get a lot messier now. While all this ship was going on, ben Zion Net and Yah, who continued to be largely irrelevant. He was a permanently frustrated academic. He got into continual battles with more influential professors and historians at the university, who he hated because he called the Marxists and some of the more Marxists um. In the late nineteen thirties, ben Zion put together an anthology called Political Liberty Political Library Sorry, made up of writings of his favorite Zionists, all of whom were far right nationalists who wanted their Zionism free of socialism. One of ben Zion's favorite Zionists was a guy named Max Nordau, who advocated for muscular Judaism. He also wrote an infamously homophobic book about the decline of Western civilization. Another of these thinkers was Israel Zangwill, who coined the phrase Palestine is a country without a people. The Jews are a people without a country, which is that became mainstream? Yeah, it really, that's why, Like that's the thing. He's a fringe in this period, this becomes the norm. Like ah um now Zangwill was a big advocate of the idea that Palestine was an invented country. And if some of these guys sound kind of fashy, it's because they absolutely were. Up until World War Two, a lot of revisionist Zionists were very pro fascism. Even once the war started and Nazi war crimes against Jewish people ramped up, there were some Zionists who were willing to work with the Nazis. And I'm gonna quote from BB here because the story is fucking wild. Abraham's Stern was the I c L commander charged with training a force in Poland to fight an insurrection against the British and Palestine. He defied Jebatinsky and refused to lay down his arms. The Polish officers who had helped train and equip his men had been killed or captured by the German Wehrmacht, but that didn't deter Stern from trying to ally himself with the Third Reich. Like more radical revisionists who had admired fascism back in the twenties and thirties. Stern believed that despite the Nazis anti Semitism, their interests could be aligned in a war against the British. His attempts to communicate with Berlin were ignored, but Stern stuck to his anti British policy a stually breaking with the i L. In August nineteen forty, he formed the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, dismissively known by the British and many mainstream Zionists as the Stern Gang. Now Stern is fringe. I want to note that it is the Obviously, the idea that you can work with the Nazis not popular among scientists, but it does happen. Like there are absolutely Zionis are like, well, we can work together. If they don't like, we don't want to be in Europe either, we want to take over this territory. Maybe they'll work with us on that um. So that said, the vast majority of even revisionists saw where the wind was blowing. World War two started, i L operations against the British mandate were halted. Tens of thousands of ben Gurion's men flocked to join the British Army to fight Germany. Ben Zion net and Yah, who was not at all involved in that he had been sent by revisionists to the United States, like his dad before him, to lobby American Jews and politicians to build support for an Israeli state. Now and shl Feffer despicts him as fundamentally marginalized and largely irrelevant in this period. Ben Gurion was also in the US around the same time and was much more effective. But Gurion was a savvy man, and he quickly realized how to influence u S opinion in favor of the Zionist movement, telling his colleagues back at home that quote, the way to acquire the American administration is acquiring the people the public opinion. Thus was born the Zionist strategy of hasbara or explanation, the use of public diplomacy to make the case for a Jewish state directly to the American people and trusting that this would lead to political and military support. Now, Ben Zion was one of a crowd of activists who spent the war years trying to influence American politics. In June of nineteen forty four, he attended the RNC in Chicago, and he was one of many Zionists who secured a pro Zionist plank in the party platform. Politics being what it is, the Republicans criticized Roosevelt for not insisting the British carry out the Balfour Declaration. This put This pushed the Democrats to adopt basically the same policy and marked the first successful joint action by the different wings of Zionism. And they realize one great way to succeed is by pushing the Republicans and Democrats to try to top each other in supporting Zionism. You can get a lot done if you do that, um, which is basically how things work today. That's good. I mean there's some changes, you know, there's there's some whispers of hope. Yeah. I'm definitely seeing, like in just the mass media reaction to what's happening now, a lot more criticism of the Israeli government, even from like there was again we just critique the New York Times. There was a horrifying New York Times article from a Palestinian that was, like the log line was if they cut the power, if Israel cuts the power while they still bomb our home. Um, which is like a question being asked by a child in Gaza. So like there's it's not as I don't know. I don't yeah, I see what you mean. Like it's become so far removed from the whims of worst anyway at this point. Yeah, yeah, it is. And it doesn't seem like I think hoping that the billions of dollars in military aid Israel will stop. Um, I mean feels uh almost almost like a foolish hope. Um. But I don't know. Fingers crossed. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not I'm not an American politics expert. So I just put my head in the sand and pretend like things are okay. Yeah, yeah, maybe things will be okay, especially now that we're going to adds. That makes all all better. Capitalism, capitalism solve this little Oh boy, you can't even finish the Sundens, No, I can't. Alright, we're back. So by late in World War Two, obviously the Holocaust is in full swing. It's very public knowledge. And while tens of thousands of Jewish people flocked Jewis Zionists had flocked to fight for the Allies at the start of the war. By nineteen forty four, a lot of them were furious about how little had been done to save the Jews of Europe. Menachem Began, the commander of the I c L in this period, published a call for revolt in his group started attacking British infrastructure again before the end of the war. This forced been Gurian to have the Haganah attack the I c L, and in the purge that followed, many revisionists were sent to concentration camps operated by the British in Africa. Now begin made the decision not to fight back against the Haganah in order to avoid a civil war. Within the Zionist community, this is seen as having cemented the domination of Ben Gurion's Mapie Party in Like for the next you know, couple of decades. But it also fueled resentment of in the right wing Zionist movie this idea that we can't trust the left because they will always seek to purge us Um, even though the reason there anyway, they were doing terrorism against the British during World War Two. That's why Ben Gurion got angry at them. So the war in Europe and the infighting in Palestine convinced ben Zion Netan Yahoo that the cause of Zionism was more or less hopeless. And a big part of this is he feels like all of the people who were going to conquer Palestine for Israel got murdered by the Nazis um and so he kind of loses hope in Zionism in this period and increasingly focuses on his own academic career. For a while, he seemed to be right. At the end of the war, President Truman demanded that one hundred thousand Holocaust survivors be allowed to immigrate to Palestine. The British opposed this, arguing that it would upset the balance of power and lead to another Arab revolt, and this led to another brief period of collaboration between Ben Gurion's Haganah, the I c L and the Stern Gang, who were the kind of Nazi guys. Now for the first time, all three paramilitary organizations worked together under a joint command and launched a massive sabotage campaign against the British. While they battled the British and Palestine and international pr campaign was launched by other Zionists using the imagery of the Holocaust to spark sympathy for the creation of a Jewish state. The sabotage campaign reached its peak in July twenty, nineteen forty six with an act of terrorism. The i c L filled milk cans with explosives and blew up the King David Hotel, killing ninety one people, most of whom were civilians. This prompted the Haganah to break with the I c L, who kept doing terrorism alongside the Stern Gang for a while. Now it was foreign lobbying rather than insurgency that finally did the trick. On February fourteenth, seven, the UN Special Committee on Palestine delivered a report that suggested an into the British Mandate and the partitioning of Palestine into two states. This made most Zionists pretty happy, but the Palestinian Arabs rejected it. Ben zion net Yah, who also rejected it. He authored a full page ad that ran in the New York Times and was titled Partition will not solve the Palestine Problem. His argument was that allowing Arabs to maintain any land that Jewish people had ever lived on at any point in the past would doom the great Zionist dream like that's his argument is um, we we we should have it all. Partitioning isn't fair because we don't get at all. Um. In November of nine seven, the partition plan was approved by a yuan vote. When Ben Gurien announced the establishment of the State of Israel in the Tel Aviv Museum, ben Zion Netanyahu was still in New York. He and his fellow revisionists were furious and the viciousness with which the I c L had conducted itself, and sure that they were completely cut out of the new government. Now most people probably know, the establishment of the modern nation of Israel was immediately followed by a big, ugly war. Armies from five Arab nations, alongside tens of thousands of local Palestinian fighters went up against the Haganah UH and the Haganah one. This isn't a military history podcast. Their defeat is a mix of factors, poor coordinations between these different Arab nations, political corruption, hesitancy among a lot of these countries to commit significant forces to the Palestinians. A lot of token forces. Yeah, yeah, a lot of token forces. Right, it's not you hear five armies and fought against the Haganah and it seems like one thing, but it's like no, a lot of them were just kind of doing the minimum, you know. Um. But a big factor is that the Haganah had been trained and armed by one of the most successful by two of the most successful militaries on earth, because Stalin is a huge backer of the State of Israel and the USSR since a shipload of weaponry um to support the Haganah. Now that will change later on, but in the like the crucial early hours the Soviet Union is is kind of full throated behind the Haganah and the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the violent expulsion of Palestinians that followed Israeli victory has come to be known as the nakba or catastrophe. Catastrophe, right, that's it doesn't mean catastrophe, but it refers to not the violent expulsion after, it was the volent expulsion during yeah sorry sorry, during in yeah, during these events, yeah yeah, yeah, while this is happening. Um. And so I'm gonna try to give an overview this. Before the UN resolution and all of the fighting, Jews in Palestine had owned about six percent of the land and made up thirty two percent of the population after partitioning. The partitioning was set to give them fifty five percent of the land of the population, while Palestinians, who made up sixty percent of the population, would be given forty of the lands. The number one. You can see why the Palestinians were really angry at the U N resolution because it's like, why are we not getting the like like this is like blatantly unfair, um, but it gets a lot worse. Like again, that's just how things were supposed to be set up by the UN resolution. During the fighting in the Haganah executed Planned Dollet, a strategy aimed at depopulating Palestinian population centers. The goals of Planned Dalet were to take the northern border, control the entire coast, and clear out Palestinian towns and cities between Jerusalem and Jaffa on the coast. Planned Dalet called for quote destruction of villages, setting fire to blowing up and planting mines in the debris, especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously. In the violence of Planned out and estimated fifteen thousand Palestinians were killed, four hundred and eighteen towns and villages were ethnically cleansed off the map. Seven to eight hundred thousand Palestinians were displaced. At the end of it, seventy eight percent of Palestinian land was under Israeli control, which is a loss of about four point three million acres based on what the u N resolution said they were supposed to have. So at the time, the Haganah coordinated with many of the militias that were seen as right wings, including Stern and the groups. Um, sorry, the Stern and the yea yeah, the other ones yeh and and like committed massacres like at the scene that's like the Masters, Yeah, the major one that is pretty well known as the massacre. Yeah. And it's I mean again, something like fifteen thousand people, mostly civilians killed during this period. It's it's a it's a massive active nick cleansing like that is the start of And that's the thing I never learned about in school. I just learned, um oh, the mean Arab powers all tried to wipe out Israel at the same time, and they lost. I didn't. And then another myth was yeah yeah, and then and then another myth was that, well, okay, they did kill lots of people, but it just happened in the course of the fighting. But it was definitely premeditated and these people were not armed, These were villagers. These were villages wiped out. And that argument, the idea that like, well, yeah it was terrible, but it just happened during the fighting and war is ugly. That's the same argument that the Turks make about the Armenian genocide, Like that's why they deny that there was no There was fighting on both sides. Yeah, well one side got all of their civilians massacred and the other side didn't, so like yeah, and one side was like a state and you know, well not a state, but like you know, hadn't becoming a state. Yeah. I was talking about the Turks on that one, but yeah, y yeah, yeah, absolutely yeah. Um. Now, up to this point, the net ya Who family had again been bit players in the Zionist movement. A lot of people, especially today BB and the net Who family tries to really play up the role that Ben Zion and that that Nathan played. Angel Feffer, who knows a lot more about the history of Zionism than I do, makes a pretty convincing case that they were very much minor figures, and part because nobody really liked ben Zion. He's kind of a dick. He seems like he was just like even to other right wing Zionists, a lot of them just saw him as kind of an asshole, Like nobody really wanted to work with him on ship, and he had a really inflated opinion of himself, like he was kind of there's I don't know, I'm not going to diagnose a guy, but he he he was always frustrated by the fact that his career was not as great as he wanted it to be, and he was not as influential as he wanted to be, and he stays even after nineteen when the State of Israel comes into being, ben Zion remains convinced that the whole project is doomed. And I think the big reason why is because it hadn't happened exactly how he thought that should happen. Clearly, it won't work if they didn't academic yeah, absolutely, um. So he and his family still left the United States and moved to Tel Aviv to give, you know, give it a go, And it was there on October twenty three, nineteen forty nine, that Benjamin net And Yahoo was born and he is He is the first and so far only Prime Minister of Israel who was actually born in Israel while Israel was a political entity. Um And he was born a citizen of both Israel and the United States. His family quickly took to calling him b B. Now it was not I don't know. It doesn't sound like an overly happy home to me. His father was miserable in Israel because his his academic career, language and obscurity. He continued to do research in academic writing, but he was locked out of prominence. They didn't have a lot of money. They heavily relied on family, you know, in order to to to make ends meet um and the Israeli far right, which is itself marginalized in this period, locks him out from any kind of meaningful position because he hadn't been an insurgent right menach and Began, the former head of the i c L is kind of the leader of the right in this period, and he had no use for anybody who hadn't been in the i c L. Like that's really the dominant part of the Israeli right in the start, as like anybody who had been fighting and ben Zion hadn't picked up a gun, so fuck him now. While ben Zion labored in frustration and baby Benjamin did you know, baby stuff Menach and began began to knit together a coalition of secular right wingers, religious extremists, and Jews who had been marginalized by the majority of the Paie Party. One day this coalition would be Benjamin Netanyah, who's base of power In the late nineteen forties and early fifties, though Benjamin and his older brother Jonathan were just two kids, Yoni and BB to their family wandering around to Jerusalem that was still war racked and partitions. So Israel is not in control of all of Jerusalem at this point. Um. And it's so there's like military checkpoints, there's barbed wire fences, there's land mines all around. Bitten stuff, It's it's a it's it seems like a pretty dangerous place. BB recalled as an adult not feeling that um, not really feeling under siege, but feeling as if his life had to exist within quote sharp borders. Like one of his early memories is his mom taking him out by the hand to show him where all the land mines were it to be like these are areas where you can play, these are areas where you can't um bb and Joni's home life was quiet because ben Zion could not abide noise, so his wife and his children had to be silent whenever he was writing or reading, which was pretty much always. They relied on relatives for money, and ben Zion would later blame his failures in academia in this period on a bias against conservatives within the Hebrew University. Now the reality, yes, Angel Feffer points out a lot of right wing academics succeeded during this period of time. He just seems to have not been very great. He sucked at working with people, He couldn't compromise, people didn't like him. It wasn't his politics. He was kind of a dick um. That's the argument I think angels may kind of in more history graphical terms. Now, Yoni and Beeby loved Israel as much as their father didn't. Yoni was three years older. He'd been born in the United States. He was tall and thin, while Babie was, according to one relative, fat like a ball. He was seven years old in nineteen fifty six when Israel joined with France and Britain in a secret packed to invade Egypt. Um there's we're not going to give any of this as much history as it needs for a complex understanding. The basics are that Um, the Egyptian president who had come to power, tried to nationalize that had nationalized the Suez Canal, which took it out of the control of the British and French companies. UH. Israel like wanted more of a buffer against Egypt, so they were willing to work with the British and the French, and they wind up conquering the entire Sinai Peninsula and a big chunk of the Israeli like the right in the center are like, we're going to keep this forever, while Britain and France are like, no, you're not. But at the same time they don't do any thing in this period to stop it. Um and babies like that. You know, there's a war during this period. It's a pretty scary time to be a kid. Babies memories of it are, in his words, sharp but not traumatic. His main memory is sticking pieces of tape to the windows in his room so that if Jerusalem was shelled, the windows wouldn't shatter from the book Baby Quote. His main memory is of the father of a neighboring family returning from the Sinai battlefield in a dusty jeep, distributing chocolate bars to the children he had bought them in the Egyptian town of Larish, the site of someone else's father, who, like nearly all the other fathers of his friends, was contributing to the war effort, in this case in uniform, while his own father remained home must have rankled. So Bebe and Yoni are kind of frustrated that their dad is an out there fighting, you know. They're like, why, like all the other dads are doing cool army stuff, why aren't you, Um aren't you? Yeah, why aren't you shooting anybody? Pap? And for the most part, regular warfare, because there's a bunch of constant skirmishes, even when there aren't like the big military act, there's pretty regularly fighting. And it's not all happening in the recognized borders of Israel. A lot of it is Israeli troops fighting in Egypt, fighting in Syria. Um. And that all kind of blends into the childhood of Bibi and Yoni. Uh Yoni was kind of the leader. Bib absolutely adored his brother, followed him everywhere. The two boys were social, and Yoni wound up gathering a gang of neighborhood kids together around him. Uh the Netanya who's stuck out because they wore American clothing which was sent by ben Zion's brother in the us UH. They lived under strict family discipline, though, and Yoni kind of chafed against the discipline of ben Zion. He regularly broke rules in order to test boundaries. Bibi did not. Bb obeyed his father. Once, when they were out exploring abandoned Palestinian homes and gardens, Yoni attempted to hoist his little brother up over a fence. Bibe was too heavy and he fell and split open his upper lip, leaving him with a scar that he attempts to hide in all of his public photographs today. The family now claims that the scar was caused by an electric burn when he was too and the re sason they lie about this is that today Yoni is like a sainted war hero and admitting that he dropped his younger brother would be like a sin essentially like um. Well, we'll talk about the cult that has kind of formed around Yoni later Um, and the reality is that like, yeah, they were kids and he dropped his brother, like whatever. Um. The net and Yah who has moved back to Israel in nineteen fifty eight, so they leave for a while. They moved back. They do this a couple of times when the nut and Yah who's your kids or sorry? Moved back to the United States in nineteen because ben Zion gets a job in New York. Bbe would spend much of his childhood and adolescence bouncing back and forth between Jerusalem and the United States East Coast. Whenever they moved. Yoni remained the charismatic, popular leader, and b B his dutiful and adoring brother. In high school, Yoni was the president of the student council and the leader of the local boy Scout troupe. BB does not seem to have resented him, and to the best of our now, everyone seems to see he basically worshiped his older brother. In nineteen sixty two, when Yoni was sixteen and BB thirt, the family moved back to the US yet again. Ben Zion was getting old and he was desperate to make a mark as a historian, which he did not feel he could do from Israel. He also didn't enjoy the comparatively spartan conditions there. The Net and Yahoo boys were devastated. Babie recalls leaving his close friends behind as very traumatic and a terrible dislocation. Now, yeah, imagine being dislocated from your friends and family would really suck. Baby. Yeah, I can see why you wouldn't like that. It only counts for him, Yeah, absolutely, the sheer trauma of being forced to move to the United States. Now, both boys were good students, although BB proved much better at learning English than his brother. They did not take to American culture though. In April nineteen sixty three, Yoni wrote a letter home to a friend in Israel that quote, people here talk about cars and girls. Life revolves around one subject sex. I believe Freud would have rich ground here a seed and pick his fruit Slowly. I am being convinced that I live among monkeys, not humans. Now this is where we're kind of leave the Net and Yahoo's for today. But it seems weird and kind of fucked up to end today's episode on this note with everything going on in Palestine right now, So instead I want to end on another story from the nakba Um and this is a story I found in an Al Jazeera episode about survivors of that calamity. Um Abu Arab, who is now an Israeli citizen, was a thirteen year old boy when Jewish paramilitaries came to ethnically cleanse his village, Safuria, outside of Nazareth. Quote. They bombed us from the air just as we were fasting for Ramadan. They knew we would all be in our homes. His parents fled with he and his siblings into a nearby forest. In the morning, troops occupied the village and they were forced to flee towards Lebanon. After a brutal journey on foot, they reached a refugee camp where his twelve year old sister died from heat exhaustion. He recalls, my mother would sit by her grave every day, lost in grief. Eventually, his father decided they had to travel back home, which was extremely dangerous. When they reached home, they found their village gone fenced off and declared a military zone. Anyone who entered would be shot. The family had to hide at a friend's house in Nazareth, where they slowly began the process of rebuilding their lives. Now, despite the fact that Abu Arab is now an Israeli citizen, he has no right to return to his village or the land that his family still owns. In Israeli legal parlance, he is a quote present absentee, as in he's present in Israel, but absent from his property, which has given the Israeli state the right to hand his family property over. His village is now host to an exclusively Jewish community where Abs are not allowed to live. And part of why this is relevant is that, again we talked about the inciting incidents. This is not why everything started recently, but it was kind of the spark is um that neighborhood in Jerusalem, a bunch of Palestinian families were being cleared out. In the justification was the land that they had lived on for generations had been bought by Jews in the eighteen hundreds. Now, the reason why those Palestinian families wound up in that neighborhood is because after the Nakba, when East Jerusalem was partitioned off, they had to flee there as refugees and it was the only place that they could live and the reason why that land is just the the Israeli state justifies taking those homes from them by saying, well, it was owned by Jewish people earlier, and they have a right of return, But none of those Palestinians have the right to return to the areas that they had originally lived in that were taken by Jews during the nakpa um, which is I mean, yeah, like it's not it's like the selective application of the right of return, because the Israeli state sees itself like it's only in service of people who are Jewish. Um. I think the you know, we can talk about this more later, but the nation state all kind of cemented that as like they're the only ones they have a unique right to self determination nobody else does. And then on top of that, just to clarify the ships of that situation, there weren't any homes there. Um that I mean, I think the way some collections or something that they bought the land, they built the homes themselves. Um. So it's even even further removed from the you know, their their own reality of like being expelled from Haifa and all these other cities, and that for you, Yeah, it's it's pretty fucked um. Yeah, and we'll talk well, we'll talk more about the what net and yah who says about the nature of the Israeli state Because it's I mean, it's it's it's f no nationalist ship, it's it's it's pretty fucking fascist. Um. I think it's fair to call it that. Um. And it's bad. But you, Dana are great and I really appreciate uh, you coming on and lending your your much greater experience and knowledge, UM, so that I don't screw this up. I appreciate you having Yeah, this is great son. If people want to support you, they can buy your book, Polarized and Demobilized Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine. And if people listening are angry and horrified about what's happening in Gaza, what's happening in parts of Jerusalem right now? Um. Is there any place you think they could they could give money to maybe help. Yeah, there's a medical aid for Palestinians that has teams both in the Gaza and the West Bank. Um. It's a very legitimate organization that is serving a you know, a growing need. Um. And then for people who are interested in kind of supporting Jerusalem families. UM, there's UH to own uh Palestine. It's t A A w O and UM as well as UM grassroots and quotes. UM. So that's both on the economic front and on the home and then and land seizure UM uh situation. You can kind of help on both ends. Awesome. We've will have links to those both in the show notes behind the Bastards dot com UM and on our Twitter account. Well we'll tweet that out too. So all right, thank you, Danna. We will be back on Thursday with more stuff. That's real bummer. He's not not a lot of fun. I'm a super fun guest. UM. No, you've been actually, you've been really wonderful. Thank you.