A second stretch goal in one month!
I said these stretch goals were controversial, didn't I?
Today we're going to talk about… maybe the most controversial conflict of the modern
age.
A story millennia in the making, and one so big it's going to be a two-parter.
Let's talk about the story of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Hi, I'm Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
Be sure to click the subscribe button as well as the bell notification to never miss a new
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Periodising, the story of Israel and Palestine, can be… difficult.
The ideas which led to Israel's founding had origins all the way back to the second
century CE when the Romans pushed many Jews out of modern day Israel, and they left in
a diasporic movement to Europe, where they were constant subjects to violence and mistreatment.
Century upon century, as Jews dispersed around Europe and developed into their own cultures,
one dominant idea kept them together.
The desire to return home.
Though it was not until many centuries later this plan set into motion.
In 1799 Napoleon offered Palestine to be a Jewish homeland.
By the late 19th century, Palestine was a part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries,
divided between several lords, and primarily made up of Arab Muslims.
There was also significant minorities of Arab Christians, followers of an Islamic religious
movement called the Druze people, and Jews.
However, in the late 19th century, most Jews lived outside of Palestine.
Jewish communities were concentrated in parts of eastern and central Europe, the Americas,
the mediterranean world, and other parts of the middle-east.
Another thing coming to prominence in the late 19th century was a concept called nationalism.
We've touched on this a few times on Step Back, mostly because of nationalism's incredible
propensity for causing violence, displacement, and genocide.
It's the concept every "nation" what that term means is never fully explained,
but they all should live in their own homogenous state and reject outsiders.
Essential for this story is this movement spawned both Arab and Jewish Nationalism,
the latter typically referred to as Zionism.
It's this idea we're going to begin with.
In the 19th century, the wonders of nationalism led to an increase in repression and violence
against Jewish communities, with Jewish pogroms in Russia, and increasing anti-semitism in
Germany.
With all this talk of nations, Jewish communities around Europe and the Middle-East began to
discuss resettlement of the Jewish people to their ancestral homeland seriously.
Mmm mmm, Nationalism breeding nationalism, this is going to end well.
To many, this was seen as the solution to the growing antisemitism and repression of
Jewish communities.
The movement formalised in the year 1897 with the founding of the World Zionist Organisation.
They called for the building of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine.
It promised a Jewish right to self-determination and would be a safe haven for Jews around
the world.
(psst, they didn't seem to think much about the people already living in the land said
nation-state would be built) The World Zionist Organisation began their
plan by attempting to aid in the immigration of Jews to Palestine, and the purchasing up
of land in the area.
The region still belonged to the Ottoman Empire and had its own Arab nationalist and Syrian
nationalist movements picking up steam.
Oh, and of course those still were loyal to their Turkish overlords.
It was in this period, you have the first acts of violence between Jewish and Arab communities.
One of the first examples of this was the 1882 death of an Arab man named Safed at a
wedding.
He was shot by a guard for the new Jewish community Rosh Pinna.
In retaliation, 200 Arabs threw stones at and vandalised them.
Over the next few years, the cycle of violent incidents and retribution began to escalate.
Over time this began to be more wrapped in the language of nationalism, than just intercommunity
conflict and theft.
Palestinians began to see Zionism as the problem.
The purchasing and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs from their land began to ring as an
existential threat.
It was here the Ottoman Empire stepped in.
They clamped down on the purchasing of this land to curb immigration.
Many of the Jews moving to Palestine in this period were Russian, sworn enemies of the
Ottomans, and they worried about more Russian influence in their territory.
Similar concerns arose when the Ottomans lost their hold over the Balkans, so it seems much
in line with Ottoman policy.
By 1892, the Ottomans banned land sales to foreigners.
By the time of the First World War, the Jewish population in Palestine was about 60,000,
with a little over half being recent settlers.
So this was the state of the geopolitics of the middle east when the First World War broke
out.
The Ottoman Empire had a defence pact with Germany, and so once the war began, the Ottomans
entered on the side of the Central Powers.
In a brief moment of agreement, Jewish and Arab groups in Palestine decided to back the
Entente powers, Britain, France, and Russia to see Palestine freed from Ottoman control.
You might remember, this worked out well for the British.
In 1915, through the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence came an agreement about Arab sovereignty.
Lawrence of Arabia Y'all!.
And through this correspondence, there was an agreement to give the Arabs a state after
the war, in exchange for a massive Arab revolt against the Ottomans.
One year later, the British got prospective control over what would become Israel in the
1916 Sykes-Picot agreement.
This gave the British the authority to handle what would be the fate of Palestine after
the war.
It also is pretty much responsible for A LOT of the instability in the middle-east, but
I think the Sykes-Picot agreement could be its own video.
The agreement made to push the Arab revolt was undermined just two years later with the
famous, or infamous 1917 Balfour declaration.
You might have heard of this before.
It proposed Palestine was going to become the national home for the Jewish people, but
they couldn't violate the rights of the non-Jews living there.
That same year, the British defeated the Ottomans and occupied Palestine, where it would stay
under control until after the war.
In the 1919 peace treaty in Paris, the Ottoman Empire officially lost control of the Middle-East.
Things initially could be interpreted as cautiously optimistic.
In 1919, the World Zionist Organization leader Chaim Weizmann made a deal with the future
king of Iraq Faisal I, and signed something called the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement for cooperation
in the Middle East.
In it, he agreed to accept the Balfour declaration, and let Palestine become a Jewish homeland.
Faisal was the leader of the Arab nationalist movement, and the Palestinian Arabs did not
like this agreement.
Many broke with the Arab Nationalist movement over it, preferring Palestine become its own
Arab state.
The Allied Supreme Council met in 1920 to sort out this issue.
It formalised Britain was going to manage Palestine, and it would enforce the Balfour
agreement.
They invited both Zionist and Arab leaders to make a deal, but one was never drawn up.
The next two years resulted in an attempt to carve out borders and decide which land
would be a Jewish homeland, and which would not.
The British compromise was to make two states, one Arab, one Jewish, to honour both conflicting
agreements they had made during the war.
This included shrinking the overall size of Palestine, giving some to what would become
Saudi Arabia.
In 1946, a different chunk, the Transjordan, was granted independence as modern day Jordan.
This time sparked the first movements of a new, Palestinian nationalism, formed in opposition
to Zionism.
Nationalism, in reaction to nationalism, which is itself a reaction to nationalism.
Such a great idea, nationalism, so so great.
Palestinian Arabs grew in their demands to make an independent Palestinian state.
In the meantime, Jewish immigration expanded massively.
Anti-semitism was on the rise in the interwar period.
I WONDER WHYYYYY in places like Germany.
There was also another pogrom against Jews in Ukraine during the Russian revolution,
leading to about 90,000 immigrants arriving in Palestine from 1919 to 1926.
Once the Nazis came to power, this rate of immigration doubled.
The same conflicts over land began to pop up again.
Many of the newly arrived Jews moved into established Jewish communities, but the war
caused a lot of absentee landlords.
Many Jews bought up this vacant land.
In what they saw as a perfectly fine and legal purchase, Arabs saw Arab farmers being replaced
with white European ones.
They also took issue that these new landowners were refusing to sell or lease land to Arabs,
and wouldn't hire them for any jobs.
The 20s saw an increase in tension between these groups.
In 1920, the Palestinian movement got a new leader, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Mohammad
Amin al-Husayni.
He tried to raise religious passions against the Jews by spreading a conspiracy theory
that they planned to rebuild the temple of Solomon on the site of the Dome on the Rock
and the Al-Aqsa mosque.
To summarise what this means in way too simple terms, in Jerusalem, there are a lot of holy
sites for Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
Many of these sites overlap.
One such is the site where an ancient temple of Solomon existed.
It was destroyed by Romans, and on the site it was built upon now sits the Dome of the
Rock.
The dome is one of the holiest sites in the Islamic faith, where they believe Muhammad
began his night ride to heaven.
So… this place is still a tense location to this day.
This tension began to sprout riots starting in about 1921.
In response, the Jewish population founded the Haganah, a sort-of Jewish paramilitary
force.
In 1929 a massive riot broke out leading to large-scale massacres.
While Britain was distracted preparing for another World War, they tried again between
1936 and 1939.
This led to a lot of bloodshed.
The British attempted to respond with a 1937 commission proposing a two-state solution.
One state for Jews, and another for Arabs.
Neither side liked it, and the Arab leaders outright rejected it.
They tried again with a different commission the next year, this time proposing no mass
movement of Arabs, but it did result in an Arab state without any resources or the possibility
of self-sufficiency, and it too fell apart.
In 1939 to buy more time, the British placed limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine,
and on the Jewish purchase of Arab land.
These restrictions held until the end of the Second World War.
This led to waves of illegal immigration, as Jewish communities tried to take in refugees
escaping the holocaust.
During this revolt, ties began to build between the Arab leadership in Palestine and the Nazi
movement in Germany.
Nationalism… mm mmm mmm.
These connections turned into cooperation as the second World War started in earnest.
Germany promised to remove the Jewish presence in Palestine after they won the war.
There was even a Palestinian-nazi joint military operation.
The British didn't much appreciate this and began to more openly support the Jewish
communities.
Despite that support, Jewish paramilitary organisations unified into the Jewish Resistance
movement and began to commit terrorist attacks against the British, including a brutal bombing
of a hotel by a Jewish radical group called the Irgun.
Several hardline Jewish groups were active in this period, including the Stern gang which
paradoxically tried to make an alliance with Germany against Britain during the war.
This never went anywhere for obvious reasons, but both sides' hardliners were playing footsie
with the Nazis.
After the second World War, Germany was defeated, and as details of the holocaust came to light
in the following months, much of the world started to support the Zionist cause.
In 1947, the United Nations added to the ongoing tradition of "getting a bunch of people
together to decide what to do about Palestine".
Their meeting resulted in new borders for two states, with a tiny Jewish minority in
the Arab state and a big Arab minority in the Jewish one.
Jerusalem and Bethlehem would be under control of the UN directly.
The problem was neither the Jewish nor Arab state would be contiguous.
Jews worried about losing Jerusalem, Arabs worried this 'Jewish' state would be over
2/3rds not Jewish but ruled as a Jewish Nation-state.
This idea went before the General assembly and succeeded 33 to 13.
The problem is most of those 13 states that opposed it were neighbouring Arab countries.
As soon as the plan was approved by the general assembly, Arab fighters began to carry out
attacks against Jewish communities.
Fighting and riots continued for several days.
Consulates that supported the plan were attacked, bombs went off, Molotov cocktails were thrown,
and a synagogue was burned to the ground.
Jewish resistance fighters retaliated attacking various Arab villages and communities.The
violence grew out of control over the next few months, killing a thousand people, and
injuring way more.
A month later this had doubled.
Despite all the violence, one part of the plan still went into motion.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the existence of a new independent state of
Israel.
His words were surprisingly inclusive.
He wanted to "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants
irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience,
language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will
be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations"
Israel was now a declared state amidst unending chaos, but will these lofty words of equality
become anything more than words?
Find out in part 2!
While I'm here.
I made a Step Back subreddit a long time ago and would like to try to make a bit more of
a community out of it.
I'll put the link in the description, but I definitely want to hear from you about what
an ideal Step Back subreddit would look like to you.
I'd also like to thank all these awesome patrons who support Step Back on Patreon.
This video was a stretch goal on there, and the next one is on Iran, so if you wanna see
that video go to patreon.com/stepbackhistory The theme song is by 12tone and come back
soon for more Step Back.
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