Noam: Hey, I’m Noam Weissman and you’re listening to Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history.
As always, I’d love to hear from you, so shoot me a note, hit me up. Email me at noam@jewishunpacked.com. Your email might even get on the show.
I want to give you a little peek behind the scenes. This work doesn’t happen in a vacuum, at all. Before every episode, there are several people who we get feedback from, including scholars of the region and history, but also just people, regular people, Israelis, Palestinians. That’s what we hear from.
But we often get feedback from listeners, and one of the things that we have been hearing about from listeners is, we’d love to hear from more voices from the Palestinian world. They like hearing from real people.
Which is why I’m excited for this episode. I’m sitting here with my friend Ahmed Fouad Alkatib. Did I pronounce that well? Decently?
Ahmed: Yes sir. Good job.
Noam: One to 10, would you give me me? Can’t say seven.
Ahmed: I would give it at like eight.
Noam: Okay, so you say your name.
Ahmed: Ahmad Fouad Alkatib. That’s, that’s like the raw ‘Ah,’ but for most media it’s Ahmed Fouad Alkatib.
Noam: Oh, no, no, no. So that’s like a three. The way you just said it was a three.
Ahmed: No, no, exactly. But that’s how CBS does it.
Noam: Okay, so, okay. I’m better than CBS. That’s good. I’ll take that.
Listen, I need to say this. You don’t represent anyone in particular. You are your own person. You’re not here to, I dunno, represent a specific people. Is that right or wrong?
Ahmed: Thank you for starting that. I always insist on beginning with this. I’ve never once claimed to represent the Palestinians or speak on their behalf. I am one individual with a unique lived experience. I have a voice, one that is shared by many, but I am my own person.
I also want to be very clear about something which is that Palestinian history is something that has touched me at a personal level with my family, with my parents and grandparents, both of whom I’ve encountered and both of whom were living in the land in the thirties and forties when the nakba happened. And so I relate a lot of it to lived experience, but I am not a historian.
Noam: So let’s get there. Let’s get there. But lemme read your Twitter bio instead of reading your formal bio. Your Twitter or X bio, I should say, is: proud American, native Gazan, pro-Palestine, pro peace, anti Hamas, anti-occupation, Realign for Palestine, resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.
So listen, I’m excited to speak to you for a few reasons. One of them is, you’ve become a friend, you’ve become someone that I speak to, connect with, text with, engage with you, speak in a number of schools across the country. You are also, you can’t be tokenized. you’re an equal opportunity critic. If you have an issue with an issue, with whatever’s going on, you’re there to talk about it.
You might have seen Ahmed interviewed on TV, on social media, because, you might not be the biggest person in the room. You’re not over six feet tall, but you have a very loud voice, a very loud and outspoken and important voice.
So listen, I’m incredibly psyched this conversation. I’m psyched because we are going to have a lot of goals together where we’re going to talk about the history of the Palestinian people, the history of specific leaders, your history, your story, the present and the future. That’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to talk about certain major turning points. We’re going to talk about roads not yet taken and what we see as the potential next steps with Gaza and Israel.
And of course, like I said, I want to include your story and your identity as a key part of this conversation. So as I say on every single episode, yalla, let’s do this.
Ahmed: Let’s do it.
Noam: Ahmed. So happy you are here. I want to start this with your specific story. How did you learn about Palestinian history growing up? You grew up in Gaza, you lived there until you were 15 years old. Until 15 years old, how did you learn about Palestinian history?
Ahmed: So there were three vectors for delivering Palestinian history to young people, when I was there at the time.
Number one was the elderly generation. And that included, for me personally, my grandmoms on both sides were alive. But also I actually got to experience some of my grandfather Mohammed, who experienced 1948 and experienced the displacement from what was historic Palestine to the Gaza Strip. The stories that they shared about their time in their native towns and cities, the stories they shared about their displacement and the journey itself to Gaza, the difficulties of trying to be in a place that, like Gaza, which was largely desolate. I mean, most of Gaza’s history and development was focused on the city itself. And we’ll talk about some of its history. Rafah was there as kind of a border town with Egypt, but beyond that, Gaza was not very well developed with all the different spaces. So people went in there and it was a coastal dunes essentially. So that’s one vehicle.
The second vehicle is through history that was taught in our curriculum. And contrary to public popular belief, our curriculum was not taught by some rogue historians in the Palestinian Authority or by Hamas. There is no Hamas or UNWRA curriculum.
Noam: And you’re talking about the 1990s,
Ahmed: The 1990s and 2000s, the curriculum–
Noam: You’re a young guy.
Ahmed: was agreed upon by the international community that financed the Palestinian Ministry of Education. So my textbooks would actually come and say, financed with generous support from the European Union.
And so there would be a joint committee that would determine what goes into a lot of these textbooks. Right or wrong. I’m not here to deliberate that. I’m simply saying there was an internationally supported version of Palestinian history that was deemed worthy of financial support by the western world, and that’s how we learned it in history.
And then the third was random storytelling by Imams, by sheiks, by political analysts, by Al Jazeera. So those were the three places where we learned about Palestinian history.
Now there were common threads across all of these three. There was a very well established, almost consolidated baseline across all three that specifically goes into two or three historical timelines, starting with the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1916 Sykes Picot, and then there’s the 1936 Arab Revolt, and then there’s the 1948 nakba, and then there’s the 56 Tripartite. Tripartite aggression as it’s called.
Noam: Oh, interesting.
Ahmed: And then there’s the six day war. And then first Inti–
Noam: You called the Six Day War, the Six Day War? They called it that The Six Day War. I’m just focusing on language right now.
Ahmed: Yes.
Noam: So definitely Balfour Declaration. So when you were taught that, are they like, that was awesome, the Balfour Declaration?
Ahmed: Not in the slightest.
Noam: Okay. If you’d had a thumbs up or thumbs down when you were learning, you were like thumbs down.
Ahmed: Very much so.
Noam: What about Sykes Picot? Thumbs up or thumbs down?
Ahmed: Major thumbs down. Major mega. But Sykes Picot, in the view that is dominant in Palestinian history, set the stage for the emergence of what would become the state of Israel.
Noam: We have a podcast on Sykes Picot. We have a podcast on the 36 Revolt. We have a podcast on the 48, what you call the Nakba, what I call, what I call the Independence War. The War of Independence, to speak English. My bad. And then the 56 War, we call the Sinai War and the Six Day War, we call the Six Day War. You call it the Six Day War. You don’t call
Ahmed: They call it naksa. The setback. Yes,
Noam: Exactly. Okay.
Ahmed: But I guess the word naksa in an English for an English audience isn’t as well understood. And nowadays in the
Noam: Past. But the nakba is the nakba is because it’s part of modern parlance.
Ahmed: Precisely that. Precisely that. And even in Arabic though, there’s an attempt to revise the naksa. Naksa is like a setback, and people are like, no, it wasn’t a setback. It was a horrendous, humiliating defeat.
Noam: It wasn’t just a setback. Israel quadrupled in size, in size
Ahmed: And conquered all of this territory. But precisely, even people who are
Noam: Like, it’s like Orwellian to call it setback. Setback–
Ahmed: The setback
Noam: Exactly. It’s a little more than a setback.
Ahmed: Precisely. But I will say though, there is also an interesting thing about the 1956 tripartite aggression that’s literally wonder
Noam: Is from France, the uk,
Ahmed: Israel, the uk and Israel. So the idea is that the French and the British, particularly the British, were against Nasser’s annexation of the Suez Canal and decided to launch a war to retake it and use Israel as a means for intervening in the war. But it is not so much as associated with Israel or Sinai as much as it’s associated with three powers aggressing upon Egypt.
Now, it was a military defeat, but it was acknowledged, and I mean often acknowledged as largely a military defeat, but it was seen as a political success for pan-Arabism, and it was seen as
Noam: What’s pan-Arabism?
Ahmed: Pan-Arabism is the idea that Nassar and his, who was the president of Egypt who led the country, took it over in 1956 through a military 52 rather in a military coup from King Farouk, who was very much British protege, who promulgated this idea that in the post Sykes Picot world, in the midst of all of these post-colonial wars of independence in the new era of nation statehood, the Arab world should create this critical mass of all these individualized countries and kingdoms to come together to align and form an aligned movement, if you will, around Arabism as the–
Noam: I just want to understand you. If Egypt is playing in the World Cup in soccer football, is the goal of pan-Arabism to root for Egypt to root, for Syria, to root for Lebanon, to root for the Saudis?
Ahmed: In my older age, I’ve really come to resent pan-Arabism as something that has been immensely harmful to the Palestinian people because it stripped away Palestinian agency. It prevented the Palestinian people from having the ability, like for example, after from 1948 to 1967, why wasn’t a Palestinian state established? We had the West Bank, we had Gaza, and we had East Jerusalem and said, who’s we? The Arabs? The Palestinians,
Noam: The Palestinians? What do you mean? Well, the Palestinians lived there was after the 48 war, which Israel got 78% of the land, they were offered 55% from the United Nations. But they ended up winning that war getting 78%. The West Bank went to Jordan, Gaza went to Egypt. And what do you mean? So the Palestinians were living in the West Bank and Gaza,
Ahmed: They were living in the West Bank and Gaza. But the Palestinians, what began as an immediate post-war arrangement of the Jordanians having West Bank and the Egyptians having the Gaza trip ended up becoming a permanent arrangement in the case of the Jordanians, like an outright annexation basically of the West Bank. And in the case of the Egyptians, it was dominion over the territory, which, what’s ironic is that there are different historical sources that claim the British offered the Gaza, the area of Gaza to the Egyptians after it was taken over in 1917 from Sultan Abdel Hamid of the Ottoman Empires, it was falling.
So the idea being that the Arabs controlled Palestinian Territories and prevented the emergence of a Palestinian state. And it was only up until the sixties that they supported the idea of an organic Palestinian led nationalist movement as codified by the 1964 Arab League summit in Cairo that pushed for the establishment of what ultimately became the PLO, the Palestine Palestinian Liberation Organization. It was born out of the Palestinian National Council that then gave birth, if you will, to the PLO.
But just stepping back a little bit, the way we were taught that 1956 war was an example, and I want to really speak to this. It was an example for how effective resistance can, actually, this was the first time that the Arab successfully resisted foreign and Jewish slash Zionist slash Israeli aggression. So it was kind of the seed for some Palestinian nationalists like Fatah and S and Yassar Arafat and others who were in Kuwait and in the Gulf region.
And some of these guys, Kahlil something, some of these guys who were part of, they were actually at the time aligned kind of loosely with the Muslim Brotherhood. But then they shifted from Pan-Islamism to realizing, oh, pan-Arabism can deliver Palestinian nationalism. And so that was effective Egyptian resistance.
Now, what they don’t tell us is that part of why that war ultimately failed is that President Eisenhower of the United States was immensely furious for how the United States was not consulted, for the Israeli French and British decision to launch the war. So stepping back a little bit to how we taught history, we’re taught it through, our grandparents we’re taught it through these very specific lenses that address the issue of Zionist migration that was small. They talk about Zionist migration and they talk about Zionist purchasing of the land. What they also don’t tell us is the role in which many Palestinians and Arabs played in facilitating Zionist and Jewish purchases of the land. So those are things that were missing from
Noam: The picture. Picture, meaning the fact that they were purchased from Palestinians.
Ahmed: From Palestinians. Exactly. There’s a sense that a lot of the buildup to the Zionist presence in Palestine was somewhat coercive and strictly the result of British colonial rule, which in a sense is partially true. But we also know that the Brits at times oppose Jewish immigration to Palestine, but that’s not addressed. It is the narrative in Palestinian history is that the British wholeheartedly supported Jewish immigration to the land and facilitated the establishment of Israel in line with the Balfour Declaration and in line with the divisive kind of landscape that was established after.
Noam: The irony is tremendous because if you study Zionist and Israeli history, what you’ll find is the Jewish people living in the region known as Palestine at the time, what they were trying to do is they were trying to remove the yoke of the British imperial government, and they viewed the Brits as the imperialists. They viewed the Brits as the problem they were trying to, the King David bombing, which is an episode that we just recently recorded and released. The whole idea is that the Jewish paramilitaries were trying to get rid of the British hand that was reducing immigration possibilities for them. And were making it very hard to move to the land of Israel to cultivate the land of Israel. And what you’ve been referring to as Palestine and what the Jewish story has referred to as the land of Israel known at this point in time as the region of Palestine.
And I want to ask you about that. How is the Jewish story, from your experience and the story specifically as it relates to Israel, how were you taught about that in Gaza until you were 15?
Ahmed: The Jewish story unfortunately was almost entirely nonexistent. It was one that acknowledged some historical presence of Jews in Samir, Samaria, but it was very much so labeled as some Palestinian/Arab Jews who lived outside of Nablus in the northern parts of the West Bank.
So that, to my memory at the time, and I’m speaking again for myself, there was no acknowledgement in Palestinian history. There’s no acknowledgement of the existence of, and I’m not saying right or wrong, I’m simply reporting, of Jewish lineage and heritage to the land.
There is the belief that yes, they may have been exiled as Abraham, as God’s people from Sinai onto the land, but that it, that once the exile took place, Jewish heritage to the land ended, there was no acknowledgement that I was taught as a young man that the Jewish people were there during the times of the Romans and the Jewish people were there during the times of the coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of Christianity. And so there really was this kind of parallel world in which this was promulgated.
But I want to talk about something that I feel really strongly about that was, the more I think of it, the more I think it must have been deliberately scrubbed from the curriculum and from the history, maybe in part, and maybe that’s a bad thing, but maybe in part because it was financed, at least at the time with European money to build this curricula. I didn’t know anything about Hajj Amin Husseini. And no one in Gaza that I have asked about Hajj Amin Husseini knows anything about him.
Noam: To everyone listening, Hajj Amin al-Husseini was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was effectively the leader of the Palestinian Arab people for decades prior to 1948. And he was somebody who established a very close relationship with Adolf HitlerAhmed: And it’s also important to highlight that there were other competing leaders, right? Voices.
Noam: There are the competing voices.
Ahmed: The Nashashibis and others.
Noam: But you didn’t learn about Hajj Amin al-Husseini?
Ahmed: Not in the slightest. I only learned about him when I came to the United States and people were talking to me about the mufti of Jerusalem working to try to facilitate German landing in Palestine. And it was really just shocking to me. And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to, what this leader supposedly did to the Palestinian people. And why is it that in a modern context, in Hamas’ literature, in the PLO’s literature, in Palestinian history textbooks, we are not taught about–
Noam: So I want to ask about the Hajj Amin al-Husseini. I wanted to ask you, who are some of the original figures of the Palestinian national leadership that you learned about, some of the names? And then I have a specifically provocative question for you that I’ll get you right after.
Ahmed: Certainly, and I’ll caveat this by just once again stating, I’m answering as a non historian, as someone who’s like an average guy off the street.
Noam: Hey, everyone listening, you’re not listening to a historian. Okay. He’s not a historian. Okay.
Ahmed: So the two figures, you
Noam: Know who else is not a historian? I am not a historian. Yes. I host Unpacking Israeli History. I’m an educator. And now we’re going to hear from Ahmed who’s not a historian.
Ahmed: Yes, thank you. Thank you for reaffirming that. I feel much better already. But the two figures, the main competing figure within the Palestinian national movement that I think is just an interesting persona to think about was Raghib al-Nashashibi. Raghib al-Nashashibi wanted a much more Palestinian nationalist movement, whereas Amin Husseini wanted a Pan-Islamist movement, and they both famously organized two competing conferences in Jerusalem in 1931. And one was called the Pan-Islamist or Pan-Muslim Conference or Congress, or I forget the formal name. And the Nashashibi was the Palestinian Nationalist Conference or Congress, if you will.
And that I think is demonstrative of the enmity that the two clans had, particularly because of what I started saying earlier about the Husseinis, maybe I was saying this to you offline, were seen by many Palestinians at the time as the overseers, the implementers of Ottoman imperialism in Palestine.And the Jewish and Zionist organizations that immigrated to Palestine used that system to land and confirm their ownership to it in the taboo system that actually persevered post the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Gaza. For example, my family home, which was destroyed in this war, unfortunately, but we had a major crisis. My dad in the eighties bought this piece of property he built as is typical in Gaza. He built a story for his mom and dad and younger siblings. And then one story for our family, and then several stories for other family members. Our property was not in the tapu in Gaza up to the time that I was there. I don’t know how that worked after I left. The Tapu system was, it was almost the constitution for property deeds and ownership. And we as a family, not just my immediate, but even my aunts and uncles discussed, pulling as much resources as possible to register in the Tabu so that we could never be pushed out of our land by the Palestinian authority.
So the Tapu system goes back decades, to the previous century. And the Husseinis had a role in administering that tapu. So the Nashishibis as a rival family were part of the nationalist movement.
Noam: A question about this figure Nasashibi, one of the notes I have is that he was bitterly attacked by the Mufti’s party in 1926 because he was portrayed by his rivals as traitors, infidel stooges, British agents, Zionist allies and so on.
Ahmed: Well, what’s ironic is that there’s some literary or scholarly sources that suggest that I’ve read that Husseini himself once upon a time in the earlier, I mean, he cozied up to the British to keep the dynasty of the Husseinis going, and that he himself was fine with some figures of Zionism and that he saw–
Noam: Hajj Amin al-Husseini?
Ahmed: In the early days, the really early days, that he thought Jewish immigration would be very limited to Palestine. And he was used to kind of like this Ottoman-ruled Syria, Jordan, Palestinian Territories, all the different ethnicities and people. And he just thought that there might be space for the Jewish people to be there. And that’s why he, and I’m talking about in the early days of the Ottoman collapse, but there were other Palestinian figures who thought that maybe we can figure out an arrangement with the British and with the Zionists to actually come to some sort of an agreement. And then there were not only the Hajj Amin al-Husseini’s party who were against that eventually and would gatekeep any other Palestinian nationalists from talking to Zionists. So this is anti-normalization going back centuries.
Noam: Right. This sounds strangely familiar.
Ahmed: Yes, sir. Well, but how about that? From 1931 Congress, that the two simultaneously competing congresses by Hajj Amin and by Mr. Nashashibi, it reeks of Fatah and Hamas.
For listeners, Fatah and Hamas are the two dominant political parties. Fatah has largely dominant in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Hamas obviously being the party that controls and has governed Gaza for almost 18 years now. So one was a nationalist, the Nassashibi, and Huisseini, was an Islamist, very much so.
And then there were other unfortunately unhelpful Palestinian figures who wanted to be connected to the British wanted to have, maintain their status, maintain their wealth, maintain their connections, but somehow thought that out of a desire to protect the Palestinian people’s rights to the land, they criminalized talking to the Zionist. I’m talking here about Musa Alami.
His name has been floated in multiple conversations and discussions. And he had a famous line that he said to a Jewish leader that, I think it was maybe Ben Gurion, but who said that I would rather see the land desolate and not developed and wait basically until the Arabs can help us do it than work with the Jews and the Zionists to develop it.
So this mentality of, kind of, this maximalist mentality that set the Palestinian people back, that saw the Zionist movement grow but didn’t have an effective counterstrategy except for criminalizing any kind of middle ground, any kind of compromise, any kind of negotiations, any kind of engagement. There were others who did engage and who did try to stop what they saw was the collapse of the Palestinian people’s ability to live on the land, but they never kind of gained a foothold in the Arab High Committee of Husseini.
Noam: How do you respond to this question? This is the provocative question I wanted to ask you before. There is a line when people learn Israeli Palestinian history that I heard growing up and that I’ve shared and tried to get responses to from different students across the world, the line is the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
When you’re talking about the story of Hajj Amin al-Husseini being the leader, and you talk about the decision to launch the Arab Revolt and the reaction to the Balfour Declaration and Sykes Picot and what you refer to as the nakba of 1948, and certainly from your family and your family’s perspective, it was nothing short of a catastrophe. What’s your response?
Ahmed: So I’m a believer, one of my principles is multiple truths and multiple things can be true at once, without being an inherent opposition to one another.
On the one hand, that line is often said in a derogatory manner that is kind of infantilizing of the Palestinian people. In some sense, that is meant to oversimplify the reason for why we are where we are–
Noam: Meaning there’s a good reason to reject the Balfour Declaration. There’s a good reason to reject Sykes Picot. There’s a good reason to reject–
Ahmed: The UN Partition.
Noam: The Peel Commission in 1937.
Ahmed: Precisely.
Noam: Each thing, there’s a good reason to make an argument why–
Ahmed: At the time it was seen as something that is untenable, something that is unworkable–
Noam: Unjust.
Ahmed: Something that is unjust, certainly. And this idea of compromising, particularly you have to keep in mind, this was also happening with the Arab world, feeling betrayed by the British and the French with Sykes Picot having stood up to the Ottomans and had their revolt against the Ottomans with the promise that the Arabs would have their kingdoms, they would have their kind of territorial integrity protected only for the French and the British to divide up what was left of the Arab territories that the Ottomans had.
So there was this mistrust at the time that permeated the decision making of many Arabs. And again, this is contextually speaking what was dominant at the time. We can now in hindsight look back at that and say, that was wrong, that was ineffective. So that was the first part of the ‘never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’
On the other hand, I absolutely believe that there have been multiple opportunities missed. I think that it’s not a shame to acknowledge that as Palestinians. It doesn’t take away from the legitimacy of our grievances, but to make the same mistakes over and over, to not learn from the past, to not look at the past through a dispassionate lens that really takes out the emotions, takes out the story of grandma and grandpa with their key from the nakba and says, this is why we must never compromise and says, where did we go wrong? Where did we actually miss an opportunity here? Did we miss an opportunity with the Oslo process, that was fragile but viable?
And I remember vividly Hamas saying, what kind of an idiot, they would use that word, would agree to giving up 78% of historic Palestine and accept a two state solution and Gaza in the West Bank. And now Hamas basically understands that the Palestinians will be lucky if they ever could even come anywhere near the two state solution, that ‘moderate’ elements of Hamas ‘moderate,’ in quotations. So then why did we waste the last 30 years pursuing armed resistance and militarizing the second Intifada and militarizing Gaza?
So we can talk and we should talk as a people about the opportunities that we missed, but then what I would say is that many of the opportunities that were missed, particularly from 1948 to 67, to establish a Palestinian state, that was not the Palestinians missing that opportunity, that was the Palestinians being pawns in the hands of the Arabs, I mean, the Egyptians with Nassar and his pan-Arabism was in ideological opposition to the Saudis and to the kingdom of Jordan. And so they did not see eye to eye on the regional architecture of the Arab world, and Palestine was the battleground for that, and that’s why they didn’t want to have a unified Palestinian state that basically would see Egypt give up Gaza, which was a chief negotiating card, if you will, in the pan-Arabism and Jordan, which saw the resources of the West Bank, which also had aspirations to control the Haram al-Sharif in East Jerusalem as a way to claim religious authority for what is essentially a made up kingdom.
And I love and respect all my Jordanian brothers and sisters, I’m talking in historical terms, but it was kind of an attempt to mirror the Saudi experience of how that kingdom was formed and to say, we are the custodians of the two holy sites. The Jordanians, in a sense, tried to replicate that with Jerusalem, and so there was no interest whatsoever after the 1948 failure and saying, okay, well that failed, so let’s give the Palestinians a state. It was like, no, no, no, no, no. Now it’s to preserve the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. For the Egyptians. It was like, no, no, no, no. Now it’s to say Gaza’s going to be a part of this overarching pan-Arabist kind of hub and platform for a post-colonial future.
So those missed opportunities must be seen as part of the Palestinian people being really used as bargaining chips by the Arabs back then, or the Islamic Republic of Iran in a contemporary context.
Noam: Do you have Palestinian heroes?
Ahmed: That’s a very Western-leaning, Western-style question in the sense. So–
Noam: My apologies, I’m Western.
Ahmed: I’m Western too. I’m an American today. By the way, today’s the 11th anniversary of me becoming an American citizen.
Noam: Congrats.
Ahmed: Thank you. That’s why I’m wearing my–
Noam: American. You’re very
Ahmed: American-Palestinian, patriotic. Yes, yes, absolutely. And I’m like, you saw my Twitter bio.
Noam: Proud American. Proud
Ahmed: American, American, Western.
Noam: By the way, it sounds very middle America of, you proud American.
Ahmed: This is America. But no, I am absolutely. I’m just simply saying that this, we were never taught–
Noam: I have heroes that are Israeli. I look at people and imperfect people. I look at Rabin as a hero. I look at Menachem Begin as a hero. I look at Hayyim Nachman Bialik, an unbelievable poet, as a hero. I think Golda Meir did many heroic things. Each of these people did things that I strongly disagree with also.
So these are people that I look up to that help inform my story by looking up to them and saying, well, you did something that was remarkable. You sacrificed something, you achieved something, you fought for something, you died for something, or, you were willing to die for something. Are there Palestinian people that you say, wow, this is someone I look up to, albeit they’re, I assume imperfect. Mahmud Darwish?
Ahmed: Certainly, certainly. But I would be lying to you if I said that I know all of Mahmud Darwish’s poetry, and that somehow for me, as somebody who’s so deeply invested in seeing a Palestinian future, that is what takes it for me, that that’s what motivates me. I mean, may I dig into this for a second in an Israeli context, and I’m not against having heroes, but in a Palestinian context, unfortunately, because of the failures and the setbacks and the defeats and the divisions and the different decisions that were made along the path that I think were deeply horrendously unhelpful to the Palestinian people’s urgent aspirations and because of where we are today, looking at the state of Gaza, looking at the state of the West Bank and what has become of it, not solely as the responsibility of Palestinians, but looking at what could we have done differently?
Should we have accepted the Camp David proposal in the year 2000? Should we have accepted the Olmert plan? Should Hamas, whatever. It is difficult in the midst of the aforementioned to look back at Palestinian history and feel like I am being inspired by this person and that person. It is difficult for me to look at any of those folks and say what I’m saying today as Ahmed, the 34-year-old dude who grew up a part of his life in Saudi, but then grew up in Gaza and then came to the United States and got asylum, that I am thinking what I’m thinking and saying what I’m saying because of these Palestinian figures.
But I really do want to talk about something real briefly. I feel strongly about it, even though I may not have specific historical figures that I can point to and say, wow, these are the ones that truly and genuinely inspired me. I feel very strongly about saying the thousands of Palestinians whom I’ve encountered through my activism, through my advocacy, through my work, through my humanitarian airport project that I launched in 2015 to be in Gaza, an Israeli approved, internationally run, non-Hamas controlled airport in the Gaza’s trip to facilitate freedom of movement. We’ll talk about that in part two of this discussion.
Thousands of Palestinians that you and I can’t name off the top of our heads, talking about teachers, professors, technocrats administrators, humanitarian workers, media professionals, journalists, folks who are in construction, engineers, people across various sectors of society who are working really hard at building the Palestinian nation. At the time, they were working really hard at building elements, what they thought was Gaza’s reconstruction after the 2014 war. They’re working really hard at replacing Hamas’ destructive narrative about the armed resistance view.
And I am where I am today, and my views are heavily informed by the totality of the thousands of threads and pieces of information that I have learned through these Palestinians. These are my heroes, the nameless Palestinians that no one knows about, but they exist in Gaza, in the West Bank, in the diaspora, and they tell me about their experience. They tell me about their work. They tell me what I should and shouldn’t be doing, the mistakes I should learn from that they went through, they tell me about ways in which I could be different.
They tell me about what is happening on the ground. They give me creative ideas. They are allies.
There are thousands of heroes that I have in Gaza right now and in years prior who have inspired me to do the work that I’m doing, rather than pointing to a particular historic figures. So those are my heroes.
Now, for you, my brother, Israel has had immense successes. I mean, being dispassionate, this is me wearing my dispassionate hat. I mean, it’s hard not to find Israel’s story compelling of a people in long isolation, persecution, exile, and then slowly coming up with different iterations of how and using the idea of the nation state that was emerging in the 17 and 1800s and saying that Jewish people should also benefit from that and implementing that with specific steps, and there were internal divisions. But not in the way that the Palestinian national project and the Arabs had. And to look at the different military successes and to look at the economic miracles of Israel and how Israel, contrary to public belief, like faced immense economic hardships the first three to four decades of its existence.
It’s hard not to look at that from just a total dispassionate observer point of view and be inspired by it, or at the very least be like, wow, there must have been some really hardworking, smart, talented, dedicated people behind it.
Noam: Well, that’s a very generous view of it. The other view, the cynic or the skeptic will say, the reason they’re successful is not because of their hard work–
Ahmed: They’re Jews, because they control the banking, because America gives them money because of all these things.
Noam: Correct. And saying that though, it might feel good in the moment, because it absolves someone else’s responsibility, but it’s so dangerous because it doesn’t allow you to be successful, to emulate that and say, okay, I’m going to do that because, jealous people, this is my take in life. Criticism is the tax you pay for success. So what people will often do is they will feel jealous and say, attribute success elsewhere as opposed to the people who are successful. We do this all the time. It’s corrosive.
Ahmed: I hear you, brother. And one of the things that I find really fascinating is that the Jewish people, because they were in exile in a sense, they’ve had a talent pool that was diverse and widespread across the world, that very much so brought in all of these different specialized skills and kind of molded them into this national identity. And there were a lot of different ideas and different talents and dedicated people who were dedicated to the military science part of things and the political side of things and to the advocacy and to the economic development.
And I feel similarly that the Palestinian people, now that we’ve been an exiled people for all this time, I mean, I’m an American. I belong here. This is my home now, but I would love to be of service to my people. I would love to put my talents, whatever we may identify ’em as, in service of the Palestinian people reaching their ultimate goals.
Instead, unfortunately, what we have is a very successful, professionally successful Palestinian diaspora that politically has been reduced to chanting for the Intifada, chanting for reductionist slogans, college encampments as the ultimate approach. There is Forced cohesion, and an enforced conformity that are promulgated across the Palestinian diaspora such that somebody like me, trying to say, folks, we can do something other than Hamas and armed resistance. Talking to the Zionists and peace and coexistence is a courageous and powerful evolution that is not cowardly, that is not… admitting that we are a weaker party, it bolsters our cause! It doesn’t take away from it.
But there’s one thing I want to just state, and I feel like it would be very unfair if I didn’t bring it up, and this is something that is a dominant view among the Palestinian community. Part of the inability to see the fact that the Jewish people have historical lineage to the land. And again, I’m not saying right or wrong, I’m simply reporting, and I have myself gone through a journey of transformation to really appreciate that yes, the Jewish people do belong to this land. And half of Jewish Israelis are Mizrahi Jews who were often harassed or outright expelled from Arab countries as part of pan-Arabism and in the fifties and sixties. But the belief that Israel is a purely settler colonial project and that the Palestinian people like this beautiful notion of Zionism, which is the right of self-determination to the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland. While it sounds very compelling and it’s this inspiring reunion of the Jewish people after thousands of years of zionismdiaspora, the Palestinian people will tell you that they feel this has been at their expense. They feel that they have experienced the consequences of Zionism.
And I myself have also kind of evolved my own understanding of what is Zionism. I mean, we were taught that Zionism equals 1948 equals militarism equals the inherent rejection of the Palestinian people and their existence. And it took a while for me to understand that the different facets in the spectrum of Zionism and to understand that Theodore Herzl himself and kind of the first formation of the Zionist modern movement, if you will, that he himself and others believed in the necessity of coexistence with the native population, that Zionism was not built upon the inherent exclusion, dispossession, displacement, and killing or displacement of expulsion of the Palestinian people.
And that how things went down were the confluence of different factors that came together. That took me a while to reach that understanding, and I have been trying to share that with a lot of Palestinians because I think it’s helpful to see Zionism in a more complex, nuanced, sophisticated way rather than this black and white. Nevertheless, they will tell you that there was British occupation followed by increased Jewish immigration, and then the bulk of the establishment of the state of Israel was spearheaded by mass Jewish immigration from Europe. So how are you going to tell us that this was not a European white, settler colonial project? I will then try to kind of pad that with saying, well, do you believe that the Jewish people in Europe have lineage and historical connection to the land as by virtue of the Jewish heritage to the territory?
And then people will counter with, well, that doesn’t exist for the Muslims. The Muslims don’t have a connection to Mecca and Medina and whatever. And I will say, well, the Jewish people view our an ethnic group more than just being a religious group. So there is this back and forth that I have as a result of just my own journey here, not the education that I received and certainly not the prevalent perspective of Palestinian history on college campuses, and I’m desperately trying to figure out what does.
And actually I’ll pose the question to you from your perspective, and I despise this word, but I often use it, as a moderate Palestinian, a radically pragmatic Palestinian, how do I talk if I’m talking to my aunts and uncles and grandmas, how do I talk to or Palestinians in the diaspora to counter this idea that Jewish immigration that spearheaded the establishment, the surge towards the end, how do you reconcile that the view that Israel isn’t purely as white settler European colonial project and the fact that it was in fact spearheaded by large Jewish immigration from Europe? How does one hold space for these two things simultaneously?
Noam: First of all, the acknowledgement of who the Jewish people are, meaning the Jews are not a religion. The Jews have a religion, but they are not a religion. As a matter of fact, when you think about the history of the Jewish people, we don’t talk about kings and queens forming the Jewish people. We don’t talk about anything other than our forefathers and our foremothers, meaning we come from a family. This is something that Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has written about extensively, that the Jews are a family that dispersed, right? Abraham and Sarah, it’s a family. We come from a family and this family dispersed over time, always with an eye towards Jerusalem, always with an eye towards the land of Israel. It’s the first thing that God spoke about with Abraham, and this is part of the Hebrew Bible.
It’s part of the entire story of the Jewish people. Whether or not you view the Hebrew Bible as history or as something else, it’s the story of the Jewish people. The story of the Jewish people has always been deeply and firmly and obsessively connected to the land of Israel over the course of history, the Jewish people as a people have been dispersed. They’ve been oppressed, they’ve been persecuted, always though, with an eye towards Zion. That’s why in the Jewish prayer books we’re constantly talking about returning to Jerusalem three times a day, returning to the land of Israel, this has always been part of the story. The laws of the Jewish people, so much of the legal system centers around the land of Israel.
And then there were movements throughout history, whether it was Judah Halevy in the medieval times of writing poetry about returning to the land of Israel or Nahmanides from 1194 to 1270 talking about the return to the land of Israel later on. The story of Elijah, the Gaon of, the genius of Vilna who lived from 1720 to 1797, bringing all of his students, so many of his students, I should say, to return to the land of Israel prior to Theodore Herzl.
I would talk about that and this description of the Jews as white, that, my friend, is a deeply modern western construct. The Jews were never viewed as white. As a matter of fact, Hitler said, the race that is the most problematic is the Jewish race that is not white, that is not Aryan, that is sub whatever we are. We have a different race, said Hitler and said, many of the leaders of that time period, the Jews have always been the wrong thing of that time period, whatever that time period is, they’ve been presented as.
So right now, the wrong thing to be is white. And so that has been utilized against the Jewish people because you don’t want to be white. You don’t want to be white presenting. In Europe, the Jews weren’t white enough. This is the irony of it all. That’s why they were persecuted and oppressed and expelled from all these countries because they weren’t European enough. Then that’s one thing I was just harness and bring to the table in conversations.
Ahmed: Well, can you bring it to ’48? You’re talking to my grandma in Gaza? And I want to plant a seed there. You might not buy in but a seed.
Noam: So I would focus on that. Then I would also talk about the fact that, one second, look at Israelis. Just look at Israelis. Look around. Yes, the movement was very much so started by the outrageous amount of Jew hatred in Europe led by people in Eastern Europe because of the pogroms, because of the insanity that ensued at the time. But there were always Jews from Yemen who looked much darker than me and much darker than you that wanted to return to the land of Israel. Didn’t know about this concept called Zionism, but they always had the desire to be in that land that was always in their story. Jews from Morocco, Jews from Iraq, Jews from Iran, Jews from Syria, Jews who look more like you than me, who always were yearning to return to Zion.
And the way humans work is there’s both a push and a pull. The push was from the rabid antisemitism that existed not just amongst Christian nations, but also, and it’s hard to say in Islam, now, was it as bad as Christianity? No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t as bad. But was the Farhud in 1942 really, really destructive and despicable? Yes. Was the Damascus blood libel in 1840, a hundred years prior, despicable and impossible to live with? Yes. All of these things were also taken. It’s not a game of victim Olympics or oppression Olympics, but the Jewish people lived in these societies as well and always had this push. That’s the antisemitism.
But they had a pull, a draw as well, which is so much more romantic, which is this what you were talking about earlier, this romantic draw to the place that was their forefathers and foremothers that I mentioned with Abraham and Sarah. That’s what I would talk to her about. But that shouldn’t exclusively come on the backs of Palestinians.
But we are going to get to the next episode, and what we’re going to do in the next episode is we’re going to talk about 2005 to the present.
Ahmed: Yes, sir.
Noam: How did we get from 2005 to the present? We’re going to dive back in for part two, where we’re going to look at the present and the future for Gaza, the future for the Israelis and Palestinians, and for everyone listening and viewing. I hope you’re appreciating the conversation like I really am, and if you’re enjoying it as it comes out, then stay tuned for next week because you’re going to hear a lot more. And if you’re listening at any other time, well run to part two and let me know what you think.
Unpacking Israeli history is a production of Unpacked, a division of OpenDor Media. Check out Jewishunpacked.com for everything Unpacked-related, and subscribe to our other podcast. You can reach me at noam@jewishunpacked.com. Your email might even get on the show. This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our team for this episode was Rob Pera and Alex Harris. I’m your host, Noam Weissman. Thanks for being here and see you next week.