Noam: I’m Noam Weissman, and this is 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. This episode of Unpacking Israeli History is generously sponsored by the Zalik Foundation and the Marcus Foundation. To sponsor an episode of Unpacking Israeli History or just to say what’s up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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Yalla, let’s do this.
Okay, now put your hands together for our amazing, extraordinary Yardena Schwartz.
(applause)
Yardena’s amazing, this book, pretty cool, you should check it out. So Yardena, thank you so much for joining us tonight.
Yardena: Thank you so much.
Noam: I am so psyched to have this conversation with you. We had an unbelievable, I loved it, we had another episode of Unpacking Israeli History that I had you on, I don’t remember exactly what I said to you, but I said it was one of my favorite episodes I’ve ever done.
Yardena: You called it the most sweeping episode.
Noam: Sweeping, most sweeping episode. So here we are again. And tonight what I want to do is, I want to talk to you about two of the most contentious places in the world. That’s what I want to do. So basically we’re going to talk about Thanksgiving dinner, and Instagram comments. That’s not what we’re going to talk about.
By the way, if you listen to me live, is this too slow, too fast? Is this 1.75? What do you want me to be, 1.5? What do you need me to be at?
So I’ll just be at 1x, when you listen after, you can do whatever you want.
But anyway, let’s say two of the most contentious places on earth, not the instagram comments, not TikTok comments, not Thanksgiving dinner, but al-Aqsa, and you know what, I’m gonna call it for our purposes, Hebron, Hebron, but Hebron. So those are the, we’re gonna talk about that tonight. Cool?
Yardena: Great, that’s I’m here for.
Noam: Okay, so I’m gonna tell you why Yardena is eminently qualified to have this conversation. First of all, she literally wrote the book, Ghosts of a Holy War, and it speaks about both of these, about Al Aqsa and about Hebron, and that’s what we’re gonna be speaking about tonight. So I loved it so much, my producer Rivky is making fun of me, like, no, you’re gonna wanna bring up the book, she’ll love it, everyone, that you actually read it. So I did, I did, and I underlined it also, you can see I actually underlined throughout. I read it, I love it, it’s amazing.
But Yardena, you’re also somebody who has been a journalist, you’re an honest journalist, which is a novelty, and you’ve reported from all over the world, you’ve won awards for your work, and I’m not going to get into every single thing about you, but you’ve done a lot in these areas, you’ve published a lot in lots of different places. Okay, Yardena, let’s dive in.
At Unpacking Israeli History, we are obsessed with this question, how do certain stories become the story? Not just what happened, but which version of what happened ends up shaping people’s identities, their fears, and politics? And your work sits at that intersection.
So I wanna trace examples of this. Tonight, what I wanna do with you, I have a rabbi, I call him my rabbi, his name is Bill Simmons, okay? So Bill Simmons is this podcaster that I’m absolutely obsessed with. And I think that he has, he’s done a lot of great work in sports and pop culture. And I try to follow him a lot in terms of podcasting. And one of the things that he does, he does draft picks. So I want to set the stage for Al Aqsa and Hebron. And I want to take a step back and think big picture about the conflict. I think that sometimes we actually go directly into the issues themselves without taking a step back, take a step back and learn the history. Actually have an evening of education, of understanding the broader story. So I want to start with a segment I’m calling draft picks. Okay? Draft picks.
Yardena: I do know what those are. Not a sports person.
Noam: You told me backstage that in basketball, you played the bench. Yes. Okay. So, let me tell you, first of all, I do this thing on Shabbat sometimes where I’m in a weird mood. I actually do, I love sports a lot, so I do draft picks of my favorite cereals. You know what I’m saying? Like I do it with my family. We have like 15 cereals and then everyone gets to have a pick and then you put together which of your cereals are the best and that’s where we go into. We debate cereals, drafting order of cereal. That’s what we do.
Tonight, that’s not what we’re doing though. Tonight what I want to do is an Israel history draft. Okay? And this is what it’s going to look like. This is what it’s going to look like. We’re going to pick three events, three stories. Not the loudest moments that everyone here knows about. But the ones that changed everything, that fundamentally shaped Jewish-Arab relations, what would you pick and why?
We’re gonna pick three topics each, okay? And I want you to start and then we’re gonna do a snake draft. You know what a snake draft is? Okay, so a snake draft is you’re gonna go, then me, then me, then you, then you, then me. So you first and then me twice, then you twice, then me.
Yardena: I’m gonna try to remember that. It’s a little, might be a little too fast.
Noam: Am I the only one who plays fantasy football here? So here we go. You have two minutes on the clock. Here we go. Boom.
Yardena: So I would say the first one would be the 1921 appointment of Hajj Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, making him the most powerful Arab leader during the British Mandate period. And why do I pick him? Why do I pick that draft pick? Because he set the formula for every single Palestinian leader since with his use of disinformation, incitement, and rejection of any kind of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel or in Palestine at the time. And his appointment was actually by a Zionist, a Jewish official, Herbert Samuel, who made the biggest mistake of his career in choosing this man who had already incited a riot in 1920 and would go on to incite my next draft pick. But I think that’s your turn, so I’ll come back to my next.
Noam: So your pick is Hajj Amin al-Husseini becoming Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. And that set the stage for everything. So I just want to give a quick reflection on that. What’s amazing about the history of the Palestinian people that people do not know is that basically since 1922, there’s essentially been a total of three leaders of the Palestinian people. That’s it, right?
Yardena: Not just it’s 1922, in all of the history of the Palestinian people.
Noam: So it’s Hajj Amin al-Husseini. I mean, Ahmad Shukeiri for a couple years, but not really. And then you got Yassar Arafat.
Yardena: who was his disciple and his cousin.
Noam: for Hajj Amin al-Husseini. And then Mahmoud Abbas. And then that’s it.
Yardena: And could argue, Sinwar.
Noam: Right, but that’s it. Okay, great, great, great moment. My pick’s a little bit of a different, my pick is actually the pogrom of Kishinev in 1903. I would say that that moment changed world history, changed Jewish history because there were pogroms against the Jewish people for hundreds of years. It wasn’t the most devastating in terms of quantity.
But it was devastating in terms of this realization that the Jewish people needed to simply have their own independence. And their own independence was just, it was enough. And you talk about the power of propaganda with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, but there’s also the power of the pen as it relates to poetry. And Hayyim Nachman Bialik, when he wrote In the City of Slaughter, and he talked about the devastation of what he saw, and he talked about what he described as the pathetic older Jews, that was pitiful as he saw it. And the Jews of Kishinev were very insulted by what he had to say. But he wrote this piece and it was the most unbelievably powerful work possible. It led even to the need for Jewish sovereignty in a way that you can’t imagine. That they voted for the Uganda Plan in the sixth Zionist Congress as a reaction in many ways to Kishinev.
Because they said, through, by a vote of 295 to 178, because they said, people make a mistake all the time that they say it’s because of the Holocaust. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. And in many ways that we did an episode about this, Kishinev was the Holocaust before the Holocaust, was Auschwitz before Auschwitz. And I do that as a moment that people, again, when we’re doing education, people need to understand Hajimeh Hoseini. People need to understand the story of Kishinev.
Yardena: I’ll just add that it led tens of thousands of Jews to flee to Palestine, to the land of Israel.
Noam: Exactly. Let me tell you my other, my other, okay, now it’s my turn. Snake pick number two, okay? Snake pick number two is the Nebi Musa Riots. How many of you have heard of the Nebi Musa riots? Raise your hand.
Yardena: I see one, two.
Noam: That’s my team over there. Those are seasoned digital educators. so, Hey guys. So that’s Hona and Yoni and there’s Alex and the whole thing. Okay, amazing. So, the Nebi Musa riots is in, you talk about this in your book.
Yardena: I referred to it just before when I talked about how Hajj Amin al-Husseini had incited… So in 1920 in Jerusalem there was this annual parade called the Nebi Musa Festival where Muslims would march to what they believed to be the burial place of Moses who in Arabic is known as Nebi Musa, the Prophet Musa, and it turned completely violent and it was an anti-Zionist march, anti-British. This was just a few years after the Balfour Declaration. The British had just conquered Palestine from the Turks, from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine for over 400 years, but Palestine had been under Muslim rule by other foreign powers for 1,000 years and the British conquering of Palestine ended that.
There was this anti-British fervor and also anti-Jewish fervor. Five Jews ended up being killed that day, dozens wounded. And Hajj Amin al-Husseini was one of many people the British wanted to arrest for inciting the riot, along with his uncle, the mayor of Jerusalem. They fled. They went into hiding with Bedouin tribes in Jordan and Syria. But then one year later, Herbert Samuel, the first British high commissioner of Palestine, the most important British official in Palestine, appointed Hajj Amin al-Husseini to be the most important Arab official.
Noam: That’s amazing. I like it. You just took my two minutes. That was perfect. Now I’m going make you do the work. So why should Nebi Musa be the moment?
Yardena: You tell me!
Noam: Fine, I think it becomes this major moment because it crystallized the ethos of the need for Jewish armed self-reliance.
Yardena: The Haganah was formed in preparation for these riots. And Jabotinsky was leading a band of mostly like teenagers. They were armed with sticks. The British wouldn’t even allow them to protect Jews in Jerusalem. Yeah, they were working out of like playgrounds because they couldn’t find anywhere to actually train.
Noam: Wow, okay, so we have Nebi Musa riots, we have Hajj Amin al-Husseini, we have Kishinev, your turn.
Yardena: Well, you mentioned Kishinev being one of the most notorious pogroms. So the massacre in Hebron in 1929 was actually more deadly and more gruesome than that pogrom. It was one of the worst pogroms ever perpetrated outside of Europe. And it was perpetrated in Hebron, the second holiest city in Judaism, the place where Jews had lived for thousands of years, even through exile. Jews had always remained in Hebron. It was one the most ancient Jewish communities in the world, absolutely decimated on August 24th, 1929 when 3,000 Muslim men marched through the ancient Jewish quarter of Hebron with swords, axes, machetes, and proceeded to break into every Jewish home they could get into and carry out atrocities much like the ones we witnessed on October 7th. So women were raped, men were castrated, infants were slaughtered in their mothers arms.
And this was two decades before the state of Israel was born. Hebron was a majority Arab city. There was no such thing as Israeli settlements. There were no Jewish soldiers. Jews were subjects of Palestine, just like they were Palestinian Jews, Palestinian Arabs, all under the auspices of the British authorities who were supposed to be protecting their Jewish subjects. The British mandate, central to the British mandate, was the establishment of a Jewish home, not a Jewish state but a Jewish home where Jews could be safe from persecution and the British literally stood by and watched this slaughter unfold not only in Hebron but throughout Palestine.
And the reason I chose the massacre and the reason I wrote this book is because you know you really can’t understand, I realized through the research and writing this book, it’s so hard to understand how we’ve got to where we are today without knowing what happened in 1929. And it was such a turning point in Zionism because before that massacre, many Jews in Palestine didn’t agree with Zionism. They believed that for the Jewish masses to return from exile to the land of Israel, you had to wait for the Mashiach, which had to be the will of God. It shouldn’t be, you know, done by secular Europeans who were leading the Zionist movement. Many traditional Jews saw Zionism as this anti-Jewish movement for all different reasons than we hear about anti-Zionist Jews today.
But the massacre of Jews in Hebron really shattered that antagonism because the Jews in Hebron were anti-Zionists. They were peaceful, pious Jews living a quiet existence. They were not a part of the Zionist movement building the foundations of a Jewish state. And so after the massacre, so many Jews who had opposed Zionism until then now agreed that, you know, because they saw that the British were not going to protect them, they realized no foreign power was ever going to protect them and if they wanted to be safe to live in the Jewish homeland they’re going to need to do that under protection of their own army in their own country and so the Zionist movement really strengthened after that and brought us to where we are.
Noam: One of the things that when I ask people, when did the Arab-Israeli conflict start, Palestinian-Israeli conflict start, I think there’s a lot of debate as to what the answer to that is. I was with a professor, I won’t say his name, but a professor in the Middle East, and his answer was it started in the 600s, because he viewed it as a
Yardena: Holy war.
Noam: Holy War, exactly, and that was the Ghost of the Holy War, framed as the, as an Islamic Jewish war that’s been going on since then. So that’s, that was one side. And there are many other sides to the debate. But one of the things that you, that you do really well in our conversations and in this book is you make a really compelling point that what we’re seeing today and after the 7th of October specifically that 1929 is a really important angle to see what’s going on now. And you have a much better understanding if you understand what happened in 1929. I want to give a, I’m gonna give my, so we have four so far for the record. We have four. By the way, it’s a good test, can name the four?
Yardena: Nebi Musa, Kishinev, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, and Hebron massacre.
Noam: And we’re gonna spend a lot more time on Hebron. So I really want us to understand Hebron. I really want us to understand Al-Aqsa. I really want us to understand what’s going on, what this war, what this holy war, if you will, is about. But I’ll give you a fifth one from a different perspective. The fifth one that I think just shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict in a different sort of way is when I think of the career of Menachem Begin.
He has one of the craziest professional careers of anyone of all time. He’s like the, this is not gonna land, but he’s like he’s like the Kawhi Leonard of, of, of, of, of,
Yardena: Does anybody here know?
Noam: I’m sorry, I’m sorry. No, I’m, I can’t understand Kawhi Leonard’s career. I’m just not following. It’s hard to understand. But anyway, he’s a great player on the Clippers. Anyway, I digress. so, he’s like from 1948 to 1977, this guy, Menachem Begin, was in the opposition. Can you imagine that for, let me do the math correctly, 29 years? For 29 years, was not, he did not get the job.
And then in ’77, during the Mahapach, I viewed that moment as radically shifting Israeli society, Israeli ethos in many ways. Menachem Begin famously said this line like Ashkenazim, Iraqim, brother, warrior. I don’t know how to translate those words, Ashkenazi, fighters, right, we’re together, we’re in this together. And he defeated Shimon Peres. He defeated Shimon Peres. He won 43 seats to 32 of Shimon Peres. And he defeated the establishment. No one thought the establishment could be defeated. It wasn’t possible.
And I think that that really changed the way Israeli society works, in terms of the economy, led to the fight against socialism in many ways, bringing different peoples who were previously on the periphery of Israeli society into the mainstream, including Mizrahi Jews, including Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, bringing them in, saying we’re in this together. And you know, he had a, and his end of his career was so sad after Sabra and Shatila in the early 1980s during the first Lebanon war. And he just said, I can’t anymore. I’m exhausted. I forgot his exact line. But he was exhausted from all the challenges. He had a really fascinating career, a difficult career. But I think that the Mahapach really changed everything. So that’s number five. You get to finish number six, what do you got?
Yardena: So I’m going go back to 1936 during the Peel Commission when the British sent another commission, they sent many commissions to…
Noam: What’s a commission?
Yardena: Basically a group of men to study what –
Noam: Does it have to be men?
Yardena: It was always men. Oh, then it was
Noam: Are there any more commissions? Okay.
Yardena: Well, the British lost. So it’s commissioning them. to Palestine from London to study the causes of what was then the Great Arab Revolt, which was this anti-British, anti-Jewish rebellion that broke out in 1936, again, overseen by Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who had been appointed by the British. The British, even after the massacre of 1929, didn’t strip him of his title, allowed him to stay in power, and it backfired on them.
They sent this commission to try to figure out what they should do with Palestine, because they were starting to feel like maybe they shouldn’t rule Palestine anymore, maybe it wasn’t worth it. And they were considering various solutions, self-governance, handing it over to the Arabs and Jews to govern Palestine together. The Arabs didn’t want that, they didn’t want equality for the Jews. And another option they were considering was partition. This was a decade before the UN voted to partitioned Palestine. The British first brought up this idea in 1936 during this commission. they had interviewed Chaim Weitzman, Jabotinsky. The Mufti boycotted the whole thing. So they were only interviewing Jewish officials. And finally, other Arab leaders were like, what are you doing? They’re only going to interview Jews. Obviously, this report that their conclusions are going to be biased against Arabs. Talk to them. So he finally did. And I’m just going to read from a small portion of the book.So they had heard from all these British officials and finally they called the Grand Mufti in and, okay so I’ll just start reading.
He said the Balfour Declaration, the British mandate, the project of creating a Jewish national home were all illegitimate. Palestine was and would always be Arab land. He called for the British to ban Jewish land purchases. (Notice I use the word purchases because none of this land was being stolen. It was being purchased.) And to ban immigration and Jewish immigration and to cancel the mandate. He repeated his claims the Jews were a danger to Muslim holy sites. The Western Wall, he insisted, was a purely Muslim place to which the Jews had no connection or claim. Their goal, he explained, was to rebuild the Jewish temple on the ruins of Al-Aqsa. Without broaching the idea of partitioning Palestine, the commission asked the Mufti what he proposed should be done with the 400,000 Jews now living there. We must leave this all to the future, he demurred. Asked if they could remain in Palestine, the Mufti replied simply, no.
So I just think it’s something to remember when people tell you that everything was hunky dory before 1948 when Israel was established and that we should just have a one state solution, the Zionists were for a one state solution for many years. They were open to a binational state. It was always the Arabs, or at least their leaders, particularly the Grand Mufti who opposed that idea.
Noam: I have so many follow-up questions, I’m gonna just ask a couple very quickly. What’s a Mufti?
Yardena: Basically the chief rabbi of Palestine for Muslims.
Noam: Okay, what’s a Hajj? Hajj,
Yardena: Hajj, so he- here, I talked about why he wasn’t qualified for this job because he had already incited riots and had fled arrest, but he also wasn’t qualified because he never finished the religious studies you would need to become Mufti. Like, you wouldn’t appoint a chief rabbi of Palestine who didn’t finish rabbinical school, right?
Noam: the Mufti.
Yardena: So he was appointed the Grand Mufti despite not having a- He wasn’t a sheikh, he didn’t finish his religious studies. He was known as Hajj, because he had done pilgrimage, hajj, to Mecca.
Noam: Hajj and Chag. Okay, cool. So that’s okay. And the other question I was going to ask you is I just like to do this as the counter just to make sure that we, is what you just shared, is that what you would describe as the Israeli narrative? Is there or is it, is there another narrative about what was taking place besides what you shared in the book here? Or is this like, is this actually just, right.
Yardena: Those are facts. Like, you could, that’s what other people might say, well, that’s Israeli propaganda. It’s actually, I mean, people are entitled to their own opinions, but they’re not entitled to their own facts. And this, these were his words. Like, this is the British record of those conversations. And other Arab leaders who were interviewed said similar things, like this is purely Muslim land, it will always be purely Muslim land, there can never be any kind of sovereignty, and kind of power sharing situation.
Noam: Okay, so we went through these six moments. Now we just learned about six awesome, like, moments in Israeli history. So we learned Nebi Musa riots, I’m such a teacher. We learned Nebi Musa riots, we learned Hajj Amin al-Husseini, we learned 1929, we learned 1936, the Arab revolt, we learned the Mahapach and we learned about Kishnev. Six important moments. There you go. Pretty good. In like 15, 20 minutes. Now you know everything.
Sorry for another sports reference, I apologize. Is there, are there unsung heroes, not the person that is the MVP, the most valuable player, but…the unsung hero, the person that’s a little bit behind the scenes, for any these moments.
Yardena: Those are my favorites. I always forget his whole name. So Aharon Chaim Cohen in 1929, he was a 17 year old Haganah fighter. And to my knowledge, he is the first Mista’arav, Mista’aravim, if you know Fauda. These are the Israelis who go undercover into Arab villages, Palestinian villages. He did that in 1929. He was one of the only Mizrahi members of the Haganah in 1929. This was before the massacre. So again, Zionism was still not this rallying force of the Yishuv. After 1929, more Mizrahim joined the Haganah, but at that point it was just this Ashkenazi, very secular operation.
They knew in the weeks before the massacre and the weeks before the riots that something bad was going to happen. And so they had this meeting in Jerusalem and they said, who is willing to go undercover into the Arab neighborhoods and just suss out the situation? And he was the only one who stepped forward because he was fluent in Arabic. His father was from Iran, his mother was from Morocco. He lived in the Misr-e-Musra neighborhood of Jerusalem, next Arab Jewish neighborhood. And he went undercover and spent weeks in Al-Aqsa where he saw weapons being stored inside Al-Aqsa. He overheard sermons calling for Arabs to rise up against the Jews in Palestine. And the Haganah understood from his work and from others that riots were going to break out. And they told him to go and warn the Jews in Hebron that it was going to reach them because in previous outbreaks of violence, none of which were as horrible as the 1929 riots, but in previous riots like the 1920 Nebi Musa riots, the Jews in Hebron had been safe because for centuries Jews and Muslims had lived side by side in Hebron in relative peace and harmony. And so when Aaron Chaim Cohen…
Noam: But then Jews were still were they second class still? Harmony but like–
Yardena: Totally, yeah. Sometimes they would be attacked, sometimes they would have stones thrown at them. Relative harmony. They weren’t being killed. So Aaron Haim Cohen went to the Jewish leaders of Hebron, I think it was two days before the massacre, and he met with the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Hebron, chief Sephardic rabbi, different leaders of the Jewish community, and warned them. He said, the Haganah wants to come and either will bring fighters here to protect the Jews of Hebron, because there were only 800 Jews living amongst 20,000 Muslims in Hebron then, or we’ll evacuate you all to Jerusalem until the riots subside. And all of these Jewish leaders in Hebron were unanimous in their opposition to both options. They said, our Arab neighbors are our friends. They’ll never hurt us. We don’t want you here, leave.
And so he went back to Haganah headquarters and two days later, his warnings came true and the Jewish leaders of Hebron, all they had was the British police force, which was manned by a British police chief, but all of the other officers except for one were Arabs. Most of them either participated in the massacre or stood by. Some of them did try to stop it, but they were just outmanned and overpowered. And the British police chief, he only fired his gun after the rioters turned on him. And as soon as he fired his gun, the riots ended within minutes.
He ended up shooting a few of the rioters, hundreds were arrested, but in the two hours before then, when it was only Jews who were being targeted, he and these other police officers just did nothing. And the Jewish officer, his gun had been taken from him the day before. We don’t know why, but presumably because they feared that he would be trigger happy at being the only Jew and knowing that there was going to be this Arab riot.
But the British had so many warnings, not just the Jewish leaders of Hebron, but the British themselves had so many warnings. When the riots broke out a day earlier in Jerusalem and they saw armed Arabs swarming to al-Aqsa to Friday prayers, going there armed, they deliberately did not disarm them. And one of the most fascinating quotes I found from that day was one of these police chiefs said, well, if we take the sticks and clubs of men who don’t intend to use them, for dangerous purposes, then they might turn on us. And it was just always this sense of not wanting to take action out of fear that action would then be taken against the British. And that was true before the riots, during the riots, and many years later as well.
Noam: Interesting because I think that when we teach history, which I’m obsessed with, the way, really obsessed with, I think that we forget the, not just forget, but these unsung heroes are so important because we know a lot of the main names that are out there external, but these are the names that helped shape history in ways that we don’t realize. I just want to make a pitch for literacy and historical knowledge. One of the things that I think about often and I just thought about this as we were going through this list, I meet with groups of students often. And there was a, I had someone on my other podcast named Izabella Tabarovsky. And she said to me, she goes, no, you know what we have to do? We have to get more of the young people, teenagers, young Jewish people across the country to become refuseniks.
Refuseniks. Now if I go around and I ask you, raise your hand if you know who the refusenik is. Raise your hand if you know who the refusenik is. Interesting. I’m not trying to shame anyone. A lot of you know what a refusenik is. Here’s what’s fascinating. When I go around the country and I talk about the refusenik movement, and I ask people, ninth graders, 10th graders, 11th graders, 12th graders, do you want to be part of the refusenik movement? I do that on purpose. They look at me and they’re like, what in the world does it mean to be a refusnik?
They don’t know. And the crazy thing about that is some of you in this room right now are probably part of the Free Soviet Jewry Movement. And if not you, your parents. And we have to tell the stories, our stories, our history. We have to be telling this more and more. We have to make sure that there’s literacy.
And when I think about the refusenik movement and the Free Soviet Jewry Movement, I want to give my one unsung hero and then we’re going to go to the next segment, the one unsung hero that I have, I’m gonna go back to Kishinev. The one unsung hero that I have is the Russian delegation during the Sixth Zionist Congress. The Russian delegation during the Sixth Zionist Congress, when it was 295 to 178 and they voted for the Uganda plan, the Russian delegation was the delegation that experienced the most violent, horrific type of Jew hatred, antisemitism, whatever the terminology is, that is possible. They experienced that. And Herzl said, listen, we got to come up with some temporary measure. Like, we got to make sure that antisemitism, at least there’s some sort of respite from it. So we’ll go to East Africa and give territory.
By the way, if Israel did that, Zionists did that, that would be colonialism. That would be colonialism. The return to the Jewish ancestral homeland is the opposite of colonialism. If they were to create a colony in East Africa being sent by the British on behalf of the British and having no historical connections to that land, that would be colonialism. The opposite of colonialism is Jews returning to the land of Israel.
So the Russian delegation entered the Sixth Zionist Congress, they were the ones that experienced the worst possible antisemitism. And they were the ones who protested. They started singing Hatikvah during the Sixth Zionist Congress and they walked out of the room. It was led by a man by the name of Menachem Ussishkin. Menachem Ussishkin was the Zionist who said, if we’re coming home, then we’re coming home for real. And then he went out and bought the land to prove it. That’s what they did.
So I view them as the unsung heroes of 1903 in a way that people probably don’t know a lot about. Let’s make sure everyone knows the history, knows the stories, knows where we come from, knows what we did. That’s what we gotta be doing.
Okay, I wanna go on to some of your expertise now. We did history, we did unsung heroes. I wanna go to their next segment. I wanna talk about Al Aqsa and Hebron.
Before we even dive in, though, I want you to tell me about these places. Like, I assume a lot of people don’t know a lot about Hebron. I was actually just in Hebron. I was with, my son had his bar mitzvah, our son, my wife has something to do with it. So our son’s bar mitzvah was in Jerusalem. And one of the things that we did is we went to maharat hamachpecha, we went to the cave of the patriarchs and matriarchs.
It was very profound, very powerful. But I don’t know that people have a sense of what Hebron is or looks like. So I want to hear from you, what does Hebron look like? And then also, could you help us understand a brief overview of Al-Aqsa? When you and I were talking about Al-Aqsa, this is something else that I see. By the way, I like blaming things on students, because it makes adults in the room feel like we’re good, we’re innocent. So when I speak to students, sometimes they don’t know what Al-Aqsa is, you’ll show them a picture of Al-Aqsa and they will call it something else. They’ll have different names for it. So what is it? There’s the Temple Mount, there’s the Noble Sanctuary, the Haram Al-Sharif. What are these places? Just paint a picture for me. What is Hebron? What is Al-Aqsa?
Yardena: So Hebron is about 20 minutes south of Jerusalem. Many people don’t know it was actually King David’s first capital before Jerusalem.
Noam: By the way, should have done, Rivky. Nerd Corner Alert. Nerd Corner Alert. Nerd Corner Alert is first capital of the Jewish people was Hebron, not Jerusalem. Okay, continue.
Yardena: And obviously as you said home to the burial place of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs. The tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs which by the way in 1929 and actually for 700 years until 1967 was off-limits to non-Muslims, only Muslims could enter because with the conquest of Jerusalem the tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs was turned into a mosque, Ibrahimi Mosque. So this is why Hebron is holy to Muslims and Jews, because Abraham is considered a prophet in Islam known as Ibrahim. Also, of course, Abraham is the patriarch of both the Jewish and Arab people.
So in Hebron today, the tomb of the patriarchs is split between a Jewish side and a Muslim side. So half of it is reserved for Jewish prayer, half for Muslim prayer, and Hebron is also divided. 80% is run by the Palestinian Authority, and 20 % is controlled by Israel. That’s as a result of the 1997 Hebron protocols that was actually signed by Benjamin Netanyahu. He received a lot of criticism for that because before that Hebron was controlled only by Israel.
And the vast majority of Hebron’s residents live on the Palestinian side. So over 250,000, think maybe over 300,000 by now Arabs live in Palestinian Hebron, H1. H2 is where all of the Jewish residents of Hebron live. It’s still only about 800 you would think from coverage of Hebron that it’s like massive amounts of Jews living in Hebron. No, it’s only 800 Jews and that includes both the Jewish families and the Jewish yeshiva students who who live there as well, but 35,000 Palestinians also live on the Israeli side which complicates things because they’re not Arab Israel. They’re not citizens of Israel. They’re Palestinians, so they are subject to certain restrictions that their Jewish neighbors are not subject to. And it’s just a very complex place.
Noam: It’s messy. I think it’s important to say it’s messy, and I think it’s a problem when people simplify things that are complex and complexify things that are simple. This is an example of something that’s really, really complicated. You just said it’s holy to Muslims, and it’s holy to Jews, and there are currently 800 Jews living there amongst hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. So that’s the picture of Hebron that we have. Tell us about Al-Aqsa.
Yardena: So Al Aqsa is a similar story to the Tomb of the Patriarchs because Al Aqsa was built atop the ruins of both Jewish temples. The Temple Mount, stands atop the Temple Mount. The entire complex is known as the Al Aqsa complex. And Al Aqsa mosque is just one of the structures on that complex. So there’s also the Dome of the Rock and it’s this vast plaza, it’s beautiful. But today, Jews can go to the Temple Mount. They can’t pray there. Muslims can pray there. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims pray there throughout the year.
Noam: So Jews cannot pray there.
Yardena: Cannot pray there. That’s the “status quo” we always hear about that was agreed to by Moshe Dayan after the Six-Day War.
Noam: Debatable if you have authority to make that call, by the way. was a good question.
Yardena: He feared a holy war, a massive holy war of the entire Muslim world waging war against Israel if Jews were allowed to pray on the Temple Mount. You could argue with, why should that cause a holy war, but that’s another conversation perhaps. But the Temple Mount is undoubtedly the holiest site in Judaism, but the Kotel, the Western Wall, is the holiest place Jews are allowed to pray.
Noam: Right, it’s a little bit funny because I don’t mean to be like, I don’t mean to be like a buzzkill, but like the Western wall isn’t actually like, it’s just a wall around the holy thing in Judaism.
Yardena: Its holiness comes from the temple mount where we’re not left.
Noam: Okay, but it’s what the Jewish people have is a wall that we have assigned holiness to, but the real holy place in Judaism is Har Habayit. You heard it at the beginning of this whole conversation, Har Habayit B’yadeinu. Like Har Habayit is in our hands, that moment. Some people when they listen to the podcast, their favorite part is actually just the beginning and then they just turn it off. Like it’s, Har Habayit B’yadeinu is like this big moment. It’s very emotional, it’s very dramatic.
It’s emotional and dramatic for everyone though, right? It’s emotional, like I wrote down a few examples. Al-Aqsa seems to really be at the center of a lot of the conflict, even in a way that people don’t realize.
I’ll give you an example. The Al-Aqsa Intifada, the second Intifada. Saif al-Quds is Swords of Jerusalem, May 2021. Al-Aqsa Flood is what they call the 7th of October. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. It seems to be at the center of a lot of what’s going on in the conflict. There’s a story, I think you tell in the book, if you don’t tell in the book, you tell it somewhere, that there was the movers, or someone tells it somewhere, but you’ll tell me if you tell it in the book, that when, I don’t remember the year, you’ll remind me, 1928, 1928, 29 where they if you were going to make a mechitza, they were going to make a partition.
Yardena: 1928, Yom Kippur.
Noam: So what happened there? They were going to make a partition at the Kotel, the Jews. And then what happened?
Yardena: So every year during the high holy days, Jews praying at the kotel would bring a mechitza just during the high holy days. It wasn’t like today where there’s always a separation.
Noam: By the way, that is an example right now, a good example of current events meeting and rhyming with history because right now there’s a debate in Israeli society as to whether or not men and women should be praying together at the wall or whether they should be a full division.
Yardena: So back then they were, prior together. Only on the high holy days were they separated.
Noam: Back then, and women, there was no partition. But that was during the Ottoman and British rule. That wasn’t during Jewish sovereignty.
Yardena: No.
Noam: Okay, fine. So continue, continue.
Yardena: So the Jewish worshippers preparing for Yom Kippur services brought this mechitza and this was usually allowed. During Ottoman times, the Jews who did things like that, whether they brought shofar or an ark, they would usually have to pay bribes to the Muslim authorities because the Western Wall was considered part of Al-Aqsa and so all of it was controlled by the Muslim authorities who controlled Al-Aqsa.
But under the British, the Jews weren’t being forced to pay those bribes. And so they brought this Mechitza and the Muslim authorities, the judges in the Sharia courts, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, went to the British and said, you have to stop this. They can’t do this. If they do this, then what’s next? They’ll turn it into a synagogue. They’ll take over Al-Aqsa. They’ll destroy Al-Aqsa and rebuild their temple. This was the argument they made to the British.
And instead of the British saying, what are you talking about? You’re insane. They said, we’ll go tell them to take away that mechitza. They told them to take it away. They didn’t, and the next day, British armed police wearing steel helmets essentially stormed the Kotel during Yom Kippur services. So people had been fasting. They pulled out benches from underneath elderly men and women. There was a rabbi who clung to the mechitza as it was being taken away, and he was just thrown down a valley.
And this was just condemned throughout the Jewish community of Palestine and even throughout the Jewish diaspora. There were statements by Jewish leaders in the US and Europe against the British consulates and embassies in their cities protesting this. And yet the British stood by and said, no, the status quo is that you can’t bring these things. We don’t want you turning it into a synagogue. They had completely believed the propaganda of the Grand Mufti.
And so it was what led to the riots of 1929 was this disinformation campaign about the Jewish plot to destroy Al-Aqsa.
Noam: That’s wild. That is wild to think about the power of that propaganda. But here’s what I want to do. I want to be the, so I had the great pleasure to be with the Weber School today here in Atlanta. And there’s different types of students. There’s the student that’s agreeable. There’s the student that’s curious. And then there’s the pushback student. I’m gonna be the pushback student right now, okay? Humor me?
So you say it’s propaganda by Hajj Amin al-Husseini. I’m going to give some thoughts on whether or not I view it as propaganda, and I want to get your reaction to it.
In Judaism, we say, in birkat hamazon, in the benching, when we have a meal, and thank you God for building Jerusalem, full Jerusalem, Jerusalem and it should be also brought back with mercy. And we say in Judaism, we believe that in this concept of the Messiah and building of the third temple. The third temple is something I believe that in Judaism does matter, right? So I’m gonna read you some statistics that I came here prepared with.
So here’s the data. A 2009 Ynet survey reported 64% of Jewish Israeli respondents said they would like to see the temple rebuilt. 50% of Jewish Israeli support allowing Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, 40% opposed. The Israel Democracy Institute in 2022 said that 50% of Jewish Israeli support allowing Jews to pray on the Temple Mount, 40% opposed.
Breakdown by religiosity, Haredim, 86.5% of pro-opposed prayer there because it’s forbidden by Jewish law. Second, the largest share of opposed, often due to fear of regional reaction. So it’s not necessarily so fringe as a political sentiment, but it does seem to split sharply by community, and Haredi opposition is massive.
I have a little secret that I’m sharing with you, and then maybe lots of other people. I’ve never been to the Temple Mount. I’ve never been there. I’ve never been there. I’m not sure why I have to think about why I have, I was taught by my rabbis that I’m actually not supposed to to.
Yardena: Because you might accidentally walk into the Holy of Holies where…
Noam: Exactly. So I was told that you shouldn’t like there’s a sanctity to it and it’s not something to be taken lightly and you shouldn’t even have to have a beat there but that’s how holy it is so I’m just trying to make sense of this is it really propaganda that the Jewish people want to return to Al-Aqsa and rebuild the Beit Hamikdash, to rebuild the temple, or is that absolutely a part of our story?
Yardena: That’s not what they were saying.
Noam: So correct the pushback student.
Noam: They weren’t saying they want to the Jewish people wish for the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah. That’s not what they were saying. They were saying they’re actively plotting to destroy Al Aqsa to rebuild the temple and I don’t think in those polls The people who said that they want to see the temple rebuilt meant that they want people to then go and destroy Al Aqsa to rebuild it. I think they mean they want the redemption of Israel, the coming of the Messiah and all that comes with it, including the reestablishment of the temple, but that’s not what they were talking about. They were talking about the actual effort that people were actually doing it and there are fringe elements of Israeli society that do believe that it needs to be, you know, people who actually take that action and not the will of God, not the arrival of the Mashiach.
And it’s very reminiscent of the early opposition to Zionism saying, you know, this has to be through divine will, we can’t take God’s work into our own hands and I think that there’s a similar disconnect here with the conversation around the building of the third temple.
Noam: So when you say Al Aqsa, that there’s a throughline in Israel, if you want to understand Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you have to understand Al Aqsa’s prominent position in it. There seems to be, there’s a real defense of Al Aqsa in all of the naming, all the naming. Again, the 7th of October was named the Al Aqsa flood, named by Hamas. That’s what they named it. And you’re saying that that is propaganda that the Jewish people are looking to rebuild the third temple there in some sort of actual–
Yardena: Looking to, actively doing.
Noam: Actively doing.
Yardena: Actively working to. And this is why they were always opposed to the archaeological digs beneath the Temple Mount and any kind of effort to… when there was a walkway put in there for handicapped people to access it. Similar to at the Tomb of the Patriarchs as well, Israel recently put in an elevator and that was opposed by the Muslim authorities in Hebron, always this fear that Israel is working to destroy these Muslim holy sites.
Noam: Fascinating, okay. All right, it’s such complicated stuff with Al Aqsa and it’s so personal, so emotional for so many people. There was a member of Knesset named Yehuda Glick, I remember, who he actually said that there should be the restoration of the third temple or the building of the third temple, but not that just that the Jews should pray there, but it should be what he imagined and what he believes that the rabbis earlier have articulated that it’s a place for everyone to worship and a place for everyone to pray and not just a particularistic Jewish place.
Yardena: Right, he advocated for Muslim and Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount. Not for the destruction of Al-Aqsa, but just for Jews to be allowed to pray there. And then he was a victim of an assassination attempt. I interviewed him shortly after that for a piece in Tablet.
Noam: You interviewed him, I saw him at a steak restaurant in Hollywood, Florida. So, very very different relationship that we have with Yehuda Glick. Shout out, okay.
So, I want to do like a few concluding questions with you. If you get of our own childhoods, of our favorite night in college, family lore that gets encoded in the way we tell our stories, and it’s not 100% accurate necessarily. So I want to do a quick check about Israeli history.
Is there something, one thing, that people consistently get wrong when they talk about Israeli history? Something in the general narrative perhaps that consistently makes you wits. What is it? Not maybe you’re wrong, but something in the narrative that’s, like you use the word, more complicated than we get credit to.
Yardena: So I find online and even at events that I do, people will push back against me using the word Palestine. They’ll say, well, Palestine never existed. There is no such thing as Palestine. And it drives me crazy because that is erasing so much of our own history. You know, the Jewish people’s history. mean, before 1948, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews living in Palestine who were known as Palestinian Jews. The book that I wrote is based on letters written from Hebron to the US by a young Yeshiva student who had moved from Memphis to Hebron to study at what was then the most prestigious Yeshiva in Palestine. He signed his letters, Hebron, Palestine. He would talk about native Jews of the land as Palestinian. And, you know, I understand the desire to negate that history, but I think it’s a very slippery slope because if we can negate that history, it allows others to negate our own history and it’s true. There was never a state of Palestine, was never its own country, never self-governed. The Palestinian people never ruled Palestine. It was always ruled by foreign powers. But that could have ended in 1947 with the UN Partition Plan. And I think that negating the existence of Palestine precludes us from speaking about that part of history, which is essential to combating so much of the disinformation.
And that’s another point that also infuriates me, this claim that this conflict began in 1948, or that the refugees and the Nakba was the result of Israel’s creation. No, that refugee crisis was the creation of Arab leaders who rejected what could have been the first free Palestine in 1947.
Noam: What is the flip side, something you wish people kept in mind when they tell the story of Israel? If there is one principle people should hold onto instead, what would that be?
Yardena: I mean, you’re going to like this because it’s your whole shtick, but nuance, complexity. I think people really want there to be just these black and white truths that one side is right and one side is wrong. And I just think it’s so much more complex than that. I hope people will take more time to learn about so many of these fascinating chapters in pre-state Israeli history.
I think we have focused too much in the Jewish community on Israeli history post 1948. And I think it’s done a lot of a of us a disservice because not only is there just such a rich history of the Jewish people in the land of Israel before 1948, but I think it’s left a lot of people without the answers and the facts and the history to counter so much of the disinformation we’re facing because it’s not disinformation about what’s happening today. It’s rejecting Israel’s right to exist and to counter those narratives, really need that pre-state history.
Noam: If people leave remembering one thing from tonight, what do you hope it is? Can I answer that question after you?
Yardena: Can you answer it for me? Because I feel like what I just said is what I… I mean, I think that we have spent many years trying to defend ourselves and prove that we’re not the evil people everybody thinks we are and I think it’s time to just, I mean, Brett Stevens said this much better than I can, but we need to just lean into our pride and our story, the story of the Jewish people is the most incredible story.
And as you said earlier, when you’re talking about how it would have been colonization if we went to Uganda, I mean, the story of Israel and Zionism is the greatest story of liberation and decolonization in modern history. The revival of an ancient language, the massing of refugees in exile, which is what we were for 2,000 years before the reestablishment of Israel, is an incredible story. And we need to just be proud of it and walk with our heads held high. And yes, we do need to counter the lies, but be super proud of who we are and what we’ve achieved.
Noam: To add to that, what I wanted to just think through is, I was just having a conversation with a professor named Jonathan Sarna, amazing professor, also on my other podcast, Wondering Jews, and he told me something that I never knew before. He said that, and I was also speaking to students about this today, we were talking about whether or not Jewish people should get rid of the term Zionism or not. And it was an interesting debate to hear the term because the Jewish Federations of North America did a study that’s been talked about a bunch that over two thirds of Jewish people or whatever it is don’t identify as Zionist, but that 90% of Jewish people believe that Israel should be a Jewish and democratic state. So, very hard to have you make sense of that. So I asked the students that and they said, you know, it demonstrates that people don’t have and people don’t understand what Zionism really is. And some people argue, well, you know what, let’s keep practicing.
I’ll just tell you, when you’re an educator or teacher, I think it’s really important to not put your opinions totally out there. I think it’s really important, and this doesn’t happen enough in university, but to ask questions, to hear students grapple with issues, to help people with how to think, not telling them what to think.
But I’m talking to you, so I’ll tell you what I think. And what I think, and Jonathan Sarna said, is that in the 19th century in America, Jewish people said, let’s be pragmatic. Let’s get rid of the term Jew. Let’s call ourselves Yahwists, or let’s call ourselves Israelites, or let’s call ourselves Hebrews. And then we could just acclimate and be integrated into society.
This notion of history is that history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. It rhymes. And this idea that we’re trying to get rid of this Zionism, Zionist term, I understand the pragmatism behind it and you know, it’s my Enneagram test, sometimes I come across as the principles guy and sometimes I come across as the pragmatic guy. In this I’m a bit principled. I want us to maintain the label of understanding what it means to be Zionists and not to think that if I unlabel myself somehow I’ll be able to integrate into society. I think that that is a foolish way to think. But as, I understand it, but I don’t think it’s the right approach.
I want to end the way we always do on Unpacking Israeli History and our live shows are no different with five fast facts. Five fast facts that my producer, Rivky, who’s in the back, has been furiously compiling as we’ve been speaking.
This has all been culled from our conversation tonight. Ready for the five best facts? Here we go. Five facts facts.
Number one, in 1920 during the Nebi Musa festival, the mood shifted to become an anti-Jewish and anti-British riot. The British attempted to arrest Hajj Amin al-Husseini, but he fled and one year later he was appointed as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
Number two, the 1929 Hebron massacre was one of the bloodiest pogroms outside of Europe ever. Men were castrated, women were raped, children were killed, while the British did nothing, partially because of British fears of the violence turning on them.
Number three, in the sixth Zionist Congress, the Russian delegation, which had experienced some of the highest levels of antisemitism possible, were the ones who protested, sang Hatikva, and walked out of the room in protest against the Uganda plan.
Number four, Hebron was the original capital of the Kingdom of David, thousands of years ago. Now it’s home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, 800 Jews, and lots and lots of complexity.
Number five, Al-Aqsa is on the Temple Mount, the holiest place in the world for the Jewish people, and one of the holiest sites for Muslims. It’s also one of the focal points of the Israeli-Palestinian combo.
Yardena, thank you so much.
Yardena: Thank you, Noam.
Noam: Before we end this amazing night, I need to share a few very necessary thank yous.
So, number one, to Yardena, our very special guest. And for everything that you do, it’s not just complicated, it’s riveting, the story of Israel, you do such a good job, and especially for doing everything you have done to make it here after this ridiculous blizzard in New York. So thank you so much. You were like in Penn Station for like 16 hours.
Yardena: Newark Penn Station. Not as nice as Penn Station.
Noam: Number two, also want to take to our gracious hosts at the Dupree Center. Thank you so much. And to our partners, the Zalik Foundation for making the action. You guys rock. guys rock. And of course, the Marcus Foundation for all YouTube, for OpenDor Media, and for bringing this history to life.
Noam: Alex, Alex, Alex, Beth, Pona, Yoni, and of course my incredible producer Rivky Stern, who’s amazing. Rivky, you have to tell me if I forgot anyone, I think I covered it. And finally, I want to thank all of you. I want to thank all of you who are part of making Unpacking Israeli History, one of the most downloaded, if not the most downloaded, Jewish podcasts in the world. And it’s so important because it’s our responsibility as Jewish and Israel educators to get these stories out there. So thank you so much for doing your job in making sure that we can tell these stories and reach millions of people with the story of Israel, with the story of Zionism, with the story of the Jewish people, and with the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So thank you, thank you, thank you so much, we do not take it for granted at all.