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.
This episode is dedicated in memory of Armand Lindenbaum, the grandson of Rav Avigdor Amiel by his wife Jean and children Felice Amiel and Ariel Lindenbaum-Sabag. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode of Unpacking Israeli History, or even just saying what’s up, be in touch at noam@unpacked.media.
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Okay. Yalla. Let’s do this.
Last week, we explored the Israeli myths of security, the stories Israelis told themselves, tell themselves about control, about threat and protection. If you didn’t listen yet, stop and go check it out. It’s important. It’s good. And that’s what I think. That’s my take.
But there’s another layer, maybe even more powerful, another myth to explore the myth of identity, because it’s one thing to realize your defenses didn’t work. It’s another to question the stories you tell about your goodness, your morality, your unity, your uniqueness. In this part, we dive into the myths that live deeply in the Israeli soul and ask what happens when those stories are explored a little bit differently.
But again, I’m not doing this alone. I’m joined by my friend, journalist and analyst, Haviv Rettig Gur, someone who understands that stories are never just stories. They’re how nations survive and sometimes how they struggle, maybe even how they break. And Haviv has an amazing podcast and everyone should check out. It’s called Ask Haviv Anything. And you got to check it out.
But right now, Haviv, thanks so much for coming onto this and doing part two with me. I’m nervous about this episode, but I’m also really looking forward to it. It’s good. Now it’s gonna be okay. Ready?
Haviv: Me too. It’s gonna be great. I’m ready.
Noam: Here we go. So in this episode, I want to specifically explore the myths of identity. Like I said, what stories has Israel told itself about itself, about who it is and how do those stories survive in the aftermath of moral, societal and emotional upheaval like the past 20 months since the 7th of October. But if we’re honest with ourselves, the truth is that these myths are questions that existed before the 7th of October as well.
So we’re going to follow a similar structure to last time. I’m going to present a myth and I want us to talk about it. Is there truth to it? To what extent is there truth? How do you see the story? How do I see the story? Has this, has the story changed for you? Did the 7th of October or the year and a half since the 7th of October change any of it for you? Are you ready? Here we go. Okay.
Haviv: Yes. All right.
Noam: 10 minutes or less, each myth. Myth number one, here we go.
The IDF, Israel Defense Force, is the most moral army in the world.
Haviv: I don’t like this myth. And I don’t like this myth for the following reason.
I don’t like the idea that we have to stand before the world and explain ourselves. America doesn’t. France doesn’t. Syria doesn’t. Yemen doesn’t. And yet somehow that is required of us. And people really even tell us, you got to explain yourself or you’ll be delegitimized. What the hell is a delegitimized nation? I don’t know what these things mean.
The IDF being the most moral army in the world is a talking point born out of the obsessive focus and absolutely unique standard applied to the IDF by the world. The international community that has forgotten international law because it needs to show Israel to be evil.
Now, Gaza is a horrifically bloody war, but absolutely nothing happening in the international discourse about Gaza is new. It was all happening in 2014, it was all happening in 82, it was all happening in 67. So it doesn’t matter what our enemies do or what actual military problem we face or how much the IDF actually obeys international law.
For example, if Hamas uses a hospital in Gaza for military purposes, that hospital is a legitimate military target under international law. Everybody’s saying that hospitals are totally immune no matter what in all cases is simply lying to you about international law. And if the IDF then strikes that hospital to hit a massive Hamas command structure, you can say, hey, show us there was a massive command infrastructure there. You can say that. But if there was one, or if there was a good enough suspicion that there was one, or if Hamas admits that there is one, which it has done for almost all the hospitals in Gaza, then it’s simply a lie to say that it is immoral or illegal to strike that hospital. That is the simple, blunt, blatant truth that nobody will be able to overturn.
And the idea that the IDF is the most moral army in the world, is the most evil army in the world, is this debate that I find profoundly stupid. I need the IDF to be moral. I served in it. And my kids will serve in it.
So all of that said, I don’t like the debate. don’t like when people say the idea is the most moral army in the world. I don’t like the implication that I have to now have a debate in which I, well, is it only the second most or the third most or 14th most?
I mean, what the hell are we talking about? When the Americans went into Baghdad, they bombed the maternity hospital in Baghdad. Was it a legitimate military target? Wasn’t it? Why did it happen? Nobody knows because nobody even had the debate. So what are we even talking about? That’s A.
B, the IDF does do things no other army does in war, like the knock on strikes before the real strike, like the pamphlets, like calling people to tell them to leave a certain area before bombing it, an area where there’s massive military enemy presence. The IDF does things that no American, no Australian, no Brit, no NATO force in the history of warfare has ever done. The most moral armies that have fought in war have never done some of the things the IDF does. And so I think that there is a case to be made for that. Also, I don’t want to make it.
Also, there’s no question in my mind that the IDF has also had tremendous missteps and that some soldiers have been outright criminals. We’ve seen videos from Gaza. There’s no question. There’s 200,000 soldiers cycling through Gaza. Some of them are going to be criminals. It’s a 200,000 population anywhere, you’re going to have criminals among them.
And so all these things are true all at once. And I don’t like the debate. Does that count as a myth or is true? I don’t know.
Noam: No, you’re saying and we actually made a video on Unpacked, actually hosted it for the YouTube channel about this question about the idea of being the most moral army in the world. And you can check it out on YouTube. Check it out at unpacked. And the topic, we changed the question because we kind of took your path, interestingly enough, which is we don’t want to answer whether or not the idea is the most moral army in the world, but, why are people obsessed with asking this question? Why is this a question that people are focusing so much on?
Haviv: Right, exactly.
I will answer from a Jewish philosophy perspective, if I may. You answered, you spoke about the roof knocks, you spoke about, well, you didn’t mention it yet, but the purity of arms, the concept of Torat Neshach, which are doctrines and values that are about valuing human life, discipline, and sense of mission. You spoke about, you know, like the roof knocks, the leaflets, the mission aborts to avoid civilian casualties. These are all truth. And you spoke about the, the, the, the challenge of not wanting to even engage in this question because in the words of Cersei Lannister, I’m not up to my Jewish philosophy point yet. when you fight an existential war, you win or die, there is no middle ground. And for so much of Israeli history, they’ve been doing a few things. They’ve been fighting wars which they feel as existential wars. And they also fight in asymmetric warfare. And asymmetric warfare is incredibly difficult because like you mentioned before, they’re fighting wars in which people are, terrorists are, underground, under hospitals, behind near school children in schools. And it becomes incredibly, incredibly, incredibly, incredibly difficult to fight a war like that. And like you said, there aren’t just missteps. There are, this is my take, are times that Israeli soldiers are doing horrific things because human beings do horrific things.
The philosophical challenge that I want to talk about as an American, not an Israeli, you’re an Israeli, you’ve been in the Israeli army. I have not. Your children are going be in the Israeli army. I have no idea what my children are going to be doing. But something I think about is this. Two different things I’m thinking about from a philosophical point. One is that until the Jewish people had their own state in 1948, they’ve lived in an artificial hot house of morality. And this artificial hot house didn’t allow people to really see to what degree they would behave morally, to what degree they would behave ethically when they have power, when they are in an asymmetric place. The Jewish people just never had it.
And now that the Jewish people have their own army, now that the Jewish people have their own state, now that the Jewish people have their own government, it’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to how they want to and to what extent they want to implement Jewish ideas, Jewish values. And Jewish values, it’s a complicated term because in Sanhedrin 72A, it talks about, If someone comes to kill you, you get up and you rise early, and you, you attack them first.
Is that more moral? Is that ethical? This is part of the Jewish story. Yitz Greenberg from a philosophical perspective said something that I’ve been thinking about so much since, I mean, really I was going to say since this war, but it’s not true. It’s before this war in 2014. I’ve been thinking about it. I was thinking about it in, in the early aughts, I was thinking about it. I’ve been thinking about this concept for awhile. And I don’t know what this means exactly but maybe you could help me just help explain this.
He says if the Jewish army was 10% more moral it would be a light unto nations. If the Jewish army was 25% more moral the Messiah would come. And then he says and if the Jewish army was 50% more moral it would cease to exist, the state would cease to exist.
Haviv: We have enemies who… Hamas built nothing in Gaza for 17 years except those tunnels. 500 kilometers of tunnels in a 25 kilometer territory. And the purpose of the tunnels is so that when the enemy comes for them they have to cut through cities to get to them. The enemy has to choose. Either they take on the horrific cost of going through the civilian population to get to Hamas, or Hamas just gets to sit in those tunnels and live and survive and rule Gaza forever.
And then they carried out October 7, convincing Israelis from deep, deep to the left, all the way to deep, deep to the right, that actually we have to go after Hamas, at any cost Hamas sets. We face an enemy whose fundamental strategy is to play off of our own morality, is to play off of the world’s morality, is to force choices at the edges of the most horrific moral problems. And that’s how they plan to survive. They plan to survive by having a Gazan death toll so high the Israelis can’t carry it out, either because the Israelis are too good or because the world won’t let them.
That’s the enemy. Morality has become a weapon of war by the most evil groups whose fundamental strategy is a vast violation of international law. When an Israeli airstrike against Mohammed Sinwar at a hospital, the European hospital in Gaza, something that happened in the last week, and the world says, how dare you strike a hospital? The actual law says, how dare Mohammed Sinwar use in any way, he made that hospital an arena of war.
Noam: Military target.
Haviv: And absolutely a military target and the whole concept that you can have thousands of tunnel entrances in cities and neighborhoods. That makes the demolition of those buildings to find those tunnels legitimate and legal and moral. So we have an enemy whose only strategy is the war on our morality because they’ve identified only one weakness. We have no other weakness in war except our morality. Hamas’s methods of war are a great compliment to Israel, even if the whole world is too blind and stupid to see it.
And I don’t know what that means if it was 10% than this and 25% of that, but 50% don’t go that far. The enemy has organized its entire strategy around our morality. And it knows that it’s only relevant for us. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about 250,000 people starved to death in the Yemen war six years ago. Literally nobody talked about it or cared. There was a little bit of congressional Democratic anger at Saudi Arabia. Didn’t last long, didn’t do anything. Assad killed 600,000 people and Assad was good friends with the South African government that is now suing Israel for genocide. Assad killed 10 times and 20 times and 30 times and would have killed 50 times the Ghazan death toll and for strictly genocidal purposes. There was no enemy to pursue. There was no legitimate military target. So I don’t like any of that conversation. That’s a lot of beautiful fluff that is very self-righteous.
I happen to respect Rabbi Greenberg. But that kind of moralistic discourse about what’s going on is such a disconnect from the actual nature of the enemy we face. If we lay down our arms, we die. And if they lay down their arms, everybody lives. And the Palestinian cause is massively strengthened. That’s the nature of our enemy. That’s the fundamental structure and nature of this war.
Noam: My only question, and we’re going a little bit longer on this because it’s a really tough topic, is if you’re going to view the Rabbi Yitz Greenberg idea as moralizing and maybe this artificial hot house idea as well as maybe not being the, maybe yes, maybe not, but not being the metaphor you’d want to utilize, what is, what, because you said in the previous episode last week, you said that morality matters more to you than legality. So who should be guiding the moral thinking of the Israeli army?
Haviv: Yes, morality should always matter to us more than legality.
Noam: What should be the moral compass of the Israeli army? Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, who, Yitzhak Rabin? Who’s guiding the morality here?
Haviv: None of this is, I don’t think any of this is actually complicated. There are laws of war. They’re very well conceived. The enemy believes that we follow them and the enemy built their entire strategy and plan for survival on us following them. And so far it’s worked for them. And those laws of war, well, they’re still around. They’re still around. Hamas is still around. Why is Hamas still around? Because we’re not Genghis Khan and his Mongols burning cities to the ground.
Noam: How does it work for them? How does it work for them? Because the Israeli people haven’t gone far enough, you’re saying.
Haviv: Because the Israeli people won’t and can’t do what it takes to uproot Hamas in a week. Obviously, thank God. If we were Hamas, how would this go? If we were Assad, how would this go? If we were Yemen or Saudi Arabia or Iran, how would this go? If we were any of the peoples that our enemies pretend to like, how would this go? And we’re not. And great and awesome and wonderful and amazing. And by the way, we will win their war that they built on their terms without losing our morality.
And the whole world will pretend we’ve lost our morality because the whole world sees some of it is absolutely legitimate. A great deal of it is decent people seeing pictures of dead kids on their phones. It triggers the amygdala. It triggers this response that is the goodness in them. But maybe they don’t stop to think that there’s an algorithm that only shows them one particular dead kid. There’s this huge sub-genre of TikTok, pictures of mutilated children from the Syrian war being sold on TikTok as from Gaza. And as soon as somebody says, no, that’s a propaganda that’s wrong, that’s from Syria, then suddenly the kid doesn’t matter. It only matters if it’s from Gaza. There’s this whole algorithmic, propagandistic nature to how people are being triggered. A great deal of it is honest, decent people responding to something they’re seeing and not thinking for two seconds about why they’re seeing only one particular thing.
We are in conflicts right now in Sudan. There are 10 times the death toll and it’s horrific and it’s genocidal and it’s violent, it’s evil and it’s being fought with allies of the United States and with weapons of the West. And nobody cares. Nobody’s talking about it. Nobody even knows about it. And so, you know, I don’t really trust the West’s morality and I definitely don’t believe that there’s morality in any of the societies around us on these questions. We are demanded to meet a standard that nobody else sets even for themselves.
And yet, we need to meet that standard, not because it’s their standard, but because it’s our standard. And we will still win with that standard. And the fact is that a lot of decent, good people are going off to fight because they know the IDF is moral. And if they thought the IDF was not moral, they wouldn’t go off to fight. So all of these questions all put together mean that we have to be moral.
So all these things all fit together. We have to be moral. We will be moral, we will fight morally, but Jesus, don’t lecture us. Don’t lecture us. That’s such a silly thing. Explain to me how to destroy Hamas. Don’t tell me if you’re 10 % more moral or 22% more moral or 37.5% more moral, how do I destroy Hamas? If you’ve got a thought on that, I’d really love to hear it. I’m not sure Benjamin Netanyahu knows, but unless you have that thought, what is this debate about, you know, actually? We have a moral compass. We know what our morality is.
And it’s written in Israeli law. When Israel is a signatory to Geneva, it’s Israeli domestic law, this international law. And sometimes you find criminal soldiers and they have to be dealt with and they are dealt with. So.
Noam: I have an answer. I’m not a military strategist, but here’s my answer to the question. Put aside military, think that yes, there’s military aspects to it, but there’s also we, the world have to provide the Palestinian people with an alternative to Hamas that is viable and legitimate and credible and exciting and where the Palestinian people can see another alternative to Hamas. And then what needs to happen is the Arab world together with allies on the West need to radically shift the educational approach in the authorities governed by Palestinians.
It has to come from the people themselves. It cannot come from around the world, but the people themselves need help from the rest of the world in order to see something, to look towards something. They don’t have anything. If you’re the Palestinian people, you don’t have anything on the other side of this that’s exciting you, that’s going to be like, I could see what’s on the other side. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. They don’t have that. And if the world could help incentivize that and if the world could help provide and ensure that there is an educational system that is not as rabidly anti-Zionist, anti-Israel, anti-Jewish as it is, then we have, I think that there’s an alternative. I think it’s possible, I really do.
Haviv: I agree. There was a religious leader, Palestinian religious leader, Israeli Arab religious leader named Mohammed Nimr Darwish, who in the 80s, who comes from the same radical Islamists, sort of deep conservatism camp of Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood, and is the spiritual leader of the southern branch of the Islamic movement in Israel and the political party that flows from his teachings and from his students is called Raam. And it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state and it takes those religious ideas of piety and return to original Islam and all of that that Hamas uses to turn into, know, to create an ideology of burning everything to the ground, it takes into a place of actually pacifism, peaceful coexistence and recognition of the Jewish state. And so from within
And it’s the biggest political party among Israeli Arabs. And so from within Palestinian Islam and from within conservative Palestinian Islam and the Hamas model, there’s also the most legitimizing of Israel political movement in the Palestinian political world. And so absolutely the answers are there.
The Palestinians are going to have to solve this thing. They will have to, I’m not going to walk into Gaza and give them a different version of Islam to de-radicalize it. They can do it. But by the way, they actually can do it. It exists in their world, in their religious and political world. All these defenders of the Palestinians around the world who defend Hamas don’t understand that their utter total and complete ignorance of Palestinians actually leads them to hurt Palestinians by defending the destroyers of the Palestinian political world and religious world. So yes, there are solutions and there are ways out.
But the idea that the IDF needs to be now held, the idea that we can have a I really like your idea of the hot of the of the greenhouse or hot whatever it is. The just the idea that Jews were in a position where they were utterly and totally vulnerable, but morally pristine.
Noam: It’s not my idea, not my idea, but that idea.
Haviv: That’s beautiful thing. And anti-Zionist today in America wish we were that again, vulnerable but morally pristine. Except for the 20th frickin’ century. There are bureaucratic technologies and chemical technologies and war fighting technologies that fundamentally change the equation of vulnerable but morally pristine because now you can be so vulnerable that you can be wiped out.
Noam: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Haviv: And it is no longer moral to remain vulnerable and morally pristine. And the Jews who still pretend to be anti-Zionist because it is just ignorance are Jews who have not had the experience of vulnerability. They are Jews in America who have been safe for five generations. And so, yes, absolutely that’s the challenge. We now have to enter a world of power and power means moral compromises. We cannot afford to not have power anymore. I wish we could, but we can’t.
Noam: I’m going to. We misbehaved on that myth of the myth of the IDF being the most moral army in the world. We doubled our time.
We are going to do one more myth right now. We’re not going to do three. We’re going to do two. Sorry, everyone. We’ll have to do other episodes.
Myth number two. Here we go.
Traveling from the IDF to the mid 19th century. And I’m going to read to you a famous line and the line is that the region of Israel then known as Palestine is a land without a people for a people without a land. Nerd Corner alert. Here we go. Who came up with this term? I’m 100 % gonna get you on this. I’m 100%. You have no chance on this one.
No matter how–
Haviv: Israel Zangwill.
Noam: it’s not Israel Zangwill. Boom, knew you were gonna say that. Gotcha. Hit him with the freeze pop.
Haviv: Why do you mean that? I’m sure it’s Israel Zangwill.
Noam: It actually, it is Israel Zangwill who popularized it, but it actually comes not from Jewish sources, but from Christian sources in the 1840s from the Scottish Free Church. Boom, there you go. Israel Zangwill then said it in a speech in the early 20th century. He then got cold feet about this whole idea of Zionism and instead said, you know what, I don’t know if the Jewish people should create a Jewish state.
Haviv: He said it isn’t a land without a people. There’s people living there. Yeah.
Noam: There’s, oh, correct. He’s like, actually that line, it’s not so true.
Haviv: He’s the man who brought that line from Christian eschatological kind of dispensation of Zionism or whatever to, forgive me for using those words, but into the Jewish discourse. And he himself didn’t like it and it wasn’t used very much by Zionists. And all Zionist writings we have, Jabotinsky from the revisionist right talks constantly about the Arabs and about Arab honor and about what Arabs and that Arabs are gonna are gonna fight and that it’s extremely unlikely they’ll just welcome us and splitting the land is not something that any people that respect itself would do unless forced to and we’re it’s gonna have to be a war and the socialists of Ben Gurion okay we’re horrified by that and didn’t want to acknowledge it but in the end that’s what happened it up happening
Noam: So, okay. So, your answer to this myth, the land without people for people without a land, that is a total myth that was utilized by, well, first the Christian Zionists and then Israel Zangwill until it was retired.
I wanna push back though quite seriously. And here’s my pushback to you on your diatribe that you started with here. My pushback is I’ve heard it so many times. Not only have I heard it, I will now beat my chest and apologize. I’ve taught it. I have taught it. I actually utilize Mark Twain’s description of the desolation of the, and when he visited the sparsely populated areas in 1867, he wrote, I think it’s called Innocence Abroad. And he described it in a certain way. Then Jewish teachers across the world then utilize this line, a land without a people for people without a land.
And yet, and yet, and yet the Ottoman census in 1878, shows that there were 440,000 people living in the area known as Palestine, which included around 400,000 Muslims, 43,000 Christians, and 15,000 Jews. And the Zionist settlement, the first aliyah that took place from 1882 to 1903, focused on the underdeveloped or uncultivated areas like the Hula Valley and the Jezreel Valley. But listen, you already alluded to it. It was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the revisionist Zionist leader, who’s then intellectual descendant, not just intellectual descendant, the person who took over for him, his successor, Menachem Begin, also very much so recognized that there was another people there.
I’m just thinking about, know, I like to be complex about the story of Israel, nuanced about the story of Israel, all of these things. But I just, as we’re talking out loud right now, I’m thinking to myself about how the people who choose to demonize Israel, demonize Zionism. They like to demonize it from the liberal left, right? A land without a people for people without a land. And the people who came in from the left who were basically making an argument that, listen, there’s an opportunity to cultivate this land. There’s so much of it is sparsely populated, which is true. And then they also like to strongly condemn Jabotinsky. And Jabotinsky in 1923 wrote The Iron Wall. And what he wrote is:
We may tell them, whatever we like about the innocence of our aims, watering them down and sweetening them with honeyed words to make them palatable. But they know what we want as well as what as well as we know what they do not want. They feel at least the same instinctive, jealous love of Palestine as the old Aztecs felt for ancient Mexico and their Sue for their rolling and the Sue for their rolling prairies.
“Every native population in the world resists colonists,” he says, “as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.”
So there you have it. If you go with the Jabotinsky worldview, there were people there. Now, Jerusalem, I believe, and I can be fact-checked on this, had at least as many Jews as Muslims, or at least there were many Jews there, maybe 30%, 20%, 40%. I don’t know exactly, but it wasn’t near the minority that it was in the broader sense, but there was always always always a number of Jews living in the land of Israel Continuous for the last few thousand years that we know
But how do you reconcile this at the very least you and I both acknowledge? We’re on the same page. That is a myth there are there was not a land without a people there were people living there. But maybe you and I see this in a different way. Maybe maybe it is the case that there were people living there, but they were not a people yet. Meaning the Palestinian identity formed over time. It cultivated itself over time. It turned into a nation over time, but it didn’t have a formal people there. It had a number of people there that didn’t have a distinct identity. What’s your take on all of this?
Haviv: There’s so much. How much time we got?
Noam: we got, we have a little bit of time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we got this.
Haviv: Two, three hours. So, I mean, the simple point is that everybody has data points in their favor. There were people living here. There’s no question. And they were not quite Palestine in the sense that the Ottoman provincial divisions did not see a Palestine as we understand the land today, which is based on the land of Israel, right? What is Palestine from that particular area of the Northern Galilee, the Upper Galilee, down to Eilat, down to the Red Sea? That is not something that the Ottomans and the people living in the land who thought of themselves as Ottomans saw and thought was a single coherent land.
And so you would have, it’s why it’s really hard to know how many people lived here. You said 400,000 in 1878, but it might’ve been 300,000. We would have no way of really, really truly, there’s your estimates and the census and the census is fine, but the census is piecing together a piece of what was then Beirut, right? Nablus or on the coast, what is today Netanya, that’s not so far north, would no longer have been part of this old Muslim version of Jund Palestine, of the Palestine region, which is essentially the corridor of Jerusalem to Jaffa, Jerusalem to modern day Tel Aviv. And the entire south is a different Sanjak or different piece of administrative district. The only organization and the only group in the land, two groups that preserve the idea of the land as what we would know today as Israel, that shape of the land were the Jews and the Christians. And Christians, Christian Arabs, in fact, the oldest extent institution in the land to this day is the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate, which is Byzantine and still around. And the territory that demarcates the Byzantine Patriarchate is the land itself. Now, where did the Byzantine Christian Church get this idea of what the Holy Land is? From the Jews. And so there is a Muslim version of Palestine, which is essentially what is today Palestinian and Palestinian understanding of what Palestine is, that the Galilee and the Bedouin of the desert of the south are somehow the same people is a function of the response to Zionism. And so when you have Jews coming in and talking about these people and looking at these people and discussing these people, they’re not hearing from the locals that the locals are Palestinian. They’re not hearing from the Bedouin of the south and the Christians of the Galilee. together in some kind of unified whole that there’s such a people in 1860, in 1880.
We begin to see serious, intense Palestinian discussion, at least in the elites, it trickles down slowly, but at least in the elites, in the 1910s. Maybe the earliest, earliest among real ideologues, but they’re the edges of society in the 1890s or the late 1890s. And then slowly, and always as a response to Jewish immigration and always as a response to the sense of the land among the Jews.
When people said there isn’t a people there, it’s exactly what you said. That’s what they’re talking about. And it was genuine, it’s totally authentic. They don’t think they’re lying. And they’re not blind and they’re not deaf and nobody in the past is dumber than we great, brilliant people are today. Palestinian identity coalesces in response to the pressure of Jewish immigration. This is something that Palestinian scholars acknowledge, discuss. No, this is not.
By the way, German identity coalesces in the 19th century in response to certain realities and pressures as well. I’m not saying Palestinians therefore don’t exist in the sense that a German people exist, a Palestinian people exist. But it’s clearly that. And so a discourse comes from a real, honest, authentic place. There are people living here. They are desperate, are, many of the farmers who are afraid of being displaced.
I once came across the diaries of a guy named Antebi. He’s a Jew from Damascus who was buying land for Zionist organizations. He was a Zionist who didn’t talk about himself as a Zionist. He wants to build Jewish settlements, but he doesn’t quite want Jewish statehood because he still thinks of this as fundamentally Ottoman territory. He doesn’t think that’s changeable. Nevertheless, he speaks to a lot of farmers and a lot of the peasantry, which is most of the population is rural peasantry. And they don’t own their, there are lot of these distant landowners sitting in Damascus that the Zionists actually buy the land from. Most of the land they buy, you reference this, is land that is unworkable, un-agricultural. I don’t know these terms, I apologize. I once volunteered on kibbutz for a couple of months, nothing more.
Noam: That’s the word, he nailed it.
Haviv: But the sense that the land is open and can be taken. The Jews who are also driving the Zionist enterprise are Jews thinking that Europe is gonna collapse in catastrophe and millions of Jews will need a home. And they talk in those terms, Ben-Gurion talks in those terms. And so the idea that there’s 300,000, 400,000 peasants of very different identities and very different cultures living in different sections that are governed by different governorates and therefore this is a people that cannot be displaced because it’s colonization that will then displace a people.
It doesn’t make sense that it’s not the reality of the 1880s. It just isn’t what is happening in the 1880s. And so all these things are true all at once. And also, as soon as Zionists land here and look at the place and think about it and talk about it and strategize seriously, they know there’s a land. And they begin to have very close interactions with the urban elites, the ayun, which means eyes in Arabic, but it refers to the great families who are the urban elites, the Nashashibis and the Khalidis and the Husainis and all these famous names of Palestinian elites, they begin to have these interactions with them. And they begin to recognize that there’s a thing here.
And by the time you get to 1914, I think it’s because of the collapse of the Ottoman censorship in 1908, you begin to have newspapers in Jaffa, for example, called Falastin, a newspaper called Palestine in Jaffa, and a newspaper called Al-Karmil, the Carmel, which is the mountains above Haifa, in Haifa who talk about Palestinian identity and nationalism. Fascinating is that all of these newspapers, all of this discourse on Palestinian nationalism that sees a Palestinian people, all of it is Christian for years. Now, one last sentence, the Muslim identification of Palestine with Palestine as this nation, as this, is not born in nationalism and is not born in resistance to, you know, I don’t know, a displacement in some fundamental sort of Western moral sense. It’s born in a debate among theologians of Islam about Islamic weakness and about how we can no longer ignore that Islam is weak because the European empires are carving up our territories. And Islam cannot be weak because that means Islam isn’t true. And so Islam must find its strength again. And so it must resist Zionism and overcome Zionism. And that’s why Hamas is both Palestinian, but also not at all Palestinian.
It’s absolutely a pan-Islamic movement that is willing to destroy Palestine on the altar of overcoming the Jews for the rescue of all of Islam and the restoration of Islam to its rightful place in history. And that’s an old idea. That’s Haj Amin al-Husseini. He would not compromise on two states back in the 30s because Islam was at stake. That’s Izzat al-Qassam. That’s a lot of the people who turned this conflict very violent in the 20s and 30s when the first major pogrom against Jews is organized in 1920 and then the big one in 1929. Those are about religion, those are about Islam. They’re not about Palestinian identity and nationalism and colonialism and all that stuff.
So there are at least six different trends and tracks all happening all at once, all layered on top of each other. No serious Zionists for any amount of time seriously thought that there’s no people here. Except at the very beginning when they came and the people here told them there’s no people here. And they quickly coalesced into something much, much more coherent, much, more people. They took it from Christian Palestinians, this idea of what the land looks like, which is of course originally a Jewish idea of what the land is. And they became a people in a coherent, serious way that we have to acknowledge. So everything is true. All the things are true all at once.
Noam: Okay, so here’s what we did. We just did a few myths. They were a lot of fun to explore. And what I keep thinking about is this idea that the power of the myth, the power of the myth to hold us together, the power of the myth to unify and the power of the myth to guide. part of our job as maturing into our understanding of the past in order to forge a healthier future is to explore myths, a deeper way to understand why myths shouldn’t necessarily be thrown away but to challenge them to to think clearly to ask questions about them to To see what aspects are accurate what or not and to go back to the way we started this last week, to have a different approach to myths and facts not to myth bust but to myth explore.
And I don’t know if you everyone listening paid attention. We explored myths from different sides of the political aisle, and our conclusions may have been different on each and every one of them and won’t lead you to a clear way of thinking of what to think about each of these issues, but maybe for how to think about each and every one of them. As I really like to say very often, facts matter and feelings matter. Logic matters and stories matter. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Yes, we’ve heard that often, but feelings don’t really care about your facts very often either.
And that’s complicated when it comes to storytelling. It’s complicated when it comes to history sharing. It’s complicated when it comes to identity forming. But it’s true. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Feelings don’t care about your facts. And then we combine both of those together and we forge our own identity as a result of all of this. I would love to hear from you listening. Yes, you listening. Which myths do you want us to explore some more? Because I really think this is important, to explore myths, not to bust myths. We live in a new era.
Haviv, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for joining Unpacking Israeli History. Thank you for exploring with me. It’s really been so interesting, thought-provoking. And those, of course, deeply serious, it’s always fun with you. We always have a good time. And I love having you on this show. So thank you so much for joining us.
Haviv: Thank you, Noam. It was wonderful. Thanks.
Noam: Unpacking Israeli History is a production of unpacked and open door media brand subscribe wherever you’re listening to the pod and follow Unpacked on all the regular social media channels just search @unpackedmedia, it’s all there. And of course, search Unpacking Israeli History and really really really check out Ask Haviv Anything, it’s awesome. Ask Haviv Anything. It’s great.
This episode was produced by Rivky Stern. Our amazing guest is Haviv Rettig Gur, and our team for this episode includes Alex Harris, Adi Elbaz and Rob Pera. I’m your host, Noam Weissman.
Thanks for listening. See you next week.